Nineteen Seventy-Seven

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Here is a house with an oval of grass out front. The lawn is surrounded by cold lava rocks. The rough stones have been smashed to bits, are colored like dried blood. Banging them against the sidewalk makes small white sparks.

The family next door gets up every morning at four. Lights come on, trucks zoom away and the lot of them spend the last minutes of night wrapping up copies of the daily paper. The old man wears a cotton hat, smokes Viceroy brand cigarettes.

Across the street is an airline pilot with a small foreign car. He has a swimming pool. A woman in a bathing suit and long beach towel wanders back and forth between the front door and his Triumph, singing songs from Rumours by Fleetwood Mac.

In the white house with grey trim, Chen practices the viola. His parents own a restaurant filled with heavy wooden chairs. The cook on the corner drives a Cadillac El Dorado. He has painted the automobile bright green, refers to it as the luckiest car in the universe.

There are more plants in the back yard; the sprinklers come on at midnight. A small garden with oleanders and roses has been cleaved out of clay in one corner. The far end, beyond the peach trees, smells of dog piss and pine sol.

Summertime comes around. The swamp cooler shakes and buzzes. As evening advances all of the neighbors walk out to the street without their shoes. Everyone wants to talk about food, how long the days have become or why the surrounding desert sings.

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Summer's Lease: Mysterious Quantum Forces Unraveled

by Rudolfo Carrillo

I dreamt I went to a party in the Northeast Heights. Esta accion was up on Montgomery, near Morris. For those of you with an interest in psychogeography, that vecindad is where my brother and I delivered the Albuquerque Tribune in the late nineteen-seventies.

Some of the houses around there were awfully deluxe, and now and then we'd run into a pool party complete with roast beef sangwiches and mimosas. We soon found those were the types of habitations with owners likely to tip around the holidays, especially if the paper was laid out by the front door, neat and regular.

Otros chantes thereabouts were shambling testaments to the fragility of the middle class with cars parked on the lawn and porches that smelled of dog shit and Coors Banquet Beer. You'd more likely get bit than collect, so we usually let those customers be until the Albuquerque Publishing Company cancelled them for non-payment.

Anywho, my dream wasn't anything like that because the fiesta que estoy describiendo took place in a high-rise apartment, but you could still see the Sandia Mountains from the balcony, sabes? I did not know a soul there. I mostly spent my time in one of the bedrooms staring at a wooden cabinet that somehow seemed familiar. In the hallway, folks were admiring the carpet and talking about a bat flying around the light fixture.

When I looked away again, the place was empty. Even the murciélago was gone.  I checked the refrigerator for pizza and sat down in front of an oversized plastic television set with a cold slice of Godfather's. Star Trek was on. It was the episode where two planets are waging war by computer and the losers have to self-disintegrate. Kirk and Spock destroy the computers in the end; fear of real war brings peace. Bárbaros, that's some cold war shit, I said to the dreamworld as I got up to leave.

Outside it was an emergency because the entire building was on fire. Everyone from the party was standing on the corner watching the flames wag their tongues like hungry leaves all around the doors and windows. Since there were a number of cool ranflas parked nearby, I picked a nineteen-seventy-one Saab 96 with pneumatic controls and switches designed specifically for underwater use, and I got the hell outta there.

The sun was just flickering back on as I made the corner of Morris and Lomas Boulevard, turning west toward our headquarters, where I let the old car float away and promptly crawled back into my sleeping skin. I was waiting for the alarm to sound.

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The Final Expedition of Troop 571

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Two fucking weeks into summer vacation and we're still hanging out with the same people. We don't even go to goddamn high school with them anymore and you're still waiting around for a phone call that might save your life, said Alexander to Freeman as the latter dished out a can of Ken L Ration brand dog food while both stood in the middle of an Avocado colored kitchen.

Come here, Arcoiris, come and get your motherfucking dinner said Freeman as he placed the dogfood bowl upon the custom Mexican tile floor and the old schnauzer waddled up to the trough. I am sure they'll call anytime now.

Three and a quarter seconds later the phone rang and sure as hell it was one of the gals from sixth period. Even though there wasn't a sixth period in their universe anymore and likely wouldn't be again, Alexander and Freeman still referred to their new friends collectively and semi-anonymously because the previous year they would not even have risked all the black beauties in town to be seen with that lot.

They sure could party, though and that's what got Alexander and Freeman interested at first. So what if they liked to do plays and whatnot, thought Freeman as he wiped up and brought a dog food spoon to bear upon Alexander. He pointed the meat by-product scooping device right at the dude and reminded him that some of the ladies from that drama class were stone foxes.

When the sun got low in the sky and it the two scouts had mostly come down from eating seven datura flowers the previous June night, Alexander and Freeman walked down Menaul Boulevard to Juan Tabo. They stopped at the house of a fellow named James Joyce. Joyce was a scout too, though he had recently been suspended for blowing marijuana smoke at a wild bear who tried to enter his tent over at Philmont. Now he mostly drove around town in his old man's gold-colored Pontiac Catalina, looking for game rooms where he might get lost among all the vector-rendered adventures.

You wanna go to a party, huh, Freeman intoned gravely when Joyce came to the door, bearing a bong that was craftily disguised as a shaving bowl. I dunno said James, let's phone up the twins and see what they are about. For some reason, of which he was only vaguely aware, the twins found a comic element to Joyce's name.

At least they'd always laugh and snort when someone said the name James Joyce. Plus which, they always had decent weed, he told Freeman and Alexander as he let his fingers do the walking on the princess phone in his parent's living room.

It turned out Abelardo was already gone for the night. He was busy playing his guitar and drinking the Champagne of Beers with some folks that did covers of songs by the Monkees, said the other twin, Refugio, into the harvest colored headset on the other end of things.

Approximately twenty-three minutes later, the three scouts picked up Refugio and all four of them drove down Montgomery Boulevard at high speed to the party of the summer. Everyone excellent was there, including the crazy communist kids with their green felt berets and Dead Kennedys albums. Someone had even scored a couple of cases of Mexican beer.

When it was totally dark, the stars came out and you could see the tram dangling on its trip up the mountain at the edge of the Heights. Alexander came up with an idea which was for all four of them to pile into the Catalina and drive up there by the tram, to Sandia Heights where Refugio's dealer lived.

Freeman immediately bowed out as he was making time with a gal that wanted to know all about fishing and duck hunting and he could not bear to part with what he felt was an act of god, meeting someone like that out of the blue who also got a hankering for an Allsup's burrito while stringing flies.

Besides if I stay, you are more likely to come back, Freeman said to Alexander, James and Refugio as they walked to the edge of the pool area of the apartment complex. As the other three left, Freeman pulled a hunting license out of his front pocket to show the woman named Caroline.

Tramway Boulevard was only two lanes wide and still had not been paved in some places, so it was pretty rough at night with no police patrols and plenty of opportunities for dangerous encounters, from cows crossing the road to acid-soaked hippies taking a shortcut home to Placitas. One day this place is gonna be a super-highway with mansions on both sides, Refugio whispered from the back seat of the Pontiac as he reclined in the back seat and pulled on a frajo.

Alexander started fiddling with the radio, trying to get a lock on X-Rock 80 when they came up on a Volkswagen microbus chugging along at sixty-five miles per hour. Watch this, James said as he roared up on the left to pass. He didn't see how the left turn signal on the VW was blinking away, how it began to turn as he came even with it.

There was a loud crash and Alexander said son of a bitch as the microbus kept on coming and coming, forcing the Catalina off the road where it soared along for a couple of seconds before flipping onto its roof. Refugio's glasses went flying, James was crying because he shit his pants and Alexander kept on cussing and laughing.

They crawled out and the radio was still blaring and the headlights were cutting sharp patterns through the dusty air. For a minute Refugio thought about walking home; he sure as hell didn't want to be around when the cops showed, but when he realized they never came up to Sandia Heights, he dug around in his pocket for a joint, found his glasses, and walked out to the microbus.

There were three people riding in that van. One of them was a Hawaiian exchange student named Felicia. The other two were jocks. Two of them were busy pouring a case of Heineken onto the pavement while the other was running the empties over to a huge datura plant that was back a ways from the road. How ironic Alexander thought as he picked gravel from his hair.

Come on, James Joyce said, help me turn this fucking car back over on its wheels. The three riders did just that and when no cops had shown up after forty-five shit-eating minutes, both parties drove off in separate directions without hardly a word being said.

James wanted to go back to the party, and hoped the other two did not mind if they stopped at his house to get a crowbar, so that he could fix the dent on the right quarter panel. Alexander said, just drop me off at my house, I am tired of this bullshit, I am tired of all these people.

They agreed and Refugio asked Alexander what he should tell when they got back. Tell about the car crash, but tell them I am dead or at least in the hospital with severe fucking bleeding to the brain, and don't say anymore after that. Just let them wonder. I am headed to State next week and I don't plan on answering the phone anywho.

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Otros habitantes de Albuquerque

Photo credit: Kevin Eddy 

by Rudolfo and Samantha Anne Carrillo

¡Bienvienido!

Come, come my friends, to the beautiful banks of the Rio Grande. Most of the geese are flying north, but come to Albuquerque anyway. Bask in the deceptively shallow waters of the river; you'll get a kick out of it and maybe you will be reminded that water used to flow through some of the arroyos here, too. You know the ones we mean, right? They're mostly up in the Heights and covered in concrete. 

The Heights is where they have all the restaurants. There's so much food up there and, one time, we heard about a grocery store that went on for miles, in the shadow of the mountain where they keep all the nuclear bombs.

You might think that's odd, but, when we looked around, that's what we saw. We've also seen other things you might not like to look at it. But, if you do, then maybe that will give you the final push you need to drop everything and come on out west. 

Don't worry—like we said—there is plenty of food. Water's getting scarce, though. But, if you keep an eye on things and don't expect a green lawn ... you'll be just fine.

Here's the first of what we saw this week. From the below picture, we can already tell the future is here. 

Photo credit: Metropolitan Detention Center

According to the teevee news, the above-pictured fellow—who goes by the name Felix Romero and has called this spinning ball of dirt home for 30 years—is a local who has been on at least two high-speed chases with la jura in the past five years. Just sayin'.

While, we're at it, this is the lady that was driving Romero around right before his latest flying metal, human-endangering escapade. She is called Meagan Fitzgerald, in case you want to know. She was arrested on our lovely, tree-lined boulevards for harboring a felon and possession of a dirty brown horse.

Photo credit: Metropolitan Detention Center

Speaking of evil chemical compounds, here's a picture of someone representing something that happened with the aid of methamphetamine. That mierda may be making Heisenberg rich on teevee, but it's a ruinous substance. From meth mouth to mental incoherence and bizarre manifestations of ultra-violence; speed kills, man. Example given: Timmithy Stover, 27, of Hobbs, N.M, who allegedly committed murder-death-kill after an intimate association with the poison.

Photo credit: Metropolitan Detention Center

Those are certainly heavy iterations of reality here in Burque town, but it's not always so dark. Sometimes, it's dusk or twilight. Young Billy Espinosa faced the long arm of the law when he tried to gank gear from a local policeman's home. He never had a chance, though he initially made off with a "...duty-issued 9 millimeter gun, bullet magazines, a police baton, handcuffs and even pepper spray." 

Photo credit: Metropolitan Detention Center

Then, there's the case of Terry Anderson, a woman—described by observers as a "crazy lady"—who came into contact with the boys in blue after breaking windows in the Heights. Police say they tricked her into coming out of her house; she exited wielding a baseball bat and attempted to hit a man with it. When responding officers tried to stop her, she began to swing at them and was subdued with a stun gun. 

Photo credit: Metropolitan Detention Center

Well, that's a bit like Bleak House on the Rio Grande, but you've got to admit it's kind of a hoot. The beauty of complexity and irony and all that jazz. Maybe next week we'll do this again, but with places instead of people. Don't worry. We're not about to ask the city for an office. We prefer the dark.

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The New Mexican Astronauts

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Hey carnales, two-thousand and thirteen is pretty bitchin', so far, eh?

Everyone's talking about how far they have come along into the twenty-first century. It's just plain glorious to think about where we came from to get here. All that shiny newness reminds me of a fable I heard one day at Ghetto Smith's while wandering through the dog food aisle.

It's a story about the New Mexican astronauts; los recuerden? They came from the south with their sister the scientist in an attempt to reconcile el norte with la neta, if such a thing is possible.

I imagine there is all sorts of stuff on the interwebz about all this. Maybe you ought to google it when you are done here. Anywho, this story is about the time those two, nursed on atomic infusions and the dull knife of continuously magic circumstances, were gifted with petroleum-powered caballos mecánicos.

La historia suena así.

The dirt bikes were a good idea because they introduced a format for exploration that was dangerous and therefore had to be studied, modeled, processed, and then undertaken with the utmost gravity.

Additionally, there would be no supervision or support on actual missions, just the endless sage, wrecked cars, spiders, and occasional cows encountered on trails that had been carved out by the agents of men who had been making movies about an imaginary version of Albuquerque, who wanted a way to conveniently strand their hero in the Sandia Mountains, near the end of the fifth reel, like he was el vaquero más solitario del mundo, or something like that.

One of the motorcycles was painted green; the other was red. This configuration had nothing to do with the mythos of the popular culture in those parts regarding two fruitful colors; in this case let us say that the patterns and spectral traces differentiating one vehicle from the other symbolized springtime and blood.

The devices were put to use, a process concerned with the depiction of new experience was inititated and lonesome guitar songs played over the top of things as a plain reflection of the awesome and empty mesa that folded outward from the main observation laboratory. The two New Mexican astronauts prepared a mixture of gasoline and oil, imagining the far shore as just over the looming mountains, a bright thing seen vaguely from the corner of one's eye, waiting to be fully observed and made real.

And so with their sparkly protective headgear properly applied, the two New Mexican astronauts zoomed through several very compact iterations of the eleventh dimension which were craftily disguised as this or that neighbor's back yard, and right out into the middle the desert.

En ese desierto, algunos de los cactus estaban brotando plumaje colorido, and birds made from stones and mud lept up into the air as the spacemen approached. Here was a shift in the sand where a serpent had slithered by; there was a beverage storage unit abandoned long ago by another explorer, whose size was determined to be in excess of three meters, and therefore probably from one of the moons of Jupiter.

The only problem was that the whole scene lacked music. The two New Mexican astronauts fiddled with the idea of strapping a portable radio-wave receiver to one of the dirtbikes but decided it wouldn't be the same because meaningful tuneage would just get lost out there in the vasty arroyos, sabes?

On the journey back, one of the spacemen, the one with the name like a wolf (the other was called after the highest of clouds) ran over a small rodent. Basta, each cried out to the other. They hauled ass back to their space chante, parked los motorcicletas in a dark room filled with ghosts and spent the intervening days listening to A Night at the Opera and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road; smoking Salem brand cigarettes stolen from the captain's quarters.

At night they would take out their microscopes and consult encyclopedias while the wind churned and rattled as if telegraphed from a much heavier planet. The New Mexican astronauts retreated into their labyrinthine headquarters and shortly after the solstice, the dirt bikes became small birds that flew off towards the sea.

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A Rough Facsimile of the Outside

by Rudolfo Carrillo

The other question I get asked is how do you come up with all of that mierda about Albuquerque that seems to come crawling off of the screen like the backwards guitar in a John Lennon song that is really about the joy of oblivion.

Well, first, I tell those folks thanks for the comparison as that is indeed an apt and concise metaphor for the way I have seen words come spinning out of my head and through my fingers, just about like that, anyway.

Afterwards, when we have each and all settled on our favorite Beatles song, I tell about where this and that story came from and how it was something I saw, like the poetical refolding of the state fair into transportable, forlorn units and truckloads of animals that set me to thinking, or maybe someone I remembered that was wandering around the arroyos and storm drains with a collapsible psychedelic shopping cart in nineteen-hundred-and-seventy-seven. It is all pretty damn random, and sometimes I write some of it down.

I could write all of it down, but I am too busy skylarking and wondering about the ultimate destination of humanity and the way beauty is all wound up in the fragile construction experience to be too bothered with the thin transcriptions of my own fatty meanderings.

That ain't to say the words collected here are in any way meaningful, just plentiful when it comes to their organization into a mythos for this state that is mostly based on my eye for it, and the way it sings to me as I wander through and around the place.

So, now, I am gonna collect and display some words you most likely could be hearing or reading about from other sectors in the global data fiesta, right about now, how it is the end of the year and so making an accounting and displaying some quantitative data is the proper ritual to enlist, to mark our passage forward. 

The sort of instant gravitas accorded to that particular and especially ephemeral popular culture process always annoyed the hell out of me. As historiography or as narrative, most year-end lists, especially the most arcane and abstruse stuff found in American pop culture, have the weight and coloring of H.R. Pufnstuf, says I, offering the reader a dry, dusty, Dadaist version instead: independent of television, free from the nagging static of reality.

Of course, I took all of that into dreadful and sustained account whilst penning my own unaccountable, bounces-like-a-foreign-convertible-with-a-bad-front-spring configuration of hyper-local events, occurrences, circuses and meta-narratives. I reckon some are important, somehow.

• There are still ruffians at the local Walmart. They were also out of rakes the last time I ambled through the holiday-truncated gardening section. It is not that much cheaper to shop there, but damn, everything there, centralized, the great navigator would be proud.

• Lead and Coal look lovely and I enjoy driving down them almost every day. 

• I think it must be for the first time in 30 years that there was not a Christmas tree lot in the Student Ghetto. Now, it is getting on towards the new year and my heart is broken for that whole neighborhood; Kai's Chinese is closed until next week, too, which is a particular goddamn shame to me because this is just the time of year when finding parking along Harvard is as easy as pie. 

• I decided it was okay to stop worrying about the the three-thousand tactical nuclear missiles stored next door by my neighbors. They seem like good folks, but one of the fuel tanks in their backyard leaks and who knows where in the hell that'll end up.

• When I was about 14, my brother and I had dirt-bikes.We met another kid out on the mesa who had built a suave fort out of plywood and all sorts of shit that had tumbled down the arroyo. Inside it smelled like burnt rope and there was a battery-powered radio and lots of canned food, plus some booze. In the intervening 30 years, esa chante has transformed into a Satellite Coffee shop, but is still cavern-like with dark edges, with inhabitants that look up from the shadows, surprised to know you are there, too.

• During the first Gulf War, I was working at UNM. One day, chingasos broke out between a group of flag-burning hippies and hate-shouting hawks, right in front of Zimmerman Library. I was walking by on my lunch break and impulsively decided to separate the two main fighters, one of whom was trying to ignite an American flag. Somehow, my crazy gesture worked, I was bigger and older then the contestants. They both retreated and I was left holding the flag. The next day was Saturday and the local daily featured the war protest on the front page. Next to the story, above the fold, was a picture of me in action, yanking folks this way and that. Serio.

• A summary of the latest reported UFO event in Albuquerque can be found here, and includes a fancy interweb map that could lead to a transformatively X-Files-like experience, except I promised you no teevee at the beginning of this scattering dataset and so ask that you believe with the above reference noted but not invoked.

Anyway, thanks for your support and happy new year from TiL.

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