by Rudolfo Carrilloi am driving a car that is colored like ashes or the far reaches of intergalactic space - and is called the salamander after a book that i like to read - when i will be god-damned if an oil-smeared and dusty like the machinery of oklahoma in the thirties group of humans stops right in the fucking road and i have to turn the wheel sharply to the left, else they be rendered as lifeless components of the inanimate galaxy all around them.
they are waiting for a straggler who is still on the other side of the road and he is busy taking a piss on the big green electrical transformer that sets next to the rubbish dumpster behind the neighborhood pharmacy. they are all yelling and cajoling him to be done with his relief, fearful of the heat which such watery pause often brings. at least one of them is also thinking that they can't spend the rest of their life in jail and so they don't see my car turn the corner on a vector that might well forcefully intercept their desperate but satisfying congregation.
thanks to my lightning fast reflexes, that never happens and I am past them and gliding into a parking space before the group's laggard finishes his work and passes out with his pants around his knees, his associates fairly howling with laughter and recrimination. they head on down the street, leaving him to rot in the bright sunshine while i pull myself out of the drivers seat using a kind of leverage that is reserved for magicians and the chronically ill.
the doors to walgreens slide open automatically when you approach them, but before i am in range of that miraculous technological demonstration, an old dude who is wearing a greasy hat with the name of a natural gas supplier in Lubbock Texas paired up with a flimsy Rat Fink t-shirt ambles up to me casual-like and asks about the weather. i tell him it ain't ordinarily this dry, but when the conversation veers toward money, I draw out a fiver from my left front pocket and hand it over with the gentle admonitions.
since it only takes 'em a few minutes to account for and bag up my supply of medicine and the mysterious high-tech life-saving devices that generally come along, I rush home so that I can spend the rest of the early morning investigating other worlds. i don't see the street people again, but instead dream that a navigable river flows through the midst of the Sandia Mountains, that there is a colorful restaurant on the edge of town, down a muddy road, where anyone who asks for a meal will be fed until they nearly burst.
(cross-posted from the notorious blog known ominously to some as Report on American City 119n)
An outstanding and vivid description of a place I miss dearly. That Rat Fink shirt alone earned him that five. There was once such a restaurant in the Sandias, The Bella Vista, the only thing it lacked was a Roman style vomitorium.
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