Three Winter Trips Away From Here

by Rudolfo Carrillo

One of the things I'd do in the eighties and nineties was to make sure not to be around Burque during the last week of the year. Places I went in the winter to avoid La Natividad in town included exotic locations in the United Kingdom and the Caribbean. But I had the best time in Mexico and made use of a variety of land routes and methods to check the place out. Sometimes I would drive and go as far as I could get, on a quest for an authentic holiday experience. Back then, that vaguely translated into looking for a party. The outcomes of all those trips varied from rousing to precarious. You can try going there if you like. After I got sick eating a cut of Argentinian beef in a seaside restaurant in Puerto Vallarta during the summer of 2001, I gave the country up for good. I heard it got dangerous after that, but has calmed down some these days. 

***
I took a short flight to Juarez on Boxing Day. Phil Collins was piping through all the headphones and it was one of those older jets, like a 727 or something. I grabbed my bags and walked over to the train station. I ended up on a commuter train to Chihuahua and stayed at a rundown hotel near downtown. The cabbie whistled and laughed when he dropped me off.

The next morning some dude was standing in the alley boiling ears of corn to sell later and I bought a hotdog wrapped in bacon from a street vendor. I found out from standing around the train station minding my own business that there was a train to the coast. It went through the mountains, and supposedly was an engineering wonder. It was cool alright, with a old fashioned observation car, but the electricity onboard was fucked up, so there was no hot food or lighted toilets for 12 hours.

On the other side of the mountains was a jagged and lush jungle with fruit trees and birds that were brightly festooned. The town of Los Mochis wasn't really memorable but there was a town further out where Chinese merchant ships docked and the sailors wandered drunkenly through town with red stars on their hats and hookers on their arms. I lost my glasses in the surf out by Topolobampo, but they mysteriously drifted back up and into my hands when the tide came back. I stayed at a hotel called the Santa Ana and ate scrambled eggs and corn tortillas in the restaurant next door.

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Another time I drove a smashed up Datsun B210 down to the Sea of Cortes. I started out on Stanford Street and Lead Avenue. I took the freeway down to Las Cruces and crossed over in El Paso, headed straight for the mountains. This was back when you got a sticker for your front window when you made the border. About half an hour into the ride west I came to the conclusion that the sticker was a probably a good idea. The two lane road was twisty and the trucks coming the other way were constant. The sticky tag would probably survive a cascading trip down the mountain side, hooked to some window or its remnants.

Along the way there was a mining town all painted and lit up for Christmas with big colorful electric lights while the copper smelter down the road fumed and roared along though the night as we passed. A military patrol stopped the car in a town with a peculiar English name, but other than a brief and cautiously friendly question and answer session with ten heavily armed individuals on a dark road in a foreign country, and suicidal truckers pouring through the gates of hell and headed in the opposite direction I was driving, the ride was uneventful.

I checked into the Holiday Inn Hermosillo about one in the morning. They had a decent breakfast buffet with atole and everything, so I hung for a while and then headed for San Carlos. There was a Pemex station about half way.  After that the sea crept up and met the desert. I thought about how that scene might be what Mars looked like a million years ago, except without the half finished and long ago abandoned condos and occasional oyster shacks that dotted the horizon. Somehow I got sunburned on that trip and had to eat lobster, too.

***
Near the end of 1998 I rented a blue Dodge Neon in Chula Vista and decided to drive as far down the Pacific coast as a week would permit. Tijuana felt chaotic so I blew the place off after stopping at a pharmacy to pick up something to calm my gut. The pharmacist was friendly but kept wagging his tongue around a gap he had between his two front teeth. I stopped in Ensenda and got a stamp for my passport. There was a cruise ship parked in the harbor with lots of big sea birds swooping around the fancy boat. Passengers in white cotton disembarked and I put the car into second and zoomed south.

That night I stayed at a little ranch by the sea. It was off the main road, a crowded dusty thing crowded with wooden shacks and cinderblock businesses. They had been set up for continuous business; they were on the only way in and out of the peninsula. I got the name of the place from a Lonely Planet guide on Baja California. There were little huts made from stone and a lagoon with a couple of seals floating around in it.

Mostly the beaches on the west side were empty. I found a small dead whale walking around one day. There were a couple of hotels on the beach but they were empty. I wondered though one that was painted yellow and orange with buildings meant to resemble aztec temples. I finally ran into a bellhop. He had a thin mustache and was balding but just smiled and reached out to shake my hand when I asked about accommodations. I finally decided to stay at another hotel a few hundred meters further along the coast. The rooms were dark, cavernous, and air conditioned. The owners had a pet pig that walked around at night. Everything was painted pink and blue. There was a restaurant with decent enchiladas and a band that played tourist favorites like Jesusita en Chihuahua.

When the road got bad after a couple of days, I turned back. I stayed at a ridiculously baroque hotel in downtown Ensenada, but got another hankering for salt water and decided to cross the peninsula. There was a party town called San Felipe on the other side of the peninsula and I got there just in time for New Year's eve. I sat around in a bar looking at all the other humansm, ate flautas and washed them down with Tecate. The sea was really still, just ripples crossing its width, some boat shadows too. The moon was nearly full and was in the middle of the sky when 1999 was announced over the loudspeakers.

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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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BrBa Haiku: Say My Name, S5E7

Words spoken in the

desert and then the bosque,

A name and a plea.

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A Mythology for Southern New Mexico

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Oye, compañeros, it's like the new year and stuff, but la neta is that I was just as unprepared for this unique ubicación on the space/time continuum as were you. Although los preparados amongst you might be making un gran chiste out of this clumsy attempt at post-event accountability, it does go without saying that the passage of years loses its gradual quality as the sun continuously swallows up whole days while la tierra is alternately consumed by darkness and engulfed in starshine; a sliver of a celestial sphere reborn brightly and eternally every dawn.

Given that sort of cosmology as a guiding force, and whilst referencing the centennial year of this here state, (cien años, que chingon!) I reckon I could use this textual timeframe to traverse the chasm of years that have passed since I first appeared, unannounced and similarly perplexed, in a raggedly settled portion of the Chihuahuan desert which perpetually looked covetously south towards home.

That was, more or less, quarenta-ocho years ago. Though I've only been around for roughly un medio of the time este lugar has been part of the EEUU, I've tried to pack in as much acción as possible, and let me tell you, just getting here was a trip, carnales.

Mi jefita, Virginia, had to travel from Las Cruces down to the rocky and forlorn colonial outpost known to some as El Paso del Norte, in my grandpa Albino's Bel Air because she was pregnant and the hospital in the Mesilla valley did not quite have the facilities or faculties to deal with a case like hers.

Que bárbaro!

Listen, it went something like this: Virginia was an educated young Nueva Mexicana, an identity she worked hard to attain, but which was still rare, fifty years después de statehood.

Anwho, ella worked for a fellow named Clyde Tombaugh, down at New Mexico State University. In case you are interested, he was the hombre que descubrió la planeta se llama Pluto. He did this in 1930 while working in Arizona, but by the mid-sixties he was dividing his tiempo between Aggieland and White Sands Missile Range, where he consulted on various military projects.

My mom was one of his assistants. Mostly she took dictation from him on his various proyectos. Besides going on and on about this planet and that natural or artificial satellite, Tombaugh had an overwhelming interest in UFOs and extraterrestrials, which he passed on to Virginia via scribbled notes and field recordings.

Anyway, debido a la tensión y la intensidad del trabajo de Virginia, her doctors decided not to tell her that there were really two babies on the way. What with all the talk about flying saucers, atomic weapons, and newly discovered astronomical bodies, she had enough to worry about, pobrecita!

But when she inadvertently got la neta from her nosy hermana Joann in the early summer of the year mil novecientos sesenta quatro, she threw her precious copy of A Hard Day's Night against the wall in frustration, shattering it into a million shiny shards and causing the framed photograph of John F. Kennedy hanging on the wall to tilt out of balance, to the right.

Virginia borrowed the car from her suegro, Albino, who happened to be nearby. He was busy turning a small plot of desert land into a tropical paradise, complete with peacocks, and so handed her the keys, absentmindedly. So she drove herself to a place called Hôtel-Dieu and went into labor.

Hôtel-Dieu: that's what they called the main hospital there in Borderville. I'm serio güey, look it up.

Well, my old man found out about all of this about una media hora más tarde and went after her in a state police car (just like the kind they had in la pelicula se llama Them!) driven by a jura buddy of his. Serio. On the way there, el amigo crashed the car and aced himself. My old man punctured his right lung and ended up in the same Frenchily named hospital as my mom.

Luckily, we weren't born until the next morning, when things had mellowed out un pocito. It was July and el sol was already brightly burning up the sky and surrounding desert, pero todos estaban sonriendo and the light was welcome. Some of la familia sat quietly reflecting, while others leaned out of windows in the hallway, smoking. Men and women in labcoats and in uniform and also in black bowties briefed Virginia on my father's prognosis, los gemelos, y le susurró a ella sobre los lights in the sky that Tombaugh had reportedly seen from his observatory en la noche pasada.

Pos, eso es lo que he oído. Most the people that lived in the text strings that I generated here and above have returned to the earth, so you can't really ask them, unless your centennially enhanced brujería is really happening. The ones that remain will probably be taciturn, I gotta tell you. It's in their nature.

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