Instead of setting this story up in any meaningful way, I’ll just shoot to the email I sent my professor when I turned this in.
“Professor Bayard,
I am not good at fiction. Either that, or I lack the empathy to write believable romance. Or, perhaps I rely on subtlety and mockery as a crutch. These are a few of the conclusions I’ve reached about myself in the process of finishing this.
It’s not what anyone wanted, it’s 24 pages long, it’s not as funny as it is esoteric, and there’s little-to-no MURDERBONER. But, then, aesthetic assessment is subjective, and I’m a serious self-hater, so here she is. I really hope you enjoy (hope being the operative concept–not enjoy), ‘cuz this one went way different. Good luck?
Regards,
Trevor”
People seemed to like it, though.
My wife has a kind-of-shrill voice, when I look at it objectively. “Hank, you need to get down here, NOW!” just wouldn’t have the same dog-whistle pitch if others yelled it. But, then, perhaps that’s because she’s domesticated me.
When I entered the kitchen, my wife was standing over the stove island in our bougie, proto-yuppie, re-done kitchen, staring at a piece of opened mail. “Who’s William Sneijder, and why would you care if he’s dead?”
Technically speaking, this is the fifth-worst way to find out that a friend has died, right behind singing telegram, stunt-plane smoke-message in the sky, Fox News’s “The Five,” and, finally, a floating bottle with a suicide note in it, hucked somewhere in to the North Atlantic.
I don’t think my wife had any ill-intent, though. She had no idea, after all, who Willie was. I hadn’t seen him since the band broke up. And, no, this isn’t one of those jokingly-intoned “oh, y’know, the old gang” asides; we were actually in a band.
It was a part of my life that I had kept mercifully separate from my wife. She obviously knew about my past, being that she has seen me shirtless and therefore has seen my array of cheap, jail-house tattoos forged in blood and pride from an adolescence in the Blast-O-Mat.
This sets her apart from most of my contemporaries, at this point. See, I may have been a sneering punk, but I had a future to worry over–so no visible tattoos past the corporeal boundaries of business casual.
I went to college, got a job, met a girl, got married, and moved to an up-and-coming neighborhood (which is white-hipster-folk-speak for “used to be mostly black, but we’re changing that”). I turned my head and decided I wasn’t a punk anymore at some point. Simple as that.
So, of course I declined to tell her that I was in a band called, uh, well, MURDERBONER.
Didn’t seem like first-date material (or any-time material, for that matter). My wife doesn’t need to know how many times I’ve had half-filled beer beer bottles, pool cues, and various other Three Stooges-gone-safety-pins-and-plaid barroom objects broken over my head.
For her own good. Yeah.
My buddy was dead. So, still without uttering a word, I snatched the letter and gave it a good once-over.
First of all, I hadn’t seen Willie since he moved out to the east coast for college. I’m pretty sure it was DC, but I can’t be one-hundred-percent on that; we kept scant contact after he left for college. And when you cross that Kansas border heading east, you cease to exist in the Denver metro area. So, it was odd to hear that he had, somehow, ended up in Taos. Like in north New Mexico. Weird, right? Weirder still, he was dead, and there was a funeral. I needed to go.
“I guess it… sorta… makes sense. He did always want to drop out and do the ski-bum, art-freak thing for a while.” Before I had realized it, before I could catch it slipping out of my lips, I had spoken, and my wife knew that this man was a part of my life.
The details of the conversation that followed are unimportant, really. She asked me about how I knew him, I mentioned the band; she asked what I was going to do about it, I mentioned my intent to go to the funeral; she asked me about why I needed to go, and I mentioned Agueda, which was a horrible mistake.
Agueda, right. See, the way that MURDERBONER shaped out, it I was on drums, Willie on guitar, and Agueda took care of the bass.
…Yes, she was a “chick bassist”; yes, we made Kira Roessler jokes, and yes I’m embarrassed that we did, but we were young.
And, yes, I dated Agueda until the band imploded, and yes, the simultaneous implosion of the band and our relationship were related. (See, that Kira Roessler joke doesn’t seem so obtuse now, huh? My name is “Henry” for fuck’s sake. And rhythm sections need cohesion.) So, I had to explain that to my wife, also. Which was just awesome.
When I finally got done literally giving my wife my life’s story–at least filling in the parts I had mercifully glossed over–I knew I had to call Agueda.
Just like Willie, she left the Denver scene and therefore ceased to exist. She only drove an hour and a half down I-25 to attend Colorado College Law School in the Springs, and yet she may as well have been in Timbuk-fucking-tu with the figurative distance that it put between us.
Agueda was an odd bird, see. Her full name was Agueda Guadeloupe-Rosa Salazar, and she seemed to always carry her full Christian name around like some fifteen-pound weight attached to her neck. She was a Salazar, yeah, but not one of those Salazars–the famed ranchero family that tamed Wild Colorado and produced a Senator, Interior Secretary, and a Representative. No, she was the child of undocumented migrants, and possibly, maybe, perhaps extralegal, herself. To this day, she’s never confirmed or denied it, and I like it that way–plausible deniability, and all.
That’s probably why she chose the path she did. There’s a truth to that “too-smart-for-my-illegal-parents” stereotyped state of mind that the overachieving children of migrants develop in southwestern public schools. A kid is raised, seeing the life-crushingly shitty existence of a non-citizen, and wants to either kill or shape that system so that it never happens to anyone, ever again.
It helps that Agueda was always the sharpest tongue in a metaphorical drawer full of metaphorical assorted-sharp-shit. Intensely logical, she could cut right down to that baser point, the apex of an argument. I guess she just needed to be a lawyer.
She broke up with me right before grad school and we kept scant contact after. The occasional catch-up phone call, the periodic mutual attendance at a show here and there–little things like that defined our relationship after she left. And, as she became a big hot-shot lawyer, I just faded in to the background noise of her reverb-filled, distortion-defined past.
So calling her was going to be weird. I have an elephantine memory, and as soon as the “three-oh-three” was mentally cued up in my head, my hand went on autopilot, jabbing at the rest of the numbers and hitting “Call” without a second, or even first thought–pure instinct.
She answered with her typical lawyerly curtness, “So, you got the letter?”
“Yeah,” I replied, all too aware of how smart she was, how well she knew me, and how well she could tell exactly what I was feeling and thinking by the tone of my voice. I would have to control it–just like old times. “Yeah, I got it. Are you going?”
“Of course. He was our best friend, Hank.”
My heart leapt at that little semantic clue that she still held us as a sort of collective–a codified relationship. I was very careful not to let my voice let her know that, though. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll drive.” I always drove.
“Ok. Do you have my new address…?” and so on it went, a quick, efficient, precise discussion of the logistics, and then we hung up, almost simultaneously.
Goddamn, I had to pack.
Packing for funerals is always a dicey prospect. You aren’t sure, especially in an occasion like this, whether or not you’ll end up being one of those people who has to stick around for a week or so afterward, sorting out the detritus and hidden treasure of a deceased person’s life. So how in the hell do you pack? Do I bring a week of pants or can I reuse a couple of pairs? What’s my underwear situation going to be like by Wednesday? Is there a washing machine close by? Can I wear t-shirts during the day, or do people expect me to be in formal mourning-wear at all times, because “FUCK, DUDE, he was your BEST FRIEND! Why don’t you SHOW SOME GODDAMN RESPECT?” I worry too much about things, I think.
As I was packing, I was also being forced in to the multitasker role, reassuring my wife that this would be a quick deal. All I had to do was drive down to Taos, take care of the administratives, if necessary, and drive back north to the safety of our (un)safe townhouse on Welton St. in Denver. “Bing, bang, boom, done and back in no time, honey” was the general tenor of my reassurances. I think it worked. I mean, she let me go, after all. Mistake, that.
After my psychologically torturous packing experience, I tossed the luggage and suitbags in to the back of my Subaru and started down south to LoDo. Agueda lived in a swanky apartment building three blocks away from the law firm where she was a Senior Associate. Her neighborhood was filled with trendy brewpubs and post-Amendment 64 dispensaries, but she didn’t care. As near as I could tell, by midway through grad school, she had actually reached that straight-edge punk’s telos: she didn’t smoke, and she didn’t drink, and she didn’t fuck, and it was all so she could fuckin’ think.
When I buzzed her from the outdoor panel to let her know I was there, I lit a cigarette that I bummed off of an equally stressed-looking dude. Smokers always look stressed. I hadn’t smoked in six years, but I figured that if any occasion merited it, it’d be this.
When she slid out the front door all gussied up in her “I make six figures” wardrobe and accessories–small day bag in left hand, suitbag draped over her back, her right hand dexterously flicking a BlackBerry–I damn near burst out laughing. She was a spitting, snarling junkyard dog the last time I’d seen her in person, and now she was… uh, the man, man.
If she noticed my momentary working-class-hero derision, she didn’t comment on it. “Are you ready to go? Did you get gas before you picked me up? You should let me pay. How long is the trip going to take?…” and so it went. Her nervous stream of niceties displayed just how scared and sad she was when her vacuous words were put in relief against the thousand-yard stare burned in to her gaze.
“Yes, I bought gas.” I was a bit insulted that she would question my preparedness like that. “Let’s just get on the road. I want to avoid rush hour in Pueblo, and if we don’t leave now, we’ll get stuck in the construction.”
“Why are you always so worried about delays?” Agueda inquired. I decided not to answer. I didn’t have one.
What I did have was a special mix CD: a carefully culled collection of the creamiest cuts that our collective past in the Denver Punk Cult produced. All the old standbys of our youth. Yes, there was a deeper intent to that, “but that’s immaterial,” as Agueda was fond of saying. The point is, I really wanted to get on the road and get that shit blaring, if only to prime those parts of her memory that pertained to our shared late-adolescence.
The ride south to the New Mexico border was fast and uneventful. Very few words were exchanged, which definitely worked in my favor: I didn’t need to lose a series of arguments to Agueda about nothing in particular. Make no mistake, I would lose; I didn’t “win” a single argument, save for our last. And that was a pretty hollow victory–Phyrric if anything. The grinding three-chord progressions and punished bass guitars of the recordings filled the awkward silence that, I’m sure, any former couple has when they see each other for the first time since the end.
The desert on the way down to Taos is absolutely breathtaking. The so-called high mountain deserts are like an unearthly scene–a Martian landscape that just looks desolate and unfit for habitation by humans. There are Red Rocks-grade chunks of sandstone poking out of the sand to the east and craggy, mean-looking Matterhorn-grade mountains to the west. There’s no humidity, damn-near no atmosphere. The animals, from the lowliest producers to the pinnacle predators, are all the same: peaky, malnourished-looking balls of tensile fury, coiled in wait to strike down any foolish human that sets foot, tire, or ski in their extraterrestrial domain.
It’s my favorite. Social Distortion is perfect music for this occasion; the cow-punk aesthetic of their music–that bluesy-Johnny Cash-punk–it already invokes the imagery of my desert in my head, so it just makes sense to play it. Following I-25 down through Pueblo (we missed rush hour, thank Vishnu), continuing past Trinidad, and finally poking through to New Mexico at Raton Pass, we made great time. Still, I let our Suburban Legends take care of the conversation element, deferring to the car stereo.
Silence between two people who know each other well can either be bracing and comfortable, or horrifically awkward. I hadn’t quite decided yet which brand this was.
As the Adolescent’s self-titled album wrapped up with “Creatures,” (and you just KNOW I loved the timing on that one) we rolled up to the hotel. Because we were in northern New Mexico, every single building was adobe and our hotel was no exception. We checked in drowsily at just about midnight and fell asleep, almost simultaneously.
I woke up the next morning, the morning of the wake, and immediately searched my daybag for my stash. Unfortunately for my lungs and brain, I have a morning routine that starts with rolling a spliff, making some coffee, and normalizing myself for the day ahead. See, I need the weed to make life tolerable, and I need the coffee to wake up: I’d certainly need both of those effects today. My wife is less-than-thrilled that here, at thirty-two, I still need to start my day with a hit, but she’s not here.
Upon noticing that there was no coffee-maker in the room, I went down to the restaurant. I ordered one black coffee, to-go, in the largest possible size. I sauntered outside, found an out-of-the-way place, and lit up.
Midway through the spliff, I saw Agueda leave the hotel, jabbering away on her cell. She didn’t notice me, and we both finished indulging our respective vices, almost simultaneously. After a shower and some more wordless preparation, Agueda and I left for the funeral home.
I hate wakes. Too often, when I end up at a funeral, I am one of the parties that has to stay at the wake the entire day, either because it’s family and it’s expected, or because it’s just expected. Either way, it is only expectation that keeps me there as a total of maybe four or five local lowlifes made their way through the chapel-esque room in a total of maybe four or five hours. No one said a word; no one even approached us.
Agueda and I didn’t speak at all; she hammered away at her BlackBerry and I just sat at the chair to the right of the coffin. Boredom makes the mind wander, and I wandered. I wondered how Willie died, why it was that we had to make this trip in the first place. The letter didn’t mention the cause of death, and no one who had filed through seemed to know Willie in any capacity greater than as a minor local character. It all seemed very strange.
As if by the will of a mean god with an acute sense of dramatic irony, as soon as I started giving my friend’s demise more than the baseline analysis, as soon as I started thinking hard about what killed him, three tall, dark men walked in to the pew-filled room.
I say tall and dark not as some sort of trope; no, these men were legitimate-assed natives from the area. Like, real Taos-Native-American natives.
Now, you might not know, (because you didn’t pay attention in history class, dude, admit it) but there aren’t a lot of actual natives left. We, you know, genocided them. And all for this pretty, pretty land.
So, when you see four actual natives walk in to an adobe building (a re-appropriated ADOBE CHRISTIAN CHAPEL, no less) in a town named after their tribe–a tribe that makes up maybe half-of-a-percent of the town’s population, nowadays–there’s a oxymoronic cognitive dissonance that takes place. Visually, it all makes sense (it’s THEIR land, and THEIR architecture style, and THEIR fucking language, after all), but you know, logically, that they shouldn’t be here. They don’t like leaving the reservation, we’re told. Don’t like mixing with the paleskins. I mean, fuck, I wouldn’t blame them.
Might be a legitimate existential issue, there. And, no, not “existential” like whining in high school literature classes; think more like “ending of existence.”
Then again, maybe Natives would really like Sartre. The Theory of the Groups would probably appeal to them. I digress.
They were all over six feet tall, all looked like the sun had done them a series of injuries over their lives–tanned skin implying a life of more than just the average amount of hard, manual work. Strong jaws and dark eyes made them all the more imposing as they approached Agueda and I, the only people in the room. They approached with the clear intent of a group who know what they were looking for and who to talk to to get it.
“Are you guys friends of Willie’s?” the left-most behemoth rumbled. He appeared to be their leader, as the other two men, though roughly the same size and shape, bowed their heads when he started speaking.
“Yeah, we are.” Just like with Agueda, I decided upon seeing these men that a monotone might benefit me.
“He didn’t have many friends, you know,” the alpha male continued. “Actually, we were the only ones who really hung with him down here, you know? And he never mentioned his family, or anything: just the band. We had to dig real deep to find you guys.”
“You’re the guys that sent the letter,” Agueda interjected. It took that statement to pry her away from her little plastic and silicone bulwark. She was suddenly very interested in the objectively interesting men that had entered the room.
“Yeah, we are,” their leader continued, as though unperturbed by the oddness of them sending the letter. “You two were in a band with him, right? MURDERBONER?” I winced. “You knew Willie when he was a kid?”
“We did,” I interjected, careful not to give too much information. “Who are you guys, anyway?”
“Enh, that’s not important for now,” the native paused, as though choosing his words very carefully. “We’re art collectors–kinda. We run the Sleeping Giant gallery down the street. You know the one?”
“No, no we don’t. Who are you?” Agueda always had more balls than me.
“My name is Clyde, and…”
“Wait, Clyde?” There was a bit too much audible surprise in that knee-jerk-ed auto-reply for my liking. I mean, that threw me for a loop. I’m probably one of the more liberal dudes I know–a modern-day-P.C.-footsoldier, fighting to dismantle the patriarchy from within–but I mean, c’mon. Ostensibly, a Taos tribe-brother… with a name like Clyde?
My incredulity must have shown, because his gaze darkened. I have a horrible tendency to let things just-sorta-slip-from-my-lips, I am slowly coming to realize.
“Yes, it’s Clyde. I don’t really want to talk about it. Willie…”
“No seriously, how did you come to be named Clyde?” Agueda had the same tendency I did, apparently–she was just more forceful about it.
“My dad was from Iowa. There. Happy?”
“Not really,” Agueda replied. God, does she ever deviate from that sharp tone? She definitely wasn’t ingratiating us to the locals.
“I know that’s a shitty name. I know you really wanted me to be named John Redcorn, and for me to have feathers in my hair. I don’t. Can we move on?”
“Please, please do,” I groaned through a clenched jaw, right hand covering my face as I winced and rubbed the awkwardness-pain away. At this point, I just wanted to escape from here without a tomahawk in my back.
Shit, was that racist? Did the Taos tribe even use tomahawks? Or were they bow and arrow-style? The whole pueblo-dwellings bit makes me think it was the latter, but comparative anthropology was never my strong suit (if, that is, it even exists as a discipline. I sure as shit don’t know one way or the other. Don’t really care, either).
Wait, was that racist? Whatever.
“Well, he always had fond words about you two. It’s nice to meet his friends.” Clyde was now speaking with an-almost-too-casual tone, as though he were worried that we suspected him of something. We certainly did. “Listen, we need to talk to you two about a matter that Willie needed to attend to when he died.”
There it was.
Agueda was having none of it. “Listen, if this is a shakedown, I’ll have you know that I’m a lawyer, and I don’t really want to have to bring suit during a funeral.”
“No, no, no, no shakedown,” Again, that forced amusement. “We just need you two to see something he was working on before he died. We know that he was close with you and we want you to see his final work. I promise. No shenanigans.”
It made sense, in a very roundabout way: Taos was an artists’ runaway, and Willie always had a touch of that philosopher’s disease. Why wouldn’t he be here? So we, again, wordlessly and simultaneously, decided to follow these tall, dark men. I mean, would you piss them off?
Taos is a physically beautiful town. Regardless of that high-mountain desert terrain in which is it situated, Taos has a breathtaking local architecture, one firmly rooted in the pueblo adobes of cultures and empires past. It’s a mix of colonial and native that really conjures up some bad historical juju.
The original Spanish missionaries may have been a bunch of genocidal conquistadores, but at least they had the good sense to preserve aesthetic value.
We reached an(other) adobe storefront a half-block away and were guided inside by the tree-trunk arms of our guides. The room was dark and had a firepit in the middle. I couldn’t make anything else out. Something told me this wasn’t a gallery.
“You said he was working on something in here?” I asked with an unfortunate portion of my apprehension peering through from behind my words.
“He was. Take a seat, please, take a seat,” Clyde gestured reassuringly at some chairs positioned around the firepit. We seated ourselves, not wanting to stoke the giant’s ire. “Here, drink some of this; it’s a tea that uses a special blend that we make from local produce.”
Agueda and I exchanged glances, weighing the situation at hand. Like, obviously and clearly, drinking this concoction was a bad idea. There has never been a story in the history of stories where the protagonist drinks a mystery mixture given to him by a total stranger and everything turns out fine. It just doesn’t happen. But, as with most of my actions at that point, I had to consider whether or not I wanted to insult this behemoth seated across the fire from me. Almost simultaneously, Agueda and I decided it was best not to insult the men. We exchanged glances and we drank.
It didn’t taste particularly bad, or good, even. It just tasted… familiar. And not in a way where you have tasted it before and you are remembering that experience. No, this was like a taste deja-vu: an inexorable feeling that I had been there before. Still, we drank.
After a long bit of silence as we drank the thick, musty tea, Clyde started to speak in what I was, oddly enough, starting to perceive as a verbal avalanche in terms of its force. Something was amiss. “Ok guys, I’m sorry, but we had an ulterior motive for getting you here. See, Willie stacked up a fairly sizeable debt, and…”
Agueda quickly cut him off, “You said that this wasn’t a shakedown.”
“It isn’t.” The effect of rumbling power emanating from his chest was becoming more pronounced, and I was starting to understand where that deja-vu feeling was coming from. “I swear, it isn’t.” He lifted his left hand and put his right over his heart as he said this. This was disproportionately reassuring to me, but I don’t believe in god. At all. Something’s wrong. “We just wanted you to know that toward the end, Willie was doing twenty, maybe thirty buttons a day. And he hadn’t paid in a month when he died. We had an idea–just to get a bit of the money he owes us back. We wanted to talk to someone who knew him. And you guys are the only ones who came.”
“Wait, buttons?” Agueda inquired, and before she could even finish, I said it.
“Peyote.” Once I said it out loud, it hit me. This deja-vu, the familiar brew, it wasn’t just one of those feelings. “Wait, what did we just drink?”
“You drank some of our finest product, man. We wanted you to see what Willie was working on. He took the peyote and worked on this–”
Agueda screamed at this point, and kicked over the firepit, “We need to get out of here, right the FUCK NOW.” This was not a decision that we made almost simultaneously. But she grabbed my arm, and before I knew it, we were running back to my car. The other three were in pursuit, cursing and spitting in rage on behalf of their apparently aflame leader.
When we hopped in the Subaru, there was none of that horror movie-tomfoolery. I got my key in the slot the first try, pulled out without hitting anything, and peeled out of the funeral home parking lot in neat, cohesive fashion.
“WHY THE HELL DID YOU JUST KICK FIRE ON THAT GUY? HOW DO YOU EVEN KNOW THAT THEY WERE TRYING TO SHAKE US DOWN? DUDE SWORE, AGUEDA, HE FUCKING SWORE…” I screamed a long string of queries and critiques, hoping that she would be able to provide an adequate justification.
For the first time I’d ever seen, she couldn’t. “GO NORTH, OH HELL, JUST GO NORTH.”
And, so I did. I suppose we were lucky, in retrospect, that we got a good solid hour of driving in before I got the inevitable nausea of the parabolic come-up. I may have been tripping before, but it was about to get a lot worse.
I pulled off of I-25 North at the exit for Raton, NM: the last town in New Mexico before Colorado. I piloted the Subaru to the gas station, and absentmindedly began the process of filling the car with gas. We needed a place to leave it for a few hours (try driving on Peyote. Really, try it), but my brain wasn’t really cooperating with the whole “logical, well-thought-out-courses-of-action” thingy.
I looked over at Agueda to try and figure out where she was in her trip. She was apparently around the same point as me, as she was hunching over, dry-heaving. Once you vomit on the come-up of a peyote trip, the true hallucinations begin: the wavy textures, the goofy countenance, the loss of ego. Agueda vomited, and almost simultaneously, I did.
As the head-rush of the initial “HOLY SHIT, I am Tripping” feeling set in, I looked back over at the Subaru. It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that the rear lights were on, and from there, an embarrassingly long time to deduce that my car was on. It didn’t really matter, anyway, because there’s no way I could have gotten there before it exploded.
As a sidenote, I always thought that that was a pop-culture trope, a joke that we all get, but doesn’t really happen in real life. Let me assure you, it most certainly does. Maybe. And let me further assure you that there are few times to blow up your car worse than at the beginning of a serious peyote undertaking.
But the car exploded*, and almost simultaneously, Agueda and I just started sprinting in to the woods. Drugs are funny like that.
When we got safely in to the tree cover, we began to discuss our predicament.
“We, uh, we need to think of a new way to get out of here, huh,” I asked Agueda.
“Yeah, we really do.”
“But, you know, isn’t the existence of time and space predicated upon our own perception? Can’t we just, like, shift our perception?” I asked, completely seriously.
Completely seriously, Agueda replied, “Yeah, but that would only work if we were extra-dimensional, too. We’re not. We just dimensional.”
Clearly, the peyote had set in, in earnest, at this point. This made dealing with brainstorming an alternative means of escape damned near impossible. I peered over at Agueda, trying desperately not to inform her that she had a radiant-assed giant fuckin’ halo emanating from her head–a head that, at this point, was less geometric and more atmospheric. She had affixed her attention to a tree, off one-hundred yards in the distance.
I couldn’t tell at first what she was looking at as she trampled across the desert grass, but when she squealed “Is… is, uh… is this ACTUALLY a BURRO?” I caught on to what she had spotted.
I approached–warily, though, man. “This… this could be dangerous.” When I reached the subject of this new stimulus, I shifted my eyes back and forth–head absolutely still– to make sure no one could see us. After all, it’s not stupid if there’s no one around to catch you. I reached out with a jutting, almost mechanistic jerking of the arm while the rest of my body remained absolutely still.
“Yes, this is a burro.”
There is an odd, universally empathetic, hivemind-esque quality to tripping peyote with someone that you are close to. It lowers the guard of the ego and opens up your consciousness to the possibility that the Subject/Object orientation of the world is unnecessary. The boundary between “you” and “not you” just doesn’t seem to exist, let alone matter.
Now, perhaps it’s this universal empathy, or perhaps it’s the Mescaline alkaloid chipping human rationality down to the basest, dumbest form, but sometimes you will actually have the exact same sublimely idiotic thought as your tripping compatriot.
“We could ride him.”
“I know. We should ride him.”
“They would never think we rode a burro back to Colorado.”
“We could stay off the main roads, use the Santa Fe Trail…”
“Do we have any supplies?”
“Does it matter?”
“Nah, I’m not really that hungry… Nauseous, really.”
“Cool, let’s hit it.”
It doesn’t really matter who said what, and I honestly couldn’t tell you anyway. But we did decide to ride that damn burro straight damn north, as far away from those murderous debtors as possible.
Now, the first few hours of the trip were pretty intense. All of the typical accouterments of a hard peyote dosing were there: the life epiphanies coming at a near-constant stream, the feeling of oneness and noneness, and the near total breakdown of the visual borders of physical objects; it’s a wonder I didn’t give birth to a coyote from my chest and follow it around seeking life advice.
The terrain we were riding Sancho Panza (we, almost simultaneously, decided to name him Sancho Panza) through was well known to me–or, at least it would have been if I were completely sober. The southern Sangre de Cristo range was one of my stomping grounds during my early twenties, when I was still young and had the knees to be a ski bum. The only problem was that, well, you know. The “Peyote” dealio.
But, I knew how to generally navigate this terrain, at least. That proved to be invaluable, as Sancho Panza seemed to be a bit slow in the head. Or perhaps he just wasn’t operating on the same level that Agueda and I were.
We gaped, absolutely awestruck at the alpenglow that gave the range its name. The deep red hue of the atmospheric anomaly was made all the more pronounced by our shared state. This gaping continued for a while, and no, I couldn’t give you a more specific timeframe than that. That’s just how peyote is. Time is fairly irrelevant in the plane that you inhabit.
After a while, I realized that Sancho Panza was leading us due north, which, while away from the pursuers we intended to avoid, was not the direction that we needed to head. We needed to go east toward I-25, but we were headed north in to the thick, dense, heavy National Forest-grade wilderness of the southern Rockies. But, try as we might, Sancho Panza the demented burro was uncooperative.
We would have corrected his path, but we were just organisms, too, you know? Like, who were we to impose our will upon him? We jabbered giddily as the core portion of the trip came and went, not caring a thing for any external forces or the coming night.
As the trip arced off and plateaued the true nature of the dire straits that we had gotten in to were made evident. We were probably twenty miles from the Colorado border, by my reckoning. While encouraging, we were deep in the Sangre de Cristo National Wilderness judging by the looks of the place. It was midnight, and I thanked whatever deity was responsible (Vishnu, again? Dude seems to have my back.) for the relatively generous light emanating from the full moon overhead. We were sixty miles from I-25, our only real hope of getting out of this without having to hunt and forage our way back to polite, civilized society.
“We fucked up, huh?” I asked, hoping that Agueda, with her logical little lawyer-brain, would contradict me just because she could.
She didn’t. “Yeah, we really should have just directed Sancho, here. I mean, we are already riding him. Clearly, we aren’t averse to infringing on his autonomy.” She had a point. “You say that you know this area, well, direct him. Head, uh… what direction do we need to head?”
“East,” I flatly stated. “We need to head east for about sixty miles, by my reckoning.”
“Why do you always say that?”
I declined to answer that question. Using the scant moonlight and a lighter to find some moss, I determined that, indeed, Sancho Panza had listened to Agueda’s earlier demand to “GO NORTH, OH HELL, JUST GO NORTH.” He had gone almost perfectly north. I made a mental note to try and remember that bit of information the next day as one of those weird, perfect coincidences that seems to happen with alarming regularity during a trip.
But I also had a feeling that sober-me wouldn’t care much. He’d just be confused as to why I was covered in twigs and leaves and other shit, why my car did not exist anymore, and why I had this beast of burden following me around, forcing me to probe my past literature classes for more pertinent jokes.
The next few hours of riding were, again, mercifully quick to pass. I suppose, in the end, it’s kind of lucky that we were on peyote while having to escape through the backcountry. It made the ride interesting, at least. And it assuredly made the time pass a lot quicker. But, then, what is “quicker,” or “time” when the temporal basis of the metaphysical concept of capital-T “Time” is denied in the Peyote-state? Guh, I worry too much.
So, Sancho Panza is a genius, I decided as my sober mind began to peer around the peripheries of my brain. He had, since the moss-aided direction correction, marched directly east. “If burro treats exist, when we get to civilization, Sancho Panza is getting a whole bag.” I’m a regular Jay Leno when nobody’s listening.
As the sun rose and began to illuminate the surrounding terrain, I came to the determination that I was, indeed, sober again. Agueda had been asleep, sitting in my lap, while I piloted our burro for the majority of the exodus east. I remembered that she used to have a habit of crashing during the come-down of a trip, that she willed herself asleep so that she wouldn’t have to manually readjust to society–she’d just reboot. It comforted me to know that no matter how much changes about the lifestyle of a person, they still deal with hard drugs the same way.
Agueda awoke as the sun rose, in totality. It was probably about nine in the morning. We were in sight of I-25; it was just down through the foothills. “Did I miss anything?” she asked, knowing full well that my answer would be “no,” no matter what she did or did not actually miss.
“No,” I answered. The ride was silent, just like the car-ride down in the first place. This silence was different, however. This was a silence of mutual understanding, of shared experience in a traumatic event. It was a silence more akin to what Mia Wallace described when she said “That’s when you know you’ve found somebody really special: you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably share silence.” Was that a bit too-on-the-nose? Too bad.
We piloted Sancho Panza down the last bit of downhill, but meters away from the highway. Hichhiking was an issue, considering that we had our trusty burrow in tow. After thirty minutes of B-movie antics in an attempt to attract a truck to pick us up, a grizzled old man, a man in the vein of the Marlboro man, or maybe the Marlboro man’s more badass and less cancer-y uncle, finally pulled over.
“Now, what’ve you two gotten yourselves into, here?” His voice was special. I half expect him to start rattlin’ off with “High Mountain Hops… the Finest Rocky Mountain Barley…” and end off with “…Coors: the Banquet Beer.” He does not.
“Well, we need a ride to the nearest place we can rent a car.” Agueda was probably the better representative of our triumvirate at this point. She had gotten some sleep.
“That’ll be Trinidad. Does your ass need a hitch, too?” Even though his leather-voice barely portrayed emotions aside from “gruff world-wearyness” and “gruff disdain,” a small amount of “gruff amusement” piqued through.
“His name is Sancho Panza, and he’d very much appreciate a ride,” I deadpanned. Agueda must’ve liked that, because she looked at me and giggled for the first (non-Peyote-related) time since grad school.
Our ride seemed to be as much a fan of the silence paradigm as we were, because after his initial interrogation, not a word was said. He didn’t even ask about the status of the damn burro in his truck-bed. I don’t think he knew Sancho like we did. We didn’t care; he’d get us to Trinidad, and we could probably rent a car from there, and then we’d go home and Never Talk About This Again. Pity.
Grizzly Man: Redux pulled away after dropping the three of us at the Budget Rent-a-Car on the grounds of Trinidad Municipal Airport. I turned to Agueda. “This is why I don’t leave Denver. Shit like this never happens in Denver.”
“Shit like this doesn’t happen, anywhere, ever. This was completely anomalous, and you know that, too. This has nothing to do with New Mexico,” she shot back. There it was again, her contradiction for contradiction’s sake (and victory’s sake–she always won her rebuttals, after all).
“Fair point,” I said, once again careful to measure the tone of my voice.
“Well, this is me,” she said, pointing casually to a Ford Somethingorother to her left. “Good weekend, huh?”
“Yeah, not half bad,” I intentionally deadpanned to match her intentional deadpan. “I’m just worried about what my wife’ll think about the Subaru.”
“Yeah, how are you going to get back there? Do you have the keys, still?”
I paused and narrowed my eyes. “It exploded, dude. What do the keys matter?”
“Did it explode?” she asked. Agueda’s question irked me. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure. “I don’t remember that happening at all.” Her comments were troubling.
“Either way, I gotta go back to Raton.” That particular thought filled me with no joy whatsoever. “There’ll either be a burned-out husk, or a source of more car payments in the future. Can’t lose.”
Agueda giggled–again. I’m batting very well right now. “Call me when you get back?” she tossed that one off as she got in her car, slamming the door before she could get my audible response. My eyes widened. She peeled off, north.
I looked down at Sancho Panza. “Hey, man, that’s improvement. Last time she booked it, she didn’t tell me to call…” I paused. “Yes, Sancho Panza, I know I’m hopeless.”
Clearly, it was time to get home. I believe that a great criterion for knowing whether or not you need to sleep in your own bed is whether or not you are anthropomorphizing the objects around you. Plus, Sancho Panza wasn’t telling me what I wanted to hear.
Still, as I sat around, thinking about what the hell I was going to do with my newly-minted Man’s Best Friend, I couldn’t help but feel optimistic–maybe.