{Albuquerque 1985}

Albuquerque 1985

There were giants in those days and Albuquerque still had abundant wildlife. If, in the mid-1980s, you were to scramble through the Loco Weed and the Datura, the Buffalo Gourds and the Spanish Bayonet, crawling on hands and knees through broken bottles and blown-out birth control, to the top of Piedra Lisa on a summer’s eve and peered back at the city, you could not, in all real honesty or concern, tell which was up or down. Albuquerque reflected back a perfect mirror image of the Canis Latrans galaxy – not the nearest, but certainly the most mischievous galaxy in our little corner of the universe. It was a wild and wooly town. Tumbleweeds blew freely through the streets and bears and coyotes were everywhere.

The ebb and flow of wildlife had to do with the fact that Albuquerque was a prime example – albeit a rapidly sinking version – of a sky island. It was a little ecosystem that extended for up to ten miles outside the city limits and had, at one time, connected to other regions of the state via riparian corridors.

Topping this island were the Sandia Mountains, those watermelon-colored majesties that distracted Coronado ever so briefly in his bloody quest for the Seven Cities of Gold. The Sandias exerted and influence of place over those of us who lived in their shadow. Like a full moon with an ocean tide, they tugged us toward them, making us think we could never elude their grasp. We would escape sometimes, though. We might get as far away as Lubbock or Topeka. But even in those flatlands, the Sandias called us back. Hell, fleeing to exotic locales in Europe, Asia, or South America did little to dampen their influence. Perhaps the drinking water contained some base ore that the Sandias acted on as a magnet. The far side of the world was no hiding place as they worked their spell, pulling us homeward.

In the foothills, the aptly named Arroyo del Oso, or Bear Canyon, was a veritable freeway of ursine traffic, with Mama bear and Baby bear taking daily strolls through town. (Presumably, Papa bear stayed at home watching the game.) Antelope bounded freely through the parking lots of the shopping malls and, though rare by then, there was still an occasional traffic snarl on the freeway caused by a migrating herd of buffalo.

While the source of much of the wildlife was the sky island, its catalyst was summer. Summer in Albuquerque. What the June 30th, 1974 issue of Time magazine called “an internationally acknowledged magical time in this little burg that sits in the middle of the second most famous rift valley in the world.” It was summer that brought out the wildlife, both two and four footed.

The tumbleweeds were a particular embarrassment to those of us who income relied on daily dealings with the summerly spate of turistas. We’d had a bad enough time back then with the mayor of New York City referring to us as a “dirty little back-water shithole of a town” on national television. Having tumbleweeds blowing across the street was mortifying. Out-of-towners saw that and expected Marshall Dillon to be facing down the bad guys in a gunfight at High Noon over yonder at the OK Corral.
Never mind the fact that High Noon was a restaurant in Old Town and that historians not only believe that Marshall Matthew Dillon never came to Albuquerque, but in fact, may have only been a fictitious character on a long-running TV show. In our cabs we would be driving down a road, a New Yorker as a fare, and a tumbleweed would blow in our path – invariably one of those five foot in diameter monsters. “Jesus Christ!” the passenger would exclaim. “What in the hell was that?”

“A tumbleweed,” I’d mumble.

“Jesus Christ! Mayor Ed was right. This is a stinking shithole.”

Albuquerque, New Mexico, celebrated in song, cartoon and… well that’s about it. We didn’t make the song Route 66, but we’re right there between Amarillo and Gallup. Neil Young would still find it a good place to eat fried eggs and country ham, but by the mid 80s he’d twisted that last number for the road and split for Santa Fe. The Sons of the Desert and Jim Glaser kept trying to get back here in their songs, though aside from the possibility of a little nookie, no one knew quite why.
Albuquerque: hometown of Ethel Mertz. Albuquerque: where Bugs Bunny felt he should have taken a left turn. Many of us who did take that missed left discovered why New Mexico is oft-times called the “Land of Entrapment.” People just got stuck here in low wage service industry jobs. An ex-wife and I found that out the typical way. Drunk one night and sick of our dead-end jobs in Tacoma, we packed our car full of random possessions and split in the middle of the night, tires rubbing on wheel-wells. We floated some checks for gas money and left town. Plowing through the Washington night, we began to sober up, realizing what it was we’d done. There was no turning back then and on and on we rode, one Walkman and an aspirin bottle half-full of amphetamines between us. We wound up in Albuquerque, cruising into town on the proverbial fumes. With a $20 bill and a car full of clothes and books to our name, the plan was to work for a month or so and then head on back east to live with her family.

Month singular turned to months plural. We would try, but we just never could quite get together a decent running car or enough money to get much further than Amarillo. We might have a car with enough of a tune-up on it to get us to Ohio, but we’d try to parlay our cash funds into a fortune by investing in a half-pound of pot. Or we’d spend the car repair money on eight ounces of weed. Or sometimes we wouldn’t have a car at all. In those times we would buy some dope.

Sometime after the months passed one year, we divorced. I heard she made it out eventually. Went home to Cleveland and started the family she’d wanted. Hell, we both wanted the family. Just not with each other.

I’d blown through a half a dozen jobs and as many girlfriends since I’d been back in town. Both my labor and my loves revolved around cooking food or pouring drinks. The girlfriends were generally waitresses or barmaids I’d meet at a string of hash-slinging shit jobs.

I’d had my fill of cooking and waitresses both, so when I saw the ad in the paper looking for cab drivers, I thought I’d give it a shot. I filled out an application and they sent me out to train for two hours and then had me drive a full shift that night. I had no cash for change and no map save the one in the back of a shredded phone book I found in the trunk. I got both lost and yelled at, but at the end of the shift I didn’t have to mop some drunk’s puke out of the bathroom.