Wheeler - Acid West: essays

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For Magic Momma and Pops and all my blood, backward and forward

Write the things which thou hast seen,

and the things which are,

and the things which shall be

hereafter

THE APOCALYPSE 1:19

Well, alright.

JOHN WAYNE

Acid Western \ s d we-st rn\ n.

(subgenre, cinema, c. 1970)

the color looks cheap and bright, unreal in that gaudy way cacophonous music alternating with camp music, screeching bird sounds a version of the classic Western reconfigured as some sort of nightmare a death romp in skulls on drugs an inability to distinguish inner consciousness from external reality desert piled high with deformity prophecies, transformations, miracles, and a sacrificial, somewhat paranoid vision a drug-like handling of time associating our westward journey with death rather than rebirth a cartoon catalogue of evils more and more desert savage frontier poetry to justify a hallucinated agenda, a laconic magical realism a horror circus conjuring a crazed version of America at its most solipsistic, hankering after its own lost origins over the sandy plains an empty stage a bad trip

AN INTRODUCTION

B eyond Deadman Canyon but just this side of Purgatory Canyon lies the Sleeping Lady. I watch her from the yard of the haunted house where Ive been staying since coming home again like I cant quit doing because I cant quit leaving. The Sleeping Lady is a formation of peaks and mesas and ridges in the Sacramento Mountains that spoon this house. She is made of our mountains, her rocky breasts presiding over town, over the whole of our desert basin, the peaks of her chin and nose in the clouds, striations of limestone and sandstone in a cliff of tremendous hair flowing behind her. During the days, I lie in the yard, burning out the ghosts, taking summer heat to the core as a reminder that whatever the intensity of whatever series of thoughts Ive worried down to a single shooting pain in my brain or chest or ass, it is not real. After an hour, when the sweat has stopped, the mirage literally rises from my skin. If there is a god of infinite love and scorn, it is the New Mexico sun, and so I lay myself bare before her, getting it all off my chest, letting it all hang out, a lazy naked prayer, but there are few neighbors this close to the mountains. There is only the Sleeping Lady. The mirage rises from her too. Together we bathe in the rays of our Lord like a couple of rattlesnakes cooking the nights cold hex from our veins.

This house is haunted because Granddaddy died here, because Grandmommy went blind here and lost her mind here, enough to finally get wrenched from the only place she could still navigate by memory, haunted because seven generations of my blood have run through this desert basin at the feet of the Sleeping Lady but now this house is empty except for me and I hear a strange sound that crescendos when the sun goes down. This house is haunted because it is home, because I am home but am leaving again soon and that makes it feel haunted too, haunted by me. I grew up in this house as much as my own, which is just down the street, where Grandmommy now lives out her last days with my parents, confused about my relation to her. It is strange to have swapped like this, to see her in my old bedroom, to be surrounded by her whole life in boxes waiting to be dumped or sold or donated, to spend nights on the floor of her old bedroom, tossing and turning because there is a sound that wont quit, a hum or a drone, getting up at all hours to unplug all possible culprits, navigating around the boxes of Bibles and needlepoints and sheet music and so many framed photos of Ronald Reagan, trying to get at lamps and fans and the refrigerator, cutting their power, circling even outside the house with an ear to the ground, hopping around from all the cockleburs impaling my feet as I fail to discover the sounds origin and finally collapse again inside, eyes bugging and spine like a tuning fork resonating with the ungodly frequency, making my blood run with it, the sound I increasingly suspect is the stirring of the Sleeping Lady.

I began lying with her when I was young, when she was all majesty and no stir. From the couch in the living room and from the top of the playground slide at Heights Elementary and from the roof where I sat with Granddaddy counting stars or shooting fireworks or watching the horizon turn to haze and static when a windstorm filled the air with sand from the white dunes west of town. From these vantage points I could lie on my side and close one eye and stretch my arm out and itd look like I was holding her, resting next to her and keeping her close, not desperately but just sort of lounging, draping one limb nonchalantly over my big mountain lady.

They did not always call her a lady. At first she was only Steamboat Ridge. The desert made my ancestors thirsty for anything nautical. Or they were prudes who didnt hanker to live in the shadow of breasts. But havent we always feminized the land, out of hope it is fertile? Please perpetuate and sustain us, Mother Earth. It is hard to suckle at the teat of a steamboat. We long to be coddled, but also seeing ourselves in the land is a defiant declaration of victory. Which of us won in that ancient battle against nature? You, mountain, are in our image. See our conquering queen rest. Still, from some angles around town, the Sleeping Lady disappears, leaving only the outline of a steamboats smokestacks looming over our home. And anyway, these days, rising out of the Sleeping Ladys forehead: a cluster of steel cell towers and broadcast antennas.

When I say home , I mean this town, but also I mean all of Southern New Mexico, the cities and villages down here spread out but stuffed into the same feverdream. When you hear Im from New Mexico, you may have visions of saguaro, towering green beacons of lawless freedom, but there are no saguaros here. You will only ever see a saguaro in New Mexico when you are high on drugs. They do not grow here, but no one believes us. They are your icon of the West. For us they are signposts of a myth we didnt make, tentacles of the hallucination. When you hear Im from New Mexico, you may have stories of Albuquerque and Santa Fe and Taos, the famous towns up north. There is no easy way to explain that here in the underbelly, south of the 34th parallel, which cuts the state in half, things are different. We use the abbreviation SNM for our home, and maybe that is a good explanation, how there is something awkward but accurate in the way it comes off the tongue like S&M. Most of us SNM-ans feel some pride or gratification in the way our half of the state is robbed or abused or forgotten entirelylike it makes us the better half because we endure the most fiscal pain or Border Patrol harassment or tourism-department shafting or general ignorance about our existence. We are just the bottom. And we like it. But I guess this feeling of pleasure about the pain inflicted by ones place of origin is not unique to SNM and most folks likely feel a bit sadomasochistic about their home region. We are just lucky enough to get that feeling caught up on the tongue whenever our name is shorthanded by mouth. Grins and sideways glances abound anytime someone mentions SNM Power Company or the Ballard-esque SNM Speedway or the probably more accurate than we realize SNM Surgical Associates or, my favorite, SNM Human Development, which is a rehab where you go to get set straight for doing too much of the bad things that make you feel good. You have always been a very bad boy if you are at SNM Human Development.