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| He Knows Why... |
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I feel so lucky to live here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, my beautiful little city. Just getting out and going to get a coffee seems like an epic journey. The sky is filled with ominous and foreboding rain, all gray and dark blue but we've needed the rain for so long! We are so happy because rain is such a rarity now in the heat of our desert! (Remember when this was called the monsoon season? And it would rain every day at four o'clock and cool things off. Rain washing our mother earth and our cars, the wet dirt, bringing back that old, sweet familiar smell... So nice). The rain dancing Indians must have gotten their prayers answered. Oh! Here comes the thunder.
I waited for placement on the road that poured the tourists and worker bees into town, with the ever present orange barrels and cones on the left and right. I drove by the Trader Joe's and let someone in to traffic BECAUSE I'M FROM TEXAS AND WE'RE NICE LIKE THAT. I went to the Dunkin Donuts to get my medium sized cup of ice cold caramel latte happiness for the day BUT I DID NOT BUY ANY DONUTS because one's too many and a hundred's not enough. Then, back in the car, I noticed the color contrast and beauty of the leaves against the gray sky, twenty five shades of green, in all their glory. And they are almost TOO beautiful, when you consider the light here. So happy to be alive today.
I wait forever at the train tracks for my chance to turn right on Cerrillios Road, the main drag of Santa Fe or, as my favorite DJ Rocque Ranaldi used to call it, Surreallios Road. As I'm driving by the park with all of the larger than life sculptures, I notice a weird guy talking animatedly with himself and shaking his head and hair back and forth really fast, to enunciate his point but I couldn't hear his rant. Which is too bad because I usually enjoy the ramblings of the mentally ill. Drugs + Homeless People =Performance Art in the City Different. And the cool breeze shakes the happy little leaves on the trees.
It's days like these that make me miss my most excellent friend and mentor of all time, Ron. I find myself aimlessly driving by his old neighborhood sometimes and I can't help this. The street he lived on was Placita de Quedo. The street name is whispered in my head, a memorized address, deeply ingrained into the ridges of my brain because I used to write him letters to that address from Texas. Over by the post office that is easy to get to. My way of saying, "Hi, Ron. Wish you were here." It makes that Pink Floyd song all the more sadder to me now. I want to send him a post card, from earth to heaven but I just end up feeling like a naive little kid, writing to Santa Clause at Christmas.
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| 1981 Black Saab Turbo Fuel Injected |
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He drove a Black Saab and he had such a RELATIONSHIP with that car! Come to think of it, so did I. I saw 21 of these united states from the cockpit of that car and now, when I see one in traffic, I almost want to cry when I think about the fact that that glorious part of my life is over and that Ron 'bought the farm', as he used to say. I took a copy of Jack Keroack's On The Road and Hunter S. Thompson's Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas, just for foreshadowing's sake and for good luck. And it worked. That fact cast a heavy spell upon the entire trip. We would not have had it any other way. Memories come flooding back.
So many memories.
The night he had decided that we don't drink enough, my little sister and I. It was a duel to the death, a challenge, a double dog dare. And we took it, of course. We drank the mescal, we ate the worm, we acted like stark raving lunatics in the basement apartment in Rapid City, South Dakota that night. We got it all out of our systems. We sowed wild, wild oats. We screamed and laughed at our silly selves while the elderly landlord paced the floors above us. Brandy was surveying the contents of his fridge and freezer, wondering out loud why he'd even bring home such a small fish and could he ever be so hungry as to plan to fix this frozen, tiny creature for supper? Embarassed by this discovery, he grabbed it out of her hands and started chasing her around with it, saying, "That's not what it's really for..." Squeals and hyperventilations.
Chasing, running, scrambling, fits of laughing, tears streaming down. Always in his OCD/ADD work mode, Ron was doing laundry in the kitchen while simultaneously washing the dishes. These two activities taxed the older pipes in the underground basement where we lived, if only temporarily.Some sort of black tar slime started coming up through the drain in the floors and we all realized quickly that we could not do anything about it but laugh and stand around, helplessly watching the level rise. It was like something out of a B-grade horror film. What have we done and how can we fix it? There's not one responsible adult on the premises. He had warned us that mescal was more like a drug than a liquor. Were we hallucinating? Who knew.
So many memories flood back. So many nights spent in the dark room and studio, just making art. Brewing coffee at midnight, taking in the smells of it, the noises that the machine was making, the miniature thunderstorm noises that it would make. "I'll sleep when I'm dead," Ron would quote from his idol, Warren Zevon. There were lots of 3 a.m. think tank meetings to discuss plans and arts. A full and complete immersion in the arts was expected by this mad scientist of a photographer and it was expected every hour of the night and the day. And we happily complied, learning everything that we could. Once, I was getting into his car and he was moving things around the front seat, making room for me and, fascinated with every aspect of his life, I found a stack of papers that looked like employment applications and I asked, "What's this for?"
"If you wanna be a friend of MINE, you'll have to fill out an application," he says, with a big, wicked grin on his face. Oh, Ron, I do so miss your antics. Others just pale in comparison. Save me a place at your table in the afterlife and I'll continue to play you your favorite songs here on earth until then.
