This time we’re going to have Rail Runners, filthy rich dingbats, dogs that poop in the night (or, anyway, in the street), and a whole bunch of other fun stuff.
Plus…
A death.
*
Okay, I’m going to skip over a lot of things now. I’m not going to tell you a lot about my visit to my parents or their home in Albuquerque. That’s because we had a good time. And good times are good…but, well, they don’t make for interesting writing. I suppose that’s not particularly profound. Everyone from Tolstoy to Tolkien has already said something like it. But, it’s amazing how true it is all the same.
So, I won’t tell you about the flight there, nor our arrival, nor meeting my parents and finding them fit and hale—which is good news for me, really. At the age when many people are barely able to move, they are up and active, eager to travel and explore. Every year they drive (with their two dogs, Sarah and Princeton) to and from their beach house on South Padre Island on the Texas coast, which is not a small journey, particularly when you have two full-grown Welsh Corgis with you.
Every year, too, they travel at least once to Las Vegas. They do not gamble. They never have. But it amuses them to go and watch the shows, eat in the casino restaurants (where the food is cheap to encourage the gamblers), and, at most, play the “penny slots” where they can find them. These are a dying species of slot machine, designed not to take quarters, or the heavy dollar coins that the Treasury still promotes in a futile attempt to placate the makers of vending machines, but rather (obviously) mere pennies. A penny a pop, in other words, to watch the little wheels go round. Payments, in the unlikely event of a jackpot, are of course tiny. But, that doesn’t matter, particularly. And so my parents will take a dollar and play it away in an hour or so. Then they’ll go do something else.
Sometimes, too, I think, they go to watch the other players—the men and women their own age or older, who have no interest in the pennies. Rather, they are at the big machines, the quarter slots and above, and who you can see squatting in their wheel chairs, smoking but connected by long and transparent tubes to the tanks of oxygen beside them, pulling the handle or punching the button of the Machine, as compulsively as a heartbeat, watching their social security checks vanish in the flash and fury of simulated ecstasy.
*
And I won’t tell you, finally, about our time at my parents’ house…the place they have in what’s called the North East Heights. It is suburban but not exactly in a suburb. That may need to be explained. Easterners, and some from California, misunderstand Western cities. They expect a city core, like New York’s or Boston’s, and then a circle of microtowns around it—the Dariens and Greenwichs, or, on a more modest scale, the Lexingtons and Concords…or even, in its way, little Winchester, Massachusetts (where I am now).
But Western cities—Albuquerque, El Paso, Dallas, others in Texas and Arizona and beyond—aren’t like that. Or, at least, aren’t yet. They may be someday. But, for the moment, they sprawl vast across the land, advancing their borders with each new subdivision or development, and their suburbs are not bedroom villages but rather the oh-so-better sort of neighborhood, middle class and quiet, as opposed to the (said in faint tones of distaste) the “other” ones. The ones downtown, or on the river, where one can find the crystal and the crack, the gangs and the decay, the Illegals in their thousands…
Another thing that Easterners don’t understand is Western downtowns. They expect Western cities to have cores, again, like New York. They expect to go “into the city,” and find Life…people living in high-rise apartments, or brownstones…theaters, stores, crowds, restaurants. But, with a few exceptions (and those mostly on the Pacific coast), that’s not the case. Rather, Western cities have dead, concrete, and empty hearts—the inevitable consequence of the fact that they had their major growth in the auto-centric 1950s and 1960s, rather than the horse and the trolley of the nineteenth century.
And so, Western cities are full enough on weekdays. Everyone works downtown in office buildings and courthouses. But they work there only. At night, on holidays, or weekends, they go home. The city core empties out almost completely. To walk downtown on, say, a Saturday is to be alone. Your footsteps will literally echo between the cement facades of office complexes.
That’s if you’re lucky. If you are not, you will have company—the gangs and their knives, the junkies and their needles, the homeless and their untreated schizophrenia…
And, indeed, it was exactly into that world of concrete and emptiness that we were about to … albeit briefly…descend.
*
My parents were eager to do something new with us. And, newest of all the state’s attractions was the “Rail Runner.” This is an innovation in New Mexican affairs. It is a train that runs from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. As a rule, riders include both tourists eager to see to New Mexican countryside without having to drive through it, and commuters who work in Santa Fe but cannot afford to live there.
No one can live in Santa Fe. Well, that’s an exaggeration. But, it has become an expensive place, indeed. In my boyhood, it was simply one more city in the state—the capital of the state, yes, a tourist city, and recognizably a prettier city than Albuquerque, but a city all the same. Middle class people could live there easily, and working class people, too. At one point, my parents considered moving there. It was only a matter of luck that I did not spend my youth as a Santa Fe boy.
But, as I say, Santa Fe had been uniquely burdened. For one thing, it really is beautiful. More, it has long had a certain cache among artists and intellectuals. It isn’t quite Taos, with that town’s associations with D.H. Lawrence and all the rest, but Santa Fe does sport a considerable colony of painters and sculptors and writers. The wealthy, for whatever reason, followed as a kind of intellectual tourist class. These formed a diverse and weirdly interlinked community of money and the arts—a mix more common than you might think. (Recall Cape Cod.)
By the 1960s, movie stars had begun to settle there as well. Seeking relief from Hollywood, and association with the presumed purity of the desert and its more exotic (if stereotypical) inhabitants, they came in droves…first to stay in the ancient and romantic hotels in the center of the city, then to buy (ever more costly) homes within and round it.
The result of all of this has been to drive real estate prices through the roof and REAL people with REAL incomes find it increasingly difficult to discover places to live in the city. So, they take up residence in little towns that have sprung up around Santa Fe, or else live in Albuquerque.
If Santa Fe isn’t careful, it will eventually become one of those places that have somehow drifted off the map. They are, that is, no longer quite real, like the sort of seaside community that attracts yachts like flies to garbage, or ski towns in pristine mountains where even the snow-machines project Perrier. Once that happens, it can be very difficult turning back. You become artificial and irrelevant, at best an entertainment, like Main Street U.S.A., and, at worst, an insult to human intelligence, like certain college towns, where tenured professors in air conditioned offices proclaim reality an illusion, and add that you don’t understand this fact because, after all, you (unlike them) are too stupid to see it.
But, still, perhaps Santa Fe will escape that awful fate. There are, you see, still places in town—at least away from the city center—where you can find dust in the streets. That is a hopeful thing.
*
Two things strike me on re-reading that last. First, I realize that Santa Fe and cities like it are suburbs in reverse. That is, the typical Levittown is the place to which the middle class (and, sometimes, the rich) flee the poverty and dangers of the city. What’s happened in Santa Fe and its cousins is that the affluent have occupied the town’s center and driven everyone middle class or below to communities outside city limits. It is not, actually, without precedent. In the Paris built by Napoleon III, the working class was re-settled in suburbs just outside the city proper. The idea was to make certain that proletarians wouldn’t be able to threaten the state by occupying its capital. So, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Paris was circled by the “Red Belts,” working class neighborhoods that voted consistently for the Left and terrified All Right Thinking People.
Second, I have made cutting remarks about those cities or towns which become fashionable and wealthy because of their ability to attract celebrity, fame, and (as in the case of some college towns) the children of the rich. Perhaps I have exaggerated. Well, of course I have exaggerated.
Yet, there is some truth to it. There really are communities whose entire existence depends on the fact that they find themselves celebrated by association. Aspen’s place in the world is as much a product of Hunter S. Thompson and John Denver as of its ski areas. Sundance would not be what it is without Robert Redford and his film festival.
And, one wonders, what happens when fame ebbs away? When some other community or coastline becomes THE cool place for cool people to be? When the famous and the infamous discover that, by George, all the REALLY interesting artists and Neo-Vorticist potters and Reformed Tonalist HTML novelists have gone somewhere else? And beckon them to follow?
What then?
An aside: North of Boston there is a string of little seaside communities. At one time, they were the toast of New England, and perhaps New York City as well. To them, came the rich and the mighty, as well as the creative and the artistic. You can still see the huge wooden structures of their mansions and their hotels up and down the coast.
They are dead.
The rich and powerful long ago departed for other places. The wooden hotels and resorts emptied out, were abandoned to decay, or burned in mysterious fires. The communities became bankrupt and empty. Only today, and only in certain places, have these towns begun to return, and then only as suburbs and bedroom villages, or tourist traps by the coast, where visitors on buses can get fried clams and fake Scrimshaw and tasteful souvenirs of superglue and seashells.
There is a prophecy there, somewhere.
*
But getting back to my parents…
They wanted to take us someplace fun and new…and to go there a new way…
So, one morning, we clambered into their mini-van, and headed off to the depths of the city on a Saturday, all concrete and silence.
And from there we would make our way to roads of steel.
But that’s for next time.
Copyright © 2009 Michael Jay Tucker
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