July, 1982
Lac Cruces, New Mexico
music, so evocative
music, how does it strike such a chord, it is just nothing but sounds
notes
music, how does it conjure tastes and smells and emotions and fears and the total immersion in experiences of days of yore?
A song, 27-years-old now, playing, listening
and now it feels like 1982.
My body feels…dragged down by memories, weighed down by the anxiety and the fear of the foreboding and the unknown, 27 years later. Ancient doubts, ancient fears. Skeletons of feelings now but feeling very real which conjure bodily and mental reactions, like a deactivated virus injected
into your body.
Which protects you from disease. Do these 27-year-old memories protect? I doubt…
Because of a song.
Because of that song I’ve jumped in the time machine and I find myself wandering the desert. again. the hot, dusty New Mexico desert outside of Las Cruces, untangling the
stillborn trip, the memories and the photographs that were not to
be.
A trip that was endless for it never had an end. Really, never.
A trip that never took us to Carlsbad Caverns, a trip that never took us to El Paso, Texas. A trip muted prematurely in the travel agenda which faded into the dusty and discarded yellow pages of the
AAA tour book. Motel plans, tour plans, family visiting plans….ghosts of non-existence
like a dream halted
midway
by
the
loud and raucous
alarm clock
the alarm clock which
in this case
was epileptic froth sirens running to the hotel lobby calling emergency for paramedics that frantic and delirious rushing how your body jumps into a state of hyper awareness and survival adrenaline and cortisol and other stress juices flooding your body
and you remember nothing later
except the rushing the panic
the screaming
the sights
of your father rendered subhuman and alien-looking racked with
convulsions and mouthy bloody froth
as he chews his tongue to pieces
And in the unsteady peace which falls for a few moments after
the paramedics
take him away
to a strange hospital
here in a foreign hot and sunny land
Why
Why
What
How
Now that your body can stop, can come out of flee mode that you can stop rushing and
saving lives and protecting all you know and love
now that your mind can once again
reassert supremacy (and a mind asserting primacy is a terrible thing)
the
questions
why how what
and as the siren fades into the distance
mom
drives the old
Plymouth station wagon which has stranded us
here to begin with, that’s what started the whole fucking disaster
and follows towards that university medical center
we never knew before
and which we never
thought we would know, ever
follow
like a desert rocket we follow
land at the hospital and
Wait
that uneasy and haunting and anguished waiting that is only possible, in, hospital
waiting rooms.
I was 17 but why do I feel like I was so much younger and smaller and helpless
thinking
now
I feel like I was 6 at the very very most
6
small and helpless and powerless
In the hospital just like in horror movies the group
fragments
one part going one way
the other part going another
and like a horror movie our mom went her way taking care of the normal hospital work bureaucracy forms paperwork
and us
(me and my brother Paul)
waiting aside alone
finally granted permission
to go to our father’s room
and we wander up
and down
and through
anxious of what we would find see hear
trembling, scared, somewhat childlishly poised we walk into the room
and the timing
the fucking timing of all timing
how was it that just at that precise and very moment when
we finally walk through the doorway
to finally reacquaint ourselves with our
father
who has been struck down before our eyes
how is it
that at that very moment another wave
a swarm
a tempest of
brain-seized convulsions falls upon him while he lays there in the hospital bed unattended
and we walk through the doorway
to see
his body writhing below those sterile stiff white sheets
and streams
streams, rivers
of crimson blood
running from his mouth
and we rush out mechanically
having seen nothing no nothing we tell ourselves
nothing
while mom calls for help
and my brother
and i
we wait outside the room
while scrubs and flowing green robes and strange doctor men and nurse women rush into the room
numb
my brother and i
standing at the window of this 3rd or 4th or 10th floor right
outside our father’s room
where they are trying to make his shaking stop
the most vivid memory of the trip
and standing there shocked and dislocated mentally physically intellectually disconnected
I can see the desert as it stretches into the horizon
toward the rest of New Mexico and Texas
the barren horizon we never reached.
During the week or so we waited for our father to leave the hospital, we filled our uneasy days sightseeing the southern New Mexico desert community. Pictured: David, 17, Paul, 11.