NOT KEEPING SCORE

Ready to leave the state again? Here we go on a […]-long project where your author takes you along as she travels, staying on as many figurative couches as she can — and thus explores the inner and outer worlds in which we live.

Time to hop on board! Weeeeee’re off to: NEW MEXICO

First stop: Las Vegas, NM

Eaaaasy, easy, easy-easy every(breathe)thing Easy
from the 6am wake-up call (darkness, Tao, datemuffin, dairy: “I’ll see your strawberry yogurt and raise you a keylime pie”)
to the 10am flight out of Sacramento (wait.wait.wait.wait) to the San Diego layover (children on leashes, men on phones, women on pedestals), swing around to Albuquerque, grab that too-small Budget car (coyly:”Upgrade?”…Smile big…Thaaaank you) and like flying I drive, over dusty rose dirt layers, turquoise streaks of air, thinner currents that carried bursting cactus spines right into already fractured chest. Yes, dears! The palatte of New Mexico!

My eyes return from color-heart palpatations; my brain returns to Reality; my speedometer returns from 105mph (car must be rigged). Drive into Las Vegas, a town awash in dust. Every tree barren, every yard gravel and dirt, every brick pale and frowning. But no matter! Instantly, love. This is the home of a university, junior college, and the state of New Mexico’s mental health hospital: Character, character, character.

A finger raises. I follow its line. “That’s the building where they did lobodomies. Boarded up now. A friend took recording equipment in there and recorded the silence, played it back. If you listen real close you can hear nurses voices, and screams,” my cousin explains.

“No shit.”

“No shit,” he nods. “Creepy shit.”

Back to his house, a serious serious serious Guy’s Pad. Four funky old couches (is that where I’m sleeping?), beer bong table, other bong table, bong, Playboy, Playboy poster, Playboy screen saver, guitar-vocals playing in background, flat Dr. Pepper half drunk in kitchen.

House likely built in 1800’s, with suspicious basement, strange windows built into bedroom doors, storage space, high ceilings. There is talk of locked doors and shuffling at night.

“I’m tellin’ ya’. This whole town is haunted.”

Sounds like tomorrow we take a visit to the Chamber of Commerce and see if we can’t find out some more history on this ghost business…