Albuquerque was an enigmatic artistic place. So much in fact that the city dwellers cared more for the homeless individuals style than the homeless individual cared for their own boundaries and how to fashion their presence from public spaces. We were in awe at the library within a maze of books when a character not unlike the image of Rip Van Winkle a hundred years late had come alive to slouch on the floor while reading the daily paper. Or on the bus, when “Gus Among Us” would babble aloud “no, no, no,” his disdain for schizophrenics because that is all he knew and all that could be heard. The homeless I saw here stuck out sorely and were called by name, like fixtures in smaller towns, because this is where ghost towns became roadside attractions and open spaces were more decayed than the cityscape. This is where my reality slipped into a defensive posture because I had not seen such expansive elitism of settlers that had no more west to win. Instead they would settle upon being creative and hot and cold while I baked in defeat for not having the right gauge for enchantment nor want for sorcery and colony. I wanted to go home to freshwater and family where I couldn’t blame my problems on geography and demographics but where I did spite my peers for topography and elevation.
This was the first time in my life people didn’t want to drink with me for good times and I earned that by bringing desolation from mountainous roads back to city folk that had the images in their eyes from distant peaks but not the wilderness in their hearts like my northern fellowship. Where I was from it was a right of passage for most of the fellas to hunt with their family or fish with their friends or a combination of game, fish, family and friends, with all of them having drank alcohol as a tradition at some point in their lives. For me, I tried to cast a few lines but I really liked the tradition that was always in season and invited rain – drinking. While wild animals were better left to those who had a reign on their group as conservationists I was better off learning on my own that the wild was within me and there to provoke me into preserving my legacy as an actor within such circles. I could hang out with all types of individuals because we had but one thing in common. That is how I became experienced in social introspection, that is why my perceptions became diluted, that is how I starved.
I was in need of being with my family after a year of living in an area where I thought nobody understood me. I found out shortly upon returning that the place I was coming from, that made me feel so distant to others, was not called Albuquerque but was the pale blue dot circling the sun – the one the rest of you seemed to be so familiar to and in command of, making me all alone and catatonic in a world of perpetual motion. I made it home in time to pee my pants from fear and to forget the solace of every automatic pressure and moistened comfort I could not find on my feet.
Francis Erich McElroy 