truth or consequences.

I spent a couple days in the Truth or Consequences area last week. I met a fellow through the internet named Tommie and stayed with him in a trailer in Elephant Butte. I drove three hours into the night, the rectangular and triangular mountains looming over me and the Rio Grande as I retraced a conquistador's path through freezing desert vacuity. Roads barely paved shook the car, in dead silence minus the metal chains of wind-blown swing seats and the perfectly visible array of stars lighting my way through. As soon as I arrived at Tommie's trailer he had me read a story about a man who pleasured himself from sitting at the bottom of a pool on a suction valve until eventually the entirety of his intestines were pulled out. There was no heater in the trailer, but luckily the water bed was plugged in, so we spent 90% of our trailer time platonically sleeping or watching movies, which I don't honestly like doing much, but I was faced with a dilemma that rarely hits me, one of absolute boredom and few options as soon as the sun set. Even the favorite nearby gas station was closed at 8 PM. Out of the slim pickin's I made us watch The Fight Club, Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion, The Good Girl and Babe. At the end of Babe I actually cried, the reason for which I cannot justify, but it will either support my often frantically explained notion that I laugh and cry without much reason, or else further exemplify how pathetically and spontaneously oversensitive I am. The trailer we stayed in is only a few doors down from a lot where a trailer once stood that belonged to David Parker Ray, New Mexico's most famous serial killer, who murdered at least sixty people, but he lost count. Tommie used to see him all the time at Pat's, the local tackle shop and convenience store.

Tommie's grandparents used to live in the trailer, but his grandfather died in 1988, the grandmother a decade later. They were responsible for the majority of the decorations, but the deer buck head was a later acquisition. See the rest of my T or C photos for a lovely photo of a photo of the grandparents.

Tommie grew up a "military brat" and was born in Fairbanks, Alaska. In the trailer was a clock made out of a tree stump that he thought looked like Alaska, which reminded me of a tree stump clock in my friend David's mother's house that David would insist was in the shape of Australia. As a map nerd I can tell you neither clock looked enough like those places that they could have been intentionally shaped that way. One night a mouse was running around the trailer and kept crawling around in my luggage and I couldn't sleep. I woke up Tommie and complained, and he said he would take care of the mouse because he liked the way I whined.

It got down to nineteen degrees at night, the air inside the trailer just as cold and dry as it was outside. I had recurrent dreams that I was running around the bustling streets of LA with my cats and hedgehog, trying to make sure they didn't get lost under the sidewalk or between walls. In the trailer fridge was bacon, eggs, some kind of artificial orange juice, not much else, all of which had been left behind a month ago when his mother last visited. We ate most of these items. For one meal I had saltines and peanut butter, since that was nearly all there was left. Finally we stopped at the Food Basket, one of two grocery stores in T or C; the other is called "Bullock's." We saw old women in motorized wheelchairs, a gang of men in cowboy outfits and two women in their bathrobes. I was also quite fond of the giant cigar display, the likes of which I had never seen without glass in front of it. We made sandwiches, and I made us guacamole. In two days we barely ate enough for one, which was okay for Tommie, but I was busy fantasizing over my father's sturdy Kansas breakfasts.

On the shore of the lake there'd be clay that we'd play with when we were little kids, pretending it was currency, and molding it into animals. We came down at least once a year to visit my cousins Richard and Ruth and their three kids who are my age and younger. Elephant Butte Reservoir is New Mexico's largest reservoir and most popular state park, recreational area and seasonal vacation destination. Over the past decade the reservoir has been drained to 7.5% its capacity, and some say it might go down to the point that there's not even a lake any longer. It's because of a terrible drought in New Mexico as well as Texas, and Texans keep making new deals to buy more of the remaining water from the reservoir. See the fourth-to-last photo in my T or C photos for a house that used to be on the shore.

The Geronimo Springs Museum in Truth or Consequences. When we went in, there was a family of Brits with massive noses questioning the gift shop lady about which private hot springs had the best deals. It seems to me Europeans are the biggest tourists of the American West. I notice in guest books at places like these that everyone who signs them is either from New Mexico or Europe. The man working there, his eye looked like it was about to fall out, and he couldn't tell me of any hot springs that were free or that we could hike to. They're all bubbling up directly into people's indoor spas so that they can charge you for the experience.

There were settlements of Paloma Springs and Geronimo Springs in the late 1800s, but the real growth into a town happened when the dam was built in 1916, at which time the settlement for dam workers was incorporated as Hot Springs. In 1950 the town voted to change its name to "Truth or Consequences," because the host of the show of that name said he would do the program from the first town that renamed itself after it. When I visited my cousins this time around, they were saying they'd rather it had kept its old name. I can't understand that; the name change is so beautifully absurd and fits so well with other nearby rural places, like Why, AZ or Superstition, AZ. All of these names and also the post-apocalyptic nature of the Salton Sea area (see May 20, 2007 entry), the Biblical regions of Utah, like Zion and Moab, the generally unfriendly landscapes of Bryce Canyon, the Grand Canyon, the Needle Mountains, the deadliness of Death Valley and the Trinity Test site, the spiritual vortices of Sedona and the hum of Taos, the aliens of Area 51 and Roswell, the phenomena of the White Sands and the Painted Desert, the way we're all going to leave these desert cities (Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Los Angeles) due to fires, earthquakes or because we'll run out of water. The Southwest is a land of cruel and unusual wonderment that Truth or Consequences belongs a part of. After all, T or C is not too far from where the first nuclear bomb was set off, and closer still to the site where the first spaceport will be. They've already test-launched the cremated remains of astronaut Gordon Cooper and Star Trek actor James Doohan.

Dr. Munger was apparently a crucial part of the history of Truth or Consequences, or so the Geronimo Springs Museum must think. Apparently Consequencer boys often got munged as a rite of passage.

Calamity Jane and I listening intently to Geronimo. See the rest of my T or C photos to catch a glimpse of him mid-sentence.

On Saturday, our last day there, we were driving around Truth or Consequences when I decided we'd find my cousins. I remembered the exact location of their house, just below the water tower where 2nd Street dead ends. A woman pulled up behind us in her pick-up, and I asked her if she knew where the Claassens lived. She happened to be the mother of one of Cousin Richard's tenants. I followed her to his door, and he leapt when he saw me, and said "Stephen!" and wondered how the lady and I were affiliated. And the whole family all happened to be home and doing nothing. I hadn't visited them in almost a decade, since my mother died. She always arranged our visits with them. In fact I only saw them once since her funeral. My father suspected this is because they're religious and we're not. But I doubt that's true. Cousin Ruth brought up the long-time-no-visit very awkwardly, even referencing the awkwardness of it, but still left me wondering. We did finally go out to eat, and I had steak and rellenos, which was more in one meal than I had eaten in two days, and they did thank the Lord for our meal.

"Big Food" Express.