The Mayor of Silver City

Throughout the Sunday morning drive from Silver City to Truth or Consequences and then later sitting in a private hot springs there, I couldn’t stop smiling at the sublime weirdness of the day before: a poetry open-mic shot through with strange energy in a coffee shop bursting with aging hippies, a surreal night at the bar that unfolded like wandering into a James Joyce novel tailored for Stephen Joel rather than Stephen Dedalus, and that found me, without any conscious effort on my part, having assumed the role of gregarious social connector, the Mayor of the City, greeting newly-familiar faces like old friends, slapping backs, joking with and introducing people to one another, charming and welcoming strangers into my orbit, a night in which a kaleidoscope of characters and dialogue floated in and out of the noisy scene like notes from an irreverent Debussy prelude as played by hobo troubadours straight out of the boxcar: jangly, dream-like, suggesting something real before asking, “Is it, though?”…

A brunette cloud of tightly coiled and cryptic hair: “When you go home tonight, accept what is presented before you.”

A five-foot-six amber felt overcoat doubled over in drunk laughter:  “I finally remembered the punchline- hahahaha- wait, what was it? I forgot it again! Hahahaha.”

Unruly hair and teeth pining a melody onstage: “Thoooought I heard somebody call my naaaaame/I put down my pack and I doubled back, but everything was quite the same…”

Sports blazer, jeans, and crooked yellowing smile: “I really want to have an orgy tonight. I wonder if so-and-so is here. Heyyyyy.”

Thoreau’s woodsman, now a local carpenter exuding cheerful sincerity: “Man, usually when we get a job it starts on the outside in the winter and then moves inside for the summer-without AC, of course. Can’t win!”

Mukluks, cigarettes, and poise: “That’s so-and-so [bawdily dancing on the bar with a friend to a song from a Disney movie while the not-having-it bartender looks stonily past them]. She’s got plaster molds on a shelf in her house of several local women’s assholes. She’s an artist.”

“Do you want to come over?”

“Yes.”

“Hey! I finally remembered the punchline hahahaha…. okay ready? ‘hey man, have you got a light?’ That’s it! Hahahaha.”

…and later still, the sincere clumsiness of sex I hadn’t planned for and went into nervous or anticipatory in a way I hadn’t for a long time, where the connection between us, the comfort we trusted but couldn’t prove was earned, made it relaxed, affectionate, uncoordinated, beautiful, and beside the point.

The next morning, Sunday, had been delightfully inefficient. A two-hour drive to spend less than an hour au natural in hot springs overlooking The Rio Grande, then another two hours (not including stops for coffee and lunch) to El Paso, my next destination, turning what could have been a two-hour trip into a seven-hour lazy meandering. I exulted in the wasted time and gas and most everything else that morning as the chaos of the day before swirled around me.

I was also still high on the attention I’d received immediately following the poetry reading, several locals trying to persuade me to stay in Silver City, one older woman inviting me to dinner on the spot and another going so far as to offer her house to me to rent at a discounted rate for the next month. That attention, prompted by my participation in the open-mic where I recited lyrics to a couple songs I’d written years before, along with the energy of a developing romantic attachment, factored significantly in my confidence at the bar later that evening and my instinctive assumption of the role of ‘mayor’ there, a role I knew well from former lives in school and church and work and which felt almost-but-not-quite comfortable now, perhaps because of how much time I’d recently spent alone, frequently insecure, and intent on flying below the social radar. It was a coat I hadn’t worn for a long time and I wasn’t sure how it fit or if I trusted it, although I did enjoy having it on for a night on the town.

I smiled thinking of the conversation I’d had with Trish, the woman whose invitation to dinner I’d immediately accepted, in which she related to me over a Santa Fe Breakfast Skillet at Denny’s how she’d been an aspiring nun in her now-distant twenties where she found herself sneaking into the convent’s bathroom at night to dance in her nightgown and watch her reflection silently twirl and leap and glide across the thin band of mirrors hanging above the sinks. She couldn’t help but skip Mass one day because ‘what a beautiful summer day’ and being indoors simply wasn’t going happen, echoing the spirit of my friend, Erica, who also blooms because she blooms and who once told me, “Steve, sometimes I’ll be driving and see a mountain and I just have to pull over and go climb it.” Emerson would exclaim approvingly to both: “Whim!” It didn’t take long before Trish had a ‘come-to-Jesus’ conversation with convent leadership who told her she didn’t have to be a nun and that a person could do good in the world wherever they might be planted. So she left. Trish counseled me in the parking lot afterwards that the meaning of this journey I’m on wouldn’t be clear until the end of it, and that this was the purpose of the journey: to find its meaning.

As if to put an exclamation point on her advice, the next day following the soak in the hot springs at a nearby coffee shop, an artist named Ovil told me about his own artistic journey. With shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair and an ornate gold ring demanding attention on his finger, Ovil related how he had painted for ten years in a particular self-created style all the while not knowing why he did so. He was compelled from within, he said, to paint variations on a theme where rigid lines and forms lay on top of an incoherent background of chaotic colors. Ten years later, once he realized the ‘why’ of his method, which came to him in an instant like a revelation and showed him that this style in fact represented how he viewed the world, and what that view was, he immediately stopped. The need had evaporated and he moved on to explore other approaches to the craft. As soon as he comprehended the meaning of his artistic journey, the journey was over. I admired such commitment to his muse (ten years!) and the wisdom it must have taken to trust he was being led or was leading himself somewhere he wanted to be, even if he didn’t quite know where that was.

 

Coda: In the Hot Springs

Clouds lazed above the mountains and over a gentle stretch of The Rio Grande in front of them, all on their way somewhere but in no rush to get there, drifting slowly enough that their movement was discernible only by close and patient observation. Those wisps nearing the sun shimmered with the full spectrum of visible light like the scale of a fish. Again and again, as a ragged tuft of cloud approached the sun, it lit up in an array of glinting metallic color. I named the colors I saw out loud to myself, trying to perceive the detail and nuances in them. My vocabulary fell short but my eyes did not and the attempt alone had its intended effect of simply being present for the intricacies of the show. Further away, larger, darker clouds glowed white around their edges while their centers, the bulk of their portentous mass, remained grey and impenetrable, even as they eventually wandered across the sun.