flaneur in fentanyl city

Found on Road Dead: Walter White. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

A  hunk of shivering metal jumping on the bridge over Lead Avenue. Stevie Nicks’ voice fraying for a moment as the Ford truck bounces to ground: yes if i were you, i’d trust in me, like i trust in you. All the streets here are named for minerals mined from the shallows of desperate desert. Everyone made a nervous smile when I told them I’d gotten a Ford. “Found On Road, Dead,” many had replied. I know nothing about motors, engines, car insurance, or oil changes—so ambivalently, I let Josué show off his lean tattooed torso as he greased up another engine: the little Honda Passport I’d packed in the bed of the Ford and driven across Texas. His grin was a little maniacal, his eyes vague. Today’s trade: seduction for a tune-up, his boyfriend singing show-tunes in the shower while he laid half-nude along the dog-haired 70s sofa. “Agatha!” he called out for the shag-poodle: a true gay nerd. A couple weeks later, after a thank-you dinner of roasted veggies at my place and then a nasty fuck, he explains the exhilaration of motorcycle speed like a prophet who’s seen Christ or the Virgen. He suits up in leather, probably heavier than him, to race bikes along the long straight desert highway: the chrome and steel he rides / collidin' with the very air he breathes / the air he breathes.

I know nothing about engines, but I knew this sound was a death rattle, no smooth purring, instead a jagged clanking of metal trying to grind itself into motion. I play Stevie a little louder. I’d sent this song to my faraway boyfriend who always wanted more. A drive home drunk one night and it came on the radio and I believed it: but if i were you, i would take the love i’ve given to you.

Driving down Lead Avenue in the darkness of the desert night was when I felt most American, speeding up to catch all the green lights on a road cut long straight through Diné sovereignty. It was so easy to rip through the burnt Earth and all of human history: you just press down on a pedal in a hunk of shivering metal until you get home or flip a lesser engine over: the intersection outside my apartment complex was notorious for vehicular manslaughter since the STOP sign was often concealed by some dangling cottonwood.

“If you like this kind of stuff,” my landlord points to a sea-side painting I’d bought at a junk store for $5, “then you should see my storage unit, it’s full of tacky art!” She wasn’t wrong, about the piece on my grey wall or her own collection; I appreciated Dorothy’s candor, she kept her strongest truths for her husband, Frank—the kind of guy who bragged about all the acid in the 70s that rotted his sense of appropriate volume. With her quaking vocal chords, she’d yell: “Frank, shut the fuck up and fix the faucet!” 

Dorothy was the first to run towards the old Jeep that flipped over on Lead Avenue. We were casually talking about the plants Frank had been planting at the complex, and she must have said something suitably belittling to him when crash. A young man threw open the driver side door of the large SUV, the one that remained upright. “No man! No! No no no no!” It was so clear that the rest of his life would be so different: even if he didn’t kill the other driver in the hoarder-packed Jeep, there would be court dates, insurance payments, medical bills. Things nobody can imagine when we’re already this desperately poor. The other man didn’t die, but he was trapped, under the weight of his Jeep’s underside, and confined by all the cardboard boxing him inside. Was there a dog—a fluffy sheep herding type, or just one of those fuzzy seat-covers?

Two blocks away is a community pool, the site of suburban gossip climax. From there, a woman in a floral fuschia caftan and an off-white towel around her waist saunters to the crash as police string up caution-tape and divert traffic. KOB-News headquarters is so close-by, they just walk to the scene, and set up their comically large camera on the opposite corner. Caftan is ready for her close-up, and starts giving a wide-eye-witness testimony of how it all went down. “Oh, you are so fucking full of it, Kathy!” Dorothy yells towards her, clearly a decades-long feud. Here: a suburban gossip climax. Everyone is coming out of their faux-adobe houses and sun-bleached balconies. Everyone is talking to one another and it seems like the smoke emanating from the dented hood could be sausage and burgers on the grill. Speeding down Lead Ave. is the best way to start a block party around here.

This corner, southwest of the meager downtown, a few blocks from the landmark hot-dog stand with the neon-dachshund sign, a five minute walk to “the bosque” of dying cottonwoods, was also eight blocks from the drop-off spot. This was relayed to me by a middle-aged woman driving for Uber, conversations I relished because strangers don’t talk to one another around here. “The cartels bring it up from Las Cruces, and then the local gangs pick it up. It all goes down in Barelas.” I didn’t know how much to trust her intel, reported without any obvious fear-mongering or xenophobia, but I did know my patch of Lead Avenue was a thoroughfare for midnight werewolves on their way to the river. I’d hear their howelling on cooler nights when I left the windows cracked. The desert echoes on forever; you hear the ambulances for miles as they wail through the pitch-black, or some faraway speeding bullets, or a wild woman with steak-knives: bitch! fuckin’ cut up the side up my PUSSY—fuckin’ cunt-wetback dick slicer! Ahhhwooooooooo!

“Don’t you think maybe it’s destiny that I should be here?” I didn’t ask him his name. He sat on the woven jute rug scratching at sores all over his wire arms. It was in the low 30s outside, and he showed up in gym shorts and a dirty sleeveless shirt. His profile picture must have been 20 lbs. ago. He had that dried saliva film around his cracking lips and cheeks that sunk into his skull. I gave him a sweater I’d already decided wasn’t my style, and some free-pile skinny-jeans that were practically boot-cut around his bones. “As soon as I started doing clear, everything became clear. I could tell what was an illusion and what was real. And maybe I’m supposed to get you clear.” Crystal clear: the names for methamphetamine reproduce ad infinitum. I had met her once, Tina (Crystal-Christina-‘Tina), when I was eighteen years old in a similar scenario—well, the guy had some meat on him, was actually pretty attractive, but meth-sweat has an undeniable scent and cortisol-consistency. Back then, we tugged at our flaccid knobs while bad techno blared over VHS porn. He broke down crying that he’d gotten me hooked and then made a gargantuan pot of kraft mac’n’cheese. In that state, cheddar powder seemed like another basement chemical. But now, in this ill-picked and unconsummated hook-up, I gave Crystal Clear ten dollars and a pitty pat on the back. He put on his new winter clothes, and hopped into a black van that turned down Lead.

The boy in Old Mexico did feel like destiny. It was only eight months ago that we shared an apartment in Obrera, Mexico City: morning coffees on our balcony that was actually just the awning of an Oxxo corner store; asking  him to complain when they installed a million watt security light that beamed directly into our bed. Now, I open his post-stamped letter with some photos and a hand-drawn dedication to our very romantic walk on the indigenous pyramids in burglar-bar colonia Iztapalapa. The photos of us from my propped 35mm hung on my wall alongside a 30s socialist map of Mexico City; they framed a large window onto Lead where I watched slow crawling pedestrians or speeding metal. He just called it meth, though he was apt to opt for reality given he was in recovery. He mistook me for devoted—because I told him I was. But, in my calm certainty, I was quaking like a broken engine.

The Ford had a cassette player, its only technology I could embrace. Suddenly, I had spent a significant portion of my student loans on audio tapes. Another fraction went towards a sound system, and then a tape-deck repair shop, bass speakers, treble speakers, more and more junk shop speakers. All to just lay over my jute rug and feel the rumble of 18-wheelers clunk across the road and some Jon Hassell fourth-world route 66 soundscape. Or the Dead Can Dance cassettes I’d found at the music shop down the road; they were covered in stray acrylic paint and I imagined their lives in some tacky artist’s studio: a guy painting sea-scenes with two hump-stroke seagulls. The music shop was right across from the Rapid Transit station, the bones of a decaying whale laying in the middle of the wide road. It was Crystal Clear Central, and here I was walking in direct-sun, fraying dirty blonde hair that sweatily clung to my black back-pack. The shop-keepers informed me via nervous stares and furled brows: you cannot be a flaneur in fentanyl-city. 

I gave one of the goth-rock tapes to an androgynous boy I’d long noticed on campus. The first time was in the fine arts library where the research librarian regretfully informed him there were no books on medieval European painting; nerd noted. He was the kind of long-haired lanky guy I would often cloak in unfounded mystery. Square-toothed grin. Now, the black hair in long braids meets a dark crop-top, his large forehead cut by a middle-part. It took a year to work up my courage, but it was a truly cinematic flirt. “Can I show you something?” Interrupting his lunch and dog-eared fantasy paper-back, I led him to the adjacent balcony. “You have you lay on your back, your legs up the wall, and look up at the sky.” Only slightly apprehensive, he does so and joins me in this miraculous vision: the cottonwood seed is hurling through the sky in currents of every winding direction; the blinding orb of sun is just beyond the cliff of adobe wall and lights up the feathery matter like white-hot glitter. The sun is exploding, casting itself across the acrylic blue heavens. We’ll either die or fall in love.

I thought he was maybe Diné, but his name is Vlad. And as we walk along the pollinating cottonwood in their city planner-planted habitat, he talks about a polyamorous partner he met at Rainbow Gathering. He did smell like the Gathering: weed mixed with sweat and a faint shit-streak inside his knee-length gym shorts. We won’t die or fall in love; our conversation runs like disparate currents in the sky, mine a bit closer to Earth. 

I gave him a ride in the Ford across town. He comments on the rattling and the steering that jerks on its own. I rub the dashboard and give the plastic cloak a compliment and plead that she carry on. I dropped him off on Silver St. and then the engine clunks its final turn. It lasted about seven months; I hadn’t even given her a name: great white whale? Dead Desert Moby Dick. Nothing as dramatic as a flip, just a slow crawl towards lifelessness–like ‘Burque itself. 

“I don’t know why you don’t like it here,” my professor chastised, “it’s like any other American city.” I had missed class because I collapsed on a long walk to campus. I was just past the covered cement bridge where dirty needles littered the cracks with human feces, dried piss, and a cacophony of dissonant classical compositions; who knew such a harpsichord spectrum existed: at one end, a quaint chamber concert, and at the other, a weapon to pierce any desire to live. It takes practice to walk past a limp body and do nothing. But here, practice makes perfect. If it even warranted a headline: Found on road, dead. 

“Que chido! Where they filmed Breaking Bad!” even this straight guy from rural Mexico cannot fathom why I don’t like it. “It is really cool,” I shouldn’t be a cunt at the beginning of a silent meditation retreat, but I’m always myself: “You can pay to ride a little meth-lab van, and look at the people along Central Avenue. Pretend they’re extras in this drama.” 

My domestic suburban drama was kept up through texts and awkward video calls with a boy I’d fallen in love with in Old Mexico. He dreamed of coming to live with me: “it doesn’t matter where, I just want to be with you.” I imagined this as his first venture into U.S. urbanism: driving to the supermarket, driving to grander more distant suburbs for clothes shopping, driving to a bar, to school, to his tattoo clients. Spontaneity doesn’t renew itself here on a desert highway: it’s long straight paths towards destinations plugged into google maps. On my banana-cream-pie Honda Passport, I groan down Lead Avenue in an 80s leather jacket and gloves. The busted shocks jolt the metal where the cacophonous cement bridge meets the ground pavement. The truck, the air conditioned car, the frenzied motor-bike is the in-between space of thinking about nothing. About doing nothing. About being nothing; about being American: about being the living dead.

The final scene of Easy Rider: Banana Cream Pie glides over freshly paved highway, a new off-ramp to the Albuquerque Sunport. Long dirty blonde dismounts metal, walks in and buys a ticket to anywhere else. Camera pans to the blue sky with wild high-altitude currents, glittering out of focus dots that become crisp and closer: planes, planes, more planes. Hot metal ripping through the sky. The future is dry. We either die or fall in love.