THE PORTALS OF TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES
by Michael A. Leavy
One thing I can tell you about Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, is that the MacDonalds there—which you only see if you head the wrong way off the exit from southbound I-25—has the world’s best Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese. No lie.
In T or C on Writers Camp weekend, we shared the Pelican Spa with men who stood next to motorcycles. Each morning, at 0700 hours, the men and I would nod silently to each other as I passed by on the way up the hill to Passion Pie Café for my Breakfast Waffle.
I never saw the men ride the motorcycles, I think because the motorcycles rejected them. The men wore outfits that looked like lightweight ski wear, and the motorcycles probably told the men to fuck off back to their rooms and put on some denim and leather. The bikes probably rode off on their own, filled with disgust by the idea of orange and powder blue synthetic pants.
Four days and change, and I never saw a motorcycle on the streets of T or C, which seems strange. They may have been avoiding me, for reasons of their own. The town has its secrets, and maybe its bikes do, too. I did see an old fellow a couple of times on one of those three-wheeled thingies designed for the mobility challenged, and on the Monday, someone putt-putted by on a tiny metal thing with two fat black tires, designed for cretins. I doubt he survived the day.
Young men trawled the streets in pickups, often with very big tires (one of these probably ran over that last fella). The young guys liked to make hooty sounds at strangers, and yell insults as quickly as they could think of them, which wasn’t always quick enough for the targets to hear them.
I used to drink with some of them boys when I was young—often on back country roads before we were legal, splitting a 6 or 12 of Heinies and a bag of pretzel rods—then in later years I sat with our grown-up selves in 12-step rooms, so I chuckled at their hoots, and hoped they might spend their prison time honing their insult chops.
That’s why you could find me pointing my phone down empty streets more often than at colorful storefronts and idiosyncratically downtrodden residential motels in T or C’s Historic District. The latter has charm in abundance—art galleries, quality coffee, beer & baked goods, all the goofy and/or used stuff you could hope for—plus gracious people and a handful of outsiders whose dreams appear to have been fulfilled.
Thing is: so many empty storefronts, so many empty pockets in and around the District. And most of the town is two long roads of endless outskirts dotted with gaps where the tax base is supposed to be and a couple batches of residential blocks where the trucks sit when they’re not cruising around.
Easy enough, then, for folks like you and I to afford the rent on a store front and open a business that’s only open 16 or 20 hours a week and employs, basically, no one. There’s always Wal-Mart.
I forgot the spas. They’re painted up like old whores, too. The Pelican is full of Japonaiserie, Chinoiserie, Thaioiserie (made that up) and the odd bit of Moroccan soft porn (my suite, anyway), and it’s lovely to the eye, so long as you overlook the colonialist racism. And the Pelican’s inner courtyard—a really, really relaxing spot at first blush—has wonderful Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, albeit belonging to very different traditions that were never meant to be mixed, and treated as interchangeable decorative elements with pelicans and other oriental figures.
Window dressing, hung in desperation, hung with a contempt cloaked as—what? irony? whimsy?—or I am being hysterical?—for a town that’s been trying to support itself off somebody else’s water for over a century, and still not pulling it off.
Really, it’s like most of the country, just concentrated, dried out, mixed with spit, then smeared over dust and old boards.
We writers all pointed our phones and shot the local sights. Unlike me, the other writers probably took photos that managed to illustrate what they wrote in their dispatches, but what we must all have had in common was lying with our pictures even more than we typically do with our words. Everything we shot was true, it was there, but the there’s not in the picture, it’s cut out, so what’s caught in the frame is no longer true, if you catch my meaning.
Our last full day in T or C, as it happened, fell on Columbus/ Indigenous Peoples’ Day. God, or nature’s god, gave hot mineral springs to this place, and before the older holiday’s namesake showed up, the newer’s probably spent millennia visiting those springs, soaking, trading, telling stories, doing a little dope—but not trying to make any money off ’em.
Then commerce came and made a town. Dreams came to die, and clown paint covered the land.
Michael A. Leavy is a neuroqueer writer, anarchist, and emerging writer. A former social justice educator, they now live and do a bit of teaching in Santa Fe, NM. Find more of their work at michaelaleavy.com.
