#193 / 2011 Spring: Organ, NM

April 26

#193

I took the Mexican bus out of Las Cruces after four days up in Organ, NM, living alone in a guest house and befriending Gordo the dog.  Up in the big house lives Eric Brown, artist, potter, teacher. He has two sweet young girls. He was currently teaching so I gave him Joe’s most special, to me, shirts. The horizontal pin-stripe I purchased for him on the Las Ramblas in Barcelona. And two more. They were so precious to me and Joe was so handsome and elegante when he wore them, which was rarely.

Eric had a new young girlfriend, quite literary; Joe would have loved her. The guest house is on the border of the desert up in Organ. I say that place has a millionaire’s view, all of Organ does, because it is up near Augustine Pass and the town of Las Cruces lies far down the slope. Very striking at night.

The desert was out the back door, the mountains ring around. It was a spectacular meditative place. And from this place my good friend Paul Sivertsen came to get me and together we loaded up Joe’s complete personal library and took it to the curator Laurence Creider, PhD, from New Mexico State University.

Since Joe’s death I have assuaged my grief by doing what needed to be done to keep the legacy of Beatlick Joe Speer alive and documented. So for all of Joe’s works for the last twenty years to be archived in the very stacks, at the very library that he spent so much time in – and loved so dearly – was such a tribute. It feels good.

I share a few meals up in the big house, feed the cat, walked Gordo and  strip, strip baggage down time and time again; reduce, reduce to bare bones. I’m ready Michael, my mechanic and best friend, enabler I call him, picked me up and one day early I set out for Juarez, on the Mexican bus, to fly out of Juarez.

My seat mate was Hispanic, heading to Mexico to visit his daughter. He had a very kind face. I practiced my flawed Spanish. I was able to communicate to him that I was moving to Oaxaca for a while. I was on my way to the airport.

I become embarrassed because I just can’t speak without crying; I am such a pitiful sight, but I don’t know what else to do but just let my emotions go. It’s not like I can stop them anyway. I get to Juarez and try to figure out how to take a bus to the airport instead of a cab or something else even more expensive.

It doesn’t take much more than an hour of trying and I am on the city bus heading to the airport. I tell the driver that is where I am going and asked him, I think, to let me know when that stop comes up. I know the airport isn’t more than a mile or two out and we do pass the sign. But since the driver didn’t give me a signal I just sat put. The bus continues. I figure well on the way back I guess.

I might add here that not too long before we pulled out of the center of town the bus driver was quite occupied holding conversation with an attractive woman. I was on the bus by now way over an hour and we had passed the airport long ago. We seemed to turn around at some point and the guy takes off in another direction. The tete-e-tete continues up front.

Finally my bus driver flags down another bus and asks the driver to take me on board. This is the one who finally took me by the airport. So I am pretty sure that the driver simply forgot about me.

The Juarez Airport was concrete slabs two stories high. I was 24 hours early. But I did this intentionally. Once Joe and I slept in the chapel of an airport in Brussels instead of renting a room, so I had hoped to find something like that at another international airport, but alas.

Late in the afternoon I did check all my flight information to put myself at ease. I didn’t want any surprises because I had never used an e-ticket before. It was a long day and night.

I was fortified with books and notebooks, but that was it. And the chairs were hard plastic with hard floors underneath. I never left the airport. Late at night when I was trying to figure out how in the world I would sleep, I decided to go to the second level and sleep in the women’s bathroom.

That section which housed a couple of places to eat was closed overnight. But I went through the barrier, got upstairs and unpacked my backpack. Then I laid down on all my clothes to keep the cold from shooting up my back. That worked for a few hours but eventually security came and ran me out. It was about four in the morning.

There were so many people lying on the hard floor by then that I spread out a few more clothes and lay down. I passed a great deal of the night talking to a young man who was working in America. His wife was supposed to meet him at the airport and she had not shown up. He was worried.

She called and told him someone was going to drive her almost 400 miles to Juarez. Anyway that got worked out. He had been there almost as long as I had been.