Acid West
Page 34
Kittinger, Joe, and Craig Ryan. Come Up and Get Me. University of New Mexico Press, 2011.
RAGGEDY, RAGGEDY WABBITMAN
This essay fleshes out family lore about how we ended up rednecks in Alamogordo. It was either jackrabbits or poker, they say, depending on whom you ask and when you ask them. Many of the cited newspaper clippings were included in a boot box of family documents I was given by Aunt Yvonne, passed down from George Bradley Oliver, saved through the generations for god knows what. But I am glad to have found the scraps and expect to add this book to the box.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES
Gilbert, Beth. Alamogordo: The Territorial Years. Starline Printing, 1988.
Sonnichsen, C. L. Tularosa: Last of the Frontier West. New York: Devin-Adair Company, 1960.
Traphagen, Myles B. Final Report on the status of the White-sided Jackrabbit (Lepus Callotis Gaillardia) in New Mexico. New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. June 1, 2001.
LIVING ROOM
The names Kate and Johnny have been changed out of respect for their families. But sometimes, because I don’t use them in this essay, I barely remember their real names at all. That bothers me. So I leave this space where their real names can be recorded in my copy of this book and never forgotten: __________________ and __________________.
Bodies in the Rubble: This uses information and quotes from Thomas M. Walsh and Thomas D. Zlatic, “Mark Twain and the Art of Memory,” American Literature 53, no. 2 (May 1981): 214–31.
Said Mark Twain: Written in a letter to his wife, Olivia Clemens, while he was on a lecture tour in Bennington, Vermont, November 27, 1871. The letter begins, “Livy darling, good house, but they laughed too much…”
Said Others: “Take heed of a gluttonous curiosity” is from the seventeenth-century writer Thomas Fuller’s book The Holy State and the Profane State. Fuller’s book begins, “Who is not sensible, with sorrow, of the distractions of this age? To write books, therefore, may seem unseasonable … Now I will turn my pen into prayer … I will stop the leakage of my soul.”
One more time, so you know I mean it: Now I will turn my pen into prayer, I will stop the leakage of my soul.
Forgotten Ear: All quotes are from the article “The Abyss,” by Oliver Sacks, published in a September 2007 issue of The New Yorker. Other information is from Jonathan Miller’s 1986 documentary about Clive, Prisoner of Consciousness, also referenced in Sacks’s article.
Static: Quotes from several articles written by Laura London in the Alamogordo Daily News from November 2007 to April 2008.
Mirrors, Held Close Together: This quotes directly (1) a Science Daily article from September 16, 2008, “How Memories Are Made, and Recalled,” by Mark Wheeler; (2) “The Brain: A Story We Tell Ourselves,” by Antonio Damasio, in the January 29, 2007, issue of Time; and (3) an interview with Antonio Damasio by David Hirschman on the website Big Think.
The hammering-monkey study was conducted at the University of Parma in Italy, where Giacomo Rizzolatti was studying how macaques’ brains control their hands. The hammer experiment was initiated only after a graduate student was eating ice cream in the lab and noticed that when the macaques watched her eat the ice cream, their neurons fired as if they were moving their hands, as if they were the ones with a spoon eating the ice cream. But the macaques were not moving their hands, were not eating the ice cream, were just sitting completely still watching the graduate student move her hand to her own mouth to eat the ice cream, which may or may not have been peach sherbet.
Said the Psychologists: Excerpts freely from Helen Phillips’s “Mind Fiction: Why Your Brain Tells Tall Tales,” in the October 2006 issue of New Scientist (much of the excerpt is Phillips quoting University of Oxford professor Morten Kringelbach). The first paragraph of this section, however, is quoted from The Truth About Confabulation, by Daniel Pendick, published in 2000 on the website Memory Loss and the Brain.
Use but Little Moisture: Gathers information about the shirt belt from a 2001 U.S. Patent and Trademark Office press release (#01–61). Other information about the scrapbook is from “Celebrity Invention: Mark Twain’s Scrapbook,” by Rebecca Greenfield, published in The Atlantic, November 12, 2010. Copies of Twain’s original scrapbook design are available from the University of Virginia Library.
Mine of Her: References an article about a superachieving candy striper written by Cindy Kleiman, published in the Toronto Star. I’ve since lost this scrap, though, and can’t tell you anything more about it than that.
THINGS MOST SURELY BELIEVED
Much of the information about the trial/appeals of Terry Clark are from coverage by the Albuquerque Journal, The Albuquerque Tribune, Associated Press, and Roswell Daily Record. Much more of the information is from letters, memos, and court transcripts I’ve collected, as well as interviews I conducted between 2009 and 2011. The following is a list of things quoted directly from these and other sources. Some quotes include the original document’s idiosyncrasies—grammar, spelling, etc.
Art: This section is based on a drawing of Terry’s given to me by Brother Maxey, as well as Brother Maxey’s recollections about why Terry drew it. “Lord, I’ve been changed. Angels in heaven done sign my name…” is from the spiritual “Lord I’ve Been Changed,” as performed by Tom Waits on the album Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards. That song is only relevant because I couldn’t stop playing it while writing this essay.
An Account of Jailhouse Immersion: This baptism account is taken from a December 30, 2001, letter written to the Reverend Floyd Harris, Jr., from a young convict, Michael Jamison, who recounts the spiritual conversion of a fellow inmate in a California prison. The letter was given to me by another prison chaplain when I tried, but failed, to find official records of Terry Clark’s death-row baptism. However, Jamison’s account is quite similar to the death-row baptism of Terry, as recounted to me by Brother Maxey and Jean Ortiz. Terry was immersed in a laundry cart filled by a recreation-yard garden hose. Brother Maxey pushed him under. The water overflowed. That said, Brother Maxey does not feel Jamison’s letter accurately characterizes Terry’s baptism, which Maxey calls “simple” and “joyous” and “very primitive.” Brother Maxey, I imagine, is suspicious of the naïve tone, suspicious that I included Jamison’s account in this essay ironically. But I see sincerity in Jamison’s words—a respect of magic—that I could never approximate because I am too steeped in a culture that distrusts sincerity. I want to believe in a god to the point that it makes me clumsy with joy in a trash can or laundry cart, but I do not have things most surely believed. So I’ll leave the specifics of Terry’s baptism for Brother Maxey to tell. You can read about it on his blog, Reflections. Jamison’s is the account that moves me.
Sane and Ready for Heaven: Some of the dialogue here is taken directly from written correspondence between Brother Maxey and Terry about the last meal. Other dialogue, as well as the rest of the details, are from Brother Maxey’s recounting of the scene.
Fifteen Minutes: The first paragraph of this section is taken from court transcripts of Karla Faye Tucker’s sentencing hearing. I’ve edited tense and punctuation.
A Brief History of Hellfire: This section is guided in part by The Origins of Christian Hell by Dimitris J. Kyrtatas, as well as Changing Conceptions of Hell in Gilded Age America by Gary Scott Smith. The forensic scientist is quoted in Linda Geddes, “Body Burners: The Forensics of Fire,” New Scientist, May 20, 2009. The Isaac Asimov short story is called “Hell-Fire” and can be found in his collection Earth Is Room Enough.
Ends: Details about the history of New Mexico executions and last words are from an article by Mark Allan, “Capital Punishment or Compassion—Executions in the State of New Mexico: The Death Penalty Since Territorial Days,” published on the Angelo State University library website.
THE GLITCH IN THE VIDEOGAME GRAVEYARD
The theory of the Shroud of Turin as evidence of early photography seems to have originally been posited in 1993 by Nicholas Allen in So
uth African Journal of Art History. That article, “Is the Shroud of Turin the First Recorded Photograph?,” was my primary source for shroud pondering. It has recently been expanded and reissued as the book cited below.
The Shroud Museum in Alamogordo, New Mexico, has since moved out of our shopping mall and into a prime location downtown, on New York Avenue. It sits, no joke, directly across the street from Joe Lewandowski’s Atari-dig-funded project, the Tularosa Basin Historical Society museum, where the prize display is a bunch of Atari E.T. cartridges. So the Alamogordo shroud and the Alamogordo E.T.s are coupled, and overlooking the site of the Pit, less than a mile away. When you make your inevitable pilgrimage to that bizarre, tight triangle of technological ephemera, you will find at its center the Alamogordo Zoo, where the atomic cows were displayed in the wake of the Gadget’s blast in 1945.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES
Allen, Nicholas. Turin Shroud: Testament to a Lost Technology. Lambert Academic Publishing, 2017.
Feder, Kenneth. Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology: From Atlantis to Walam Olum. Greenwood, 2010.
A MILLION TINY DAGGERS
“Those ingenious labyrinthine inlets”: The nineteenth-century English essayist Charles Lamb coins these descriptions for ears in his rant against fancy music, “A Chapter on Ears.” He’s upset the ears cannot be closed so easily as the eyes, that the sounds of music in particular are a kind of evil spirit his brain is not equipped to understand. It’s satire, maybe. But then maybe he is right that we allow ourselves to be too easily lulled by pretty sounds, that to stay alert we need more than just melody, more than emotion:
Above all, those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as they are called, do plague and imbitter my apprehension. Words are something; but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sounds; to be long a-dying, to lie stretched upon a rack of roses; to keep up languor by unintermitted effort; to pile honey upon sugar, and sugar upon honey, to an interminable tedious sweetness; to fill up sound with feeling, and strain ideas to keep pace with it; to gaze on empty frames, and be forced to make the pictures for yourself; to read a book, all stops, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter; to invent extempore tragedies to answer to the vague gestures of an inexplicable rambling mime—these are faint shadows of what I have undergone from a series of the ablest-executed pieces of this empty instrumental music.
Nogier’s acupuncture diagrams:
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Everybody gets a drink, on me. Sean McDonald for taking a chance on a bum from New Mexico, sticking with this book, and getting it into fighting shape. All the others at FSG, particularly Taylor Sperry for spotting it, and Maya Binyam for her insights as she ushered it across the finish line. Y’all get many more pounds of red chili pistachios too. Eleanor Jackson, for believing in the book before it existed, then getting others to believe in it too. John D’Agata for unleashing the magic of essays, and teaching me how to teach them. Geoff Dyer for yelling at me to quit aching for profundity, which I have not, but we remain friends anyhow. Many from Iowa, for reading and being pals throughout: Sandra Allen, Landon Bates, Gemma de Choisy, Keanan Faruk, Kristen Radtke, Helen Rubinstein, and all the rest. Carmen Giménez-Smith for first telling me I was unlikely to succeed as a poet, for which I am eternally grateful, and for her continued support. The Compound, RIP. All the Alamo boys. Alamogordo Daily News for my first job in journalism, the best job, chucking it at houses in the dark. And you, for making it this far. Finally, some dives where I wrote and moped, but mostly reveled in sloppy fellowship; I hope you will give me a break on the tab: El Patio (Mesilla, New Mexico), Red Garter (Tucson, Arizona), George’s (Iowa City, Iowa), Radio (Baton Rouge, Louisiana).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOSHUA WHEELER
ACID WEST
Joshua Wheeler is from Alamogordo, New Mexico. He teaches creative writing at Louisiana State University. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPHS
SNM
THE LIGHT OF GOD
CHILDREN OF THE GADGET
AFTER THE FALL
SO LET ALL THE MARTIANS COME HOME TO ROOST
TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES AT THE GATEWAY TO SPACE
BEFORE THE FALL
RAGGEDY, RAGGEDY WABBITMAN
LIVING ROOM
THINGS MOST SURELY BELIEVED
THE GLITCH IN THE VIDEOGAME GRAVEYARD
KEEP ALAMOGORDO BEAUTIFUL
A MILLION TINY DAGGERS
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
MCD × FSG Originals
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by Joshua Wheeler
Map copyright © 2018 by Jeffrey L. Ward
All rights reserved
First edition, 2018
Map and title page illustrations from iStock.
Illustration here copyright © 2018 by Na Kim.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wheeler, Joshua, 1984– author.
Title: Acid West: essays / Joshua Wheeler.
Description: First edition. | New York: MCD x FSG Originals, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017047910 | ISBN 9780374535803 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Home—New Mexico. | New Mexico—Social conditions. | Technological innovations—United States—Social aspects. | Popular culture—Effect of technological innovations on—United States. | National characteristics, American. | United States—Social conditions—21st century.
Classification: LCC PS3624.H44 A6 2018 | DDC 814/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047910
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* A. Bartlett Giamatti, the seventh commissioner of Major League Baseball, writes this about foul lines in his essay “Baseball as Narrative,” where he also writes, “To know baseball is to continue to aspire to the condition of freedom, individually and as a people, for baseball is grounded in America in a way unique to our games.” Another of his baseball essays begins, “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.”
* As early as 1954, Sports Illustrated was publishing scientific research that showed a batter never saw his bat hit the ball, lost sight of the ball eight to fifteen feet from the plate. Seeing the ball pass through the strike zone has never been integral for successful batting. And even the best batters fail most of the time, hitting maybe three times out of ten. This high rate of failure is accepted as part of the game for the players; the umpires, however, are expected to be perfect.
* Maybe the Hollywood fakery is more accurate than we know. In September 2011, our drones assassinated an American citizen for the first time and without any kind of U.S. trial. He was killed in the Middle East deserts of Yemen but was born just down the road from here, in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He was born while his father was in Las Cruces on a Fulbright fellowship, studying how people of the Yemeni desert could learn from New Mexican agricultural practices because the desert of SNM is so much like the desert of Yemen. So little water. S
o much sand. All life in these areas is miraculous. The assassinated—New Mexico–born—American citizen was the radical imam and al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki.
* This is the first known game of organized baseball, in 1846. Some of the first baseball ever played in New Mexico was played in the south of the territory by soldiers at Fort Cummings and Fort Bayard in the 1870s. They were taking a break from killing Apaches, a group of people America declared war on because they were in our way, and it was easy to portray them as savage desert terrorists.
† The USAF report focuses on how to diminish civilian casualties resulting from drone strikes. The report found that the design of chairs in ground-control stations leave drone operators ergonomically prone to boredom and therefore deadly mistakes. The implication: Less comfortable seating may make our drone pilots more morally acute. I’m thinking, of course, of stadium seating, which never lets one’s ass get lax. Imagine all future wars fought from bleachers.
* Giamatti again, this time in his essay “Baseball and the American Character.” His question eventually leads him to conclude, “In baseball and daily life, Americans do not take sides so much as they change sides in ways checked and balanced. Finally, in baseball and daily life, regardless of which side you are on and where you stand, shared principles are supposed to govern.”
† A Reaper’s video stream does not actually beam halfway around the world. From Pakistan it first hits a satellite in space, and from there it hits a relay satellite on the ground in Europe, and then it travels by cable under the Atlantic Ocean to America. The relay satellites are on the ground in Germany, at Ramstein Air Base, in a clearing just beyond the fences of Ramstein American High School’s baseball field.
* There’s a hymn I sang often in my youth, from a pew in a warehouse chapel over on Cuba Avenue: “Heaven Came Down.” I’m certain that in his description of the Gadget, Henry is referencing, however subliminally, this very hymn. I sang it so many times, those lyrics that make simultaneous the historic event of the crucifixion and the divine experience of the singer receiving grace thousands of years later, as if every time you repent, Jesus is crucified again, just for you. Those lyrics that meant one thing about joy until Henry says them about the Gadget: My sins were washed away and my night was turned to day / Heaven came down and glory filled my soul! Now heaven came down will become a refrain in this essay about the Gadget and mean the opposite of joy, which is sorrow, and also, I think, nervousness.