Shots of Whisky, Lines of Coke and Gunshots over Cerrillos Road

Shots of Whiskey,

Lines of Coke

and

Gunshots over Cerrillos Road 

by

Chance Willey

For Team Everything, D Numbers and Meow Wolf: 

The cosmic winds endlessly carving the Santa Fe art Scene 

and for my generation; 

masked and merry makers of these scenes.

      June 27th, 2013. Tonight’s frivolity will be hosted by the local band “D Numbers”, joined by video artist Robert Drummond, with Meow Wolf holding the after-party. This is to be a grand re-imagining of musical opportunities in Santa Fe with a whisky shot of real nightlife, an event I dare not miss. 

      7:00pm...I am waiting for my guides, Logan Wheeler and Todd Van Beusik, on a street corner in downtown Santa Fe. In some pockets of Santa Fe Logan and Todd are well known for their heavy drug use and whacky antics. “Fiendish”, “strange” and “savage”, are all words one might expect to hear in a description of Satanist rituals and serial killers, but cause for worry when used to describe one’s guides. Out of caution that these adjectives might hold water, I expect the strange and prepare for the bizarre. Tonight has been highly anticipated and methodically planned. For three days I had played telephone tag with Logan, trying to get our scheduling down. Between missed connections I had received six ominous voicemails, all pertaining to tonight’s drug use.

      I had been told that Logan and Todd would be cruising up in a white Chevy Aveo LS around 6:30 to pick me up. It is now seven and I am still waiting, getting anxious. I light a Parliament and wait more. After a while I notice a white Chevy cruising, looping around the square, one-two-three-six times by way of West San Francisco to Washington to West Palace to Lincoln, playing Duran Duran’s Hungry like the Wolf with each circuit. Finally the car stops, holding up all other traffic.  A red Mazda begins honking. 

      A man with pink shades and a red flannel shirt leans out of the car and hisses “Get in!” I hop in without question or complaint and as Hungry Like the Wolf replays for the sixth time, we drive off. 

      The man in the passenger seat turns around and deadpans: “We wanted you to jump in front of the car”. I recognize his voice as that of Logan Wheeler. He looks like the kind of man you would find running nude through a cornfield after an axe murder, with Charles Manson eyes and a reptilian smile. He is dressed now though, entirely in black, sporting a silver Tibetan necklace and long, stringy blonde hair.    

      Listening to their conversation in the front seat it soon became clear that Todd was the one who tried to keep the situation in check, while always planning for the oddest night imaginable. Logan, on the other hand, was the freak who operated in random spurts of binge craziness; violent nights consisting of booze, drugs, sex and a good fight were Logan’s bag. An hour ago I had not anticipated such combinations but now as Hungry like the Wolf played for the twelfth time, Logan shifts my expectations when he yells:

      “We need some fine ass bitches for to have sex with”.

      “No...you do. I’m no single man. Lets just call Kat,” Todd says.

      “She's got that boyfriend,” Logan muses. “But when has that ever stopped me?”

      “I know, right? She's our party girl it would be sinful not to have her.”

      Logan seemed thoughtful for a moment.  “I don't know, its gonna get weird.  She’ll start talking about her boyfriend and then I’ll say something vindictive and sarcastic and make everyone uncomfortable.”

      Todd sneers. “No, man, you say that now, but here’s what gonna happen: you’ll party with her for seven hours and feel great and then tomorrow morning you’ll put Stevie Wonder on and cry like a baby.”

      Logan assesses the accuracy of Todd’s statement.  “Why won’t she love me man?”

      “Not in front of the kid”. Todd was referring to me. "Lets just appreciate her for what she can be to us, make an unthreatening phone call and get her in the car. And that means no jokes about cutting her open with a bottle and harvesting her organs.” Todd turns to face me changing his voice; ”That’s what we did with the last girl”. I didn't know whether to laugh or jump out the window, so I just gave a giggle.

      Logan turned around. “Its funny cause its true”, he says, stone faced. I am wounded, feeling the blade of uncertainty slipping between my ribs. Had they really killed a girl?  We were now up at The Cross of the Martyrs, the same state park that had earlier in the year been the setting to a series of violent rapes. I am immediately sorry for making that grim connection.

      Time rolls on and Logan’s attempts to contact Kat are fruitless. It seems now that, to spite Todd, Logan’s fevered pursuit of feminine company will push all other preparations to aside. Everything from glow sticks to the girl was missing from the Aveo and the D Numbers show would soon be starting. Breaking his lobotomy-like stare, Todd turns to the back seat and assures me that shoplifting the glow sticks and catching up to Kat won’t be a problem, but, what with all the flaky drug dealers in Santa Fe, rounding up enough of the right drugs to stay wide awake but barely conscious will be the greater chore. He further tells me that the few contacts they have will respect the urgency of the situation and will meet their demands with punctuality.   

      Half an hour passes by spent rounding up everything and catching up with Kat, a giggly blonde with bright blue eyes and track runner legs who likes to repeat catchy phrases over and over again. “Life is a trip”, “who are we really?” and “damn straight” are among her favorites. We are now at the Railyard and the boys are drinking as I smoke outside the car. They drink shots of whisky and Svedka Screw Drivers, doing lines of cocaine and bumps of “Molly” between swigs. Now drug addled and drunk, the three of them come out of the car, knock the lit Parliament from my mouth and proceed to the water tower where the stage has been set, slipping into a milling crowd of hipsters and trance kids.

      Apple laptops light the faces on stage as the ether shifts around the crowd. The air twists with techno staircases and electronic valleys form, all shaped in waves of sound. There are pulsing lighthouses and shape shifting prisms strung up between newly forming constellations on a crystal beach. This surrealist universe, driven by eerie hums and drawn by pen-stroke guitar riffs, is the work of D Numbers. Situationalist collage artists of the music world, D Numbers combines elements of techno, trance and house music for a synesthetic experience, pleasing to the mind and greatly helpful in the come-on of absolutely any drug. “Molly”, however, is the perfect drug for this show and Todd is undulating proof of that. Glow sticks now cracked and stuck through the button holes of his shirt, he dances like a mad shaman of professional hysteria, mixing the dance styles of beat generation performance artists and Apache Indians. Kat dances like all girls her age, accidentally sexy, while Logan tries to match his 80’s dance moves to the shifting beat. 

      10:15...twelve gunshots over the main strip, time increments varying between each shot, a crazed NRA salute to this odd night in this damned New Mexico capital. The D Numbers show ended about ten minutes ago and we are on our way to Molly’s Lounge for the Meow Wolf after party when the caps start busting from behind The Western Scene Motel on Cerrillos. My senses, unhindered by drugs, react with fear and shock to the pops and bangs as my three companions continue to look forward and talk about possible acid dealers, unfazed by the Tarantino soundtrack. 

      After a couple bumps of “Molly” and another line of coke in the bar’s parking lot , Logan leads the way to the guarded threshold where a Hispanic police officer gives us some bad news. The after party turns out to be for persons 21 and over.  Happily Todd is recognized by a member of the Meow Wolf organization who lets us in, two of us for half the ticket price. We dance in Molly's for 15 minutes and then leave on Logan’s whim. I can see that Todd wants to stay but he tells me that it’s best we don’t fight Logan’s desires.

      It becomes clear to me now, as we follow Logan to the car, who is running the freak show. Logan, jaded and twisted, in the tortured spirit of Kurt Cobain, hails as front man. He shifts the night’s moves with a morose electromagnet and finds it fashionable. I see a self-destructive film glaze their eyes, I don’t know how long it has been there but I see it now, that rolling shroud I have become all too familiar with. The one I had seen before on the faces of sorrowful good girls before gang bangs and on the faces of good men on that shot to shot crusade for conferrable paralysis. The generational mask that hangs, in vulgar mass production, on the walls of Santa Fe night life is now rolled over Logan’s face and Todd’s.  The night turns gray like the skin of a drowned man and I recognize it as just another escape, a momentary fix for a viciously circular problem. The fear in Todd’s eyes suggests that he knows, knows of the mask. He had put it on himself and now, his skin to sensitive to pry it off, his hands to numb to pull it away, had let it forge into iron, armoring his fragile self and shining softly for a generation of emotional cripples. Seeing their faces frozen over in soft metal layers of transience and teenage glory causes a tear to roll down the ethereal contours of my soul. I know that, like the gang banged and the wino crusaders, the big talk bad boys of Santa Fe are now lost in their own confused forgeries - bad checks that can only be cashed in youth but will yield no fortune. 

       The night comes to a close, its life and music re-imagined by everyone but the audience, who used it for a come on and then left early. The same vacant-eyed driving force behind every great escape and every next big thing in Santa Fe, sparked tonight into violent action only to disappear in hollow dance with the two masked boys in the Chevy Aveo.