Marfa Revisited

by Sean Wilsey

A continuation of "The Republic of Marfa," which was a history of the small Texas town of Marfa, pop. 2,424, found in McSweeney's No. 2, here further elaborated, in an anecdotal fashion, not at all in keeping with the grandiose tone of this sub-head, and with particular attention to dogs, communism, rattlers, parades and children who curse, rather than picnics, shoot-outs, and the late Donald Judd, who opened the place up to all sorts of artists and architects--but with additional material on the unexplained optical phenomena that surround this place (Marfa lights) and figured largely in the first installment.  The reason for the author's presence in this remote place--along with the presence of his wife, Daphne (Beal), also a writer (this can be difficult at times, but is mostly rewarding)--being that the Lannan Foundation, an organization that bestows various corrupting freebies on writers, bought a couple of houses there, had no one to fill them for the summer, due to the misapprehension that it is unbearably hot then--it is not, since Marfa is at an elevation of 5,000 feet--and so let us stay there, which was great, though sort of intimidating, particularly during the brief periods when other writers were also there, and seemed to be much more productive, making us feel like we should have been less focused on the following:

         After arriving in Marfa we needed to get our bikes fixed, since they were mangled from the UPS trip down here.  Daphne had met the janitor at the elementary school who said he could do it if we just came by his house some afternoon.

         So we did.  As we walked into the yard, which was full of boulders and cacti and rusting bicycles, passed a thrashed and bitten-up dog house and saw that the front door to a low little adobe was wide open, Daphne whispered: "Get ready for a Marfa moment."  She then shouted a few hellos and out come a sleepy looking guy with a lot of decayed or missing front teeth, a blue t-shirt, and no pants.  There was a lot of awkward "Oh, well, excuse us, we can come back, etc."  But he said this was a good time for him.  I tried to check and see if maybe he was wearing some brief underwear that were hidden by the t-shirt, but I could only identify increasingly pale and tender skin, and a tan line.

         He told us to come back in an hour and when we did the bikes were beautifully fixed and he refused to take any money.

         There is a new truck stop in town that is a favored stopping point for a trucking line owned and operated by kerchief-wearing, observant, Mexican Mennonites.

         In the fancy new bookstore/wine bar this fidgety unshaven dude around 19 was keeping up a patter of asinine questions along the lines of, "what do y'all do for fun around here?" with the resolutely polite girl behind the counter.  I was sitting next to him, trying to tune it out, but I looked up when he asked her, "What shampoo is that?"

         She kept washing some glasses, and eventually said, shyly, and a bit caustically, "Can you smell it?"

         "Yeah," he said.

         Then he turned to me and said, "I've been out in the woods for a year, so I can smell real good."

         One of the most frequent customers at the new wine bar is Mr. Cross, the extremely cheerful former druggist, now retired, who sits on a couch, with a large unlit cigar in his mouth, and his silver diver's tank of pure oxygen on a dolly at his side.

         Some friends of ours went for dinner at an outdoor place called the Starlight Theater, in Terlingua, which is a tiny town about 50 miles away, right up on the Mexican border.  Their waitress started off the evening in the usual fashion, by saying "Where y'all from?"  When they said Marfa she was incensed and blurted out, "Marfa, I hate that fucking newspaper in Marfa!  I was raped a couple weeks ago in Ojinaga and that Marfa paper made it look like it was my fault."

         We went down to Ojinaga, Mexico, with Solvi, a seraphic eight-year-old Icelandic child who has become one of our best friends in Marfa (his mother's here on an artist's residency at Donald Judd's Chinati Foundation, Marfa's cultural institution), Michael Meredith, an architect who was designing a house for Chinati's director and producing elaborate theme songs for people on the side, our friend Rob Weiner, Chinati's second in command, who gave us the in with Lannan, and our Lannan neighbor, David Foster Wallace, to have fish at El Bucañero--"the pirate"--a seafood restaurant located just over the border from the hottest spot in all North America, Presidio, Texas, the official border crossing town, which is inhabited solely by weary border patrol and failing onion farmers.

         El Bucañero is supposed to have very fresh fish, in spite of its location in the Chihuahuan desert, because it is run by narcotics traffickers who fly the stuff in as cover.

         Unfortunately, it was closed, so we went to a place where they incinerated all their food in the deep fat fryer and fleeced us with mariachis (which Solvi loved).  Then we ate a lot of ice-cream, ordered extremely warm club soda from a stand, and sat in the square for an hour.

         On the way out of town, I was driving (we were all piled into the Chinati Foundation's Blazer), and I saw a car about 100 yards ahead of us drive through a puddle.  So I said, "Hey, Solvi, there's a *puddle* up ahead!"

         "Go faster!" he shouted.

         I floored it, and, like an SUV ad, sent water spraying in every direction.  This water turned out to be raw sewage.

         When we got to the border the agent in the little window just said "Woah!" and we were waved through.  The smell followed us all the way back to Marfa, which is an hour trip.  Wallace taught Solvi show tunes--"Tsssssssteam heat!"--and we all sang them with the windows open.

         We went to an "ice-cream social" (lots of heavy home-made ice cream and light proselytizing) at the local Episcopalian church.  It was presided over by the white female pastor, who had invited the local Catholic priest (male; Mexican) to come over with some of his friends and play the bongos.  We'd seen this same Catholic priest on the bongos a few weeks before, at a honky-tonk in Alpine, the next town over, where he'd got everyone out on the floor for his rendition of "Oye Como Va?"  His church does a musical service called the "brass mass."

         Solvi, who mostly hangs around with people in their 20s and 30s, has caught on to the following English phrases, all of which he shouts:

         "Is that a Twisted Sister pin on your school uniform!?"

         "I'm dead sexy!" (He licks his finger and touches one of his nipples when he says this.)

         "Fuck me in the butt!"  (He seems to have found this one on his own.  Or possibly at "Scary Movie," playing in Alpine, to large audiences of children.)

         He's taught us the following Icelandic phrases:

         Cuker-az: Poop butt

         Hoar-hois: Boogerhead

         Nu er komith ad flankingunni!: It is time for your spanking!

         A man was killed around the corner from our house the other day when he was struck by an Emergency Medical Services vehicle.

         We are both taking singing lessons at low prices from Jerry "Jabo" Griggadean, a former professor at UT in Austin who used to teach the history of rock and roll.  He's here for the summer visiting his friend Linaeus, an avowed communist who makes medicine balls and is restoring an old grocery store called "The New Star."  I arrived for my lesson the other day and there were five large to mid-size dogs in front of Jabo's adobe house, which is next to The New Star.

         They were: a small solid white one given to unsettling eye contact; a huge shaggy black one, impressively not panting; a thin black mid-size with beautiful eyes; a wiggling friendly black and gray one with swollen teats dragging on the ground; and also a little dirty yellow-white one.

         Jabo's in his early 60s, tall and thin, with middle-of-the-back length gray hair, a gray beard, spectacles, and an inexhaustible supply of tie-dyes.  He's got this slight drawl, and is enthusiastic.

         I said, "Jabo, you've got a lot of dogs out here."

         He said, "These are Linaeus' dogs!"

         "You mean these are all his dogs?"

         "No."  Big smile.  "These aren't all his dogs.  These are just the traveling crew--his socially-acceptable dogs.  They represent about a fifth of Linaeus' dogs.  And since Linaeus is a revolutionary, he names all his dogs after revolutionaries."  He points to the shaggy one.  "This is Zhude--who was one of Mao's generals.  Here's James Chaney"--white one with the black eye  "Elizitsky"--thin black mid-size and extremely friendly.  "Ethel Rosenberg"--dirty yellow-white.  "And Teresita here just had a litter of puppies, and they'll almost certainly be named after revolutionaries, too."

         I hadn't met Linaeus at this point, but I met him a few days later.  He is a big, tanned man who wears the same (clean) shirt at all times, a large red star on a white background with a silhouetted campesino (Sandino, founder of the Sandinistas) below it, and likes to mock Donald Judd and Chinati--which he refers to as "Chinazi"--for fascist aesthetic tendencies.  His dream is to open a communist summer camp in Marfa.  He plays the tuba and Jabo accompanies on the trombone.  They do this on his back porch surrounded by dogs, and, now, seven puppies.

         The guy who takes care of our garden is Rip Winkle.  He is young and buff and *waxed*, with piercing blue eyes, and a bushy mustache--and he moves like a porno star.  The other day he was working bare chested when Daphne approached to ask him a question.  He interrupted her, pointed to his chest, and said, "Does this offend you?"

         I tried to feed the horse in the field across the street the other day.  It wouldn't come over, so I waved around a carrot and called to it until it looked up, bared it's teeth in a menacing, hostile fashion, and ran away.  Mr. Cross, the ex-druggist, told Daphne, "I saw your husband messing around with that horse."

         Driving on the empty two-lane to Marfa at 2:00 AM Sunday night (or Monday morning) on my way back from a funeral in Oregon, I saw something shining in the road ahead of me.  Immediately I dimmed my hi-beams.  But as I got closer I realized that this thing was not a car, but a single, very bright light, heading my way.  I was staring at it, fascinated, and slowing, until, when we were about 1/4 mile apart, it winked out.  I stopped the car, stuck my head out the window, idled, and then said, "hello," really self-consciously, as though this might be a practical joke taking place in an empty landscape the size of New England.

         Daphne was jogging on a road that leads out towards Mexico and remote cattle ranches when her foot landed about eight inches away from what appeared to be a snake.  She stopped, turned, and saw that it was a snake, about three feet long and just lying there.  She thought, *it looks dead, but it looks too plump to be dead.*  So she walked back a couple steps to check it out.  As she got close it suddenly coiled, hissed, and began to rattle.  She took off fast.

         The next time she had a lesson with Jabo she told him this story.  He smiled, rubbed his chin, and said, "I wonder if that was my friend the rattlesnake?"

         It turns out that Jabo had walked outside of his house barefoot a few evenings earlier to look at the stars.  Walking back inside he noticed that he had been standing and stargazing about six inches from a small rattlesnake.

         He told us: "I was shaking but I grabbed a shovel, talked to the snake, saying, 'we're friends,' gently scooped him into a bucket and put a screen over it.  The next morning I strapped the bucket to the back of my bicycle, rode out on the ranch road and released him."

         The place where Jabo released his snake was right where Daphne ran into her snake.

         This is a flyer that's up all over town:

         Photo: A bearded Mexican-looking dude wearing serape, sombrero, bandoleers, brandishing a gun, and leering before a backdrop of sun-dappled buttes.

                                             WANTED!

                                             Models

         Needed: Hispanic males between 21 and 45.

         Job: Advertising photo shoot.  Must be willing to be cast as a "Pancho Villa" type character.

         Contact: Bill Putman (713) 824-1600 (leave message) or at Three Palms hotel in Presidio.

         Plusses: Beards, mustaches, etc.

         Pay: Outstanding

         Yesterday Jabo asked us to be in the Marfa Lights Parade, on the back of a flatbed trailer, along with the Marfa Community Band, of which we were suddenly members.  We told him we weren't sure, but at the last minute we decided to show up.  The Marfa Community Band, in it's parade manifestation, consisted of Jabo on trombone, Linaeus on Tuba, Mrs. Baldridge, the elementary school music teacher, on keyboards; Art Spragg, who used to be the photographer for the paper, but is now a PE teacher at the high-school, much liked for allowing the kids to bring in chips and cards and play poker, who was just looking cool; and Daphne and me.

         Linaeus gave us a drum and a couple contorted hunks of cast-iron to bang together triangle-style, and we rolled through town in front of a brigade of equestrian border patrol.  We performed, "The Washington Post March"; a Name Unknown blues number; and "The Marfa Lights Rap," a surreal number in which Mrs. Baldridge--who looks every inch an elementary school music teacher--and Jabo (lyricist) rapped and beat-boxed in front of a tie-dye bedspread that was draped over the front of our float.  Art Spragg held up a sign with the words on it--"On highway 90 look to the right/And you're gonna see the Marfa Lights"--while I banged on the triangle and Daphne hit the bongo.

         David Koresh's lawyer has moved to town.

         Tomorrow is Jabo's last day here and today there was a recital given by all of his students, which culminated in the performance of "The People's Polka," by the People's Chorus: Jabo, singing and on trombone; Linaeus, on tuba; Beto Halpern, a twelve year-old, who played trumpet; Daphne and me, singing.

         This is how it goes (lyrics: Jabo):

"Ban-ker says, 'Will you work with me?'  Far-mer says 'Yes, in-com-

mu-ni-ty.'  Gar-bage man says, 'Do I get my share?' The

an'swer is, 'Yes, you'll re-ceive what is fair.'  We va-lue the

la-bor of ev'-ry-one!  We're e-ga-li-ta-ri-an!"

We can learn to live with each o-ther, care for plants and animals,         too.

We can live like sis-ters and bro-thers, you re-spect me and I re-         spect you."

         Daphne also performed a blues song--"Sugar Blues"--for which she received a long ovation.

         I did a piece Jabo and I'd worked up called "Crossing into Ojinaga."

         Linaeus, who was very nervous, said, "this one is for Daphne," and played The Beatles' "Birthday Song" on the Tuba.  Hers was yesterday.

         A sign on one of the roads out of town says: "Will the last one moving out of Marfa please turn of [sic] the lights."