bottom, enjoying the mild evening and watching the stars fill the pale blue desert sky. Through the open door into the bar I could also watch the pianist, a well-groomed young man who played a seemingly endless series of chords and tinkling arpeggios that never really developed into anything you could call a song. But he cruised suavely up and down the keyboard and he had a winning smile and excellent teeth, which I suppose is the main thing in a cocktail bar pianist. Anyway, the ladies clearly liked him.
I don't know how many beers I had, but-I will be frank here--it was too many. I had not allowed for the fact that in the thin mountain air of Santa Fe you get drunk much faster. In any case, I was surprised to discover as I arose a couple of hours after entering that the relationship between my mind and legs, which was normally quite a good one, had broken down. More than that, my legs now didn't seem to be getting on at all well with each other. One of them started for the stairs, as instructed, but the other, in a burst of petulance, decided to make for the rest room. The result was that I lurched through the bar like a man on stilts, grinning inanely as if to say, 'Yes, I know I look like an asshole. Isn't this amusing?'
En route, I bumped into the table of a party of middle-aged rich people, slopping their drinks, and could only broaden my brainless smile and burble that I was ever so sorry. I patted one of the ladies affectionately on the shoulder with that easy familiarity that overcomes me when I am drunk and used her as a kind of springboard to propel myself towards the stairs, where I smiled a farewell to the room-everyone was by now watching me with interest-and descended the stairs in one fluid motion. I didn't exactly fall, but then again I didn't exactly walk down. It was more like surfing on the soles of my shoes, and was, I believe, not unimpressive. But then I often perform my best stunts while intoxicated. Once, many years ago during a party at John Horner's house, I fell backwards out of an upstairs window and bounced to my feet with an elan that is still widely talked about south of Grand Avenue.
In the morning, chastened with a hangover, I drove back to the campus of St. John's, found my niece and embarrassed her possibly even grossed her out-with a hug. We went to breakfast in a fancy restaurant downtown and she told me all about St. Johns and Santa Fe and afterwards showed me the sights of the town: St. Francis's Cathedral (very beautiful), the Palace of the Governors (very boring, full of documents about territorial governors) and the famous staircase at the Loretto Chapel. This is a wooden staircase that rise 211/2 feet in a double spiral up to a choir loft. The remarkable thing about it is that it is not supported by anything except its own weight. It looks as if it ought to fall down. The story is that the nuns of the chapel prayed for someone to build them a staircase and an anonymous carpenter turned up, worked on the staircase for six months and then disappeared without payment as mysteriously as he had arrived. For a hundred years the nuns milked this story for all it was worth, and then one day a few years ago they abruptly sold the chapel to a private company, which now runs it for a profit and charges you fifty cents to get in. This kind of soured me on the place, and it didn't do a whole lot for my respect for nuns.
Generally speaking-which is of course always a dangerous thing to do, generally speaking-Americans revere the past only as long as there is some money in it somewhere and it doesn't mean going without air-conditioning, free parking and other essential conveniences. Preserving the past for its own sake doesn't come into it much. There is little room for sentiment. When somebody comes along and offers a group of nuns good money for their staircase, they don't say, 'Certainly not, it is a hallowed shrine, built for us by a mysterious and rather hunky-looking courier of Jesus.'
They say, 'How much?' And if the offer is good enough they sell it and use the money to build a new convent on a bigger site, with air-conditioning, lots of parking space and a games room. I don't mean to suggest for a moment that nuns are worse than other Americans in this regard. They are simply behaving in the customary American way. I find that very sad. It is no wonder that so few things last for more than a generation in America.
I left Santa Fe and drove west along Interstate 40. This used to be Route 66. Everybody loved Route 66. People used to write songs about it. But it was only two lanes wide, not at all suitable for the space age, hopelessly inadequate for people in motor homes, and every fifty miles or so it would pass through a little town where you might encounter a stop sign or a traffic light--what a drag!-so they buried it under the desert and built a new superhighway that shoots across the landscape like a four-lane laser and doesn't stop for anything, even mountains. So something else that was nice and pleasant is gone forever because it wasn't practical-like passenger trains and milk in bottles and corner shops and Burma Shave signs. And now it's happening in England, too. They are taking away all the nice things there because they are impractical, as if that were reason enough-the red phone boxes, the pound note, those open London buses that you can leap on and off. There's almost no experience in life that makes you look and feel more suave than jumping on or off a moving London bus. But they aren't practical. They require two men (one to drive and one to stop thugs from kicking the crap out of the Pakistani gentleman at the back) and that is uneconomical, so they have to go. And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs, and the countryside will be mostly shopping centers and theme parks. Forgive me. I don't mean to get upset. But you are taking my world away from me, piece by little piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off. Sorry.
I drove west along Interstate 40, through an impoverished landscape. Habitations were few. Such towns as existed were mostly just scatterings of trailer homes dumped along the roadside, as if dropped from a great height. They had no yards, no fences, nothing to separate them from the desert.
Much of the land was given over to Indian reservations. Every twenty or thirty miles I would pass a lone hitchhiker, sometimes an Indian but usually a white person, laden with bags. I had seen hardly any hitchhikers before now, but here there were many, the men looking dangerous, the women looking crazy. I was entering a land of drifters: dreamers, losers, vagrants, crazy people-they all always go west in America. They all have this hopeless idea that they will get to the coast and make a fortune as a movie star or rock musician or gameshow contestant or something. And if things don't work out they can always become a serial murderer. It's strange that no one ever goes east, that you never encounter anyone hitchhiking to New York in pursuit of some wild and crazy dream to be a certified public accountant or make a killing in leveraged buyouts.
The weather worsened. Dust began to blow across the road. I was driving into the storm that the weatherman had spoken of on television the morning before. Beyond Albuquerque the skies darkened and a sleety rain began to dart about. Tumbleweeds bounced across the desert and over the highway, and the car was knocked sharply sideways with each gust of wind.
I had always thought that deserts were hot and dry the year around. I can tell you now that they are not. I suppose because we always took our vacations between June and August it im planted in me the idea that everywhere in America outside the Midwest was hot the year around. Wherever you went in the summer in America it was murder. It was always ninety degrees. If you closed the windows you baked, but if you left them open everything blew everywhere-comic books, maps, loose articles of clothing. If you wore shorts, as we always did, the bare skin on your legs became part of the seat, like cheese melted onto toast, and when it was time to get up, there was a ripping sound and a screaming sensation of agony as the two parted. If in your sun-baked delirium you carelessly leaned your arm against the metal part of the door onto which the sun had been shining, the skin where it made contact would shrivel and disappear, like a plastic bag in a flame. This would always leave you speechless. It was a truly amazing, and curiously painless, spectacle to watch part of your body just vanish. You didn't know whether to shriek at your mother as if you had been gravely wounded or do it again, in a spirit of scientific inquiry. In the end, usually, you would do nothing, but just sit listlessly, too hot to do anything else.
So I was surprised to find myself in wintry weather, in a landscape as cold as it was bleak. The darting sleet thickened as the highway climbed up and into the Zuni Mountains. Beyond Gallup it turned to snow. Wet and heavy,
