A couple of days after I had arrived in Artesia so I could go to my father's wedding in Taos, NM, I made a trip to Alamogordo to see my old college friend Kird. We hadn't seen each other since before I graduated from college. In that time, he had joined the Air Force, gotten married and had a child who was now three years old.
But something happened before I got to see him. He and his wife had split up, and she was planning to move to Virginia with their daughter. However, she hadn't left town yet. I didn't know whether or not I was going to meet them. Kird told me to come see him at his parents' house.
Kird looked pretty much the same as when I last saw him, except that he had gained a little weight. We started talking and he told me about how he had entered an Air Force talent contest and won. He showed me a videotape of the performance. He did a monologue by Christopher Durang. He was up against an actor who performed Salieri's "mediocrity" speech from "Amadeus" (wearing full make-up). Kird told me he was advised to perform that monologue because if he didn't win, he could blame it on the material. Because he won, he got to take a 'round-the-world tour of Air Force bases for an entire year. He also said he was approached by several casting agents. The only problem was that he was pretty much stuck doing the Air Force thing for a few more years.
One of the surprising things Kird told me was that he remembered very little of his college experience, especially with regards to the Theatre Department. He said he could recall being in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" because he was in it with an actor he was roommates with. I told him he played a fairy and asked if he remembered those big clunky masks that everyone complained about. He said he didn't. I asked him if he remembered being in "The King & I," in which he delivered the first spoken lines in the production. He said he didn't. I told him I felt like I was carrying his memories around for him. He laughed about that.
(The strange thing was that he seemed to have no problem remembering every woman he slept with. I guess that mattered more to him than being an actor. However, I'm aware of just how selective memory can be. My Mom doesn't remember the week Kird spent a week with us in the summer of 1984, but she still remembers that time I came home from college with stinky feet.)
I told him about my parents splitting up, how my Dad was getting remarried in a few days and that I was going to go to the wedding in Taos. He told me I was doing a terrible thing by going to the wedding. "If my dad did that to my mom, I'd tell dad, 'Dad, I can't go to the wedding. I need to stay here with Mom and help her get through this.'" This actually took me by surprise. I hadn't even thought about how this was impacting Mom, the same as how I didn't take her feelings into consideration during Christmas. This emotionally stunned me to the point that I didn't even bother to point out that Dad had paid for me to come down, paid for the hotel room in Taos, etc., so I was pretty much obligated to go to the wedding. Maybe he would have toned down the harshness once I told him, but I don't know.
That still didn't affect us having a good time. We went over the house of a friend of his whom he did musical collaborations with. We were goofing around with his four-track recorder and I laid down a keyboard track on one of their songs. They were rather impressed with what I was able to improvise on the spot. (Later in life, I would meet musicians who really knew what they were doing, but they were not in any way impressed by me.)
Then we went over to see his wife and daughter. They were staying in a mobile home. (It may have been the one they had been living at.) His daughter was sleeping, but he was able to talk his wife into bringing her out. His daughter wasn't wearing any clothes. Kird held her and rubbed his forehead against hers. He was obviously hurting from not getting to see her so much. I realized that when he was criticizing me, he wasn't really talking about me, he was talking about how much he would hurt if his wife married someone else and his daughter decided to attend that wedding.
I don't exactly recall this (talking about memory problems), but I must have spent the night in Alamogordo. And I probably slept on his parents' couch. I know it was the next day that we went looking at a house he wanted to rent. As I had mentioned before, he really liked the house, but was nervous about having to commit to a one-year lease. As it turned out, the woman decided to rent it out to someone else.
And then I came back home. Kird and I would continue to see each other when I drove through town on my way to Artesia from San Diego. Every time, his situation changed. He kept reconciling and separating from his wife until he eventually gave up and married someone else.
When I had previously written about Kird, I mentioned how I was planning to try to get in contact with him. In July, I found his e-mail address. He started working for another law firm in Hobbs as a defense attorney. I told him about the blog and sent a link to the first part of the profile that focused on him. I also included a photo of my son. He sent back a response that said, "I have finally figured out who your music sounds like: The Sparks." That was all he wrote in the message. I sent a reply, mentioning how I missed cult bands from the 70s and 80s who would put out a new album every year. But he never wrote back. The best I can figure out, he looked at the blog post about him, but didn't look at Part 2. That he didn't want to communicate further with me was very disappointing. I had planned to go to Artesia with my family the next month and I was sort of hoping he would want to come out to Artesia to visit.
But anyway, in Monday's post, my Dad gets married. I will be posting articles on Thursday and Friday. One will be special. The other won't.
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