Even though it had just been four months since my last vacation from the Hillcrest Cinemas, I decided to take the week of Thanksgiving off since I couldn't get off for Christmas. (Yeah, I know. In blog time, it was just two weeks ago.)
I'll start this story a couple of weeks before I hit the road to Artesia. I found out that Abed was planning to move back to Tularosa, NM. I asked him if he knew when he was going. He hadn't actually made up his mind. I told him I was going to New Mexico the week of Thanksgiving, and if he wanted to, I could drive him there on my way to Artesia. I even told him he wouldn't have to pay for gas because I was going home anyway. He said he'd think about it, but I could already tell that this was going to solve a lot of problems for him.
In the year that had passed after opening the Hillcrest Cinemas, Abed had started doing poetry readings and performing songs with his guitar.
The week before we were going to leave, Abed was somehow scheduled to work seven days in a row and it was really getting to him. (This was my fault, I was the one in charge of the scheduling.) The Friday before we left, a customer yelled at him about something while he was behind the concession stand making lemonade. At this point, he was fed up with people thinking they were better than him and telling him what to do. He threw the lemon he was squeezing at the customer and asked the woman managing at the time if he could just go ahead and go home. Then (according to her), he leaped over the glass barricade between the box office and the lobby floor, ran out the door into the courtyard and kept running without stopping.
Anz the Manager told me Abed wouldn't be working the Saturday and Sunday shifts I had scheduled him for. This meant we were going to be a little short, personnel-wise, but we'd get through it. In the meantime, we had planned a little midnight madness at the Hillcrest Cinemas to show a couple of movies to Landmark employees. Before the festivities began, Noad, an employee of the Guild Theatre, came over with a couple of friends. One of them was a woman named Colz. Colz was rather cute. We started talking and she seemed to like me. At one point, we all went over to the nearby ARCO AM/PM to buy some alcohol, but the clerk told us they shut of alcohol sales at 11pm. (WHAT?) We walked back to the theatre.
Before the movies started, Abed got to do a performance of his poetry and songs. He had shaved his head completely bald. This would be the first time I would get to see him perform his own material. While he read his poetry and played his songs, Colz asked me who he was. I told him he was one of our employees, but he was going to be going home to New Mexico on Sunday and I would be driving him. I could tell she was becoming more and more fascinated with him while he performed. I could see my chances with Colz quickly dissipating.
After his performance, Colz went up and talked to him. I was hanging out with Abed's father and sister while the conversation was going on. I couldn't hear everything, but it was obvious she was praising what she had seen and heard him do. Abed had a tough time looking her in the eye while she was going on about him. She went downstairs to watch the movie we were showing. Abed father kind of jabbed at him. "Hey, Abed! It looks like you met a girl. It's too bad you're leaving this weekend!" Abed didn't say anything in response, but I could tell he didn't like the idea of leaving when he found someone who was interested in him.
The next day, Abed called me at the theatre to ask for Noad's phone number. He was trying to get a hold of Colz. It turned out he was able to call her and spend the day with her.
After I got off work Sunday night, I went to the apartment where he was staying so that we could load up his stuff and leave. The nice thing was that he brought his stereo with him so we were able to listen to music on the way. (My car didn't have a radio.) He had brought a tape of songs he had written and I brought a tape of the tracks I had written on my keyboard. We stopped in Yuma, AZ to fill up on gas and ate dinner at the Lucky Greek Cafe.
Afterwards, we drove straight to Tuscon and spent the night at a Motel 6. We went out for breakfast the next morning at Waffle House. He had ordered the hash browns "smothered, covered" and whatever else. He got kind of mad because they didn't turn out the way he expected and didn't like how all the past-tense verbs didn't really describe what was happening to the hash browns. After breakfast, we went back to the motel room and listened to music a little before leaving.
I remember how it was raining very heavily most of the way between Tuscon and the New Mexico border. I had to drive slower than normal because I kept getting caught up in the tailwater of the vehicles in front of me. We eventually made it Alamogordo. Before driving Abed up to Tularosa, we stopped by and saw Kird. I was going to be spending a couple of nights with Kird before going to Artesia. After we hung out a little, I drove Abed over to his mother's house and dropped him off. I went back to Alamogordo.
Kird was somewhat in disarray because for the second time in two years, his wife had taken their daughter and left him. He was in the process of moving out of the house they had rented. In the last couple of years, Kird had been working on his music and had helped to create a thriving music scene in the Las Cruces/Alamogordo area. His group and others had enjoyed local success similar to what was going on in large cities in the wake of the Grunge scene. He organized a music festival called "Alamo-looza" and said about 250 people turned up. (That's actually a really good turnout for Alamogordo.)
Because of this, he was kind of living a rock star a few months lifestyle prior to my arrival, but only with regards to sleeping with women who came to his concerts. One of these women turned into a regular girlfriend. I met her the first night there. She was about ten years younger than Kird. She also knew his wife because she was her regular hairdresser at the salon in Walmart.
We were sitting around at his house watching the Rush Limbaugh TV show. This was the point at which he said that he had told his girlfriend about every woman he'd ever slept with. I embarrassed him by naming someone he hadn't told her about.
Kird slept in late the next morning. I ran around Alamogordo and took photos. After I came back, Kird had woken up. A couple of guys from Goodwill came over to pick up his bed and some other belongings that he was donating. Later, some people he knew from the Air Force base dropped by. Kird told them he had talked to a recruiter about re-enlisting because he really didn't have anything else better to do. One of his friends said he would never go back into the military.
Kird decided he wanted to go to Las Cruces that night and asked if Abed wanted to join us. Abed was up for a little adventure that night, so we ran around Las Cruces for a few hours, stopping to see a few people here and there. Then, Kird wanted to see what was showing at the Fountain Theatre in Mesilla. They were showing "Gas Food Lodging," which Abed and I had both seen already, but we thought it was good enough to see again. Kird actually liked it.
After we got back to Alamogordo, we went to Kird's house. Kird was tired and wanted to go to bed. Abed noticed that he had a LOT of music publications and books in the living room, many of which included his favorite artists. We decided to take some photographs with him surrounded by the books, newspapers and magazines. One of the books Kird had was Brian Wilson's "Wouldn't It Be Nice." I would try to sneak the book into the shots, but Abed would get mad and take it out. (He succeeded in the photo at the top of this page.) At the time, Abed didn't think much of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, but because of me, he came to appreciate his genius and went with me to see him on his Pet Sounds tour in 2000. (And yes, I am aware that Brian Wilson has disavowed that autobiography, but at the time, it was the best representation of him that I had available for the photo shoot.)
I drove Abed back to Tularosa and came back to sleep at Kird's. The next morning, I said my goodbyes and drove to Artesia by way of Roswell. That's where the unexpected part of this vacation will come in. I'll go more into detail tomorrow.
A side note to this post: As it turned out, Kird never did re-enlist in the Air Force. His wife and daughter did return to him, and while that lasted a few years, it never was permanent.
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