No, walk THIS way.....

Vance has reminded me of a classic routine he and David Lewis used to do. It was this funky little dance to the tune of Walk This Way, by Aerosmith.

Seesaw swingin' with the boys in the school
And your feet flying up in the air
I sing hey diddle diddle put your kitty in the middle
Of the swing like you didn't care
So I took a big chance at the high school dance
With a missy who was ready to play
Wasn't me she was foolin'
'Cause she knew what she was doin'
When she told me how to walk this way
When she told me to

Albuquerque 1985

This is from a blog I (Rick) occasionally follow by a guy named Raoul Severen. This is what he had to say about Albuquerque in 1985, though it really can work for the Mid-70s as well. I met Severen a few times. Cool guy. He was stationed at the Air Force base here back at the end of the 70's.
_______________________________________________

{Albuquerque 1985}
from Closer to Fine by Raoul W. Severen

There were giants in those days and Albuquerque still had abundant wildlife. If, in the mid-1980s, you were to scramble through the Loco Weed and the Datura, the Buffalo Gourds and the Spanish Bayonet, crawling on hands and knees through broken bottles and blown-out birth control, to the top of Piedra Lisa on a summer’s eve and peered back at the city, you could not, in all real honesty or concern, tell which was up or down. Albuquerque reflected back a perfect mirror image of the Canis Latrans galaxy – not the nearest, but certainly the most mischievous galaxy in our little corner of the universe. It was a wild and wooly town. Tumbleweeds blew freely through the streets and bears and coyotes were everywhere.

The ebb and flow of wildlife had to do with the fact that Albuquerque was a prime example – albeit a rapidly sinking version – of a sky island. It was a little ecosystem that extended for up to ten miles outside the city limits and had, at one time, connected to other regions of the state via riparian corridors.

Topping this island were the Sandia Mountains, those watermelon-colored majesties that distracted Coronado ever so briefly in his bloody quest for the Seven Cities of Gold. The Sandias exerted and influence of place over those of us who lived in their shadow. Like a full moon with an ocean tide, they tugged us toward them, making us think we could never elude their grasp. We would escape sometimes, though. We might get as far away as Lubbock or Topeka. But even in those flatlands, the Sandias called us back. Hell, fleeing to exotic locales in Europe, Asia, or South America did little to dampen their influence. Perhaps the drinking water contained some base ore that the Sandias acted on as a magnet. The far side of the world was no hiding place as they worked their spell, pulling us homeward.

In the foothills, the aptly named Arroyo del Oso, or Bear Canyon, was a veritable freeway of ursine traffic, with Mama bear and Baby bear taking daily strolls through town. (Presumably, Papa bear stayed at home watching the game.) Antelope bounded freely through the parking lots of the shopping malls and, though rare by then, there was still an occasional traffic snarl on the freeway caused by a migrating herd of buffalo.

While the source of much of the wildlife was the sky island, its catalyst was summer. Summer in Albuquerque. What the June 30th, 1974 issue of Time magazine called “an internationally acknowledged magical time in this little burg that sits in the middle of the second most famous rift valley in the world.” It was summer that brought out the wildlife, both two and four footed.

The tumbleweeds were a particular embarrassment to those of us who income relied on daily dealings with the summerly spate of turistas. We’d had a bad enough time back then with the mayor of New York City referring to us as a “dirty little back-water shithole of a town” on national television. Having tumbleweeds blowing across the street was mortifying. Out-of-towners saw that and expected Marshall Dillon to be facing down the bad guys in a gunfight at High Noon over yonder at the OK Corral. Never mind the fact that High Noon was a restaurant in Old Town and that historians not only believe that Marshall Matthew Dillon never came to Albuquerque, but in fact, may have only been a fictitious character on a long-running TV show. In our cabs we would be driving down a road, a New Yorker as a fare, and a tumbleweed would blow in our path – invariably one of those five foot in diameter monsters. “Jesus Christ!” the passenger would exclaim. “What in the hell was that?”

“A tumbleweed,” I’d mumble.

“Jesus Christ! Mayor Ed was right. This is a stinking shithole.”

Albuquerque, New Mexico, celebrated in song, cartoon and… well that’s about it. We didn’t make the song Route 66, but we’re right there between Amarillo and Gallup. Neil Young would still find it a good place to eat fried eggs and country ham, but by the mid 80s he’d twisted that last number for the road and split for Santa Fe. The Sons of the Desert and Jim Glaser kept trying to get back here in their songs, though aside from the possibility of a little nookie, no one knew quite why.

Albuquerque: hometown of Ethel Mertz. Albuquerque: where Bugs Bunny felt he should have taken a left turn. Many of us who did take that missed left discovered why New Mexico is oft-times called the “Land of Entrapment.” People just got stuck here in low wage service industry jobs. An ex-wife and I found that out the typical way. Drunk one night and sick of our dead-end jobs in Tacoma, we packed our car full of random possessions and split in the middle of the night, tires rubbing on wheel-wells. We floated some checks for gas money and left town. Plowing through the Washington night, we began to sober up, realizing what it was we’d done. There was no turning back then and on and on we rode, one Walkman and an aspirin bottle half-full of amphetamines between us. We wound up in Albuquerque, cruising into town on the proverbial fumes. With a $20 bill and a car full of clothes and books to our name, the plan was to work for a month or so and then head on back east to live with her family.

Month singular turned to months plural. We would try, but we just never could quite get together a decent running car or enough money to get much further than Amarillo. We might have a car with enough of a tune-up on it to get us to Ohio, but we’d try to parlay our cash funds into a fortune by investing in a half-pound of pot. Or we’d spend the car repair money on eight ounces of weed. Or sometimes we wouldn’t have a car at all. In those times we would buy some dope.

Sometime after the months passed one year, we divorced. I heard she made it out eventually. Went home to Cleveland and started the family she’d wanted. Hell, we both wanted the family. Just not with each other.

I’d blown through a half a dozen jobs and as many girlfriends since I’d been back in town. Both my labor and my loves revolved around cooking food or pouring drinks. The girlfriends were generally waitresses or barmaids I’d meet at a string of hash-slinging shit jobs.

I’d had my fill of cooking and waitresses both, so when I saw the ad in the paper looking for cab drivers, I thought I’d give it a shot. I filled out an application and they sent me out to train for two hours and then had me drive a full shift that night. I had no cash for change and no map save the one in the back of a shredded phone book I found in the trunk. I got both lost and yelled at, but at the end of the shift I didn’t have to mop some drunk’s puke out of the bathroom.

_______________________________________________
To read more of Raoul's Confessions, go to his Closer to Fine Blog

Reviews of this site to date

I wanted to see what our stats were looking like. Here is what others have to say about the Moonpie Chronicles blog:

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"Luckily she has loving parents that can offer her what she needs to make her life as comfortable as possible. Keep your chin up Moonpie.....we're rooting..."

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Pretty unanimous opinion, I think.

A note to n00bs and historians

In case anyone is coming here expecting the truth - which none of you can handle anyway - you should know you'll come away sadly mistaken. Or at least 50% sadly mistaken.

You'll need to get on boots - tall ones - before wading into this cow byre of memoir. In the modern parlance, this is known as Creative Non-Fiction. Thirty-five or so years ago, Bill Cardoso dubbed it Gonzo Journalism to describe the style of reporting used by the (now) late Hunter S. Thompson.

Now, what Vance and I did - at least in the original book - was to create a melange of words, drawings, and photos that reported on our progress. Progress was ostensibly meant to refer to achieving our goal of raising the money to go to Memphis. A close scholarly reading of these manuscripts, at least at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, is more likely to reveal a Progress towards the frightening world of adulthood; a world some of us didn't actually enter until at least our 40s. Even then, it was more of a vacation destination.

The continued remaining Moonpie documents are a portrayal of a wild, even vicious time. Our paths diverged and converged over the years like a double-helix strand of DNA. The diverging was especially true of Vance and I. Other friends, Martin, Jones, Blane (Vance's brother) Schactner, Lewis, Corbin, Lampson, the Eskew brothers, etc, seemed to stay in a revolving circle of contact and friendship. I guess. I've been back in this town since 1982, and I've only run into any of them once in all that time, and that was a deliberate meeting, so I really don't have much of a clue as to what goes on a round here. But those people, those are the people who became the Stormtroopers. Vance and I seem to come back into contact with one another about once every seven years.

But, as is my wont, I digress. My point is that the creation of the Moonpie experience was based on making shit up as well as reporting it as it happened (with a buffer of eight hours to sleep off whatever was consumed while "it" was happening.)

One further note is that we've all done our 50 trips around the sun. We're getting up there. Memories do tend to fade out. Or we remember a better way for things to have happened... "Dude, I had hair down to my ass and one night I drank an entire keg of beer and smoked a half-pound of weed, ate sixteen tabs of acid, and snorted a dozen lines of blow and then got it on with ten teenyboppers named Gretchen. I shit you not."

Here's your grain of salt, chums. Take it while reading.

Theme from "Jones": The Motion Picture

[Funky bass line here]

Back-up girls: Jones!
Issac Hayes: Who's the white private dick
That's thinks he's a sex machine to all the chicks?
Back-up girls: Jones!
Issac Hayes: You're damn right

Issac Hayes: Who is the man
That would risk his neck for his brother man?
Back-up girls:Jones!
Issac Hayes: Can ya dig it?

Issac Hayes: Who's the cat that won't cop out
When there's danger all about?
Back-up girls: Jones!?
Issac Hayes: Right on

Issac Hayes: You see this cat Jones is a bad mother--
Back-up girls: Shut your mouth.
Issac Hayes: But I'm talkin' about Jones.
Back-up girls: We know. We know. Would you shut up about him already?

Issac Hayes: He's a complicated man.
Back-up girls: No, serious. Shut the fuck up.

Issac Hayes: But no one understands him but the Professor.
Back-up girls: And we're not too sure about him, actually.
Issac Hayes: Jim Jones!
Back-up girls: That's our part!
Issac Hayes: Shhhh!
Back-up girls: But-
Issac Hayes: Shhh!
Back-up girls:It-
Issac Hayes: Shh!
Right on.

Tim Foster

Hey, remember Tim Foster? That guy that used to terrorize Jim Jones?

He's a friend of my sister Jennifer's now. He's really sick and tired of people telling how he used to beat them up in high school. He's in a band now. I've seen him play at parties a couple of times. I'm too old for that shit now. I must be because it's too loud!

Hell no, I didn't work today.

The 'rents

This is believed to be the only known photo of Martin's parents. It was taken in a Soviet Siberian gulag, moments before his birth.

The Hill

In the future, there will be references to "The Hill."

This is what's left of it thanks to urban sprawl....
View Larger Map (You'll have to click in a few to see it. For the uninitiated, it's the big brown space in the middle of the houses. In the larger view, almost directly north, one can see the location known as UTK (more later.) Continuing north is White Wash, and eventually, Alan's house.
Back in the 70s, the area around the hill was all open mesa. Granted, it was a dumping ground/race-track/party grounds, but it was our dumping ground/race-track/party grounds.

Here is a Google Earth Street-Level Shot..
View Larger Map

Hey, Hippie. You got a watch?

I know you ain't got no watch, cuz if you did, you'd know it's nighttime, and night time ain't no time to be in this neighborhood.

Yeah, Cheech and Chong. I mean, it was the 70's after all.

Point of inauthenticity on That 70's Show: the kids never listened to Cheech and Chong.

What is this? #1

Did you ever watch This Old House on PBS? They have a little thing they do called "What is it?" where they try to stump one another as to the purpose of a particular object.

I believe the above object is a custom-made ceramic left-handed window crank for a '63 Karmann-Ghia.

I can't imagine what other possible use it could have.

Famous Quotes

"Where do you guys go when you ditch class? The Tastee Freez?"

~ Tim Burns. Art Teacher. Eldorado HS mid-1970s.

We dissed this dude mercilessly. Then we had the nerve to get all pissy when he fucked with us and wrote a fake note from Vance's mom. Not C00l, Tim!

I ran into Tim Burns about 20 years later at the State Fair. He was selling bronzed baby shoes.It was funny at the time, but in retrospect, that could be me now.

Shit.

Day One: Rick's Version

It was 1975 at Eldorado High School and it had just snowed. A pretty good dump for Albuquerque. One of those rare snows that didn’t shut down the entire school system. Jones, in his infinite wisdom, thought it would be a great idea to go throw snowballs at cars. Me and Pissant didn’t really want to do it, but Jones, and this new kid, Blane were up for it. Someone else was there too, but I don’t remember. It might have been Alan “Hairlip” Schactner (so-called by Jones because Alan had an actual moustache.) This other new kid, some guy called Gallini, showed up and he seemed willing to go along with the whole thing.

We crossed the Montgomery Boulevard to, what was then, a vacant lot. Cars would drive by and we’d half-assedly chuck snowballs. I had to admit, that I wasn’t trying hard. I was the good kid. Jones was the type of kid who loved trouble, but hated doing it himself and so always made the rest of us join in. When I say “made us” I mean he’d call us pusses or something.

I remember at one point, someone saying “here comes a car.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw the others throwing as I bent down to pack some snow in a ball. I stood up and saw everyone running. I started after them, and as I did, I looked back over my shoulder. There was a car stopped. The driver had what looked like a broomstick shoved out his window.

There was a cinderblock wall that bordered the empty field. All we needed to do was hop it into someone’s backyard and we were free. There was a POP-POP-POP sound and I looked next to me. This Gallini kid was about ten feet away.

“Fuckin’ Jones!” I shouted. We’re getting chased and he’s lighting off firecrackers!”

As Gallini and I approached the wall, chunks off it exploded. The broomstick we’d seen was a rifle, and the fucker was shooting at us. We vaulted the wall in unison and kept on running. We hooked up Nassau and ran East for a half-mile. And cut a wide arc around the school, heading to Gallini’s house over on Tracy Court to lay low.

There was no way we were going back to school that day. We just sat around an shot the shit. Got high. I think it was the first time we really talked. I found out that he was into skiing and rock-climbing. That he had just moved to Albuquerque from Memphis. Oh, yeah, and that his name wasn’t Gallini. It was Vance Deniston. He was Blane’s brother. Gallini was just slang for a cigarette, something he was always bumming.

That’s what I remember as the first day that Vance and I became friends.

And then, now for something completely.....

Every week on Channel 5 in Vance's living room. Included were bong hits. For some reason, Corbin though it was a good idea to reuse the water, so he kept it in a squeeze bottle.

Soul Food. Soul Music.

We're still not quite putting things on here contextually, but that's cool. There are so many ways for us to go. The links, particularly the ones regarding Moonpies, the NRBQ song "RC Cola and Moonpie," and the City of Memphis all play a role in the leadup to this thing.

And, of course, the above photo of Booker T. and the M.G.s crossing East McLemore Avenue (the location of Stax Records)is pure classic Memphis.

Right on. Right on. Right on.

Tribute paid to this Blog so far

Mr. Top Petty has written a song in our honor:

Tom Petty Moon pie Lyrics:
Written by: Tom Petty

Well who you callin' Moon Pie, my real name is
Richard I live in a little town you've probably
never been to before There's a post office
[ Find more Lyrics at www.mp3lyrics.org/Qm1W ]
surrounded with gardenias And a pair of mud flaps
waggling out my door

I don't know what I want to say next but
somebody's got to help me Nobody knows I'm here Oh
please don't call me Moon Pie, my real name is
Richard

Tracy Byrd pays homage to our humble roots in his song Lifestyles Of The Not So Rich And Famous

Yeah our idea of high class livin'
Is sittin' on the porch on a cool night
Our Champagne and Caviar
Is an RC cola and a moon pie

Even the city of Mobile, Alabama is determined to cash in on our new-found fame:

AARP.org
Moon Pie hailed as 'idea for the ages'

* EDITORIAL Sweet home Alabama

The city of Mobile seems determined to squeeze every bit of publicity it can out of its plan to raise a giant electronic Moon Pie to ring in the new year.

Pissant and Jones

"Pissant and Jones." It sounds like the title of a hit 1970's Buddy Cop Movie

As promised, here is a photo of Martin "Pissant" Maskill. That's him on the right. To the left, and as out of focus then as he is today, stands James Horatio "Jones" Jones. Jones was the one who gave Martin the name of Pissant. Jones denies it, but we all think he got it from an episode of The Waltons.

The story goes that Martin was the one that came up with the idea. Original documents are on their way to the High Desert headquarters here for further examination and dissemination.

Connection-wise, I believe Jones and Martin knew each other from when they lived in Texas. I met Jones through another kid at school, Mike Clark. And I met Vance and Martin through Jones.

Jones will be referred to later. Jones is... well Jones. Everyone of us had Jones stories. When ever I would tell my son, "One time me and Jim Jones..." he would start laughing because he knew what was ahead.

Oh, yeah. And that's not a baggie of oregano in Martin's hands.

Deniston Speaks

If I had known this would be happening now, I would have paid more attention during "Film crit." class. Did Jon Voight really have a daughter who turned out to be an ugly chick with too much money?

Pepe LaDouche

This is the other co-founder, me, Rick Raab-Faber. A third member - one credited with the plan according to some, is a certain "Pissant," a man so high up in the American Aviation industry that I can't even hint at his name... ah, fuck it. It's Martin Maskill. I've got a pic of him somewhere that I'll post soon.

Yay-hoo #1

This is the cofounder of the whole endeavor, Mr. Vijay Singh! Formerly Miss Wyoming. Formerly Vance Deniston.

A lifelong reality becomes a dream

"Want to buy a cookie?"
~ The German Guy who owned The Donut Shoppe

It's here. Finally technology and fate are making the famous Moonpie Chronicles available to the world. With all new "Where are they now?" segments and shit like that.