Book Overview
I have this thing about places, I only ever want to be there when I'm not. Even when those places are where my life's been hardest and terrible things have happened. But maybe that's what makes them so familiar. Nothing forges intimacy like suffering with another, and that's how it is with Taos. I suffered here. I walked her streets and on the back roads till everyone knew me and no one liked me. Maybe, it was what I did, because I was dying and wanted everyone to see, wanted them all to know. Wanted to show them, the best way I could, the festering scar in my brain, the one that came before all the rest, the scar of scars, mine. Showing them my death, baring it all like that in the streets for them to see, comforted me, somehow. It quelled my brain, the beast. In the mornings, I made phone calls looking for death. Sometimes, I used the payphones in the plaza. Mostly, though, I used the landline at Caf Tazza down the street. Once someone answered and agreed to deliver, I sat on the railroad ties in the dirt of the municipal parking lot or at the ketchup and mustard stained picnic tables outside of Smith's to wait for it. And once it was in my sweaty hand, I tasted it in the bathroom stall. After that, there was stumbling through town with the hiccups, a slink in my step and mischief in my eyes that hadn't been there before. I became something else for the second parts of those days, something malevolent, death's own body and comfortable in my skin.
