Happy New Year

Forty-four years ago Mark and I hosted a New Year’s Eve party at our crumbling adobe in Placitas. To get everyone to leave at 2 or 3 in the morning we had to let the fire go out so it was too cold to snort cocaine in the bathroom anymore.

Who were these folks enjoying themselves in the bathroom? Among many disparate Anglo communities in the village—in the sixties and seventies there wasn’t much mingling between the gringos and the Hispano land grant heirs—we were the so-called “intellectual” ones, made up of artists, writers, and academics. There was crossover between our cohort and the Dome Valley crowd, who considered themselves the hipsters of the day, and the hippies with a New Age mindset who didn’t vaccinate their children. But the New Year’s Eve Party was pretty much confined to the group we partied with, went to literary readings at the Living Batch Bookstore, and if we had the discretionary money, snorted coke with.

That night, most of the music was Motown and other R & B records of the day: Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas, Curtis Mayfield, the Isley Brothers, the Temptations. But we also had a pretty good collection of New Orleans mardi gras music of The Wild Tchoupitoulas, the Meters, the Neville Brothers, and Allen Toussaint, courtesy of our friends from down in the bayou (then a professor at UNM). I wrote a short story in my book Stories From Life’s Other Side called “Our Heart and Soul” that described a dance party at their house where we were told to leave our kids at the babysitter so we could smoke dope and get drunk with total impunity.

The house where the New Year’s Eve party took place was a four-room adobe with only three functional rooms: kitchen, living room, and bedroom. The bathroom was just a walled off room inside the living room, hardly large enough for more than a few coke snorters at a time. The year after the New Year’s Eve party the septic drainage pipes, made out of tarpaper, completely fell apart in the middle of winter and we had to dig up the leach field and replace them with PVC (we paid a $50 a month rent that didn’t include landlord maintenance). We started building a house on land I’d bought outside the village before I got together with Mark, but that took five years to be ready enough to move in. When I got pregnant with Jakob and my mother heard that we wouldn’t move into the new house before he was born, she burst into tears thinking about him crawling around on the mud floors of the rental.

Those were the days, my friend, but I only wish they’d never ended when I remember the fun we had that New Year’s Eve. Years later, after we moved to El Valle, we did get to go to a club on New Year’s Eve in Santa Fe to hear and dance to Joe King Carrasco play one of the best concerts ever, and we celebrated a few more at the casinos of el norte dancing to the Darren Córdova Band or Los Blue Ventures. Now, at the end of this 2021 year, full of much hardship and angst for all of us, I wish there was a great band playing in a great venue where I could go dance with Mark and all my friends once again. But at the ripe old age of going on 72 I have to find my joy in the fact that it’s finally snowing, with a major storm predicted, and tomorrow, New Year’s Day, I’m going to strap on my cross-country skis for the first time this year and head up the canyon. Happy New Year.