So, we packed our things into an old Ford van and a Cadillac ambulance, and hit the road, arriving in Carlsbad, NM the week of July 4th, 1979. We moved into a mobile
home (which I've vowed I'll never live in one of again), and started school at the end of the summer. Things weren't too good for your humble narrator in Carlsbad,
being at the same time a "long-haired hippie freak" and a "yankee". Carlsbad is only about 30 miles from Texas, and is much more like Texas than just about anywhere
else in New Mexico, other than maybe Hobbs. Long-hairs and hippies didn't fit in too well there in the early '80s, so making friends was pretty hard for Robert, but
he eventually fell in with the rest of the social outcasts.
Things weren't much improved when, in September of 1980, I discovered the Society for Creative Anachronism, and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Since I wasn't practicing for the Junior Rodeo like everyone else, there was obviously something wrong with me.
(An aside: The funny thing I've discovered about the SCA by talking to a great many members is that it's very rare to find people who were popular during their high school years. Additionally, the vast majority of members are the ones who were mocked for being "schoolies", "brains", and so forth. It's kind of a haven for intelligent outcasts with no social skills, and a great teacher thereof. After 20 years of membership and looking at the world, I've found no other organization wherein the members are so polite, courteous, and gracious. It's also one of the few social situations that make me feel normal, size-wise. In that one of the primary activities within the SCA is armored combat, it tends to attract very large men who want to fight. At 6'1" and 250lbs, I'm average to smallish. Everywhere else, I'm huge.)
My not fitting in had some collateral causes and effects. I'm fairly certain that the school systems I attended in New Jersey were far superior to the one in Carlsbad. I don't believe that I was taught anything new other than a few things in Accelerated Algebra. So, I mostly didn't pay attention in class, and read a lot. I scored very high on all the standardized tests, usually in the top 2-3 (not percent, individuals) in the school, which got a great deal of (for lack of a better term) publicity, much to the consternation of my teachers and classmates. I *never* did homework, and so I failed almost all of my classes. Homework being 50% of your grade, I usually had a 48%-49% average in my classes. So the kids hated me because I was smarter than they were, which was being rubbed in their faces, not by me but by the teachers, and the teachers hated me because they saw my test scores (both standard and classroom) but never got any work and hardly any classroom participation from me. I must confess to having tried to dissuade them from paying attention to me in class. My favorite tactic was to sit in the back of the room and read a book, apparently not paying any attention to the lecture. Then, as teachers are wont to do, they would ask for someone in class who looks like they're not paying attention to provide an answer to something they were discussing. I was a likely target at first, as it appeared to them that I wasn't paying attention. Without looking up from my book, I'd give the correct answer, then do my best to ask a question about the subject that the teacher didn't know the answer to. They quickly learned I was not a safe target for their attentions, though some learned slower than others.
This is how I spent my years in High School, when I went at all. Outside of school, I got involved in the usual teenage drinking games, shopliftings, running aways, and various other questionable activities. I also got my first guns, my first piercings, my first run-ins with The Law, my first car wreck, and lots of experience working on cars, almost exclusively Chevy V-8s.
It was also at this time that my mother was diagnosed with cancer.
She was the single toughest woman I've ever met, and a damned sight tougher than most men. She was diagnosed with breast and lymph node cancer in 1983. She had both breasts and several glands removed, took the chemo-therapy, and went back to work at the International Minerals and Chemicals Corporation potash mines, where she was a laborer. It was hard work, with a really weird set of shifts setup to avoid paying overtime to people forced to work seven days in a row (seven days of graveyards, 2 days off, seven days of swing, 1 day off, seven days, then 4 days off, and start the cycle over) but it was also the best paying job she'd ever had.
Cancer being the persistent disease that it is, she then found out she had bone cancer, which was treated this time with radiation. Driving her to the hospital for one of these treatments, I got my first *really* serious speeding ticket. I was heading north from Carlsbad to the Roswell Regional Medical Center, doing about 160 mph in a heavily modified Datsun 240Z. As I approached Artesia, I started slowing down, and therefore was doing only about 110 when I drove passed an Artesia cop. That was entertaining, but I still got her to Roswell on time.
After the bone cancer went into remission, she went back to work. Then came the brain cancer. I had graduated by this time, buried my father, who had died of a heart attack in 1985, moved to Albuquerque, and was attending UNM. My time line here is a bit disjointed, as one might imagine, so the actual order of things is likely to be different than this retelling. I came home for spring break in 1989, to visit my mother, who, by now, couldn't speak, and was in a nursing home. I stayed with her for a week, talking to her, though she could barely understand me through the haze of drugs and pain; lighting cigarettes for her to not smoke; holding her hand and telling her I loved her. Two weeks after I returned home, I got the standard 4AM call telling me the end was near, so back to Carlsbad I went.
I was there for a day before she died. I was there for it, 12:33AM March 30, 1989. I held her hand, talked to her, and listened with a stethoscope as her heart stopped. All in all it was very weird and painful, but there's nowhere else, given the circumstances, that I'd rather have been.
Thus ends the Carlsbad chapter our hero's story. The Albuquerque chapter has already begun, it's start overlapping the end of this one, but such is life.
The scorecard for the Carlsbad chapter of the story is:
More stitches.
Two arrests, no convictions.
One father dead (no great loss to me, we were never that close).
One mother dead (great, gigantic loss).
One G.E.D.
Still no broken bones.
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