The hippy must have been drinking all that liquor about the time I was talking with the shoplifter and the guy who looks like a game show host. By the time I wound up our conversation and drove fifteen miles down the highway to the gas station, he was staggering.
"Too many horses showed up, man. Too many horses."
Four other dudes, all locals who seemed pretty strung out, were drinking with him at the gas station's bar. One of them apparently bought "a million shots for everybody." It was five o'clock, and I missed the fucking party. Now he needed a ride.
He didn't look like a hippy at all actually, more like the image I have of a stereotypical highwayman. Like a 19th century British outlaw, what I imagine that would look like. He was probably about 60 years old, close to 6'6" and wearing a long, black coat with heavy boots. His face was sunburnt and he had a strangely creepy, permanent half-smile.
But the guy told me he was a hippy. Or maybe it was more like he was of hippies, at least once.
"I was out there for a while — out in California, man, back in the 70s. Then I drifted out here with the hippies. A bunch of us came out here to the mountains, I don't know why."
In retrospect, it seems shitty of me to grill him about his identity before letting him in the car, although he didn't seem to mind. The decent thing probably would have been to ask those questions during the strange trip down the same dirt road five times as he drunkenly gave me terrible directions to his trailer. Every couple minutes during the drive he drifted from one half-baked story to another, always forgetting to tell me when to turn. At one point I pulled over so he could get out and piss next to the post office. It was 5:30.
"I know where we're going, man. We've just got to get there."
He told me he made a hundred bucks that day cleaning horses for some rancher a few miles up the mountain. But there were only three dollars left when I found him. Not that I asked him for money, but he told me anyway, maybe thinking I would ask.
About six o'clock he flagged down a truck and asked directions to a fire station he said was near his place. I was getting hungry, and was feeling pretty sure this drunk/hippy/outlaw/asshole was making a lot of things up. He looked approximately as much like an average northern New Mexican as I did, which he noted.
"It's tough being a white guy in Canjilon, man — the Spanish never give me a break. You, where are you from? Illinois? Yeah, you look really Lincoln-esque. Seriously. You could be president, man."
Then he started in with a long description of some half-drunken accident a couple months earlier when he tried to ride his prize horse over a cattle guard in town and it fell through. The accident almost killed the horse and the hippy was stuck on the back of the thing until some dude helped pry him off. Most of his neighbors (the Spanish) had reportedly been mocking him since, which must have bothered him.
Somehow the physics of that story don't make sense to me (like how the hippy wasn't seriously injured), but the underlying narrative does: forty years after moving here, this dude was still an outsider. The locals drink with him at the gas station, even buy him enough liquor to get so drunk he forgets how to get home, but they still laugh extra hard when his dumb ass almost kills his favorite horse.
I've been in this goddamned place six months — maybe he was trying to make a point.
He told that story as I was finally driving the last hundred yards up to a muddy spot where I dropped him off. He said the trailer was a couple hundred yards away, past an area where he grew "organic vegetables." As a thank you for the ride he offered me some fresh broccoli (in March?) and a joint. I was told both "vegetables" came from the garden.
For some reason, I turned both down. So he got out and stumbled into the woods.
Not that it exactly matters, but I still have no idea if he really lived there, or whether he actually owned any horses or if he even had any weed. I don't even know if he knows, actually. He might have wandered into those woods like he and I both wandered into this state, having no real plan.
I've got to move, or get a horse.
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