I rub the back of my neck. “It’s very big.”
Sam is the New Member Educator for Nu Kappa Epsilon at New Mexico State University, and he’s stuffed in the backseat between my suitcase and a pile of backpacks and orange vests and camo hats and hooks and poles.
Jose Rodriguez, the driver, is this NKE chapter’s president, and this Corolla—its paint dulled under what feels like an inch-thick layer of desert dust—is his vehicle; he drives the three of us from the El Paso International Airport to Las Cruces, New Mexico,
rarely looking away from the road, holding the steering wheel and commanding the car with remarkable discipline.
Headache is gone now, eye has stopped twitching, but I chug a bottled water because I’ve never felt so parched in my life…out here, the entire world feels like
a dehydrated snow globe, the snow replaced by dirt and dried-out vegetation, and it seems as if—every time I think the dust has finally settled—someone is shaking the dust globe again. Just thirty minutes ago, when Sam and I stepped out of the airport and into the early evening to find Jose’s idling car, we were blasted by the sort of hot air I’d expect when opening the oven door to check on a pizza. This isn’t stifling Florida heat, where every minute of summer feels as if you’re trapped in a boiling high school locker room. It isn’t Pennsylvania or Illinois either, where September feels like a transition to a violently cold season, and all of the American Eagle advertisements are already showcasing sweaters in dark browns and oranges. A “dry heat,” they call this, but until now I’ve never felt it before. I’ve never been to the Rocky Mountains, to the deserts of Arizona or West Texas. Born and raised in humid Florida, my farthest trips west came when my parents took me to see cousins in Houston, another Gulf Coast city where a day’s bear-ability is measured by the humidity.
And the idea of “dry heat,” of deserts, o
f a “vacation visit”—even if I’m only going to the small town of Las Cruces—feels exhilarating, suddenly.
Vacation visit
. The business card back in my car, flipped.
All that
blank space.
“Las Cruces is right past this mountain,” says Jose as we near the university. Jose is a muscular
Mexican with a well-maintained fade; he wears all white (white polo with khakis either sun-bleached or washer-faded), and he speaks a slow and thoughtful English, traces of an accent rising and falling with the rhythm of his sentences. Maybe his tight haircut means he is conservative, a strict Catholic, a committed ROTC student…or maybe, on the other hand, his back-seat collection of hunting equipment means he is instead adventurous, reckless even, a Generation Kill type. I can’t tell. “From Las Cruces to El Paso, it is only thirty minutes,” he says, “so this is not a bad drive. And Mexico is just beyond the river in El Paso, so it is a quick drive from our school to Mexico.”
“Your school’s only half an hour from Mexico
?” I ask.
“Always interesting,” Sam says, “but a little wild, a little dangerous.”
“I’ve never been,” I say.
“No?”
“But I definitely want to check it out.”
“If you go,” Sam says, “just make sure you order bottled water. Otherwise, you’re going home with a different sort of vacation souvenir.”
“Noted,” I say.
“Mexico is so close,” Jose says
. “A popular spot for underage drinkers.” He drives barely a mile per hour over the speed limit, rarely passes any of the slow right-lane traffic on the highway. Conservative? After all, he sits with an upright driver’s ed discipline, even adjusts his rearview regularly. Or reckless? Perhaps this plodding is the result of a car worn weak from years of irresponsible driving, a man forced to change his ways after too many street races gone sour…
“My eight-
year-old sister could drink in Juarez,” Sam says from the back seat.
“Hmm,” I say.
Conservative, disapproving?
“Shit,” Sam adds. “I even took my sister out there, once.”
Or reckless?
“G
et her wasted?” I ask, cracking the joke without—
shit
—considering reactions.
Silence for a moment
, the car a tomb of judgment.
“She’s eight,” Sam says severely. “No, I didn’t get her
wasted
.”
“I was only
playing. Just…you know?”
He stares at me with angry eyes, cheeks hard, hat so tight on his scalp that it looks like
the fabric might splinter. Then his face opens into a wide smile. “I know, bro. Just fucking with you.”
I exhale.
“
I’ll wait until she’s thirteen to get her drunk,” Sam says.
“Ha!” I say.
He’s a joker, I learn, the type of loud, crude, baseball-cap-clad
bro
who might as well have been plucked from Pitt or Shippensburg and deposited here in the desert.
I turn to Jose beside me
. “Are you from Mexico? Juarez?”
“Oklahoma,” he says.
“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t mean to assume…”
“My
parents
. They are from Mexico. They live in Las Cruces. They own a pecan farm.” And he points out the window, past dark and dry and unending New Mexico and West Texas desert, and in the distance stand rows and rows—thousands—of scraggly trees, thirsty-looking like they hate that someone has planted them out here, and Jose says: “Just like those. Pecan trees. Those are owned by the university, I think. Our school is very agricultural.”
“Didn’t know that.”
“This is why we are called the Aggies.”
“I see. I get it.”
“Most people don’t. They always ask, ‘What is an Aggie?’ It gets old.”
“Did you have a football game today?”
“We play at Utah State,” Sam says from the backseat. “Night game.”
“You do anything special for road games? Get together for drinks?”
“We tailgate for home games,” Sam says. “Away games aren’t usually televised.”
“Too bad,” I say and shake my head. “Well, there’s plenty of other games tonight. We should stake out a spot at a bar, get some pitchers, watch some football.”
“Um,” Sam says and meets Jose’s eyes in the rearview and they both have this look like
This guy’s coming along? Not gonna happen
…And it’s something I hadn’t anticipated, that at the moment I’d like to actually join them for a drink, I might be rejected.
So I try to change the subject before they shut me out altogether.
“Did you happen to see who won the Pittsburgh game?” I ask. “Earlier today?”
“Pittsburgh?” Sam asks. “The Steelers had a Saturday game?”
“No, no. The University of Pittsburgh.”
“There’s a university in Pittsburgh?”
“Yep.”
“You
sure
?”
“It’s a large school,” I say. “Probably bigger than NMSU.”
“I doubt that,” Sam says.
A silence falls
upon the car for a few moments, conversational doldrums from which it might be impossible to escape. For most college-aged men, all of life is a competition. What we order for dinner, how many beers we drink, our shoes, our shirts, our cars, our haircuts, our jokes, our jobs, our girlfriends. The size of our fraternity houses, or the size of our alumni contributions. And it occurs to me that even my statistic—the reliable statistic, the number of students enrolled at a university—has now become the object of competition. For four years, Sam’s entire world has been New Mexico State University, the restaurants and the dorms and the classrooms and the bars and the football team. To admit defeat in this particular competition, to admit any sort of deficiency in the university is, perhaps, to admit personal flaws.
“So, like, are there cool things to do in Mexico?” I ask
finally.
“Many things, yes,” Jose says. “You just need to know what they are.”
“Okay,” I say, and I wait for more but there is no further response.
Loosen up
, Ben said, but already it seems I’ve fucked up the vacation visit.
*
The landscape doesn’t change much, looks like we’re going nowhere, but at some point we circumvent the looming mountain—it really just looks like a pile of soil and rocks that someone dumped on the horizon—and a messy bit of civilization is scattered over the rolling dust-scape ahead: Las Cruces. As we near the city and the university, I see that the open fields of dirt surrounding the city are littered with discarded plastic bottles, orange juice bottles and milk cartons and water bottles, all empty, grocery bags dancing across tipped-over shopping carts. In the city itself, adobe-style houses stand next-door to dumpy lots, abandoned storefronts. Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, despite the exhaust and the cracking highways, felt like
finished
cities beneath the grime, places populated purposefully and now pulsing with activity, but here, all the world looks forgotten-about, as if the unbroken desert winds have toppled and scattered a once-stable city and no one has come to pick up the mess.
And, it seems, this is barely a “college town.” Not like the University of Illinois
, where every house was a fraternity house and every building bore the “I” logo. No. Here, there are standard four-lane streets with standard names (Stewart Street and Payne Street, and even as we pass the stadium—a tall, grassy mound, cut in the center with bleachers—there is no “Stadium Avenue”), standard two-story commercial buildings, standard fast-food locales like McDonald’s and Carl’s Jr, none of it even painted in the colors of the school. It is a sprawl of urbanization effected by a state university, but not a college town. No strip of college bars, no swarms of students in NMSU t-shirts, no Rush Season excitement. Through my car window, I watch a mother herd her three children up the stairs of their apartment building. A mother? A family? In a college town apartment complex?
As we drive to Jose’s apartment
where I’m told I will stay for this visit, we pass short hunkered-down classroom buildings that have the look of a budget-crunch high school campus. New Mexico State University, unlike the historic schools of the Northeast (even Shippensburg), probably had the misfortune of being built in the 1960s, and instead of century-old brick decadence, it looks like a functional campus built to absorb a population boom.
“Are you all right?”
Jose asks.
“I’m great,” I say. “I’ve just never been anywhere like this.”
“This?” he says. “This is Las Cruces. That’s all it is.”
“I’m sure you’ll be happy to leave
this shithole by Wednesday,” Sam says from the backseat, removing his hat and running his hands through his haphazard brown hair. And where is the competition now? He is a man, a fraternity man, a
college man
: he’s supposed to be
excited
about New Mexico; he’s supposed to talk about the NMSU football team, about concerts and restaurants and bars and festivals; he’s supposed to boast of this town’s college-ness, how happenin’ it is, how hard they party; he’s supposed to cheer for his school like an SEC football fan in the swollen mobs on ESPN’s “College Gameday.”
“Okay, so what are the plans for tonight?” I
try again. I’m on the edge of my seat, have unbuckled my seatbelt without realizing it, and I try to make eye contact with both Sam and Jose. My buzz is wearing off, and I feel somehow like time is running out on my Saturday. “Cool stuff to do in Las Cruces, right?”
“Cool stuff?” Jose says.
“Like, going out?”
“We never talked about these things with our last consultant.”
“Who was your consultant last year?”
“He was short,” Jose says. “Very serious.”
“Hopefully I’ll be different. I’m serious, but not
that
serious.”
“He glared a lot,” Sam says from the backseat. “Never seemed happy.”
“He yelled at one of our pledges about his t-shirt,” Jose says.
“Yelled about a t-shirt?” I ask.
“Did not like the slogan. I forget what it said. Made him turn his t-shirt inside-out.”
“Oh,” I say. “That’s not cool.”
“He had very shiny shoes, too. Polished them each night.”
“Well,” I say. “Not me. My shoes are, you know, dusty already.”
“It’ll get worse,” Sam says. “Can’t keep anything clean out here.”
“So what about the bar scene, then? Does it make up for the…dust?”
“Some killer army bars, if you’re into that,” Sam says.
“Army bars,” I say, and no…I’m not into that.
“Our last consultant,” Jose says, flipping his turn signal a full 200 feet before he makes his turn, and completing a magnificent hand-over-hand rotation of the steering wheel, “he told us that the best thing to do for a traveling consultant was to make sure you had time to rest, and that you had time to yourself.”
“Time to rest?” I say.
And I suddenly realize with depressing certainty that, because I have no car, I can’t go anywhere on my own; if I want to go to a bar, I actually have to
convince
them to drive me to a bar.