truth or consequences.

A trip to Truth or Consequences is for me always somewhere between the last words of Kurtz’s trip into darkness and the first words about emerging into light. It is a very light place, white in fact, with a desert clarity that tends not to romance shabby edges. And the shabby edges exude a whiff of the American dream meeting the dangerous; viz the dark. Water rights cede to Texas;  “meth watch” signs dot a road (“riverside drive”) begun with a park with swings, retirement trailer parks opposite the skinny Rio Grande. It’s a town of betweens where geography might still be destiny, one day.
Conrad and I first went there years ago over a Christmas holiday. I remember the seediness of a place with torn floors where a woman ran the bath water. Many of those places of course are now gone or fixed up, as the town bears such destinations as Sierra Vista and Blackstone, on the uphill side, and such camp and cult favorites as Firewater, La Paloma, Riverbend Hot Springs, The Charles, along with signs of past glories now being turned into vacation rentals.
Delmas Howe, the artist, in a famous event before Joe Waldrum died, showed his Stations of the Cross New York City pier paintings at Waldrum’s Rio Bravo Fine Art. Stephen Low, who was William Burroughs’s secretary back when in Lawrence (Kansas), hit TorC before decamping to Desert Hot Springs for his final stop this life. Burroughs, Low and Waldrum are sadly now gone. But a more recent attempt to up-market TorC found a guy from Mádrid (NM) who for a brief spell some four years ago founded and started a bunch of small art galleries along Main Street. From the looks of things today those aren’t operating anymore although while they did one had the opportunity to imagine all the storefronts repainted and a jam of traffic incoming and outgoing. Visitors would take baths, thriftshop, and recede back into the air conditioning for martinis and runways. Landscaping courtesy of the Exotic Cactus Ranch, perhaps the audacity of a century plant amid the statuary. Ah, Tor C. I will always love you. Call me a desert rat, the coalition of old aluminum Airstreams, Civilian Conservation Corps projects near the lake, and the springs that make water and property synonymous, are as close as we get to Lourdes around here. 95 years worth of Hot Water” Festival was celebrated with an aplomb play on words in mid-November.