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Show PACE 8 THE ZEPHYRAPRIL 89 Hard Times in Santa Fe by Edward Abbey it "The City Different." Chamber of Commerce calls from what? Different from the typical American city, the Chamber means. But more and more Santa Fe comes to resemble cities in general, but every other city, and not only American age has laid any town where the blight of our techno-industri- al The Different down its heavy hand. of Santa Fe has been well preserved, a museum piece of adobe palaces and mansions of mud. Height restrictions have saved the city - - so far - - from the usual plague of glass- walled skyscrapers and mainframe metal boxes thirty stories high. But outside of the traditional city, the inner city, the pretty the approaches are much the same as anywhere else: strips city, of commercial sleaze and shopping mall slums lining every highway East and northeast of the for miles to the north and south. arteries of business are the new residential areas, the middle-claThe core other was broke, penniless, bankrupt. Neither of us had a job or I was a writer, not a bloody intention of finding a job. any Frank was a mystic. did not panic, not even when the gas company shut off the gas, the power company turned off the electrioity, the city cut off the water. We would do as artists always do - live by our wits. Frank lit a joss stick, assumed the lotus posture, closed his eyes, and subsided into a stupor of deep meditation, reducing his metabolism to that of a hibernating lizard. In that elemental state he could survive or weeks, living off body fat and employee. We bliss. ss or "Anglo" quarter, a neat and tidy reservation filled with overpriced villas of cinderblock, plasterboard, wallboard, tarpaper and chickenwire, the corners rounded and the surfaces sprayed with light brown stucco to give each structure the That is, the simulation of genuine contemporary Santa Fe look. fake adobe. The authentic imitation. Good enough for the forty thousand newcomers from Elsewhere, USA and Europe, who have poured into Santa Fe since the end of World War Two. Nobody seems to mind. Prosperity is irrefutable. . Not everyone shares in the new abundance. south of the city (where the poor always seem to On the west and find themselves) live the original inhabitants of this City Different, the native i that mestizo mixture of Indian and Spanish who Mexican-America- ns never quite succeed in adapting, who never quite catch up. They slums and among their junked automobiles, employment and full-tim- e welfare, breeding surviving on part-tim- e too many babies, training too many criminals, dreaming too many brood bitter flat-ro- of dreams. Indifference on the white people's side, envy and hate on the other. Someday soon the lovely old town of Holy Faith will explode in class warfare, a warfare made even uglier by cultural My response was different: I pawned the household furnish incompatibility and the racial divide. Polite people do not talk about such matters. Strolling ings piece by piece. about the icy streets last November, I too preferred to think of First to go was the in the canopied sweeter things. The volcano will erupt soon enough; why spoil master bedroom, a grotesque antique and superfluous item in a home the present? Enjoy, enjoy, they cried in Pompei, unto and into without the comforts of steady female companionship. I disthe Latter Days. mantled the masaive thing and hauled it in my old pickup truck to Down the narrow street called Palace Avenue I passed the a shop dealing in something known as "Distressed Freight." My high adobe wall of the house where I once lived, for one frigid payment was sufficient to provide us with pinto beans and dried Such a diet, while bleak, supplies the essenwinter, during my youthful Bohemian days, the carefree 60's. The rice for a week. nutrition. house belonged then to a friend of mine, the great Southwestern tial protein for A few santos from the De we as John tapestries and called him, had Puy. "Debris," landscape painter fled the winter, pursuing a woman to Switzerland, Greece, Crete. time of Coronado enabled me to buy such essential delicacies as eggs, coffee, wine, cream, French bread, Danish cheese, Knott's He left me and another friend, a Yogi fakir from New Jersey named plum jam, even the occasional odd Virginia ham in its burlap Frank Wohlfarth, in charge of his fifteen-roopalacio. A serious mistake. Sri Aurobindo Frank, I must reveal, would John knew better. But love had deranged sack. We managed. descend from his astral world, from time to time, to share these his mind. A mere snap of the fingers, acFrank and I cleaned out the pantry and emptied the freezer simple pleasures with me. coffee and the sizzle of the first week. Ate everything available, the canned goods, the companied by the aroma of frozen meats, the dried pastas, the last jar of peanut butter, frying ham, was usually enough to bring him out of his trance and the final box of cornflakes, the ultimate tin of smoked baby into the vulgar world of illusion, if only for an hour or so. clams. He consulted our finances and each discovered that the Om. sweet On. four-post- er cold-weath- ox-hi- er hand-carv- de ed m fresh-brew- ed are cordially invited to join a select audience for... 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