SAM IS MY SHEPARD; I SHALL ALWAYS WANT

THOUGHTS ABOUT SANTA FE

(Above: Sam Shepard working at the Santa Fe Institute where he was a Miller Scholar from 2010 to 2011 and his buddy Cormac McCarthy was a Trustee. Shepard lived in Santa Fe with Jessica Lange and her daughter Shura from 1983 to 1986 and again, alone, from 2010 to 2015. His father, an alcoholic who had raised Shepard on an avocado farm in California, was living here in Santa Fe also in the mid-1980s working as a custodian at the La Fonda Hotel. He was killed one night outside a bar when he was struggling even to straggle home and was hit by a passing car. Photo by Mike Piscitelli.)

Below is one of the hundreds of letters that Sam Shepard wrote over a 45 year period to his friend and former father-in-law and fellow wanderer as well as spiritual groupie of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff and epistolary partner, Johnny Dark, on January 10, 2001.

Shepard wrote:

“Back home and still reeling from the amazing avalanche of experiences over the past year. I think you and Scarlett may have the absolute right approach: never leave your cozy little home and your warm baths and your big fuzzy dog because life will just bash you over the head out there. I remember leaving Deming and feeling very lonely and driving out into that long stretch of highway with nothing around ... Right afterward I called you and then I headed on to Santa Fe where I thought I might spend a leisurely day and do some writing but, instead, I went out that night to an old restaurant me and Jessie used to go to called the Pink Adobe and asked if the owner was around—a great old Louisiana woman named Rosalie but it turns out she had died last summer, which kind of shocked me … and then I went staggering out of the place and the moon was full and everything was so reminiscent and nostalgic of the time me and Jess had lived there and the air was full of that wonderful smell of burning pine—so I decided I would get good and drunk. I hadn't had that thought in over three and a half years—totally dry—not one single drip of liquor and now, suddenly, I know without a doubt that I am going off with the full intention of getting absolutely smashed. … The bar is completely on the other side of town, way up on Canyon Road and it's a Sunday night and no one is on the streets at all and I'm walking and there's that great New Mexican mountain chill in the air. It's only about forty degrees and having gotten used to Minnesota winters it feels like nothing and with my new reamed out heart artery I feel almost invincible anyway so I walk the whole distance, find the bar where some fat guy is singing old Dylan songs and I order my big glass of red wine. Sitting there at the bar and looking down the row of slightly pathetic middle-aged ex-hippie types who are obvious regulars the whole aching despair of bar life comes flooding back and I can't believe I'm actually back in this situation—this old familiar situation of drinking alone with strangers. I finish my wine and leave and start walking back down the hill into town again—back toward the plaza. I walk for miles and miles, wondering if maybe I've gotten disoriented and forgotten the way but then I keep checking for landmarks and realize I'm on the same road me and Jessica used to bicycle down every morning with Shura strapped to the back of her mother's bike like some little papoose—she was about three years old then and we would go to this little coffee shop connected to the La Fonda Hotel and have breakfast. Then I go diving further into the past and remember when you and I had met each other in the lobby of the La Fonda after a night of debauchery with two women and no sleep and I keep right on associating into the inevitable memories of my Dad being a custodian at the La Fonda and then, before I know exactly what's going on with myself I'm there inside the La Fonda at the bar ordering another glass of red wine! There's a whole group of English tourists sitting in one corner of the place ordering German beer. They're very organized and even go about getting drunk in an orderly fashion. I finish this second large glass of red wine and go out into the lobby and start wandering around staring at all the great photographs of early Santa Fe days, some dating back to the very early 1800's—views of the plaza with muddy streets and burros and Indians and Mexicans and soldiers and all the great mix of races and the marketplace and traders from all over—none of them with even the slightest clue that the whole place would one day be invaded by Hollywood and millionaires and that the biggest commodity would be art and Indian jewelry. I head out into the street and find yet another bar, another hotel, another big glass of red wine and finally manage to get myself good and sloshed. Now, I got to the plaza or rather, try to walk through the plaza on my way back to the hotel where I'm staying. There's still not a soul on the street. One lowrider car—a silver Chevy which I'm actually surprised to see—I thought all the low-riders had moved up to Española. The plaza is completely decked out in Christmas lights—everything is wrapped and draped in lights: the trees, the band shell, the bank, the Governor's Palace, the iron fences surrounding the snow covered lawn—red, green, blue, white; blinking on and off. I get to the very center of the plaza and start turning in circles for some reason and staring up through the barren trees, very drunk, seeing the big moon overhead—something like one of those early bad foreign films with sub-titles and I start feeling very sorry for myself and conjure up all this stuff about my father and the play I just finished in San Francisco which deals with his death and all that stuff and the whole thing just becomes a god-awful drunken mess of emotional indulgence in the past!! At one point I'm crying out to the moon and the heavens in a drunken wail, thinking there's no one around and all of a sudden I see someone walking straight towards me across the plaza—not a cop, just a person but It's so shocking to see another human being—and this is part of what I was trying to tell you down there in Deming in the coffee shop—how it sometimes feels as though I am absolutely unaware of anyone else existing in this life that I wonder to what extent I am cut off from other people—how far have I removed myself into this totally ridiculous state of isolation??? Having survived those bad Santa Fe blues I make it back up into the cold country.”

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I didn’t write a WEDNESDAY NEWSLETTER this week - my first time not writing one since I started that series - because I felt as if I needed to settle into Santa Fe a bit more where I arrived a few days ago and to acclimate myself not only to its altitude but also to the slower pace which that entails as I learn to breathe differently here and live life at this different pace even if it is performative. As I was walking into town on the Fourth to buy some Ginger Ale and cashews and a cleverly labeled protein drink at the Five and Dime and then to sit on a bench in the park at The Plaza, which is where I’ll be taking my pleasurable seat to watch the performance of my new pace this month, I started thinking about Sam Shepard and his connection to The City Different, as the town has branded itself.

When I was in Lisbon last month, a woman I met there told me that she first got to know my writing when I was the Executive Editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in the 1980s because being a devoted reader of Interview was a way for her to immerse herself in the world’s wider culture after her county’s Carnation Revolution in 1974. After our meeting, she posted on Instagram my cover story on Sam for Interview. I saw Jessica Lange on my first Sunday in New York in her last performance in Mother Play on Broadway. And now I was sitting on a bench in Santa Fe. Shepard was the the connective thread I was contemplatively sewing into my pilgrimage. Sam had a distaste for the tourists who discovered the town along with him. But he, like me, like all writers maybe, was a tourist in his own life. He, like me, like all writers maybe, had the desire for both community and isolation. That takes a lot of balance and sometimes we lose it. I just call myself a pilgrim because of its nicer ring. “He was terrible at his relationships, but he had his writing," Johnny Dark once said when being interviewed about Shepard when a collection of their letters, Two Prospectors, was published by University of Texas Press. "He lived in Santa Fe, but he also lived in hotels and on the road. He was almost like a man without a home. … He might have been running away or he might have been running toward something."

(Above: My cover story on Sam Shepard for Interview’s September 1988 issue. Photograph by Herb Ritts.)

Last year I arrived in Santa Fe broken as, on some deeper level, I arrive everywhere. But a year ago my shoulder was actually broken in four places after falling down a metro staircase in Paris on my way to Orly. I refused to alter the plans of my pilgrimage’s first year, however and I just folded the crucible of my brokenness into it and had my surgery two and half weeks after my fall in Paris here in Santa Fe where I had planned to be. Brokenness. The fall. The existential existence of both in my life had to be redefined as actualities last year. But healing had to be one too. Santa Fe had been the setting for all of that. My return here has been emotional.

Santa Fesino Cormac McCarthy died here. I think he and Shepard maybe wished they could write more like each other but I also bet that when they’d hang out at the Santa Fe Institute after putting in a day of writing, Sam at his Underwood and Cormac at his Olivetti, they never talked about their own work but the work of others. Critic Harold Bloom claimed that McCarthy was “a true heir to Melville and Faulkner.” McCarthy was a bibliophile and one of his most cherished books was the edition of Moby Dick illustrated by Rockwell Kent. I owned that edition too but let it go when I began this pilgrimage by freeing myself of possessions. I do miss my books though; I miss living with them. McCarthy often would open Moby Dick to a random page - I’d like to think as well that he maybe did this with Shepard - to read a passage aloud. One of his favorites: “Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored.” Death seen as a pilgrimage. David Krakhaur, an evolutionary biologist who is the president and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute, reported doing this with McCarthy when he in 2021 wrote of their friendship for the scientific magazine Nautilus. “Cormac will look up and remark, ‘Where did that come from?’” wrote Krakhaur. “‘How did he think to say, “it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote?”’”

“The first book Cormac lent me was an early edition of Charles Montagu Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta,” wrote Krakhaur. “As far as Cormac was concerned—and I am strongly inclined to agree—there is no better writing on desert landscapes and culture. ‘Heavy is their long day of idleness, they slumber every hour and smoke tobacco, some of them I have seen toss pebbles in their hard fists, to drive the time away …’” he quoted from the book. “‘The night advanced, we lie down in our places on the earth, to sleep; but then sinners of goats trooping in from the night air, walked over our faces every hour till the morning light.”

There is no light like the Santa Fe light. The sunrise yesterday was glorious. But I also sense that there are sinners of goats in its night air. Shepard shepherded them here. I hope I can find a way to do so with an ever-needed grace myself. The secret perhaps is letting the creatures you lead find their own pace without realizing they are being led.

Truman Capote writing in In Cold Blood, alluded to this town’s slower pace. “Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.” But I don’t want drama. Santa Fe is about a different kind of performance. I don’t want to wail at its moon the way Shepard described himself doing in the letter above. I have given up the exciting quake that wailing requires for a quieter wonder.

In Shepard’s early letters to Johnny Dark he wrote about what it meant to be a man. As he got older, he wrote about what it meant to be a good one. Dark described Shepard’s move to Santa Fe in literary terms. “It was the further adventures of Huck Finn as written to his friend Tom, in which Huck goes to the American Southwest and begins to get along with himself."

In 2017, Sam Shepard wrote his first novel, The One Inside. It is a stream of consciousness narrative, a liminal tale told in that connective space between past and present, and is filtered through views of mountains and deserts as the narrator drives across the country, propelled by jazz, benzedrine, rock and roll, and a restlessness born out of exile. “He’s a loner who doesn’t want to be alone, grappling with the incubus, a rippling of nocturnal waters, the nausea of unending nights,” wrote Shepard. “There are troubling moments of prescience, as he intuits future fragmentation, stoically kicking his way through the shards. He’s just going to keep on living till he dies. Whether he paints himself in a good or bad light is not the point. The point is to lay stuff out, smooth the curling edges.”

And now I’m off to sit contemplatively on a bench. Maybe later I’ll happen upon a fat guy singing old Bob Dylan songs.

Onward …