The Man on the Street in Taos

By Tom deMers

When death, the big wind, blows out our birthday candles, only the wish remains, and only the longing that deepens our wisdom and compassion will be of much use.

— Stephen Levine

I was inching along in traffic half a mile from the main intersection in Taos, New Mexico. Mid-afternoon, late July, less hot than it might be. I could turn right and bypass the mess, but I wanted to go left at the intersection and head out of town. Family vans, passenger cars, trucks, all of us held hostage by the blinking eye.

On the street to my right a figure appeared, a thin, wild-eyed man a few cars ahead; black hair with wisps sprouting loose from his ponytail. His clothes looked slept in. He ran up to cars and darted between them but did not cross the street. He seemed like a messenger on a desperate errand, sputtering, unable to deliver his message. The boys in the car in front of me yelled at him in Spanish. They sounded like snarling dogs. He retreated, then came toward me. Did he want money? His face was distorted, his voice a wail, and his scarecrow legs dangled from shorts so short they were obscene. I wanted to hand him a towel, then power up the window. Instead I dug for my wallet, but he was quickly on to the next car. I watched the couple behind me staring straight ahead.

The drive home up I-25 was in the dark, much of it in a downpour. I followed a semi that held to 80 miles per hour like old time religion. I imagined it was a ghost truck, no one in the cab, just the glowing lights of the dash, the wipers beating for no one at all. Perhaps the man in the street was at the wheel. What was he trying so hard to tell us? He reminded me of another Taos trip a few years back and a convergence of articles in the local paper. They were about death.

Story number one: a small bit about a woman’s body pulled out of the Rio Grande. The police thought she was 47. They took a box into custody they found on the bridge over the river. The police think she used it to climb over the railing. The gorge bridge is 684 feet above the river. Her Michigan relatives reported no contact with her for years. They thought she was living out of her car. The police did not think so. They had her car, no sign of anyone living in it, just the odor of depression and cigarettes.

Story number two: a woman in Texas on trial for killing her five kids. Her name is Andrea. The prosecution claims she knew right from wrong when she took them one by one from the breakfast table and drowned them in the bathtub. The defense claims she was psychotic as a result of severe post-partum depression. Her stated reason for the crime: her kids had turned out badly. She was drowning the kittens.

Background: her husband was known to be a fundamentalist Christian who took her complaints about depression as whining. The Bible tells us that childbirth suffering is Eve’s curse for having eaten the fruit, the lot of womankind for heeding Satan.

Story number three: took place while I was in Taos, reported the next morning. A Boulder boy was in Estes Park when his girlfriend and two of her friends came to visit. The girlfriend had chosen that night to end their relationship. The boy took a gun and shot two of the girls, then put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. The story said the girls would recover. I learned later that the dead boy was the son of my daughter’s English teacher.

Story number four is waiting to happen. Maybe American aid workers shot to death by the Taliban. Or the next black man in America gunned down by police because he took a comb out of his pocket.

Death is a given, part of the contract we all sign to get here. But the manner of death is not a given, and that’s what is troubling, the needless, defeated, and violent deaths. Trumpeted by the media, they are all around us, an electronic in-your-face reminder of our violent heritage.  We are the lords of destruction, our soldiers a traveling priesthood enforcing the gospel of freedom Texas-style. Is it so odd that death should appear dancing on a Taos street, an early visitation from El Dia de los Muertos?

Like that fall celebration there is something fanciful about our dance with death. No invading troops march through our streets. No body counts from Boston or schoolchildren killed by stray bombs. With few casualties relative to other wars and business pretty much as usual, most Americans encounter death as a digital experience in video games, the news and films. Sitting in the living room finishing your popcorn, a pleasing transformation takes place: death loses its sting. Digital death propagates a sense of immortality, and we are grateful for that, for the happy guy using Viagra, for the chance to live forever with a whiter, brighter smile. Living forever is the new American Dream.

In his 1974 Pulitzer winning book, “The Denial of Death,” Ernest Becker argues convincingly that culture and civilization as we know it spring from an obsessive need to avoid the finality of death. Thus, by cloning ourselves on TV and in films, by creating our own narrative, we’ve created our most ardent desire: to nullify death and avoid personal extinction. We’ve become the gods we once worshipped.

Why can’t I see that as a good thing? It’s not true, of course, but there’s something else, some Ken and Barbie hollowness to a life lived out of touch with the flesh and blood that we are, some violation of our contract. Losing death, we lose the passion and urgency that death inspires. Without heart attacks, we lose our hearts.

Death, it turns out, is the best reason for living.

The man in the street reminds us of that. “Get real!” he cries. His skimpy clothing hangs like rags. His eyes beg for acceptance. We want to look away. When we do, it’s we who disappear. •

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