When Black Friday Comes

Benson, Arizona

On Friday, I'll turn 70. I've never felt better and I'm down 53 pounds and packing my old wardrobe for donation to the homeless center in Sarasota.

When Black Friday comes
I'll stand down by the door
And catch the grey men when they
Dive from the fourteenth floor
When Black Friday comes
I'll collect everything I'm owed
And before my friends find out
I'll be on the road
-Steely Dan

We drove though the desert for days to get back to Benson and pick up the RV. It has a new windshield and the damaged rear end is bright and shiny. It was a good vacation with the typical suitcases and motels....

On my birthday I plan to have some "top shelf" margaritas, Brie with pecans and apples  and Chateaubriand  for two at the Double Eagle in Messilla, New Mexico. It's my favorite restaurant in the world. Billy the Kid ate there. At least he was tried there and sentenced to hang in Lincoln County for killing Sheriff Brady....where he made the escape that sealed his fame...

In the grocery store today i was looking (not buying) in the ice cream row when a bearded fat man with a Navy Seal baseball hat barked at me to move to one side of the isle or the other.

I told him what to do to himself and he pointed to his hat and yelled that he had spent eight years saving my ass. I told him that at least he had the hat, and that I was flying missions in Viet Nam when he was still crapping in his diapers.

He told me to kiss his ass and I replied that it looked way too much like his face....you can sense at this point that we are regressing to kindergarten taunts....

He was behind me in checkout and so I waited just outside for him to come out for about ten minutes. He had 50 pounds and 30 years on me, but my switchblade is sharp. He never came out until after I left. What a poseur.

Billy was here

Messilla, New Mexico

Mrs. Phred and I played our first tennis in four months yesterday. My right wrist has been hurting all that time. I finally gave up waiting for it to heal and just used the wrist brace the ortho doctor gave me. I don't have a backhand because I'm ambidextrous and just switch hands when the ball is on my left, so some of my best shots are on that side now.

From the Messilla blog:

Billy was captured December 23, 1880.

On March 28, 1881, he was transported to Rincon by train and from there to Mesilla by wagon for trial for the murders of Andrew “Buckshot” Roberts and Sheriff William Brady. The indictment for killing Roberts was a federal indictment. The indictment for killing Brady was a territorial indictment. The territorial district court handled both jurisdictions, with the federal cases tried first.

His trial for killing “Buckshot” Roberts began on March 30, 1881. The case against him in this trial was thrown-out on the grounds that the killing took place on private land, not public land, and the federal government thus had no standing to prosecute.

The trial for the killing of Sheriff Brady began April 8. The judge presiding, Judge Bristol, dismissed Billy’s defense attorney from the Roberts trial, probably because of the change in jurisdiction, and appointed John D. Bail and Albert Fountain to represent him.

On April 13. the jury brought in its verdict: guilty. The judge then sentenced Billy to death by hanging, to be carried out on May 13, 1881 in Lincoln, New Mexico.


Three days later he was taken to Lincoln. It was from the Lincoln courthouse that Billy escaped on April 28, killing two deputies.

We went into Mesilla in the afternoon for lunch. Mesilla was a stop on the Butterfield stage line and  the Pony Express.

The building below is the courthouse where Billy was tried. It's a gift shop now. The wind was gusting to 60 MPH and our food kept blowing off the table.

Mesilla was the territorial capital of the Arizona and New Mexico. A lot of the old adobe buildings are still here.The sandstorm closed a number of highways in New Mexico because of zero visibility.
 

Our RV is full of very fine grit.

We have a reservation at the the Double Eagle tonight at 7PM for their award winning margaritas and steaks. Maybe more tennis and a movie.

Billy the Kid Hair Salon

Las Cruces, New Mexico – 9 April, 2006

We spend three days in Las Cruces. It is at an altitude of 4,000 feet and is near the Mexican border. The Rio Grande River is just south of town and the rugged Organ Mountains are visible to the north. Las Cruces has a population of 75,000 and housing prices seem very reasonable. Rainfall averages eight inches a year. There are two city parks with municipal tennis courts

I take Mrs Phred to the Billy the Kid Hair Salon for maintenance. We also run the cycle and RV though a car wash to get rid of accumulated road dust, do laundry and check tyre pressures and fluids. The motorcycle front tyre is showing sidewall cracks from age. We both like the feel of this place and the people we meet here.

The Howling Coyote Open Mic provides a forum for poets and musicians to perform on Friday night. The Fine Art Museum has a fine display of amateur astronomy photography. We go to the town mall weekly craft bazaar and buy used paperbacks and a jar of mesquite honey.


The small town of Mesilla a few miles away has an historic movie theatre called The Fountain. The theatre walls are covered with large murals. The building has large cracks and you can see that straw was used to strengthen the mortar in the walls.


Billy the Kid was sentenced to death here in Mesilla. We see a very good but disturbing French movie with subtitles called 'Cache' (the hidden) and drink some local wine called 'Plum Loco'. There is a Catholic church in the Mesilla town square. It has a large memorial for fallen servicemen and those who also served. All the names on the monument are Hispanic. A policeman drives slowly past the church as we read the names and makes the sign of the cross in his cruiser.

Ghost Whispers

Lincoln, New Mexico

A trip to Wal-Mart for gloves and then another bike ride from Ruidoso — seventy miles to the Lincoln County Courthouse. The very small town of Lincoln is where Billy the Kid killed two guards and escaped. Ghosts whisper my fate in my ear as I walk, alone and slowly, up the same stairs as Billy to the room where he was shackled to the floor, awaiting the hangman. I look for bloodstains at the top of the stairs. Large legends for such a tiny place. It's almost unchanged since the 1880s.

This is not the dry, dusty place that one might imagine. It's rolling grassland with mountains and hardwoods that turn brilliant yellow at this time of year. The Kid was perhaps innocent, but was sucked into a feud between two rival shopkeepers. Both stores are still here like time stood still. An Irish immigrant and an English newcomer both wanted to sell cattle and other goods to the soldiers at the nearby Fort Stanton. The fort was established to control the Mescalero Apaches and make the area safe for settlement. Billy worked as a cowboy for the dead Englishman and became embroiled in the cycle of violence. The two large competing stores are still the main buildings in Lincoln, which seems to have a population of about fifty with no services other than the stores that have been made into museums.

I discuss Pat Garrett's book with the museum curator. She says it sucks and recommends Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life.

Near the closed fort, five miles from Lincoln, we find a lonely fenced graveyard with a large anchor. It has graves and crosses for thousands of Merchant Mariners. A sign says 'No metal detecting'.

We will be traveling though the Mescalero Apache Indian reservation on the way to the White Sands National monument, Las Cruces, Truth-or-Consequences, Elephant Butte Lake State park, Gila Cliff Dwellers National Monument and a ghost town named Mogollon. Then into Arizona.

Ruidoso: Billy was Here

Ruidoso, New Mexico

The landscape has changed in seventy miles from high desert to mountainous forest.


Ruidoso is a ski resort that is showing the typical sprawl signs of being too nice a place to live. It has large casinos and a Billy the Kid quarter-horse racing track. No cellular service for the laptop modem for the first time.

We've been paying about $15 a night for state park campgrounds. This is our first time in a private RV campground and the cost is double that. There are a few more amenities like a swimming pool (empty for the season) and cable TV (two channels, one of them in Spanish).

We're getting nine miles per gallon for the RV and 60 miles per gallon on the motorcycle. So far, we've put 2,170 miles on the RV and 150 on the Yamaha 250. We decide to ditch the helmets next time. I rebuild the motorcycle trailer so that we can take the motorbike on and off without removing the bicycles each time.



We ride the Yamaha to the municipal tennis courts and I lose again (six-love both sets). Later, a forty-mile ride up a long bumpy fire trail to a fire tower called Moryeau Lookout, at the 9,600-foot summit. The stone tower was built during the Great Depression by the Civilian Conservation Corps, whose works tend to endure. As we reach the top of the tower, my companion's cell phone gains service and rings. We can see two hundred miles in every direction. The ride back down is in gathering darkness and my hands are very cold. My companion told me to bring my gloves. Maybe I should listen to her more often.

New Mexico is a no-helmet state. I'd feel very guilty if anything happened to my companion because of an omitted safety measure. I insist on helmets and she grumbles about hers continuously for the first two miles while clinging to my back.

We're getting good pictures, but my laptop is not letting me upload them to my website. I'll try using my alternate picture site later this week.