Visions of Dramadera

New Mexico, 1998

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It was John’s idea to go. He laid it out one night over fat pours of whisky at the Canterbury, the medieval-themed dive bar that was our favorite watering hole at the time. His brother, Robert, had moved to New Mexico and was living in a compound of sorts in the northern reaches of the state, where he had become a kind of acolyte to an Apache medicine man and pottery master named Felipe. It was intriguing — wild, peyote-flavored stuff — and as luck would have it, Robert was heading south of the border with Felipe for some weeks and the place would need a caretaker… or five.

“We’ll have a free place to stay, in the middle of nowhere,” John went on, rolling the ice in his glass. “No distractions. We can hole up in the hills and write ourselves a play.”

All four of us at the table — Charlie, Jimmy, Eric, and me — -agreed to this prospect without hesitation. After all, wasn’t this the very idea of what we wanted to do? We were young theater artists full of piss and vinegar in mid-90’s Seattle who also happened to be deeply enamored with the sweeping romanticism of the American west.

We headed out on road trips any chance we could — into the forests and scrublands — where we’d camp and fish and ingest heroic doses of psychedelics. We’d run shrieking through the Douglas firs and commune with the blooming sage and howl at our gargantuan shadows blasted onto canyon walls by bonfires. We then took these experiences back to the soggy confines of the city, where we spun them into visceral, fantastic, and hysterical pieces of performance.

We considered what we were doing to be a kind of modern shamanism, so when when we were given the opportunity to go ply our trade in the home of an actual shaman, we leapt at it with abandon. A period of self-imposed exile in an adobe compound, surround by the monastic starkness of the high desert itself? Yes, please.

As for me, this was 1997, and my life was in shambles. While things were very rich creatively, I was doing an extraordinarily shitty job of holding it all together. Aside from my thriving theater group, a regular gig doing improv comedy and a willowy quasi-girlfriend, my day-to-day existence had metastacized into a hairball of chaos, irresponsibility, and deep addiction that was threatening to not only cast me onto the street, but perhaps into the ground itself. I was a stricken, wounded animal, and getting away from Seattle could only do me good, so I in particular viewed John’s proposition as a kind of deliverance.

*

The village of La Madera sits dug into the hillside of a small valley in northern New Mexico’s Carson National Forest. The area is home to the Jicarilla Apache, a band known for their blue corn and micaceous clay pottery, of which Felipe Ortega, who occupies the heart of this story, was a master. The fact that the national forest’s name honors notorious Indian killer Kit Carson serves as a kind of salt-in-the-wound for the local inhabitants, a perpetual government-funded obscenity gracing countless signs along the side of the road.

“See that,” Felipe remarked so many times, gesturing to these signs celebrating Carson’s name. “That man slaughtered my people — women, children — everyone. He is memorialized throughout this region as if he was some kind of hero, when he was in fact nothing more than a cold-blooded murderer.”

That was Felipe’s style. He didn’t dress up words in any kind of effort to soften their landing, but rather spoke without a filter, often punctuating his sentences with his personal favorite, “I don’t give a flying fuck.” Not just a fuck, but a flying one, as if his were slightly more fabulous than the run-of-the-mill zero fucks given.

He was honest to the point of bluntness, and while happy to host white folks, he never made any attempt to protect our feelings or hide the fact that we were on land that was wrested from his ancestors through thievery, chicanery, and outright genocide. He delivered these tragic facts with the matter-of-factness of someone who long ago had learned to swallow such injustice.

But I had yet to meet to Felipe when I flew into the hazy sprawl of Albuquerque on the day after Christmas, where John, Charlie, Eric, and Jimmy awaited me in Jimmy’s orange and white ’68 Chevy Suburban, an aged beast that they had driven down from the northwest couple of weeks earlier.

After stopping for lunch at the the legendary Frontier (where I got my first taste of New Mexico’s fabled green chili) we pressed down the highway past Santa Fe, through the scrappy town of Espanola and yuppified hot spring resort known as Ojo Caliente, then into those red hills until we rolled up on La Madera itself.

The official name for the compound was Owl Peak Studio, in honor of a small mountain on the other side of the narrow valley. The place was made up of a two-story adobe house built by Felipe’s grandmother, two casitas behind the main building, along with an outdoor horno oven in front, and a sweat lodge out back.

The five of us set to occupying the property. I split a room with Charlie next to the main room where Felipe did most of his pottery work. At night we slept in adjacent beds under heavy wool blankets. The earthen walls and ceilings shimmered with specks of mica, so immediate and present that I could swear they collectively hummed.

The house and countryside that surrounded it seemed to sing in a frequency too low to discern, but if you really listened, you could just make out the vibration of the metals which entered our dreams at night and ripped open the screen between this world and another — a sparkling, angular place of deep darkness and brash light, where our thoughts took on animal forms and whispered into the landscape itself.

I sometimes awoke, slickened in sweat from my feverish dreams and the swelter of the wood-burning stove, which until two or three a.m. bathed the place in a dense slide of heat. I’d slip out of bed, throw on my peacoat, scrunch into my shoes, and make my way out the back door.

There I was greeted by more dried mud — a wall, along with the round house of the sweat lodge. Scrappy patches of snow gripped the rocky ground, and the moon poured its silver honey over the little structures and hillside of La Madera, lighting up the night in a way I never knew possible. The air tasted of wood smoke and minerals and a chorus of dogs erupted into a chain of barks and bays as I rolled a cigarette, lit the end, inhaled, and absorbed the magnificence of it all. The state license plates were right: this was indeed the “Land of Enchantment,” a place of moonlight, starshine, and dark so deep that I wanted to dive in.

We would arise around seven or eight and gather outside next to the thick wooden door that led into Felipe’s medicine room. We drank syrupy coffee from clay mugs, puffed down rollies, and soaked up the heat of the morning sun that arced its light into the valley.

After breakfast we’d read or work crosswords or brainstorm ideas for the play we were there to supposedly write, though we all agreed that the soul of the play would have to come to us organically, that it needed to be coaxed out of the natural rhythm of life and shouldn’t be rushed. We often spent the afternoon hiking and exploring the myriad trails that wound into the hills away from the village and beyond. A few lonely houses popped up from the little washes and gullies, quiet, save the dogs that alerted the owners or spirits of our approach.

Aside from these inevitable dogs, the country surrounding the village was largely silent. There is something about the desert that swallows sound, and that, plus the dearth of people, lent a forlorn eeriness to these hills. While I came to cherish my time walking the paths surrounding and leading out of the village, I never ventured too far.

This had nothing to do with concerns about safety — it was more out of a tangible sense that, as wonderful as this place was, I was only afforded the status of visitor and wasn’t given leave to freely tromp about unaccompanied. I somehow understood that my presence must be unobtrusive; I was a privileged observer and should never forget it.

The landscape around La Madera was otherworldly in the sense that it really felt like I had stepped off of the continent and perhaps the planet itself — a dizzying spectrum of orange and red that took on daring, psychedelic shapes. And history lived everywhere around us — in the shadows and dust — soaked into the marrow of the rock itself. Just on the drive up the valley from you easily make out the forms of caves bored into opposite cliffs that whole families once called home.

These hills and valleys had been occupied for thousands of years, where people hunted, farmed, fought, fucked, and lived out the daily joys and dramas that any human being knows as life. These ghosts were everywhere, along with the evidence — pottery shards, arrowheads, petroglyphs, and graves — of their very physical lives.

During those first couple of weeks we entertained ourselves through the failsafe combination of music and mota — a big shaky bag of Mexi that had a light touch but was still more than enough to turn up the contrast. Our CD selection was limited to a handful of choices and seemed to alternate endlessly between Portishead’s “Dummy,” and “OK Computer,” Radiohead’s recently-released mangum opus.

Both of these recordings by somewhat mopey English bands only served to enhance the intoxicating weirdness of the landscape, especially when we left the compound and hit the road in Jimmy’s creaking and groaning old Suburban. The nearby hills and far away mesas, combined with scrubland and vast views did their best to flavor the music, and vica versa.

I remember listening to the operatic flashes and drones of “Paranoid Android” while we rolled through the town of Los Alamos, which is where they developed the atomic bomb. Our spines crawled as we took in this forbidden place of razor-wire enclosed government labs juxtaposed with the white picket fence mundaneness of middle American suburbia, all set to the soundtrack of Thom York’s ethereal wail.

At night we’d wind down with cans of Tecate and sometimes listen to Art Bell’s “Coast-to-Coast Live” radio show, where we’d catch up on the latest news on UFOs, sasquatch, ancient aliens, and government conspiracies (this was before the internet and the History Channel ruined such mysteries).

And while Owl Peak Studio did boast a single, aging desktop computer, it was perpetually covered in pottery dust and linked to primitive, dial-up internet that moved at the speed of wood, which seemed appropriate, given that “La Madera” translates to “the wood” in English. So aside from a couple of interminable e-mail checkings a week, our existence in this Apache Indian village was positively non-digital.

*

Felipe and Robert arrived from Mexico a few days earlier than expected. One afternoon the blue minivan rolled up and there he was, Felipe Ortega, in human form.

“The bitch is back!” he proclaimed, strolling through the door, as Robert carried some bags behind him. “Thanks for not burning down the place while we were gone.”

Robert introduced us one by one as we gathered next to massive wooden dining room table.

“Welcome do Dramadera,” Felipe proclaimed. “There’s certainly plenty to go around… drama, that is.”

Like most Apache, Felipe wasn’t a tall man. He had creamy brown skin and wore large glasses, which only served to amplify his mischievous round eyes. His natural strength and intelligence glowed through his gaze, so much so that he seemed to be able size up and understand a situation immediately and innately.

There was a power at work inside of him, one that couldn’t be denied. His legs were bowed and somewhat squat and his arms seemed to hang just a bit lower than usual; his fingers were long, agile, and amazingly delicate. And aside from his shoulder-length hair (which he usually kept tied back into a ponytail, the man seemed to lack a single strand anywhere else on his body.

While not at all overweight, Felipe at the time sported a wonderful little pot belly that bespoke of his love affair with food, though I would wager he was a greater cook than eater, as his talents in the kitchen were legendary and real. Over the next few weeks I would become acquainted with these powers firsthand, through his blue corn tamales, amazing salads, handmade tortillas, rice, beans, roasted chicken, and handmade bread baked in the outdoor woodfire horno just feet from the kitchen door.

Like the horno, all the cooking indoors was done without the benefit of gas or electricity, save a few small appliances. Felipe exclusively worked his magic with wood and fire. He hated shortcuts, and that included the use of modern stoves and ovens. It should come as no surprise that this helped to propel his cooking into next-level greatness.

The days following Felipe’s return were filled with great feeds and high living. Robert had brought some goodies up from Mexico, including Alitas cigarettes, a cheap brand rolled in rice paper. The slightly sweet taste of the rice paper intermingled nicely with the harsh burn of the filterless smoke and we enjoyed these as a novelty and break from our usual hand rollies.

We washed the food down with cold Tecates and after-dinner glasses of Cremade Almendrado, a surprisingly tasty almond-flavored liqueur that he had also included in his packet of consumable souvenirs. The crown jewel in Robert’s delivery, however, was a huge, gallon-sized jug of mezcal — Mexico’s aguaveliquor — complete with actual worm at the bottom that would go to whoever was man enough to finish the bottle.

Felipe’s story was a fascinating one, especially to hear him tell it, which he loved to do, most often while cooking or working on his pottery. He was an amazing multi-tasker, which he said came naturally to him as a gay man. “You straight boys can only do one thing at a time. It’s amazing you’ve evolved at all.”

He talked about becoming a medicine man and a healer, how it was his calling. He said knew this from a very early age and how it also was very much tied to his sexuality. “In our culture, healers and shaman are viewed as a whole different gender altogether.” He stated this as if it were a self-evident truth.

Like many Native Americans, Felipe kept these traditional beliefs while also counting himself a devout Catholic. He frequently referenced and praised the Virgin Mary, while also mentioning that he was an active Penitente, the Catholic order known for acts of self-flagellation. Despite this, he practiced the very pagan art of ancient Apache healing right out of the house.

“But my real dream was to become a Catholic priest,” he said one night as we cleaned up after dinner. I nearly choked on my Tecate.

“Really?” I asked.

“Really.” he replied. “And I almost got there.”

He was in his ninth year of seminary and just months away taking his vows. But he had a rebellious streak that had long ruffled the feathers his superiors.

“I’ve never done well with authority,” he said. “I openly challenged the seminary’s rector, which probably wasn’t the wisest thing to do. He had it in for me and that was that.”

Felipe claimed that not only was there some sex going on between men training for the priesthood, but that it was rife.

“Why do you think they call it the semen-ary?” he quipped. “Everyone one was fucking everyone else! Only when I got called in and questioned about it, I didn’t deny it. What was I going to do, lie? I’d be lying about who I was, which I wasn’t willing to do. Besides, for them, it was never about me being gay. If they were going to get rid of people for that, they’d have to fire ninety percent of the priesthood, honey.”

*

It was Jimmy’s last day in La Madera, as well as his birthday. He had to fly back to Seattle in the morning from Albuquerque with the agreement that we’d drive his rig back up in mid-February. It was also his birthday. We decided to celebrate by climbing Owl Peak.

The actual ascent only took about an hour and some change, though it was a punishing, vertical climb over loose earth and rock beneath the constant cover of pines. There we no real trails, so we just had to bushwack it straight up. It was invigorating to scramble up this little mountain that had been staring us down from the otherside of the valley, and to be fair, we were getting a bit stir-crazy back in the compound.

At one point, as I took the lead position near the summit, I paused for a moment to catch my breath and enjoy the view at a small rock outcropping that afforded a vista of the valley below. Suddenly and silently, an enormous golden eagle rose up on a thermal draft just feet away.

The air shot from my lungs as, for a fraction of a second, I stared eye-to-eye with this raptor, a flexing mass of sinew, beak, and talon, cloaked in a flush of blood brown feathers. For that moment I felt the breadth of this creature’s power and undissolved beauty. My eyes followed in teary wonder as it soared higher and further until its form dissolved into the blur of pines, rock, and sky behind.

As my four friends approached, breathless in their own right, I pointed to the sky and attempted to cough out inadequate words. I described the scene, but never managed to convey the communion that I just had with that creature. John tried to reassure by saying I had just experienced some “powerful medicine,” and I couldn’t disagree.

Soon after we were on the top of the mountain taking in the valley below, with its stretches of wheat and corn fields flushing alongside the gurgling strand of river. Birthday mission completed, we cruised back down at careless speeds, anxious to make it back to the compound and feast on sandwiches made from Felipe’s insanely good bread.

We were nearly to the base when I saw Jimmy go down. He yowled in pain and I was soon crouching down at his side, along with Charlie. He held his knee, which had been ripped open with a several inch gash by the sharp end of a broken tree branch.

“Shoulda paid attention to that eagle,” Jimmy said through a grimace. “Looks like he was trying to tell us something.”

*

Felipe referred to La Madera as “Dramadera” to reflect that fact that life in the hamlet — especially as it revolved around his place — was a never-ending soap opera of intrigue, crisis, and romance, performed by an ever-shifting cast of characters.

These were characters in that they were people playing their parts in a continually unwinding real-time narrative, and “characters’ because many of them were larger-than-life, people who seemed to have stepped out of a book or a movie, adding color to the already chromatic surroundings. Like Alaska, Montana, Nevada, and other parts of the ruggest west, northern New Mexico is a place where people often go to reinvent themselves, and many of these folks passed through Owl Creek Studio.

Art was a whisky-swilling, middle-aged white dude with a ponytail who lived in an RV down by the “reever,” as he pronounced it, never failing to employ the long e of a Mexican accent. Whether this was an attempt to emulate or mock the locals was anyone’s guess, though I suspect it was a bit of both. Hell, Art was usually so jacked on whisky that he probably didn’t even know. His Yosemite Sam voice was pure gravel — a grating, sonic imposition that put on a profanity-laced performance for whomever happened to be in earshot.

Art was a recent arrival in La Madera. He was in the middle of building his own adobe house next to his RV down by the “reever” and had also learned the basics of native pottery. He made knockoffs that he took down to Santa Fe in order to fleece moneyed New Agers and tourists who didn’t know any better.

He loudly announced this without a trace of shame. He was brazen and loud, boasting about his fraudulent pottery in the face of an actual Indian master in the form of Felipe. Why Felipe put up with it was a mystery to me. It would seem that a white con artist in the form of Art the gasbag would be an affront to Felipe’s very existence, but somehow Felipe tolerated Art’s daily visits to the studio.

Perhaps he found him entertaining, or, more likely, Felipe exercised the widest of policies of inclusion at Owl Peak and let Art blow his cacophonous horn if for no other reason than that he was harming no one (locally, at least) and perhaps added a bit of drama to “Dramadera” that Felipe, in a sense, craved. Whatever the case, Felipe’s animate eyes would usually roll back deep into his skull as soon as Art exited the premises.

Another oddball who regularly hung around the place was a Don Singh, a soft-spoken, somewhat secretive guy who was the very opposite of Art’s hot bluster. As his last name suggested, Don was a practicing Sikh, though he originally hailed from Cleveland, Ohio, rather than Rajastan. New Mexico is kind of a hotbed in the US for Sikhism, with large ashrams (mostly populated by American converts) in Albuquerque and Espanola, which was just down the road, really.

Don was tall and rangy and must have been pushing sixty at the time. He spoke little of his previous life — other than he was unhappy with the “rat race of it all” — and was now very much caught up in the magic of the land. He sported a long, wispy white guru beard and lived on a property tucked up into the hills behind the village. He described the place as a kind of paradise, an oasis of sorts that offered the combination of beauty and isolation that he’d long been seeking. When pressed on its exact location, however, he always grew cagey.

“It’s truly a wonderful place,” he’d say, as his eyes shone. “I would love to invite you around, but I’m afraid I’m a guest myself and the owner values his… privacy.”

My favorite regular guest was a guy named Lonnie. Like Felipe, he was a native, though he hailed from a pueblo about an hour away. Lonnie also was an accomplished potter who sold his works in galleries in North America and Europe. Business was good for Lonnie, as evidenced by his fine clothes and sleek black BMW that he drove along those rough, treacherous roads.

Not only was Lonnie a master Indian potter, but he was also openly gay, though seemingly a much more fragile creature than Felipe, who radiated a deep strength. Lonnie was willowy and fey, with a sly, gentle humor. He was curious about our lives and motivation: Why would these young white guys want to come hang out in with Indians in New Mexico? Were we just tourists, or did we want to learn something deeper?

One night we went out for dinner in Espanola, a nice Mexican place with nice wine and good bistec, Lonnie offered to drive me back to the compound while everyone else rode rode with Felipe in the van. During the drive along those dark roads he opened up to me:

“You know, I always hated white people,” he confessed.

“I don’t blame you,” I said.

“I’ve hated whites my whole life,” he continued. “… until I met you guys. I don’t know… maybe you aren’t all bad. “

Felipe confirmed this a few days later.

“He never had any time for whites before. And I’ve known him for years. Who knows?”

“What about you?” I asked. “How can you welcome us into your home? How can you feed us? After everything — the stealing, the killing, the history — how can you not hate all of us?”

Felipe took a breath, and then spoke.

“I could hate all of you,” he said slowly. “I could hate all of you with good reason, but it would be overwhelming. It would consume every part of me. This doesn’t mean I will ever forget what has been done. I won’t and I can’t. But to let this horror take control of my life would just be too much. It would devour me.”

Felipe’s older brother and mother would often stop by and chat with Felipe, along with cousins, aunts, and uncles. These family members never seemed overly-curious about this group of scruffy young white dudes occupying the compound; I suppose they were just used to it.

This was the case with most of the locals who came around. Some of them would just stop by to chat, usually in slow, lilting Spanish with bits of English sprinkled in, while others would come for medicine sessions. Felipe would then close the door to his medicine room and tell us to make ourselves scarce, which was always a good cue to go take a stroll or a hike.

One night Felipe invited me to come take a session. He saw my current state, how I was ripped up inside, and offered some very basic healing. I accepted, though I wasn’t really sure what this would entail. I’d never participated in any kind of alternative medicine at this point and went in to that room on trust.

I have to admit that a small part of me was apprehensive, that a homophobic whisper told me that this was just an excuse for an older gay guy to put his hands on me. And then I remembered where I was and what I’d seen, that this guy was legit, and the only way to experience this for real was to give myself over.

It’s been many years, so the edges of the memory have bled into a blur, but I do recall a bearskin, antlers, woodfire, and sage smoke blown over my body. I remember Felipe singing in Apache, the mysterious words washing over my skin and then soaking deeper. And Felipe did lay hands on me, in the gentlest way, when he read my back.

He held the belief that we keep all of our life experiences stored in our spines, and that these can be drawn out and deciphered, in sense. With those impossibly delicate fingers, he slowly made his way up, vertebrae by vertebrae, from my birth to up until my twenty-eighth year, which I had just begun. He described memories experiences specific to actual years of my life in vivid detail, including the death of my great-grandmother when I thirteen. I walked out of that chamber relieved, shaken, and slightly more whole. I can only imagine what he would read today.

*

One morning, Felipe took us to see the “Deer Dance” at a neighboring pueblo. Young men donned antlered deer masks, full pelts, and employed long sticks as front legs, prancing and bucking to the beat of the drums. They also held bags of venison and at one point, the young women of the pueblo chased down these evasive “deer” in order to snatch the meat. This dance was both a celebration of the deer as a food source and fertility/mating rite.

Felipe had secured permission for us to be there, which was no small privilege on our part: we were the only white faces looking on. While not exactly warmly embraced by the the residents of the pueblo, our presence was tolerated, which was more than enough as far as we were concerned. Felipe acted as a kind of human passport, allowing us access and experiences that would otherwise be closed off to us.

The best example of this was the day we headed out to Bandelier National Monument, which is home to countless cliff dwellings and other structures dating back over 800 years. Felipe bragged how the Jicarilla Apache would sneak over and steal the horses from the original settlers of this pueblo (His people’s legendary raiding and thieving prowess was a point-of-pride that he repeatedly brought during my stay in La Madera.).

We were assigned a big, white, Sam Eliot-looking cowboy dude as a tour guide, who laid out the history of this Indian settlement to us and the handful of other folks in the group in a booming western twang. Felipe was having none of it, rolling his eyes and shaking his head at the cowboy’s overcooked delivery. It was all just too much for him to take, so at one point made a sudden detour and waved for us to follow. He jumped off the sanctioned trail with the four of us at his heels. The cowboy stopped mid-sentence as we slipped away among the rocks, but was powerless to stop us. After all, we were with the Indian.

We got a personal, off-trail tour of Bandelier that day from the point-of-view of someone very much connected with the land and its history. Felipe was in full trickster mode, breaking scores of rules and perhaps even federal laws, and following him as he scurried through this ancient, fantastic place was an exhilarating experience, an exercise in pure freedom.

At one point we came upon a kiva — a ceremonial chamber carved out from the rock underground. Felipe stayed up top while the five of us descended the wooden ladder into the sacred space. John produced a clay pipe, sparked it up, and passed it around; each of us inhaled the sweet smoke and then exhaled in reverential silence. Felipe gave us a knowing nod as we emerged from this very much off-limits place, as if to say, Isn’t it fun to be naughty sometimes?

My memories from those weeks in La Madera come back to me in a flurry of flashes, a dizzying cloud of colors and snapshots and vignettes that play out in my mind two decades down the road: the taste of sweat and dirt as I labored digging clay from the forest floor in one of Felipe’s secret spots; the soft envelopment of the green tea pool at the hot spring in Ojo Caliente; the ribbonous tumble of the Rio Grande as I peered down from the rim of the gorge; the crunch of my boot over brittle patches of snow; the sweet, buttery richness of a blue corn tamale; the ever present scent of sage, piñón, and woodsmoke; the old mission in Chimayo; Charlie gulping down those final swallows of mescal and chewing the worm as John looked on in disbelief and incandescent anger; the terraced Jimenez Hot Springs and the sylphic hippy girls who bathed naked by candlelight; the taste of hand-rolled tobacco, Tecate, and ice cold water; the impossible wash of moonlight and the echoes of barking dogs and red, red everywhere, and the sweet thump of the drum and guttural sounds of Felipe singing those ancient prayers as we groaned and writhed in the beautiful agony of the sweat lodge.

The day before we left La Madera I was riding alone with Felipe. We had gone into Espanola to pick up a few things for our final dinner and were on our way back to La Madera, when he made a pit stop at a very ordinary thrift shop at the side of side of the road.

“Stay here. I won’t be but a minute.”

He emerged moments later and slipped back into the car.

“Here,” he said. “I want you to have this.”

He handed me a blanket — a heavy, thick blanket of obvious quality. Like Felipe’s pottery, it was simple and practical in its construction: brown and grey with the geometric diamond pattern found throughout the Southwest.

“This is a good one,” he said. “I paid a hundred bucks for it, so don’t lose it. Take it with you and most importantly, use it. You now have a small piece of La Madera to take care of you wherever you go. And please, don’t forget about me.”

Though touched at the time, it wasn’t until some years later that I learned the full symbolic significance of Felipe’s gesture: In much of Native American culture, there is no greater honor one can bestow than giving you a blanket.

*

We left La Madera and piloted Jimmy’s Suburban all the way back to Seattle, getting caught in a blizzard in northern Utah on the way. True to our intentions, we took our experiences that winter and forged them into a play (featuring dramatized versions of Art and Don), which was met with a general scratch of the head by the critics and a shrug from our audience.

Sure, it wasn’t our most successful work, but we were still quite proud of it if for no other reason than because we owned it, entirely. It’s almost as if we wrote and produced the thing for our own benefit, that this was the only way to digest and metabolize the ineffable experience of our time in La Madera. Sometimes art is an exercise of exorcism by the artists themselves; at least that’s what we tell ourselves.

Felipe’s blanket warmed me for years after that. I can’t say that my visit to La Madera turned my life around, but it at least planted the seeds of improvement and redemption. Granted, it took a while, but I’d like to think that his blanket acted as a talisman of sorts. The darkness I plunged into during those years of my life was real and complete and the fact that I managed to emerge alive and relatively unscathed was never assured. Things could have easily gone the other way, and some days I think that the blanket is the one thing that kept me whole. After all, it was my only constant: it enveloped me nightly. I eventually left it behind in Los Angeles, where it was destroyed in a house fire, perhaps because I didn’t need it anymore.

I never did forget Felipe, and was gutted to learn that he recently died from the cancer that had gripped him for the past few years. He was the third person in my life that I lost in the span of some three months, and in some ways the most significant, given the deep effect he had on me during the short time I spent with him. It’s been nearly twenty years since I’ve seen either La Madera or Felipe, and while I struggled to breathe life back into some of these old memories, his spirit burned so bright and clear that I heard his voice and felt his presence every time I sat down to write this piece.

Still, I miss him more now that he’s gone, even if he doesn’t give a flying fuck.