Good Morning

During Phase 3, me, RJ, Wolfy, Rocky, and Big John all decided to go get pierced at the same time. It may have been some kind of room-mate bonding trip, but mainly I wanted some kind of physical demarcation of all the changes I had undergone in the last few months (aside from the beard, long hair, and general buffness - oh how I miss thee, buffness). This is also the time I came incredibly close to getting a penis piercing.

RJ, Wolfy, and John were all gung ho on getting some metal shoved through their man rods, while Rock remained firmly on the side that that was a terrible idea. I don't even pretend like I was thinking clearly those days and really debated joining the rest of them - mainly because it was something I would never, ever, ever do. Then I wouldn't tell ANYONE at home for about three months until I'd bust it out randomly at a party to the utter shock of everyone.

Then I realized I was seriously considering PIERCING MY PENIS in preparation for a twenty second joke over three months away that involved flashing a lot of people. So I wisely decided to go with an eyebrow piercing instead, which I still miss (along with my glorious flowing locks).

Wolfy, John, and RJ all did go the whole way, though.
Now when you get a piercing down there, you're told to have absolutely no sex for about three months - and then for a long time, a condom is a must.

So of course three days later RJ had unprotected sex with a sixteen year old girl he could barely stand.
It sounded a lot like this -

*girlish moan*
Agh!
*moan*
Agh!
*moan*
Agh!

Agony. It sounded like rhythmic agony.

The next morning I was woken up at about 7 in the morning to the question "Hey, Schlaffer, does this look infected?"
Unthinking, I turned around. There greeting me was a fully infected pierced penis not six inches from my face.
I screamed like the smallest girl you could possibly imagine.
My eyes still burn.

Big John held out a few more days, but then he too fell to the incredible temptation of infection via intercourse. Wolfy followed the directions perfectly, but ended up getting rid of his cause having a metal ring in his urethra ended up being a lot less cool than he expected (I remain unclear as to exactly what he expected). So I think I made the right choice.

Pulling down my pants at that party still would've been a hell of a moment, though.

Just Another Tuesday Night

Before the Ranch became a program, it had been both an orphanage and a genuine hippie commune. The actual campus was several acres of land and had tons of stuff on it - both newly built by the students and remnants from the past. There was a long dirt road down the side of a mountain that led you to the office area, made of stucco and adobe. Up the hill was the Phase 1 House - a large wooden cabin where your stay was initiated. Behind the house was the firepit, the greenhouse, and the garden - all surrounded by woods. There were two paths down to the barn - one took you past the Phase 2 cabins and what would eventually become a sort of rec room after I was gone. The other went past the new pig barn and the outdoor bathroom. There were abandoned buildings with an abandoned firetruck, a low ropes course and a high ropes course with a zipline (that I never went on), a weight room, and tons of open fields, trees, and space.

Two staff members lived full time on the Ranch. Vince actually had a house on the far end of the property where he and his whole family lived - his wife, two daughters, his niece Lupe, and his dog Mick. Vince grew up on the Ranch back when it was an orphanage that was actually owned and run by his family. At some point they lost the land after his father's murder, but he was back living on the property as the Ranch's official jack-of-all-trades. He always hoped one day he'd have the opportunity to buy the land back and while I doubt that will ever happen, I hope it does. The guys would think about trying to hit on Lupe, who was our age, but Mick was a good deterrent - a vicious rottweiler who loved Vince and his family, and was chained up every night in front of Vince's house. Walking alone at night one of the biggest fears was whether Mick was on the loose.

Keith lived in a cabin across the 'creek' from Phase 2. he was a large, large man with a thick white beard and a heavy lisp that made a really odd combination. He was a former Hell's Angel, misogynistic and unpleasant with a decent heart and few social skills. Sometime after I left he almost married one of the native girls but it fell through, which is too bad, but not altogether unsurprising. His way with women was never something to look up to.

So while Vince and Keith were both on the Ranch at night, and only a phone call away, they weren't on duty 24/7. But Phase 1 needed to monitored around the clock with a strict ten pm lights out curfew and a group of guys who made fucking up into an art form. A security company was contracted to watch Phase 1, and different guards would come in for this particular graveyard shift.

So no offense intended to my friends who work in security, but I've noticed after both this and working at the J that guard companies are almost always something of a mixed bag. You get a few really good, quality, responsible people who usually get transferred or promoted to better jobs and assignments very soon, or you're stuck with the dregs. It almost seems better to hire one person you can really trust privately to do the job, rather than deal with some of the useless rabble that can make up the guard service night roster.

One of the guards was named TJ, and he quickly became known as the 'nice' guard. It started with him just letting the guys out to get ice cream late at night, or looking the other way during board game nights. Occasionally he would let people stay up and watch a movie. Then he started dealing pot to some of the kids.

But it all really came to a head the night his 17 year old coked up wife showed up at about 2am with their baby.

She came to get in a fight. I'm not sure about what, but if you're 17, on smack, already a mother, and married to the dead end security guard selling pot to kids in rehab you probably don't need any extra reasons to fly off the handle. Holding the baby, lips white, she starts screaming at this guy about what a shitty husband he is, shitty father. She probably wasn't wrong. But all the commotion brings out the Phase 1 kids to see what the hell is going on, and my guess is they start to rag on her.

So she turns her attention to them. She starts screaming that they're all fuck ups with no future (pot? kettle - line one. turns out you may be black) and that their parents don't love them or they never would have sent them here. All the while the guys are cracking up and TJ is trying to calm her down. She starts throwing pool balls at them as hard as she can (and they hurt).

Then she starts to hit them with her baby.

No, seriously, I swear to god I wish I was kidding - she tried to hit them with her baby.

So Ranch Kids have seen a lot of screwed up shit but this is too much for them and they grab the baby to try and get it out of harm's way. It's bad when the drug addicts are saying, 'no this has gone too far.'
TJ says "stop, stop, you're going to hurt the baby."
And she turns to him and says "What do you care, it's not even yours."

That's when he either decked her, or pushed her off the hood of a car, I can never remember.

Obviously TJ was fired, and soon they'd get rid of the whole security team in favor of one private employee. I seriously hope that child was taken out of that situation and given some kind of chance at a healthy normal life, but I'll never know for sure. As for the Ranch - if anyone else but me was really phased by this, it didn't show, because the longest lasting effect of the night was that for a few weeks the guys would use her as an excuse for any beer bottles the staff found near Phase 1. It was open season for a little while.

Because the most fucked up part of it was that this was just another Tuesday night at San Cristobal.

Why I Don't Play Risk

In elementary school I went to a travel camp at the JCC (I swear it feels like my entire life has been somehow or another been tied to that place and it needs to end) where we would go on a different trip every day. There was a group of five of us that became pretty close and had our own sort of 'travel camp clique' which I have to assume in retrospect was about as lame as it sounds. But we had a lot of fun together, so one night we decided to have a sleepover - the five guys. A precursor to a bevy of 'man nights' i'm sure we'd all go on to have later.

I can't even remember a few of their names, and memories of other old camp friends long since gone by the wayside are sort of flitting through as I try, but I do remember that night very well because it began the end of any relationship I would ever have with Risk: A Game of World Domination.

For some reason there was a weird obsession with eating pickles that night, and I remrember being really disgusted with the amount of fart jokes made over the course of the evening (so really, my sensibilities haven't changed a bit since I was 15), but it all fell apart when we decided to play Risk. Now I'm no Risk expert, but I know there are supposed to be two sets of die - one are red, one are your regular old white dice. I think you have three dice to attack and two to defend, and one color is more associated with attacking and the other not.

Well, whatever you're supposed to have, we had the opposite. Instead of having three white and two red or whatever, we had the other way around.
Who cares, right? Use the right number with the right action and play the game, who cares about the color?

Joel did.
Oh boy, did Joel care.

Joel was a smaller kid who up until that point I really liked. We got along great.
But he FLIPPED OUT over the dice. He demanded that we could ONLY play with three red dice, because you HAD to have three red dice. When we said we'd really rather just play the game, dice color be damned, he started crying. Literally. And screaming. He said we were breaking all the rules, and he wouldn't play, and that we were all mean, and called his mom to come pick him up at 1 am over the damn dice.

Even then I knew that was utterly lame.

That was the end of the clique, and travel camp kinda sucked that last week.
Risk and I took a little break, but I was back soon enough.

Until New Mexico.

When I first got to the Ranch, I was put in the 4 man room, appropriately named cause it had two sets of bunk beds for four guys. It was certainly the least personal, least private, and generally most unpleasant room in the house to be in. But - you always had company, and some nights we decided to be real rebels and stay up after curfew to play board games. I am a trouble maker, let me tell you.
(also, there is really nothing more emasculating than being 17 with an enforced 'lights out' bedtime - until three twenty something girls come in one night to read you a 'bedtime poem')

So at one point the room was made up of me, RJ, Mikey, and Birdman.

Birdman was there by court order awaiting either trial or sentencing for a drive-by shooting. He was this ultimate Eminem wannabe with a bleached blonde fader haircut, an ever present sidecocked bright red baseball cap, and he used to shave slits into the side of both eyebrows to look like an absolute moron. He tried epicly hard to BE hard, and I guess he did end up there by court order, but this guy was all talk - trying to talk about how he 'killed niggaz' and how 'I ain't gotta lie, I quit school cause of recess.' What I do know is that being at the ranch was a test and if he did well it would reflect on his sentence, so he had a real shot to try and avoid jail and totally failed time after time by being a cocky little bastard who broke every rule and got caught every time. I know he did eventually end up in jail, on top of his whole time spent on the Ranch, so what a real waste.

RJ was a recovering meth addict and dealer, and he was the real thing. RJ's dad was a drug lord in Arizona who actually threatened to disown RJ after he decided to go to rehab. The only reason RJ went in the first place was because he got his then girlfriend pregnant and decided he couldn't raise a child as a meth-addict. He checked into a Wilderness Program and while he was there found out his girlfriend had miscarried. Realizing that if he went home he'd end up exactly where he was before, he checked himself into the ranch instead. About a week into my being on the ranch he had his first meth relapse when the Phase 2 kids brought some on the Ranch. One of my first memories of being there is watching him come down, crying and sweating in his bed, literally sobbing and telling me he was so sorry, apologising to me personally, someone he'd barely known for a week just because he knew I was straight edge, and because I was there.

Last but not least was Mikey. It was never confirmed, but a bunch of us still think to this day that Mikey was a highly functioning autistic. He was older than the rest of us by a few years, and would wear tight old jeans and ragged flannel everywhere. He rarely bathed or washed, and the staff had to coerce Mikey to shower after one particularly long period of sustained filth. He refused to do chores and would famously stare down dishes as though the were some old enemy he could command to wash themselves through sheer mental energy. His emotions were almost always muted and he avoided eye contact. He had been in Phase 1 an incredibly long time by the time I got there, and I think it's because they had no idea how to handle someone with an actual mental disability. He never should have been there in the first place. I can say that about a few people.

Mikey also had an impressive addiction to computers and computer games. He would routinely sneak out at night and break into the computer lab, staying up all night. One night it was snowing pretty hard, and he left tracks out on the ground. They found him in the lab on four computers simultaneously - playing different games on three, and watching porn on the 4th - earning him the name "The Midnight Prowler."

Mikey was a genius when it came to games of skill, strategy, and numbers and ALWAYS won. Without fail. It was a source of personal pride for him, and I'm not sure he had a lot else to hold on to, so he could get REALLY arrogant - and it got on some nerves.
So one night the four of us are playing Risk and RJ and Birdman decide their sick of Mikey's smug superiority and start cheating with abandon, denying it every step of the way. I'm happy not to be laying in my bed staring at the ceiling at 10:30 so I don't care, but Mikey is getting pissed. Especially when they start to win.

They're laughing and having a ball, while Mikey starts to shut down. Finally, they take him out entirely - they're laughing, and ragging on him. Mikey still has the dice in his hand. He's staring at the board, like he does with the dishes - just staring this blank, distant, terrifying stare that he has, saying nothing. Then, without any warning, he throws the dice as hard as he can at the board, knocking everyhthing over and starts screaming as he takes the board apart. I've never seen Mikey express more than disdain, frustration, or bemusement before but he has gone off, calling them liars, and cheaters, and convicts and worse.

Well that done pisses RJ off so the next thing I know he's in Mikey's face ready to fight, threatening to kill him, begging Mikey to hit him. Mikey is still screaming, Birdman and I get in the middle - I take Mikey, he takes RJ. The GIGANTIC bald security guy shows up to calm everyone down, Mikey is back to staring blankly at a wall while RJ yells "Fucker" over and over again, coming up with about 32 different words for retard.

Suffice it to say, after hours board game nights were a thing of the past.

I didn't mind. I'm never playing Risk again.

Scott

Scott Ramsden was my friend.

I met him when he was 21. He had pulled up in his car, packed to the brim with stuff, with a big brown beard and he stayed. He had come to the ranch of his own volition, as a 21st birthday present to himself, because he wanted to get himself help. At first it didn't seem like Scott needed any help. He said he had an addiction to cocaine and other undisclosed problems, and he was ready to face his demons. But when he first got there he seemed like a man with his life under control. He was smart, and beyond being smart, he was wise. He was a really good guy.

He became something of a mentor to my friend Brad, and a friend of mine. He stayed out and above the politics of the place and treated most everyone as equals. The three of us would hang out a lot, having talks about life. He was someone I liked talking to.

Before the ranch was a program, it had been a lot of other things - most recently an orphanage and a commune. There were abandoned buildings on the campus, filled with torn up walls and shattered glass. Scott and I would climb up to the roof and sit up there. He told me how his friends back home in California used to get together and wear suits and drink wine and talk about music and that was what he missed most.

Since Scott was there of his own accord, and because he was such a good student he was allowed to keep things no one else had, including a computer. We stayed up til curfew playing one of those stupid online games where you try to score with some pixelated girl - starting by just trying to get her on a date. It was about as hard as real life, and we spent hours just laughing and trying to remember facts and trivia of our onscreen love.

He took one of the only two pictures of me from over there that I know of. I'm sitting on one of the beds, looking down, wearing a flannel shirt and a skull cap. It's blue tone, and it was a picture of me that I liked, which doesn't happen often. I don't know where it is.

We used to play a game sometimes at night by the fire, where we would take turns and each person had three minutes where they had to answer anything asked. We had to tell the truth, so I assume everybody lied. But sometimes they did tell the truth. One night I asked Scott who he thought he would keep in touch with. He sat there, in the light of the fire, and finally answered that he didn't think he'd keep in touch with anyone. I can't remember if I felt hurt that he hadn't said me, or sad that he didn't think he would with anyone, but I made it a point then to make a vow to myself that Scott was one of the ones worth staying in touch with, and that I woud.

Scott moved to phase 2 in record time, beating the previous title holder - me. But soon Scott's demons began to emerge. There was a pattern to his issues - when he was under watch, he'd be fine. But once he had some freedom, and people trusted him, it would come out. He started doing coke again, a lot of it. And he started cutting himself. Large gashes on his body, a big 'X' on his chest - deep cuts, intense depression.

That's when the ranch figured why he was there, because before they had realno clue. I don't think that place was worth a damn for most anyone who ever had the misfortune of setting foot on its' grounds, but maybe it would have been good for him to stay. He had a strong connection to the then head-therapist Leift position changed three times in the eight months I was there) - even if that connection included a weird sexual undertone that Leif had no problem exploiting to get the results she wanted - a practice that didn't stop with Scott. But he needed someone who wouldn't let him destroy himself.

But as soon as Scott was found doinf coke in the cabins, he was ready to do what he always did - run. He packed his things and left in the middle of the night. Before he left, he snuck Brad out and picked me up. The three of us stood by the bridge at Arroyo Seco and looked down at the gorge, this deep crevice clawed into the Earth, and we said our goodbyes.

It was the last time I saw him.

He moved back to be with his parents, a kindly very religiously based and deeply faithful couple who were unequipped to deal with this kind of addiction and depression. I'm sure he was great for awhile.

When I got home, I wanted nothing to do with anyone or anything related to the whole experience for a long time. I was just happy to be away from it all. But I had Scott's number and aim and every day I said I'd call him. He was one of the people I was going to keep in touch with. I had made a promise and I'll be damned if I wasn't going to be right.

And I'm sure I would have, but I never did. Because I got a call first from Brad telling me that Scott was dead. He was found drowned in a river, after commiting suicide. I don't know whether he ran away for the last time or whether he stopped being able to run anymore.
I wish I'd called. I really wish I'd called.

I can barely remember his face or voice now. When I try, I can, a little.
I remember what he said about Leif once - "Have you ever met someone so pretty, so smart, so cool that you just think to yourself I have to fuck you!"
A few years later I totally understood what he meant.

He wasn't my best friend, and he wasn't the first person I knew really well to die. He wasn't even the first Ranch Kid to die.
But he was my friend, and when I think about him I miss the fact that he and Brad and I will never sit on a rooftop somewhere in suits and drink wine and toast to the fact that we beat that terrible place together.

The Sad Strange Tale of the Girl With Red Hair (Part 2)

Part 1

It turns out he just wanted to talk. He wanted to declare a truce, end of hostilities, bygones be bygones. RJ told him in no uncertain terms to go fuck himself, that he was a piece of shit, and that RJ didn't talk to 'beaters.

This just made the guy even angrier - which is exactly what RJ wanted. He wasn't ready to be done with this guy yet.

The boyfriend showed up at the phase 3 house a few nights in a row, doing donuts in the parking lot, spewing gravel everywhere. One night he threw a brick through a window, with a note threatening everyone in the house. He claimed he was being stalked by Ranch Kids, and that he wasn't afraid to defend himself.

Then one night, he ran into Big John.

Big John was RJ's best friend at the ranch. A former member of the Folk, a Chicago gang - he was absolutely stacked, with a shaved head and rippling muscles; he looked like he could have been a pro-wrestler if he'd been taller. As it was, he was physically impressive. John had a bad coke problem and was prone to bouts of rage. I don't mean he got angry, I mean fits of utter rage that culminated in tirades of profanity, property destruction, and on rare occasions violence. John and RJ saw each other as brothers, which means they didn't always get along and nearly came to blows a few times themselves - but they always had each other's back. And while a lot of guys on the ranch were a lot of talk, claiming they were killers to be cool but then backing down anytime things got rough, John and RJ were the real deal. They were always ready for a fight. RJ popped some kid in the face once in a Wendy's just because the guy looked at him wrong. He took a lot of pleasure in describing exactly how this kid's lip split, how his nose started gushing like a geyser as he fell to the ground, the look of fear in his friends' faces as they looked over the other Ranch kids before running off. John was there - he just laughed.

In Phase 3, John ran with Little Don and Toomey. Toomey was a local drug dealer who had a house where he ran three operations - drugs, a barber shop, and a comic book store. The guys used to use me as cover to get drugs when I went to go buy comics - I'd stop at the shop for my fix, they'd head into the house for theirs. It was a pretty good system for them cause no one suspected anything out of my weekly comic run. I never went in the house, but the first time they walked out of it they talked about it like it was heaven. There had been a coke rock just sitting out on the table - to them it was like a diamond.

Little Don was a former Ranch Kid who had come back to Taos after taking off for awhile. The fact that Don and John ended up running with each other was a shock to the rest of us because they had been sworn enemies before. When Don had been on the ranch he had a dog named Mary Jane, a stray black and white pitbull runt that they had picked up off the street. This dog was the most amazing dog in the world - cute, loyal, ferocious - she loved us and we loved her. But when it came to other dogs, she was brutal - the tore the ear off a dog twice her size that tried to mess with her in town once. And then she'd sleep in our beds.

MJ used to be Don's but when he took off, he left MJ there. He said he'd be back in a week to get her and never showed up. John started to take care of her, and eventually she was his. He loved that dog, spent his stipend on her food, and looked after her. He wasn't the best owner, but he tried. Half a year later Don showed up to get his dog back. John refused. and Don wasn't happy. About a week before I got to the ranch Don snuck onto the ranch one night with a gun to try and get Mary Jane back. It was the very first story I heard.

But by now John and Don had buried the hatchet, and were working as side-men for Toomey - acting as muscle and drug runners. John was even dating Don's old girlfriend Tracy, who went from Ranch Guy to Ranch Guy to Ranch Guy. It made me sad, because Tracy was a nice girl and smart and could do so much better than being passed around by fuck ups and delinquents. But she never thought she was better than that, and that was the real tragedy.

I'd find the three passed out on our floor a couple nights a week. One time John and Don stole and pawned my TV when I went out to work. When I called John on it, he went into a rage and started screaming that I was a kike, and threated to beat the shit out of me. The ranch did nothing.

I bought a new TV.

John, Don, and Toomey were walking the streets of Taos one night when the boyfriend pulled up to them in his car. He knew John and RJ were tight and he wanted John to talk to RJ for him, to put an end to all this.
I don't know if he just tried to talk sense, or if he started mouthing off, but one of them pulled out a knife and stabbed him in the stomache.

Afraid for his life he took off and moved to the east coast, where he could never bother the girl again. He wrote a letter to the ranch telling everything that happened.

The ranch did nothing.

They claimed it was because they couldn't prove anything, but I think it was a combination of not wanting the hassle, and taking a very private side against an abusive guy.
Either way, they had succesfully run this guy not only out of town, but across the country, without consequence.

In the meantime, RJ and the Red Headed Girl kept fucking. She used to sneak up onto the ranch at night and bring the guys beer. They'd all get drunk, and RJ would take her to his room. I would say they got it on, but I'm not sure it ever occured to RJ that there was someone else in the bed with him.
RJ loved anal sex - he was a self described 'anal fiend,' and would talk endlessly about doing it with this girl. The guys were jealous, mainly because they weren't getting any and wanted a piece, but knew RJ was at the top of the pecking order and were happy with the beer. It was the first time I heard the phrase 'poop dick' - waking up to make breakfast one morning I was greeted by a smiling RJ in my doorway proudly exclaiming "I put it in her butt the other night and I haven't showered since, so I still smell like poop dick." It had been a good three days since she'd been over.

Knowing me, I'm pretty sure I didn't eat breakfast that day.

I always wondered how this girl felt, going from one terrible relationship to this. If she knew how the guys talked about her, if she knew she was being used, if she even cared. Or if she thought she was better off than before.

The last I remember of her was one night she snuck RJ and Travis off to the hot springs, where they were drinking and soaking. Eventually they got drunk enough that RJ and the girl started to do it right there. RJ was doing her from behind while Travis watched and drank, and he thought it was a riot at first until he realized he wasn't getting any. So RJ motions to Travis to come over. The way Travis reenacted it, he was like a snake - sneaking and crawling his slimy way over the desert rock until he was playing with her while RJ kept going at it. She was so drunk, she didn't notice until they high fived.
She screamed "What the hell are you doing?"
They just whispered, "Shh... it's okay, it's okay..."

The two of them telling the story, laughing, acting it out, finishing each other's words is something I will never forget.
I felt dirty for her.
I felt dirty just for being there.

I never saw her after that. RJ let her go when got bored, like he would. There were a lot of girls and a lot of stories. I was on the outskirts - usually in my room, or watching a movie, or taking walks with my friend Brad, that I doubt she knew me well enough to even remember me. I'm disappointed I didn't know her well enough to know her as anything more than this.
Because the girl in this story is barely a person the way it's told, just a prop. A sad, lonely human prop tossed around in a fucked up play with fucked up people.

RJ is married now. He has a daughter. I haven't spoken to him since I missed his wedding, and I cut ties with all but three people I met out there. I've tried to distance myself from everything about that place and all the things that happened, because I'm so scared that someone, anyone, will think that I'm a person like that. I wonder if he's changed, or what he thinks looking back on it all now laying in bed next to his wife with a daughter in the other room. But knowing the stories of his life, I doubt he even thinks about this one at all.

Her name was Carly. It came to me as I left work the other night, like a string I had pulled until it unraveled. A flood of other memories came with it. She spelled her name with a "K" at front or an "i" at the end - it was something different, but I can't remember which.
Karli the Red Haired Girl.

I'm not sure what the point of this is. I'm not sure there is one, other than that I remember it.
And maybe someone should, so there won't be any other Red Haired Girls.

The Sad Strange Tale of the Girl with Red Hair - pt. 1

I honestly can't remember her name.

In New Mexico, at the Ranch, there were three Phases to the program. In Phase 1, you lived in a group house with all the other newcomers and anyone who had been held or sent back. In Phase 2, you branched out to live in one of the four cabins on the grounds. And Phase 3 was another group house, this time in the center of Taos.

When I was in Phase 2 I started taking classes at The University of New Mexico, Taos Campus. This was a satellite campus to the regular UNM in Albequerque, and it was small. Two buildings, the main building and an 'arts' building, literally out in the middle of the desert surrounded by nothing but the sage. The only place in walking distance was the golf course, where the guys would go to cut class and secretly charge the meals to the ranch owner's tab. We'd get dropped off and get picked in a long white van, and everyone in town knew we were 'the ranch kids,' and would look at us accordingly. The school was mainly for adults coming back to further their education on top of their jobs and so everything was run in a once a week block scheduling. My fall semester I took 4 classes and was in school every Monday from 9am to 9pm with a half hour break between each 2 and a half hour class. I didn't mind - any time spent off the Ranch was worth it, and that was an entire day.

I think she worked for the school, as a receptionist or something like it. I was either 17 or 18 and I think she was a few years older, maybe 21. It may not be fair to say, but it's an observed truth that any girl I met in Taos that age was either pregnant, a mother, or stuck - whether by drugs, circumstance, or lack of means. The people that could leave left, and not many of them could. She was no exception.

I've spent most of the time since I decided to write this loose and sprawling story trying to remember her name, and for the life of me I can't. I could call a friend but maybe it's better this way. Because even though the story is about her, it's really a story about a bunch of other people who did things to or for her. She wasn't nearly as important she probably should have been.

Even when I was there she was the Red Headed Girl to me - I didn't know her as much more than that. I know I didn't find her attractive at all, and that may sound superficial but I remember it being striking because I have a thing for red heads. A huge thing. A girl I'm totally neutral towards will dye her hair red and suddenly she looks really good. And a beautiful girl dyes her hair red - I'm done. But despite all that, I never saw anything in her like that. I remember her having curls, and a plain face with bad acne and tired eyes. But it didn't matter what I thought, I wasn't the one after her.

RJ was a guy at the ranch and he used to say he had a special skill - he could look at a girl and tell how many days it would take to get her in bed. Exactly how much time, energy, and effort it would take, all by watching them for a little while. We sat outside one day and he rattled off numbers as girls walked. But he was always looking for the easy kill - the one he could have tonight, and if not tonight, then tomorrow. It didn't matter if he found them at all attractive, and a lot of times he didn't, which is why that was important at all. It was just about getting some, and that is something I will never understand. So he saw and set his sights on his easy mark, the Red Haired Girl.

She had a boyfriend, a big guy - not obese, not muscular, just a big guy who was slightly balding and probably in his early thirties. He seemed like a nice guy, took a computer class with one of the guys, just another townie. But as RJ started to hang out with the girl, just being nice, giving her a little attention, this guy got jealous.

And that's when he hit her. And he hit her pretty bad.

Now for all his good and all his very many bad, RJ had a genuine hate for anyone who would hit a girl. So when he took action, I honestly believe he would have done so whether he was trying to nail this girl or not. But the fact is he was. With his suggestion, they broke up, and RJ made clear in no uncertain terms that if this guy was ever seen bothering this girl again there would be some serious shit going down.

Then RJ and her started having sex. And I have no doubt that this bastard was crazy before, having already hit his girlfriend, and apparently several times before, but now he lost whatever he had. Following her, calling her all the time, threats and pleading, and finally showing up at her mother's house one night threatening her and to burn the house to the ground.

And then he turned his attention to us.

He tried running RJ over in the parking lot one day. I don't mean as a joke or a threat, I mean attempted murder. I watched it happen. He came veering out of nowhere, coming straight at him. RJ jumped the the sidewalk at the last second. He followed RJ around town sometimes, but couldn't get to him because he was on the Ranch except for school. You'd think maybe someone would have called the cops, and they did after the fire threat, but otherwise no. That's just not how Ranch Kids did things.

I remember one day ten of us or so were sitting outside eating lunch, and he came walking over with some guy at his side for backup. I thought for sure something was about to go down right there. And we didn't all like each other very much most of the time, but at that moment Ranch was Ranch, and the ten of us stood up in unison behind RJ. Because this guy was a fucking girlfriend beater; and even to the gang members, drug dealers, and teenage hoodlums assembled there are just some things you just don't do.

And then there was me, none of the above, still standing. I don't know why. I don't fight, and especially not over a turf war.
But he hit a girl. He beat her. And nothing in the world to me is worse than domestic or sexual abuse. Nothing at all. And in that split second, even if only for a moment, we were a group. Whether I wanted to be a part of that group or not, just then I was.

For some of them it may have just been gang loyalty. It was a different culture there. Whatever the reason, it was ten to two. And a lot of these guys weren't nearly as tough as they'd like to think they were. But some of them were, and RJ was one of them.

And you don't want to take on ten Ranch Kids, believe you me.

A Knock Knock Joke

I think living in New Mexico was the first time I ever started to appreciate solitude. Boredom gets to me pretty bad, and I get Cabin Fever really quick, so I usually want to be out doing something and with people as much as possible, and in high school that was a pronounced need. I think other people would still say I'm pretty social, but I'm certainly less than I used to be. I'm sure there are a number of factors, and being in a relationship really mellowed that need at the time, but the first time I can remember really looking forward to being alone was one night in my least favorite state of the union.

I was living in a house in Taos, and there were always between 5 to 7 of us living there at a time. I shared a room (which was really a converted garage, and looked like it) with my friend Wolfy. To say I wasn't particularly close with most of my housemates would be an understatement, to document the list of illegal activity that operated out of or around the people in that house would read like a court indictment, and to say that I spent my 8 months in New Mexico in anything other than a consistent state of seething anger and frustration would be like saying that foreign nations are really appreciative of current US foreign policy. So I'd eat out a lot, often by myself and with a book, and I'm pretty sure that started a terrible habit that lasts to this day.

So when I finally got the house to myself, even for a few hours, it was an amazing and rare moment of serene pleasure. And one night the stars aligned and I was blissfully alone at last. Wolfy and Rocky had gone off to do something they weren't supposed to at Travis' (our old friend who you may remember from a previous post, famous for busting his arm doing drunken backflips trying fuck a fourteen year old,) and I don't remember who else lived with us at the time but they were all gone.

It was wonderful.

I put on some music, tucked under the covers, and pulled out some JLA. Heaven.
Now the entire front wall of our room was actually a giant glass window with a sliding door, which would cause some problems later. But you could easily see entirely inside or out.
I'm laying there reading about Martian Manhunter's change into the Fernus the Burning when I hear -

*knock*knock*knock*knock*

I figure Wolf and Rock have come back, but I don't see anyone, so I check the front door.
Nothing.

Okay, stranger things haver happened. I'm all tucked away again when I hear -
*knock*knock*knock*knock*

Now I'm sure they're just fucking with me cause they know I'm stoked to have some time to myself. So I call out that this isn't funny, and check the front door - no one's there.

I tuck myself in again, and start to relax when louder and more ferocious than either time before
*knock*knock*knock*knock**knock*knock*knock*knock*

Now I am pissed. I run out of the house into our gravel driveway screaming about what assholes they are when I finally notice that the knocking is coming from our upstairs window.
Along with the sound of a high pitched girl moaning in rapid succesion
*oh*oh*oh*oh*OH*OH*OH*OH*OH-OH!
and then a man's voice, deep and gutteral just screams out
*YEAH!*
in the kind of manner where you can just imagine a clenched fist being pumped into the air.

Trurns out John and Tracy were home.

I ran back to my room, hid under the covers, and tried to block the sound of a man screaming "Yeah!" to his climaxing orgasm out of my mind with obviously failed results.

Post script - I told this story to a set of aquaintances who had just recently gotten married. When I got to the end the girl's eyes went wide and she just pointed and nodded at her now husband.
So I guess John isn't alone in his battle cry.