Does anybody remember the “Boy Are You Lucky” post from earlier in the month? It’s actually a column I had published in Horse Fly for June, and the title is “The Yelling Man.” It’s about this strange hollering and screaming that goes on for hours sometimes, somewhere over the hill from here. I wrote it up like it was some poor crazy bastard, and it may well be, but it could also be a lot of things.
Well, a lady in Taos called me to task for not calling 911:
How many people do you have to hear screaming? Call 911.
My reply was too flippant, eliciting the following:
Well, how about tracing the source (house) of the screams and visiting it during the day and asking if there is someone who is ill or what the problem may be. Don’t you think there’s a certain responsibility we all share — family of man and all that — to reach out to someone who might in trouble?
Quite understandable. This is a sensible thing, in the abstract. My first impulse was to write simply, “You have to be putting me on,” but I recovered. Never one to leave well enough alone, however, I came back with this (my words, now, slightly edited for clarity):
Well P____, the guy (if that’s what it is) has been doing this off and on for months. I think the family of man has the situation well under control, or certainly the community does. What I meant to get across is my sense that there isn’t anything to be “fixed.” If you understood the piece as anything other than a celebration of humanity’s all-enfolding compassion, perhaps I wasn’t clear enough.
“Crazy” people do have their roles to play. Many schizophrenics, for example, could be experiencing another reality and communicating from there, or trying to. Valuable societal resources, in other words. The asylums could be full of saints.
Besides, the noise could be a sick calf — you wouldn’t believe what they sound like. It might be a chupacabra. It might be a junkie with a big knife and a snootful of rat poison. It might be the guy who was flagging down all the cars on Vista del Valle Road last spring and making them go slow because it was “his” road… Heck, it could be a ghost. I may be the only one hearing it, too. Have you considered that? I certainly have. Seriously. None of my neighbors has ever mentioned the yelling, BTW. Hmm. Maybe I could go ask the two big guys with shaved heads who I swear were shooting up in their car last night three houses down, but I don’t think they’re from Llano. Yet neither my house nor the two in between are ever locked, and there hasn’t been a burglary in the 30-some years my landlord has lived here, either. A mysterious equilibrium that bears respecting, says I.
I also thanked her for her comments and for reading Horse Fly. She’s obviously a competent, caring person who means well. I just can’t imagine ever doing what she suggests, which seems to be to be the perfect way to make someone have to call 911, if you get my drift.
Sometimes the shadow only wants acknowledging. Everything in this unusually strong place is right there on the surface, so you can’t pretend that you don’t see it, or shouldn’t, because this is where the strength comes from.
From the road by my mailbox, I look out at 13,000 foot mountains just a few miles away in perfectly clear air over the rusting bodies of dead cars, an aging singlewide, and a crumbling old corral. With all that feels so good about living here for me, New Mexico has terrible poverty and the first atom bomb. The people at the little gas station where I go are always calm and friendly, and I always feel real good there, but three years ago there was a triple murder in the parking lot. One kid with two semi-automatics with full clips and a car full of friends. Everyone knows because there’s a triple descanso, for crying out loud.
You can’t just have a pretty package, and so you already have your head in a space of dealing with the contradictions and the paradox, and then you somehow realize you’re dealing with something outside of yourself, yet part of yourself. And before you know it, you understand that something big is going on, and it’s true, but you can’t say what it is because you know the words are crap. And so you start to give a little, here and there, and try not to judge so much, because there’s this other thing, and everything that’s going on is part of it…
So with this guy, if that’s what it is (who’s quiet now, by the way), the point is that I don’t know, and especially because of where I am, I don’t know, and for now I assume the sound belongs here. For all I know it’s the Second Coming and Jesus is in a bind. That might fit perfectly, somehow. (He said we wouldn’t recognize him when the time came, remember.) I’m also a man with ringing in his ears, 24/7 crickets and phantom tree frogs, and a week ago a raven/shaman put a picture in my brain, so think twice about swearing me in as a witness, for your own sakes.
You have been warned, and I am off to the dance.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Once, while living in Madrid, I heard a man yelling in the street below my 6th floor balcony. After a few minutes, in the apartments across from me and about 4 floors up, a woman opened her window, stuck out her head, and hollered at him to go home. From what he was yelling and her responses, it became clear that the woman had left her husband and moved into her sisters apartment. He then started throwing rocks up at her and demanding she come home. My impulse was to call the police. But very quickly, people in the neighborhood started talking to the man, sometimes quite animatedly, waving their arms all around. Eventually he sat down on the curb as an older woman was talking to him and he put his head in his hands and it was obvious he was crying. She helped him up and he walked off, I suppose to go home. I never saw him around there again. Nobody called the police, and none came.
Well, there you go. Exactly where I’m coming from. What a great story, George.
There’s a line somewhere though. It’s hard to know when our inaction is just the modern day reluctance to get ‘involved’. Hence innumerable stories of people being murdered in full view of others who did nothing. Raises the old question, doesn’t it … “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
I certainly agree we should not jump in hastily. Perhaps all we can do is follow our intuition (unfortunately, I’m not sure that mine is all that well developed.)
Just occurred to me.
If, as you said, you were writing about “celebrating the humanity of all-enfolding compassion” wouldn’t you march over there and lay on some of that compassion in the form of concern?
Without investigating, you’re at the empathy stage. But it seems to me compassion involves a bit more activity.
If nothing else, you’d be showing compassion for our collective curiosity. Find out what’s going on and tell us!
If it turns out it’s only someone doing bench presses with too many weights on the bar, the compassionate thing to do would be to spot for him so he doesn’t hurt himself.
You have it wrong. It’s “celebrating HUMANITY’S all-enfolding compassion.” We don’t have to dredge up compassion from the Good Boy Dept., it’s already there. Left to our own devices, we’re generally pretty nice to each other.
You have to understand that this has been going on for months, maybe longer. Personally, I’m 90 percent convinced the noisemaker is a crazy person. Either that, or it’s a never-resolved domestic argument. The solitary bellowing doesn’t fit the latter framework, however. But I’ve lived here for three years, and not one of my neighbors has ever mentioned this yelling. This could be very significant. Too few of my readers seem willing to go down the alternate reality path, yet that’s of the essence here.
The really obvious unaddressed point, which I have downplayed to avoid stirring crap up, is that patronizing Anglo busy-body white man’s burden stuff can get a person fucking SHOT. The code o’ the West is live and let live.
So far, I live.