GARGOZO MANUSCRIPT

We were on our way back from Cochiti with Palmer driving one of his vintage Cadillac convertibles.  He had settled on acquiring used Cadillacs and Corvettes as an investment strategy and now had about a dozen.  He scanned the local papers every weekend looking for old cars.  He bought the property next door primarily for the large back yard where he had installed a lengthy car port for his collection. Palmer had found several one-owner, low-mileage Cadillacs put up for sale by widows who had long since given up driving.  The cars often had been sitting idle in a garage for years and the elderly owners were usually unaware of the car’s value.  If it was a convertible it was an added bonus since Cadillac had stopped making them in 1976.  The Cadillacs were quite a sight - massive compared to the cars of today with a vast expanse of all-leather interior and ludicrous tail fins.                    ...

As we drove past Cochiti Lake I turned to Palmer and said, “If I didn’t know better I’d say those were bodies down there on the beach.” Palmer kept his eyes on the road and said, “Those are bodies, paleface.” I took another look and despite it being a half hour before sunrise and us traveling at 60 mph, Palmer was right, there were a half-dozen people spread-eagled on the western shore of the lake. Palmer continued, “The results of a Friday night with too much firewater.” We were driving through the sacred ancestral lands of the Cochiti Pueblo on our way to an early tee time at one of New Mexico ’s tribal golf courses.  It was the late 1980s, more than a decade before Indian Casinos became commonplace in the state.  The Robert Trent Jones designed course at Cochiti was one of the first pueblo-owned golf courses in the southwest.  It was set into the red and orange hues of the Jemez Mountains amid creeks and ponds.  It had quickly gained attention as c...

I met Palmer at Occidental in the 1960s before he became a gastroenterologist, before he was banned from practicing medicine in three states, and before his uncivilized behavior was eventually diagnosed as bipolar.  Palmer came to college from New Mexico where he had grown up in Deming, a town whose population was then around 5,000.  Palmer was always going on about “the land of enchantment” and while his enthusiasm for New Mexico was well deserved it may also have been an effort to compensate for his home town.  Deming is best known for two events – the annual duck races, and a run in that sixty-three-year-old David Eckert had with the local police that made legal history.  Two Deming police officers pulled Eckert over for a routine traffic stop and claimed that he appeared to have “clenched buttocks.”  Suspecting that Eckert was hiding either drugs, weapons or a secret decoder ring; the officers managed to obtain a search warrant from a local judge base...