‘The Pesky Domestic’
Paul had moved here from Pittsburg and remembers Taos as a magical place where anything was possible. “And anything could happen, and did!”
Parker was traveling back and forth to NYC at the time, where she was working in experimental theater productions, expanding her own repertoire. Her classical training aside, she always enjoyed working outside of her comfort zone, and the productions she worked on with Whaley allowed her to stretch her creative muscle.
“I’ve been a practicing Buddhist for a long time,” Parker said, “and I know I’m supposed to lightly let Bill go – but I’m having a difficult time doing that. This was a strong, enduring friendship and I will miss him and our conversations.”
Paul said she remembers the scene Whaley presided over in Taos’ theater community, as “a bit of a boys club, but it was different for me than for some of the others,” she explained. “I had to be responsible, I had a child.”
“I always felt he gave me an amazing amount of respect,” Parker said, Bill was such an intellectual and the plays he chose to produce reflected that.”
“We did ‘Sexual Perversity in Chicago’ by Mamet, and Tennesee Williams’ plays – I remember wild, dramatic scenes – it was such a great summer – truly.”
“It was a lot of fun to work on those productions and to be a part of all that,” Paul agreed.
“He was very ambitious,” Parker said, “intellectually ambitious. I mean he left for a decade and came back with a Ph.D., reinvented himself, and did the HorseFly.”
“He was a real character,” she recalled. “Authentic.”
WRITING ON A SNOWY Valentine’s night, 20 years later. I remember dressing up in 2001. We are celebrating our first Valentine’s day. Painted vase, beautiful see-through shawl, candles and those ‘almost’ clumsy hands making the presentation. Those hands could type away. We walked through the snow holding hands from his house on Leatherman to the old Dragonfly. We had moved beyond hiking and long discussion and I had already been hired to sell ads and write for HorseFly. I was also becoming used to being edited.
Bill was a romantic and quite each are awake. The thundering sound charismatic, as I came to know by of the coffee basket emptying grounds observing his encounters with all the from day or night before resounds tribes and genders of Taos. He learned against the trash can walls, also scattered that from Knox, his stepfather. Even across the counters. He had more, he learned the domestic chores warned me that he did not like the of herding cattle, tending and riding clanging of washing dishes or cleaning horses, and driving roads to find up in the morning. out what was going on with acequias 5:15 a.m. Coffee done, inhaled. and other ranchers and who might or Sourdough bread sliced. Crumbs now might not be keeping up with the rules scattered among the grounds followed or standards. I can’t tell you how many by the sound of plunging toaster hours we “took a drive” that included handle. Orange is cut, peeled piece “roundabouts” on dirt roads observing by piece, juice and rinds now join the and sometimes getting lost. Hours. bread crumbs, coffee grounds and butter.
He had warned me he didn’t know He doesn’t like the interruption of much about love, but those same his pondering mind by dishwashing or hands presented me with a ring just cleaning up. before the next Christmas. He said it 5:30 a.m. “How’s your piece coming wasn’t a present, it was for an engagement. along?” I’m standing there in a chenille I didn’t know what I was in for. robe, wool house shoes. I ponder a Of course, I went for it. Doesn’t love moment. “You don’t have any other conquer all? I know how to love. We employee to query at 5:30 in the morning married. ... I’m not quite awake yet.” There
Play forward, beyond the romantic were our dogs, chickens, cats, etc. that and settling into domestic cohabitation, also needed morning nourishment. to a day in the life of HorseFly. 5:45 a.m. “How many ads do we
5 a.m. Usually that or before we have?” I walk out to my own studio. I’ll clean up later.
I return to the house for my own self-care. A house with a loud voice on the phone, laughing, haranguing. Allencompassing engagement with the calls that came from various political compadres,
Trudy, Butchie, Jerome ... too many to name. Butchie started calling me at 6:30. The line to Bill was too long.
The weeds are high, taking over even the wild sunflowers, never mind other intentional plantings. He goes and buys a weed eater, in a box, needs assemblage. “Okay, I say, you put it together, I’ll run it. I know what should and shouldn’t be decimated by what is now seeming to be a weapon of mass destruction.” (I wrote about this that month in HorseFly).
Three hours later his frustration set in. (Paloma’s gift, our first Christmas, was a leather tool belt filled with pens and little tablets and a small measuring tape. He loved to measure ... I wasn’t even sure for what).
“Okay,” I say, “I’ll put it together and you can run it,” 30 minutes later, he dons waist belt for handling (no mask or goggles) and we walk around picking out what he is now going to decimate.
First of all I point out the sunflowers, warn him of the cacti, “The alfalfa is good for bees,” I said. I pointed out the weeds. “See these, leave the others alone.”
He revs up the weapon of mass destruction and straight to the sunflowers, the first innocent victims to leave the soil. That’s all I need. “I’ll run the weed eater, okay?”
A sigh of relief from Bill. After using discernment in the garden, I think, “Now, I’ll go clean the kitchen, start some laundry and finish my column and check on ads.”
By 5 in the evening all the phone calls start again. Never mind the ones all day. Supper sits on the table. I eat at the counter and go back to studio and domestic chores.
Knox Johnson built a cabin in Tahoe, taught Bill many things. He has two sisters, Helen and Mary, and another whole family, The Whaleys, and we all convened there to swim, cook, make art, explore, eat, laugh. Knox beat on the drum he bought when visiting Taos. Those were our sojourns and, really, the only vacations we seemed to have that gave us the solace we needed from Taos doings. When I came to Taos, I never left. He had to leave to work things out and returned to become a legend. I used to run from the bad boys, Sakti, Bill and Bill Gersh, for I had known too many before. Little did I realize my life would and still be so entwined with Bill.
Many meetings, many events we pulled off. I lived the life of HorseFly, sometimes in a chenille robe and flip flops. I have seen many people wanting to ride on the brim of his hat, and even after the many troubles we encountered and endured, I would not trade any of it; I love Bill.
We will do a memorial for Bill in the early summer, Taos-style.
BILL WHALEY is gone. Deb Villalobos is still here. They had quite a ride together. I don’t know their timelines. I’m just guessing that while Deb was a nurse in Chattanooga or Jackson, Mississippi, or flipping catfish in a Cajun café in bayou country, Louisiana, Bill was probably off skiing in Lake Tahoe, herding cattle from horseback on the family homestead, or studying Plato, Euripides, Sophocles and Finnegan’s Wake at some uppity academic bucket-of-blood near rural Winnemucca.
Their adventures with Taos’ The Horse Fly defy logic. How Deb and Bill kept the newspaper together for 10 years beats me. They both got in more trouble than Shakespeare’s conspirators in Macbeth, King Lear and Julius Caesar. Bill never met a judge or a politician he couldn’t offend. And Deb surrounded herself with enough county sheriff’s deputies to win a corndog eating contest at the Taos Fiestas.
Bill, and my old buddy Leo Garen, were a match made in theatrical hell. And Harvey Mudd is probably still holding 30 IOUS from Bill. I once heard a rumor that Harvey hired Jim Levy to break Bill’s kneecaps, but Levy chickened out because he loved too much screwing up the reels during every movie ever screened at The Plaza Theater.
Deb’s intimate essays in the HorseFly on her cancer illness were disturbing and courageous. Her and Bill’s court battles together against the Taos
power elite are legendary. Bill was a good boy/bad boy growing up. Deb was a good girl/bad girl growing up. I don’t think either of them had an ounce of good sense or a smidgen of fear. They were both crazy as betsy bugs and considered Mount Everest, “No hill for a stepper.”
They were integrated in our Taos community on all sides: Anglo, Hispanic, Pueblo, outsiders, insiders, visiting criminals. I thought I knew everybody, but Bill and Deb knew everybody and their brothers and sisters and suegros and bisabuelos, nietos, primos, grandchildren, madrastras and kiva boys.
Talk about folks involved with their community. Seems to me Deb was always cooking for the world; old-timers from Chamisal loved her as she led them through workout sessions at their community center. She and Bill gently took care of the great rock and roll poet, Richard Trujillo, during the last difficult years of his life. And they’ve been friends with Leo Santistevan forever. I also salute their munificence for lately welcoming Joanne Forman into their little trailer park.
You can’t look at their kindnesses without feeling awed and beholden.
We all know Bill was a member of the Four Horsemen of the El Prado Apocalypse. Or maybe they were the El Prado Pistoleros, what do I know? Juma Archuleta, Gene Sánchez, Arsenio Córdova, and Bill, the Gringo academic smarty-pants. I’ve mourned each one as they bit the dust. I miss Juma’s haircuts and raucous laughter, Arsenio’s guitar during Ranchos Church memorials, Gene’s palship with my neighbor, Ted Jeantete, who always spoke Spanish with me, and Bill’s sardonic commentaries on our beloved American Armageddons.
Dennis Hopper in Taos was like Nicolas Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas.” Bill Whaley and Dennis Hopper together in Taos ... were like Nicolas Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas.” I would rather have put my money in a Trump Atlantic City casino than invest in most of Bill’s 100-1 shots.
But I always paid to get in and take a soulful look around. Bill Whaley had moxie. And he could reinvent himself like Leonardo DiCaprio in the film “Catch Me If You Can.”
I figure Deb and Bill bet on each other like Liz Taylor and Richard Burton kept betting on each other. Why’d they do it?
Because they loved each other. If you don’t know by now that “love is like a ball and chain” go back and listen to Joplin again.
And while you’re at it wear warm pants and take two aspirin.
When I look at complicated paintings by Breughel, Hieronymus Bosch and Anita Rodríguez I see the Taos panorama as Deb and Bill saw it and willingly took it on, no matter the odds against it.
But Deb keeps nonchalantly feeding her turtles, and Bill kept nonchalantly walking his dogs (including those two little yappers of Gene and Jules) out on the mesa, or up Italianos Canyon. I know Deb’s mom in Chattanooga died last year, and I see Deb driving back and forth across America, from the deep south to Taos – rhymes with chaos – New Mexico, while Bili, Fitz and Paloma kept the home fires burning.
How lucky we’ve been to have them both. Such complicated, endearing, multicultural and never neutral ne’erdo-wells we must always celebrate. No matter how many of us may have yelled at them, they’ve always kept us awake, interested and involved. I bless them both for that.