Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
suavely upand downthe keyboard and he had a winning smile and excellent teeth, which I
suppose is the main thing in a cocktail bar pianist. Anyway, the ladies clearly liked him.
I don't know how many beers I had, but-I will be frank here—it was too many. I had not
allowed for the fact that in the thin mountain air of Santa Fe you get drunk much faster.
In any case, I was surprised to discover as I arose a couple of hours after entering that the
relationship between my mind and legs, which was normally quite a good one, had broken
down.Morethan that, mylegs nowdidn'tseem tobegetting onat all well with each other.
One of them started for the stairs, as instructed, but the other, in a burst of petulance, de-
cidedtomakefortherestroom.TheresultwasthatIlurchedthroughthebarlikeamanon
stilts, grinninginanely asiftosay,“Yes,IknowIlooklike anasshole. Isn'tthisamusing?”
En route, I bumped into the table of a party of middle-aged rich people, slopping their
drinks, and could only broaden my brainless smile and burble that I was ever so sorry. I
patted one of the ladies affectionately on the shoulder with that easy familiarity that over-
comesmewhenIamdrunkandusedherasakindofspringboardtopropelmyselftowards
the stairs, where I smiled a farewell to the room-everyone was by now watching me with
interest-and descended the stairs in one fluid motion. I didn't exactly fall, but then again
I didn't exactly walk down. It was more like surfing on the soles of my shoes, and was, I
believe,notunimpressive.ButthenIoftenperformmybeststuntswhileintoxicated.Once,
many years ago during a party at John Horner's house, I fell backwards out of an upstairs
windowandbouncedtomyfeetwithanelanthatisstillwidelytalkedaboutsouthofGrand
Avenue.
In the morning, chastened with a hangover, I drove back to the campus of St. John's, found
mynieceandembarrassedherpossiblyevengrossedherout-withahug.Wewenttobreak-
fast in a fancy restaurant downtown and she told me all about St. Johns and Santa Fe and
afterwards showed me the sights of the town: St. Francis's Cathedral (very beautiful), the
Palace of the Governors (very boring, full of documents about territorial governors) and
the famous staircase at the Loretto Chapel. This is a wooden staircase that rise 211/2 feet
in a double spiral up to a choir loft. The remarkable thing about it is that it is not supported
by anything except its own weight. It looks as if it ought to fall down. The story is that
the nuns of the chapel prayed for someone to build them a staircase and an anonymous
carpenter turned up, worked on the staircase for six months and then disappeared without
payment as mysteriously as he had arrived. For a hundred years the nuns milked this story
for all it was worth, and then one day a few years ago they abruptly sold the chapel to a
private company, which now runs it for a profit and charges you fifty cents to get in. This
kind of soured me on the place, and it didn't do a whole lot for my respect for nuns.
