Presidio: A Novel - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Randy Kennedy was born in San Antonio, Texas, and raised in Plains, a small farming town in the Texas Panhandle, where his father worked as a telephone lineman and his mother as a teachers’ aide. He was educated at the University of Texas at Austin. He moved to New York City in 1991 and worked for twenty-five years as a staff member and writer for The New York Times, first as a city reporter and for many years covering the art world. His first novel, Presidio, hailed as a "rich and rare book" by novelist Annie Proulx, was published in 2018 by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster. A collection of his city columns, Subwayland: Adventures in the World Beneath New York, was published in 2004. For The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine he has written about many of the most prominent artists of the last 50 years, including John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Nan Goldin, Paul McCarthy and Isa Genzken. He is currently director of special projects for the international art gallery Hauser & Wirth. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Janet Krone Kennedy, a clinical psychologist, and their two children.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Presidio

ONE

Later, in the glove box, the police found a folder of notes. It said:

Notes for the police:

(Or anybody else who finds this and wants to read it)

My name is Troy Alan Falconer. These are the things I love most: I love checking into a motel room on a hot afternoon, when the cool air inside smells of freon and anonymity. (They always leave the A/C running for you.) I love checking out at dawn, my hair combed wet to meet the world. I love hard-shell luggage and Swiss-made watches. I love black Roper Boots and white dress shirts with pearl snaps, starched so the placket stands up like pasteboard. I love full-size automatic sedans with electric windows and bench seats, upholstered in breathable fabric, not vinyl. I love driving cars like this down empty highways in the middle of the night, listening to the music of sincere-sounding country singers like Wynn Stewart and Jim Reeves.

I love these things for their own sake. But I can enjoy them only when they possess a certain additional quality, a quality that purifies the others—the quality of belonging rightfully and legally to someone other than myself.

If you’re lucky in this kind of life, a single motel room can offer up everything you need. Inside the room is a suitcase. Inside the suitcase are the traveling possessions of a man more or less your size, a nonsmoker with passable taste in clothes and aftershave. Inside his billfold—lying right on the bedspread; salesmen like to take a swim before supper—is enough cash to keep you out on the road for two or three weeks. And on the nightstand in the cut-glass ashtray are the keys to his car, parked on the diagonal just outside the door, the windshield making a convex portrait of the afternoon sky.

For me, the instant when I settle down behind the wheel of another man’s automobile is the most satisfying part. While the feeling lasts, the earth is full of promise. It’s more like getting out of something than into it—like slipping my skin, breaking clean from all the things I need to leave behind (among them the last car in which I’ve had this same feeling). I check the mirrors, ease the key into the ignition, and idle quietly out onto the road.

The first car I stole solely for my own sake was in Lubbock in the fall of 1970. A brand-new Ford Torino hardtop with hideaway headlights, it belonged to an Air Force second lieutenant who kept a change of civilian clothes on an aluminum tension rod over the backseat, and in the armrest rack a row of neatly maintained eight-track tapes, including a few by the aforementioned singers.

I had never come across a car equipped with an eight-track before. There were only a few good songs to choose from, but I knew I was finally going to get to do the choosing, not some disembodied disc jockey out there in the ether. When I heard the sound of the music coming from the speakers under my command I was so happy I almost forgot to doubt the feeling.

This was past midnight—those empty hours when the highway patrol has nothing better to do than radio in tag numbers—but I cranked up the volume and rolled down the windows and drove straight through to Plainview before I pulled over to take care of the plates.

I’d like you to believe that I started out with some kind of justification, a reason better than anger and want. But that was mostly it—same old story. It wasn’t until later that it changed from a profession into a way of life, a calling that felt almost religious if I’d been inclined that way.

If I had, I would have been its reverend, preaching my message of freedom through loss from my pulpit behind the dashboard. But I’d have been delivering the sermons to a congregation of one, a nondescript man whose freshly shaved face could be seen sticking up into the rearview mirror from the driver’s side. And believe me, he’s heard it all before.

*

Troy drove back into town on a Friday night in November of 1972 during the final week of the high school football season, when an away game had all but emptied the small grid of graveled streets. He had planned it that way, consulting the schedule in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. People in small places don’t forget their own, particularly the disappointments, and Troy didn’t want to be recognized by anybody in town except his brother, who would be where he always was, at home, findable by the light from the television, watching Gunsmoke or a fight if he could tune one in.

New Cona wasn’t yet a century old. It was one of the farming towns that took root at great intervals on the cheap land formed by the final closing pockets of the American frontier. For those who arrived later, born there, it was never easy to understand why anyone had settled in this particular place in a part of the country that maps had once called the Great American Desert, a place whose previous inhabitants had used it mostly as a hunting ground and a near-waterless pass-through in which to strand their enemies.

The town sat halfway down the western edge of a caliche plain formed by the earth that flowed down to the Gulf of Mexico as the Rockies pushed up. The mesa left in the wake was hard and slab-flat, a hundred and fifty miles across, devoid of trees and all but the hardiest brush, covered with low grasses that fed every living creature except coyotes and wolves, which ate the creatures that ate the grass. The Spanish called that part of what would later become Texas the Llano Estacado, the staked plain, maybe because the breaks at its boundaries looked like palisades or because horses’ leads, with nothing to tie them to, had to be staked to the ground itself. But the name could have meant something else, orphaned in translation like so many others left over from the Spaniards and the Mexicans.

A few trees could be seen now, in town and clustered in the distance near farmhouses, looking conspicuous, like uninvited guests. Other things rose from the flatness—radio towers, water towers, telephone poles, torqued cedar fence posts in endless rows alongside the roads—but in most visible ways the land had changed little as a result of civilization, and outside town the structures seen from the road all sat low to the ground, obedient to the horizon. The oldest were bleached sere brown, as if the elements were winning a slow war against their intrusion. Looking out past them into the distance, it wasn’t hard to imagine the fear a cavalry soldier must have felt here once as he mounted the mesa in pursuit of some enemy he couldn’t see. But the land no longer seemed actively hostile. It just seemed like one of the places on the earth that had long ago stopped bothering to hide its indifference.

That night a new moon had left the countryside almost invisible. The only way to gain a bearing beyond the headlights was to look for the distant glow of town drawing a silver bead across the windshield, and this far out the lights remained so faint that Troy’s eyes picked them up only when he looked away. The line began to brighten and dissipate into discrete points that spread across his field of vision, and as he drove into them, the outline of a water tower materialized above, dimly visible under a crown of red aircraft beacons pulsing into the dark.

Five miles out he passed a cotton gin, which on long stretches of road in many parts of Texas holds out the first sign of human existence, and it was alive this time of year, even this time of night, casting an orange halo...