By Angus Stump
It was 1985. I was driving down East Mountain Road as Julie Traxler was driving up. We stopped in the road to talk. Julie’s VW Beetle was a living, breathing mobile art exhibit, forever changing and sprouting its own new mini-exhibits. At various times, it sported toothbrush curtains, lipstick kisses on the windshield, a little hula skirt for Mardi Gras, and countless other inspired treatments, each a tiny part of the private exhibition that constantly curated itself in her wake.
Today, her car had an eight-foot marlin mounted on top of it. “Nice marlin,” I said. “Yeah,” she said. “Did you put that there?”
Julie Traxler has gone on now. She is in a more interesting place, and we’re all poorer for it. Julie was an artist, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. Everything she touched was a work in progress. She was never quite done and never quite started, because art was just something that happened to her. Julie Traxler was just one of those people.
Lloide might be four of those people.
Amalie’s is less than a year old and the most talked-about coffee shop in Albuquerque. The cafe is Middle Eastern, heavily international and curated for a mid-to-young professional. The kind with a passport and a reason to use it. The architecture is soothing but not soft, welcoming but not eager. As I waited in line, I played eyebrow tag with some young ragtags draped across very nice furniture. It may have been D&D, but I don’t think so.
I ordered black coffee. It was so real.
True-to-oath by-God black coffee. Not espresso, not Turkish, not Italian brew. Something else. Something vivid and specific.
Kansas doesn’t have this.
I sipped my indescribable coffee alone. I did not feel resisted. I did not feel embraced. But I did not feel like just a customer. I was a person here, and I felt respected.
I thought about that.
I had come to New Mexico, to Albuquerque, to Amalies and elsewhere, to find interesting people.
I thought about that too.
Then Lloide and his friend walked through the door.
The universe was showing off.
Lloide’s hair is a Medusa-like spray of elflocks. These are braids gone their own way over decades, with their own agenda and life goals by now. He has written of himself that his elflocks “don’t grow nearly as wild as the neurons inside my head,” and I won’t challenge that.
Eager-eyed, powerfully sincere, and piercingly intelligent in the manner of the outer-edge art school freak, Lloide is not the all-singing spotlight weirdo, but a kind of creative vibe that seeps into the corners of a room and lingers. The kind that really means business.
His partner was quiet, sophisticated, sphinxlike. Lloide went to the counter and came back with a large slice of cake, which he set in front of the man with something approaching ceremony. The man appraised it. He took a bite and nodded.
That was the last thing he contributed to the afternoon.
I imposed myself on their table and blurted out my pitch. Science fiction, time travel, heist, romance, buddy flick, breakfast recipes, no genre slot on Amazon. This book is Mikey, and Mikey is yours now. Mikey has always been polite to the other books. He does the dishes sometimes. We’ll be sorry to see him go.
Lloide received this like communion. He placed the book immediately. His mind went straight to Bubonicon, (“kind of in reference to the Bubonic Plague,” he offered). It is Albuquerque’s annual sci-fi convention, and has been going since the late sixties. George R.R. Martin is a regular.
Lloide received the book as a peer.
The fake name took a minute. He lobbied for his real name. I wouldn’t take it. He tried again. We worked it letter by letter until we landed on a slightly different version of his name. I told him I didn’t spell it wrong enough.
So I’m going with the unsanctioned Lloide. Fact is, anyone that wants to find this guy will find him. Work like this, much like Tessie, always finds its way to the people who need it.
He asked about the QR code. “Please scan it,” I said. “Explain how the book found you. I just hope you’ll spend a little creative energy on it. It’s like getting a postcard from a book. I’m building a map of all the places I didn’t sell the damn thing.”
Julie Traxler had about a hundred bowling balls in her yard, all arranged in various sculptures and diorama. One hung from a tree. I asked her once where they came from. She said, “Oh, you know how you’ll be driving down the road and you see a bowling ball? Most people don’t stop. I always do.”
Lloide pointed me toward his website.
I see flame imagery, rendered with fractals. He starts in the math, you see, and he wiggles it around until an image declares itself. Then he follows it. My first response was wrong. Or not exactly wrong, but incomplete. I had loved his art for the wrong reason, or maybe in the wrong order. By the time we got to his Victorian Rose Garden, I asked how he controlled the radiance so brilliantly. He relaxed a bit.
It truly is spectacular work. But I should have led with radiance.
His music is stranger. Here we have an album of instrumental compositions written in search of a film. There’s another built around the Eleventh Doctor Who. There is also a Concerto for Shower-Curtain Rod and Sonic Screwdriver, played on an instrument he built himself.
And there’s one piece in a tuning Harry Partch ascribed to panpipes from Mount Olympus with two time travelers meeting throughout their lives at different points relative to each other. One melody is reversed, and it is harmonized against itself as it goes the other direction.
I cannot think of a better metaphor for time travel.
He researches folklore from cultures that attributed certain sounds to supernatural beings. He performs at festivals he helps organize. The chronic illness that took him off the road didn’t take away the compulsion. He just does it from Albuquerque now.
The inscription in Mikey: Hi, I’m Mikey.
The sphinx was still working on his cake. I thanked Lloide by name and left.
As I walked back to the hotel, I kept my eyes peeled for bowling balls. Didn’t see any.
