Albuquerque's Carlos the Rag Man, beaten for car money, cruelty in life stories, Fort Langley childhood memories, homeless chemist's sad end, living with a limp, LSD trip gone wrong, tragic story of Dallas
Ask A Genius 981: Old Dallas from Fort Langley
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/28
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, Dallas, I had a really bad headache today. I was having trouble focusing, lying down a lot, and trying to get some writing and scheduling done for articles. My mind started wandering, and a memory came up from when I used to live in Fort Langley. I was a child at the time, probably in my late single-digit age or early teens. I remember walking into and out of town, past the cemetery to the main street, many days, either going to school or just hanging out. There was this one guy who was always walking up and down the streets. He was old and had a really bad limp.
So, this guy, even as I became more aware of people and time as a young kid, I remember him. The story goes that this guy named Dallas, in the small town of Fort Langley, population 3,400, when it was even much smaller, was going to buy a car with cash. He had a wad of cash. On his way to buy the car, he got stopped by a group of men who beat the living daylights out of him. He was a nice guy, as far as I remember. The story goes that his limp came from that beating. Then he died.
Rosner: Did they catch the guys?
Jacobsen: I don’t know. That part of the story never came up. I can ask some people I know to get more details. It was such a tragic story. It was one of my first young, intimate memories of a real tragedy in someone else’s life. Just trying to get something as ordinary as a car, especially in that era when cars were a big deal, and losing all that money, being beaten, and then being left to walk around with a limp in a small town where everyone knows you. It’s not like some random block in New York. Everyone knows you. Then he dies. That’s the story.
Rosner: Yeah, I mean, I was older. I was living in Albuquerque when I was 26, working in a bar on Central Avenue, which used to be the main drag, and it still kind of is for the university. But Albuquerque itself is a little sleazy, and Central is plenty sleazy. There was Carlos the Rag Man. Carlos used to be a grad student in chemistry. In the 60s or 70s, he was making LSD, and I guess he dealt it. The cops were about to bust him, so he ate his supply. It could have been like 300, 500, or even a thousand doses. LSD, you know, you can swallow a ton of doses, and what it takes to mess you up is almost nothing in terms of micrograms. So he was totally messed up.
The cops arrested him and left him in a cell for three days, which broke his brain. They should have taken him to the hospital and shot him full of Thorazine, which would have knocked him out. He could have spent his tripping time unconscious or very sedated, but they failed in their duty. His family sued the Albuquerque cops and won millions of dollars. So he was a millionaire, but his brain had been broken, and he was now crazy. He couldn’t live in a settled environment, so he was homeless and called the Rag Man because he’d walk around in rags up and down Central Avenue, semi-coherent. After living like this for probably 20 years, he was sleeping on a discarded couch, and some shitty teens set the couch on fire, and he burned to death. That’s the story I thought of when you told the story of old Dallas. Pointless, pointless cruelty.
Jacobsen: That reminds me of a lot of life. There’s a lot of random shit in life.
Rosner: Yeah, and it also jibes with the sads that I have. We’re two hours post-Biden-Trump debate, and the debate seems like an irrevocable tragedy. Maybe it won’t turn out to be, but I got the same sick feeling I get when I receive bad news that can’t be remedied or when I think about how I’ve wasted my life on nonsense. I have wasted big swaths of my life on nonsense, which is a smaller tragedy than being beaten to death or set on fire, but my failings sometimes feel tragic to me.
Jacobsen: Any final points?
Rosner: No, I mean, when people tell stories like this, the lesson seems to be that life can be cruel and unfair. One of the tasks of humanity is to build social and scientific structures to mitigate the cruelty and arbitrariness of life. Evolution, not having motives or goals, can be cruel. Every conscious being is made to want to survive, and we are conscious of what we want because consciousness helps in surviving. But evolution offers no pity, relief, or chance to avoid death. Life is fucking cruel. We’re a few thousand years into the human project of mitigating that cruelty, and we’re on the cusp of making huge strides in remedying the cruelty of life. The trade-off will be that we may get a lot of our wishes coming true but at the expense of moving into a world with new forms of consciousness that may not treat humans very well.
America is polluted with guns. On average, 100 Americans die each day from gun violence. Half of those are suicides. But still, that’s a ton of people dying from guns compared to other countries. The solution doesn’t seem to be to control the guns because there are already so many. In like five years, there will be two guns for every adult American. Right now, it’s one and three-quarters. Of course, not every American has a gun. About a third of US households are gun-owning households. The solution isn’t getting rid of the guns because that seems impossible. America is just very well-seeded with guns. A potential solution, though very science fiction-y, is to be able to record our consciousness regularly. This is common in science fiction. Sometime in the future, you’ll be able to record the contents of your brain, so if something happens to you, you’re downloaded into another vessel. With the strides we’re making, this seems increasingly likely to be possible. Some things, like time travel, are probably impossible, but downloading your brain seems like it could happen. If that’s the case, it solves a lot of problems. If you get shot, but your brain was downloaded a week ago, all you lose is a week and maybe your body. Maybe you have to live in the metaverse for a while until you can afford another vessel to keep your consciousness in, but it’s better to be yourself in whatever space you’re living in than to be just dead. It’s a huge potential remedy for the cruelty of the world.
—
Rick Rosner, American Television Writer, http://www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, http://www.in-sightpublishing.com
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