he would drink. If they wanted to party in Juarez, he was more than happy to oblige. About the only thing Mike wouldn’t do is back down. The occasional pummeling might not have made him any the wiser, but it instilled an enduring toughness that would ultimately earn him the acceptance of the older boys.
Mike, of course, would tell you he won more fights than he lost. But the mangled claw that was his right hand, the semi-wayward nose and picket-fence smile might lead one to seriously reconsider the definition of winning. He was a solidly built 5′ 7″ of strutting bantam, with curly hair, slightly bowed legs, and a strong chin that preceded him wherever he went. There was about him an aura of mischief that was both innocent and foreboding. Sober, he was a bright, engaging, quick-witted guy with a wicked sense of humor and an innate curiosity. Drunk, he was a little ball of hate.
Mike had grown up the son of a warrior, patriot and disciplinarian. His father was a lieutenant colonel who wore his rank comfortably, in or out of uniform. Growing up the first son of a career soldier, in fact, was something Mike and I had in common. My own father was a retired lieutenant colonel and West Point graduate who ruled his family with military precision.
Survivors of both the Great Depression and World War II, these were men who cast long shadows. The rules of the road were absolute. As a son, you could either embrace the rigid measure to which you were held, or rebel and incur the wrath of the righteous soldier. For Mike it was an easy choice. He was not his father’s son. He was his father’s problem. And he would express himself by being everything his father was not.
Among the things Mike Halliday was not, successful student would be listed near the top. He could hardly sit still through a Saturday matinee, much less a spirited reading of Canterbury Tales. If you wanted him to find the hypotenuse of a triangle, why couldn’t he just get up and look for it? And how in the hell does the ability to parse a sentence make you a better person?
To his credit, Mike managed to complete four years of high school. Unfortunately, four years were not nearly enough to earn him a diploma. At the age of eighteen, Mike Halliday applied the holy trinity of ways to fuck up your life: he dropped out of high school, got married, and had a baby. It might not make him the Most Likely to Succeed, but it would earn him a draft deferment and keep him out of Vietnam.
It should be noted that Mike was not a stupid kid. He may have been an undiagnosed alphabet of learning disabilities, but when something did manage to attract his interest, it was in for a thorough examination. What held Mike’s attention were all things mechanical, the early manifestation of which resulted in all things being taken apart. It wasn’t that he was so curious about how they’d been put together. He knew that instinctively. Taking things apart simply allowed him to find a better way to put them back together—with a few custom alterations that were often an improvement, occasionally a disaster.
When Mike and I sat down to begin this book, we were gathered around the workbench in his eastside El Paso shop, a windowless warehouse with a fifteen-foot ceiling and concrete floor. Without using a single watt of electricity, the place was lit up like the Rose Bowl on game night. Thanks to a unique set of tubular skylights on which he held patent, Mike burned only enough electricity to run his coffee pot and radio. His Sun Bulbs did the rest.
The frame of a 1972 Ducati 750 GT rested on a motorcycle rack, its engine beginning to take shape atop his workbench. It was not so much a restoration as a re-invention. He showed me some of the modifications he had made and talked about those yet to come.
Mike was proud of his work and always eager to talk about it. But sooner or later, as it always does, the discussion turned to old times—the glory days when drugs, money, and adrenaline fueled our lives. Though I have known Mike for over forty years, there was still a lot I didn’t know about the early days. I urged him to start at the beginning, his first encounter with the demon weed.
MIKE HALLIDAY
Okay, it was in the summer of 1967. My son was one year old at the time. I’d been working road construction on the new freeway between El Paso and Las Cruces. I was on the crew of a giant rock crusher—a huge thing that chewed up boulders and spit out gravel. It managed to kill about one guy a year. The centrifugal force and kinetic energy happening there was some serious shit. You couldn’t just turn it on and off. If it got you, you were dead.
Anyway, I was back in town on one of my days off and four of us were driving out Montana Street with a couple of six packs. We pulled off on one of the dirt roads—there used to be so many of them out there you could go for days into the desert, then find a completely different road to bring you back.
So my friend Oscar pulls out a joint. Now I had grown up with the understanding that pot was smoked by Mexican gangs right before a street fight so they wouldn’t feel the pain of getting beat by chains and steel pipes and stuff. I knew what it was, but I had never tried it or been around it so I watched the first guy take a hit, then the next guy, then Oscar. He handed it to me. Well, I’m no genius, but I knew how to smoke—that was one of my skills. So I took a big hit. And that was probably the most life-changing thing that ever happened to me. I really believe it saved my life.
I was a horrible person. I was a bad drunk, okay? I was eighteen, nineteen years old, and I was an alcoholic. I used to drink quarts of beer just to get the taste in my mouth so I could get on with some serious drinking. And fighting? That’s why my hands are all bent to hell. I would be in a bar and see two guys facing off—I had no knowledge of either one of them or what the fight was about. But I’d walk up and announce that I could kick both their asses—that’s how stupid I was.
But as soon as I smoked that first joint, I realized I’d found what I was looking for, what I needed in life. And I never even knew I needed it! I was completely flabbergasted by the effect it had on me. I didn’t want to fight anybody—didn’t need to prove anything to anybody. It was so clear how stupid that was, I was almost embarrassed about it. I knew after that first joint that this was something I didn’t want to run out of.
Of course, I worked in New Mexico at the time and I didn’t have access to it that much, but when I got back to El Paso and started smoking more and more, I’d go over to Juarez by myself at night. I’d just drive to the bridge, walk over, and ask a cabbie for some pot. Then I’d put a few joints in my pocket and walk back across the bridge.
Usually I’d wait until I saw a little crowd, like four or five guys that were partying. I’d just kind of get in with them and act like I belonged, and the next thing you know, the inspectors were waving us through. They weren’t really looking for pot in those days—they were more worried about people sneaking into the country and illegally mowing your lawn.
Just a few miles west of downtown El Paso, hard by the Rio Grande, stood the University of Texas at El Paso—a little school that did all it could to be taken seriously. UTEP was a stepchild, franchised in the mid-sixties by the mega-rich University of Texas system. Though it tried with all its might to attain the lofty status of its namesake, its only claim to fame so far had been the 1966 NCAA National Basketball Championship, for which the school would receive far more derision than acclaim.
Texas Western College, as it was known in 1966, had won the title starting five black players versus an all-white University of Kentucky team coached by the legendary Adolph Rupp. It was an historic event that galvanized a city and forever altered college basketball. But poor little UTEP couldn’t win for losing. They were pilloried by the national press for renting their players, some of whom they labeled as felons and none of whom, they noted, had ever seen the inside of a classroom.
It wasn’t true, of course. Several members of the team would settle in El Paso and be embraced by the community. All of them would graduate. None of them had ever been to prison. But as Coach Don Haskins would sadly reflect, “If I had known what the reaction was going to be, I’d just as soon have finished second.”
UTEP was mostly