On a scorching October day in Southern California’s Mojave Desert -- in the “suburbs” of Tecopa, a sleepy town of 72 residents not far from Death Valley -- a beat-up, white Toyota 4- Runner barreled down a lonely one-lane road at 90 miles an hour. The empty trailer affixed with a broken hook clinked and clanked along the poorly-paved road, struggling to keep up. The axels groaned. The tires squealed.
When the paved road came to an abrupt end -- the unofficial line between nowhere and almost somewhere -- giving way to gravel, the driver didn’t slow. With one calloused, sun-darkened foot, he pressed the pedal closer to the floor. As the car accelerated, the thick off-roading tires kicked up dirt and gravel all around, obscuring the scenery -- and the road -- in all directions.
Not that Carlo, the man behind the wheel, was looking anyway. With his right foot pushing the gas and his left knee controlling the steering wheel, he used both hands to knock the last of a bag of popcorn into his mouth, which was tilted straight up, towards the roof of the car. The vibrations from the rocky road below that sent him bouncing up and down weren’t helping. A few of the cheesy kernels fell into his mouth, which he held wide open, revealing his gleaming-white teeth, but most missed their mark, falling onto a filthy, tattered white v-neck and then into the lap of a pair of faded jeans with rips at the knees; they were probably designer when he bought them three decades ago.
I watched from the passenger seat and tried to forget the unshakeable feeling that I was going to die as Carlo’s knee directed our high-speed roller-coaster through the obscured terrain of the golden Mojave mountains. We should have crashed. The trailer should have popped off. I should have demanded to leave the car before either of those things happened. But “should” is not a word that graces Carlo’s vocabulary. He has a way of making things happen that shouldn’t. Of making you do things you think you can’t.
He punched the radio and turned the dial all the way to the right -- his hearing goes with the years. 107.9, one of the two stations that reach this far out, blared an adrenaline-inducing combination of Cream’s White Room and static. Minutes later, to Sympathy for the Devil, Carlo veered off the gravel road onto BLM land, trundled across the rocky desert ground for a few hundred feet, and screeched to a halt.
By the time I stumbled out of the car and took stock of the marvelous sight -- mound after towering mound of gorgeous gravel and rocks, glimmering red, orange, yellow, and purple in the desert sun that beat down on the abandoned mine sandwiched between two small mountains -- Carlo was already hard at work. “Come on, let’s go,” he called from behind the truck as he pulled buckets out of the trunk. “It’s hot.”
Even though he spent the last nine years building a desert garden, Carlo never liked to stop and smell the roses. Work more, build more, he always pushed. He coaxed the people around him to produce more than they ever thought they could.
I watched as he sank to his knees, shoved the bucket between his thighs, and attacked the gravel mound with both gloved hands, shoving the ornate rocks into his bucket with a strength and ferocity foreign to most men of 59 -- to most men of 21, for that matter. Then, he half walked, half-ran the bucket back to the trailer, stumbling from the weight, grabbed another, and repeated. I followed suit. Before long, we had filled the carpeted trailer with sixteen buckets of marbled gravel and strapped them in for the bumpy ride.
Bouncing through sandy ditches and over slabs of rock, the 4-Runner protested the added weight with every squeal it could muster, but Carlo refused to go any slower. Always faster, never slower -- that was Carlo’s way. That is, until we reached the last hump before the gravel road. I got out to inspect the incline.
“With all the weight, I don’t think this’ll work.”
“Yes, it will.” He hadn’t even bothered to look.
“It’s not a big deal, we can take half the buckets off and carry them over the hump.” “No, it’ll work. Get in the car or move.”
It worked. Somehow. At top speed, the overworked, behemoth vehicle bounded over the final hurdle and onto the road, without so much as tipping a bucket. As Carlo grinned triumphantly, I shouted, half-joking, over the blaring radio: “There’s nothing Carlo Roncancio can’t do!”
All levity drained from his face and he locked his jaw as if he was entering the boxing ring. He turned, trained his oversize black-rimmed glasses directly towards me, and spoke with more intensity and sincerity than I’d ever seen in the month that I’d lived on his property: “Damn straight.”
Carlo wasn’t born into the desert life. Far from it, he was raised in Kingston, New York for most of his childhood, after leaving his birthplace in Bogota, Colombia when he was very young. In the first few weeks that I got to know Carlo, I tried to learn more about his life growing up, but getting Carlo to answer a question is no easy task. Not because he refused to open up, but because Carlo talked about what Carlo wanted to talk about.
You might admire the three-by-six-inch black-and-white photo from his parents’ wedding that he kept propped up on the end of his green marble kitchen table, next to a two-foot-tall purple geode, and ask a benign question about where they got married. Ignoring your question, he’d jump at the chance to gush about his love for his parents -- how beautiful his mother and how handsome his father looked -- then immediately recount the sorrow of his mother’s passing, working himself up almost to tears now four years later, and dive into a rant about his “crazy bitch” sister who bungled -- intentionally, he says -- his mother’s medical care, giving him only thirteen says to say goodby to his ailing, beloved mother. Before you could find a foothold on the conversation, he’d berate you with the tale of his “whore” niece who “was a nice girl, but would fuck anything,” then -- after a glance back at the wedding photo -- hand down a forceful commandment that you appreciate the older women in your family and get all the stories you can from them before it’s too late. Talking to Carlo was exhausting. He was a conversational schizophrenic.
Despite his wild rants and conversational twists and turns, there were three things about his life in New York that he always came back to. The first was his difficult relationship with his father, a wealthy Colombian stoic who didn’t provide Carlo much of any attention, except when he beat him for failing to make the family look good. Largely because of his father’s outsize influence on his childhood, Carlo didn’t realize he was gay until his early 30s. The second thing was the passing of his grandmother -- Anna, though he called her Anita -- when he was young. The third was so terrible that I would have struggled to believe it if he didn’t keep the proof right next to his parents’ wedding photo on the kitchen table. When he was in high school, his sister, also named Anna, and his girlfriend, Rose, were killed by a drunk driver in a car accident. Even today, every time he eats breakfast, their obituaries sit at his table.
It wasn’t a stretch for me not to believe Carlo about the tragedy that befell his sister and girlfriend. He told many stories that were too outrageous to be true. When he talked about the three decades he spent as a millionaire photographer in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, he spun outlandish tales, like how he cut Mick Jagger’s hair before doing coke together in his dressing room, or how bug-eyed addicts used to bang down the sliding glass door in his self-designed Vegas mansion looking for a party. How he was a devout raw vegan for six years and lifted weights every day. How he went celibate for ten years after watching too many friends fall prey to the AIDS epidemic, and only started sleeping with men again if they showed recent test results.
So many of Carlo’s stories were difficult to believe, at least for someone with as narrow and as short a life experience as mine. But every once in a while, he’d show me something that made me wonder. He had a photo of himself with a mohawk, clad in a leather gimp suit, on a chain leash held by Sigourney Weaver -- the cover photo for a Tarantino movie that was never released, he claimed. In another photo, he and Alexis Arquette are dancing together in an LA club. On the wall of his over-the-top, bizarrely-designed living room, an old shirtless photo of Carlo attested to his diet and workout regimen. Now, decades later, only the wide biceps remain -- the slight paunch, thin legs, salt-and-pepper stubble, and dyed, receding black hair are all new additions. And, though he couldn’t provide photo evidence of the Mick Jagger meeting, he was surprisingly talented at cutting hair.
Those stories were from a past life, before he moved to Tecopa nine years ago. Before he broke ground on Villa Anita, a desert garden meets art exhibit meets hotel. He called it a “secret oasis” to escape the city life he could no longer bear.
Villa Anita -- Carlo’s brainchild, his home -- was a reflection of its creator. Spanning eight desert acres replete with lush green gardens, hand-painted trailers, and towering sculptures built entirely of recycled materials, the complex was beyond extravagant. And, like everything Carlo did, it was built on “Carlotta magic.”
That’s what his boyfriend, Jack, called it. The two of them had dated and lived together on the property for four years, ever since Jack, now 26, started working there after college. Despite the vast age difference, they were basically married. Jack’s name was all over everything -- even the land titles. They discussed often the likelihood that Jack would live a full life long after Carlo passed, and they were fully prepared.
Jack’s phrase, “Carlotta magic,” was mostly a joke. “Carlotta” was the name of the clothing line Carlo tried to start in the 90s, without much success. As for the “magic,” that’s what Jack called Carlo’s ability to make just about anything work the way he wanted it to. Building a new bathroom, Carlo would stack a tilted shower on top of three half-broken pallets piled on top of rocky ground, slap a level on top, the bubble would come to rest perfectly in the middle. Jack would stand back in awe.
Sometimes, like with the shower, his feats truly did feel like magic. Like the time Carlo took the Penske box truck off-roading a few miles down the road to haul rocks (from the area near Charles Manson’s old house) without getting it stuck in the sand. Or the fact that he frequently pushed a gut-wrenching 120 mph on the highway without getting pulled over.
But, more often than not, especially with his creations, it was a magician’s magic. Carlo tricked the eye and deceived the mind. No guests noticed the sloppy, haphazard way the orange insulation was sprayed into the clear, glass bottles making up each towering bottle wall, because they were too busy marveling at the sheer size and impressiveness of the four-walled bottle cottage. Nobody noticed the filthy cobwebs above the low-hanging, five-foot-wide stained glass kitchen chandelier because any look upward was immediately drawn to the striped black and neon green ceiling lined with framed paintings and photographs. Yes, even the ceilings had art on them. Carlo put up so many trees it was near impossible to see the forest.
He did the same with food. Nobody noticed that the arugula salad was dripping with an obscene amount of lemon juice or that the zucchini was coated in an amount of oil that would make Gordon Ramsey weep. They were blown away by the sheer amount of food -- platter after platter, dish after dish lined the dining room table, lit by four different sets of hanging lights. Before you could inspect any one platter too closely, he’d whisk another in with fanfare, recapturing your attention. Five kinds of vegetables, two kinds of potatoes, and a roast chicken Carlo always claimed to have cooked himself, even though he never did. He was a showman, dazzling visitors with the spectacle of it all, preventing any of them from looking close enough to see the cracks under the paint.
Sometimes it wasn’t magic at all. Sometimes he lied. He lied about small things, telling guests the vegetables were organic when they really weren’t, that the wine was from Napa when it really wasn’t. And he lied about bigger things. He once tried to comfort multiple sets of guests afraid for their covid safety after being pushed into the same living room -- where all guests were invited to spend time before and after dinner -- by telling them that the house had air filters that sprayed alcohol to disinfect the air. In the end, against their better judgment, they all stayed for a drink.
In the two months I worked at Villa Anita in the Fall of 2020, those were the most shocking of Carlo’s coercions: how frequently he convinced covid-cautious city folk to share a family-style indoor meal with us and whatever other guests happened to join that night. In mid-November, while the rest of the country entered a deadly pandemic winter, I sat around a table with Carlo, Jack, two fellow workers, a professional gambler from Las Vegas, his girlfriend from Los Angeles, a 40-something restauranteur from Arizona, her boyfriend the cargo pilot, and a pair of young filmmakers from Miami -- all unmasked. That was a common occurrence.
It wasn’t that Carlo didn’t fear the virus, it was that he didn’t understand it. His understanding of germs and contamination stretched as far as hands and surfaces. He’d been spraying tables and silverware with rubbing alcohol since long before 2020. After eating dinner and talking in close proximity with a guest, he’d sometimes ask me to wash their dishes particularly thoroughly, just to make sure we don’t get sick. There were many things he didn’t understand about science. He once derided me for wearing sunscreen because “that shit really causes cancer. Look it up.”
Carlo had an unshakeable worldview -- one that the pandemic didn’t nicely slot into. To Carlo, everyone always wanted something. Nobody’s intentions were pure. A kind older man doing a favor must want sex. A friendly visitor asking questions must want to steal. On top of being a magician, Carlo was certifiably paranoid.
Every question he asked or assumption he made revealed a deep-seated belief that everyone has malintent and nobody is quite who they say. The world -- as Carlo had been pushed by a lifetime of trauma to see it -- is run not by the people who are the most honest -- because everyone will take advantage of you if given the chance -- or the purest -- because everyone is motivated first and foremost by sex, money, and drugs -- but by those who are the boldest. By those who force their truth onto those around them. As a great photographer knows, the truth of what “is” doesn’t matter -- only how people see it.