“I was born in El Paso during World War II, in 1943, but then my family moved to Santa Fe because my dad was a construction engineer and got a job building the Los Alamos laboratory. He didn’t know what they were doing; he saw those little radioactive signs and didn’t know what they meant.
“We moved back to El Paso during my first year of high school, around ‘58, and I went to El Paso High but got thrown out for failure to show appropriate respect to authority, so I went to Cathedral but got thrown out of there too for the same problem. Finally, I got sent to Allen Military Academy in Bryan, Texas, and I joined the Naval Reserve. When I got out of Allen, I went and helped start the Vietnam War. I never actually was in Vietnam; we’d just cruise up and down the coast and bombard the place.
“I got out of the navy in ’64, when I was about 21, and I came back to El Paso and got a job working on pumps, like I learned in the Navy, and I went to Phoenix and started my own business, servicing water softeners. I delivered salt, and I developed a route with over a thousand customers, but after a couple years I sold that business and came back to El Paso. I thought I was rich because I had ten grand, but I lost it, I invested it all in a load of marijuana that didn’t make it across the bridge so, naturally, that became a challenge and I spent the next ten years bringing pot across the border. I’d bring it from all the way down outside of Acapulco and drive it up, and I had a few kids who’d help me jump the fence and bring it over into downtown El Paso – remember when they had all those rail yards in downtown – and I’d take it all the way to New York and sell it there, until I sold some to the DEA. Well, actually the DEA didn’t even exist back then, it was the ATF. I did 14 months and then got sent back for failing to report while on parole. Everybody was running around doing that; it was wild times back then, it was the Chagra days.
“I had gotten married right out of high school, and I had three sons and then a daughter by another marriage. They’re all doing well; I mean they all have enough attitude to do well. My son thinks if he puts enough signs up he can become County Judge. Man, talk about paying for your sins, my daughter put me through some real crap. She ran off one time, and they got a circuit so if you want to dance topless, these bikers will shift you all over the country, but then she came back to El Paso and was dancing at Machievelli’s, and she got shot. Some dope deal was going down and it went bad, and she was just a bystander, standing around naked, and this guy comes in and starts shooting and shot her through the arm. It was a blessing because I don’t know how I would have gotten her out that scene otherwise, she was making so damn much money, but she don’t dance no more, not since she got shot.
“Anyway, it got to where the penalties became too much and the thrill was over, it got to where I just wasn’t into pot anymore, so I stopped doing that, and one day, back in the seventies, I woke up with a hangover and I thought, 'God damn, what am I good for?' It was one of those religious experiences. You have to leave something, I thought, and I was doing a lot of construction on solar adobe homes so I decided that I was going to develop solar energy because I always had a knack for machines and abstract thought. I started to design solar devices, and I thought this is what I’ll leave, this will be my justification for being here. I figured the crunch was coming and I’d be ahead of everybody, so that’s what I’ve been doing all these years, and I have all these solar inventions – I made solar pumps, a couple of different engines, a bladeless turbine – but nobody wants it, nobody gives a damn, it’s the most absolutely thankless, fruitless task I’ve ever undertaken.
“Once you study it and you read all the facts, you know that our whole infrastructure is built on hydrocarbons, and without oil, this civilization is heading down the shitter, and I’m going down with everybody else because nobody would listen to me.
“I had to teach myself about this; there’s not a single solar energy course in Arizona, Texas or New Mexico, in any of the schools. You can get a doctorate in solar energy in Cuba or Japan or India, but not in the United States. At Harvard they got a solar energy program, but it’s only good during the two months out of the year that they have any sun, and the University of Chicago, they have a guy that’s done all kinds of research on how to concentrate sunlight, when Chicago has sunlight, but here in the Southwest, it’s incredible, it’s beyond hopeless, it’s ridiculous, there’s nothing.
“El Paso could lead the country in solar energy. We get more sunlight than anywhere else – more than Phoenix, more than Yuma, more than any other city in the Unites States. We have the manufacturing capacity over in Juarez to build solar machines, and in El Paso we could actually almost maintain the same level of civilization by using solar energy, but the East Coast, the Northeast, forget it, there’s no way to sustain that. It’s only been a couple hundred years since the industrial revolution, but we’re at peak oil now and the age of hydrocarbon is coming to an end. Everything about the human race is going to decline, including body size. We’re not homo sapiens anymore, we’re hydrocarbon-man. We’re going back to where we were at the beginning of the 1800's, and nobody is prepared for that. When the oil’s gone, we’re back to rickshaws.
“About six months ago I got clogged up, I couldn’t urinate, and I started passing blood, so I went to the hospital and when I woke up, they had removed a tumor from my bladder. They put me on hormone therapy, and they cut my balls off. They told me that’s it, that I have like grade nine prostate cancer, and they said I had two years maximum. That was six months ago, so I figure I have about a year left, and now I’m in a hurry, I have to get my ideas out there, I’m in a rush to write all this shit down because I never wrote patents or anything, and I keep thinking of more new stuff, but I don’t have many places I can publish it. I can do it with the El Paso Solar Association, but they’re all part-timers, they have no support from anyone, so I’ve been thinking of taking my stuff and going to Cuba and see if they can use it, because eventually everybody’s going to need it, and Cuba will share it. I’m compelled to do this stuff so when I get up to the pearly gates, at least I can say I tried.
“I don’t ponder my mortality; I’ve lived such a good life. Ever since I first got out of the Navy, I’ve almost never had any jobs, I’ve been independent, self-employed. When you don’t have to have a job, it gives you time to study and learn things.
“I’ve always felt comfortable with artists because I understand what art is, and I consider inventing solar machines to be art because it reflects my life, like art reflects an artist’s life, but it’s more challenging than the fine arts because not only does it have be original, it has to work too, it’s bound by physical law. It’s tremendously rewarding that way; and when the light bulb goes off, it’s like, ‘Eureka!’”
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Click here to see samples of Victor Cobos writings and inventions.
