Arizona Dreaming

Reflections on a home away from home

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Well, I feel the rain drops from the storm down in Mexico
Truck will go no further, out of gas
I walk through the desert past a lizard and a rattlesnake
I tip the bottle and bite the lime

There ain't no moral to this story at all Anything I tell you very well could be a lie
There ain't no morals to these stories at all
And everything I tell you, you can bet will be a lie

I been away from the living,
I don't need to be forgiven I'm just waiting for that cold black sun-cracked
Numb-inside
Soul of mine
To come alive

— The Refreshments, Nada

The time I first lay eyes on Arizona, in the flesh, it’s August, 1997, and I’m riding shotgun in my best friend Paul’s red Nissan pickup truck, barreling across the Sonoran desert on I-10 from LA.

I’m sick as a dog. Sun poisoning. Like most 19-year-old guys, I’m kind of an idiot. I spent the previous day body surfing on Zuma beach. All day, without so much as a drop of sunblock. I’ve got a mix of ethnicities — Irish, Slovak, English, Welsh — but not a single one of them has a melanin count that can hold up to 8 hours of California sun unaided.

As we pass the windmill farms and make our way into Phoenix proper, the pickup starts struggling. We’re hauling Paul’s Honda CBR 1000 in the bed, and there’s a U-Haul trailer with all our crap hitched up to the back. With the mercury well into the triple digits, the little 4-banger’s coolant temperature is ascending quickly into the danger zone. Despite how I feel, we have no choice but to turn off the A/C and roll down the windows. It’s an unholy 112 degrees outside.

I’ve got blisters all over my shoulders and upper back, I’m nauseous, and I probably have a fever. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a hot shower after getting a minor sunburn, but this is a second-degree sunburn, and the desert heat is searing. I have no desire to make a detour into Phoenix to see what the city is like or grab a bite to eat. I just want to get the hell out of the fire.

I’d spent the entire summer living and working with Paul and his family on their farm in northern Idaho. When we weren’t pulling 12-16 hour days installing pumps in water wells drilled deep into Idaho’s mountainous terrain, we were out chasing cattle, fixing fences, bailing hay, or crashing weddings for free beer. When it came time for both of us to head out to Franciscan University in Steubenville, OH, to start our freshman year, we decided to first visit his brother out in Seattle and then make a road trip down the Pacific Coast Highway before ultimately heading East. Not our first big road trip together. Not our last, either. But on this trip, Phoenix comes and goes in just a few minutes, with me too delirious to stop and smell the cactus blossoms.

The next time I see Arizona, the conditions are considerably different.

It’s December, 1998, and in the same red pickup, Paul and I and our friend Tomas are driving non-stop from southern Ohio all the way to Mexico City for the feast of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. With a cap on the pickup and a mattress in the back, we do rotations in shifts: one man drives, one rides shotgun to keep him awake, one sleeps in the back, then we switch. An unexpected overnight stop for repairs in San Antonio kills our progress, though, and we arrive too late for the holy day festivities. As we pull up to the plaza of the giant basilica in Distrito Federal — or DF (prounounced deh-ehfeh) as the locals often call it — we get out to find the gates locked and the Basilica closed. It’s a frustrating end to a week of driving through some pretty hairy conditions, but we did our best.

The roads through Mexico are nothing like they are in the US. Just a few miles past the border, we nearly slam head on into a stalled-out and abandoned tractor trailer right in the middle of the unlit highway. The roads are often unlit, in fact, and some end without warning. No matter which route we take, the road is strewn with seemingly random military checkpoints, where teenagers with automatic rifles nervously poke and prod large sleeping gringos while grilling us about where we’re going. There are also crooked cops, who stop us just to see if they can extort a bribe. Sometimes, the roads are downright treacherous. One foggy afternoon, we come across a galleta truck that has gone of the edge of one the cliffside mountain roads. We are forced to wait as the behemoth is hauled slowly back up the side by two ancient tow trucks, each having strung their tow cable around the trunk of a thick tree for extra leverage as their winches struggle and groan to haul the bulk of the thing up a nearly vertical face. The cables bite so deep into the bark it looks like they might just saw the whole tree down. But eventually, they prevail, and at long last we are allowed to pass.

Half an hour later, as we eat peanut butter from a jar for lack of a place to stop for food, we come upon the scene of a one of the reckless tour buses that had been passing us at high speeds all day. This one appears to have misjudged a particularly sharp hairpin turn and gotten lodged between cliff faces about 50 feet down. There is already a crowd gathered and nothing we can do, but the scene is macabre, and I cannot escape the feeling that people in that bus may well have died from the fall. I can’t imagine how they’ll ever retrieve them or the vehicle.

We’ve been avoiding paying for lodging by staying on the move and keeping to our rotation, but it’s late in Mexico City when we arrive, and we’re forced find a cheap hotel. The one we wind up at looks to be the pay-by-the-hour sort, but we book a whole night. I’m broke until I go home and work through the Christmas break; here only on the charity of my friends, so I have no real say in our accommodations. Still, it’s hard not to comment on the stale urine smell of our room, and not to wonder aloud just what kinds of unspeakable things have transpired there before we arrive. Tomas and I decide that for sanitary purposes, we’re sleeping fully clothed on top of the bedspread rather than find out what lies beneath. Paul shrugs and pulls back the sheets and climbs in.

The next morning, we make our visit to the tilma and present our petitions. While there, we run into a guy who offers to show us the old basilica with its solid silver altar, which is closed to the public. We take him up on the offer before realizing he wants us to pay him for this guided indiscretion, so we slip him a few pesos, grab a terribly-composed selfie in front of the altar, and move on.

Children are hawking churros in the plaza. Their refrain is a constant auditory loop: “Churros! Diez peso, diez peso, diez peeeesssooooo!” We grab some, cinnamon sugar crumbling from the edifice of absurdly long tubes of striated dough. They’re stale, but that doesn’t stop us.

We make the drive just outside DF to Teotihuacán, the ancient Mesoamerican city whose Nahuatl name means, “the home of the gods.” We climb the pyramid of the sun, and walk the grounds, and buy cheap trinkets from aggressive vendors selling Aztec calendars and decorative obsidian knives.

Tomas finds a carving of Quetzalcoatl, the villainous plumed serpent god who demanded so much human sacrifice, and connects with the culture of his people in a characteristically Tomasian way.

But there are still adventure to be had, so we move on. From DF, we make our way to Acapulco, where we enjoy Don Pedro brandy and Cuban cigars from the umpteenth floor of a hotel overlooking the ocean, and I get low-grade food poisoning from otherwise delicious seafood tacos at a rooftop cantina. We opt to avoid the “hoochie-coochie massage” being advertised by the swarms of taxi drivers looking for tourists to bleed money from. Instead, we make our way up Mexico’s West coast, stopping in Ixtapa and Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlán until we finally find ourselves crossing the desolate, saguaro-strewn wastes of Sonora and its eponymous desert.

We cross the border back into the US at Nogales, emerging from the interior of the Mexican peninsula into our home country like pearl divers surfacing for air. If you’ve traveled enough in a place very different than what you’re used to, you know the feeling. You crave familiarity like your lungs burn for oxygen.

After a brief but thorough screening at the checkpoint, we make a bee-line to the nearest McDonalds, desperate for food that is familiar and seems reasonably safe. Without so much as a GPS or a cell phone, we’ve driven nearly 3,000 miles throughout central and western Mexico, passed countless military checkpoints we weren’t sure we were going to escape from, outwitted corrupt cops, narrowly missed driving straight into the ocean, over cliffs, and other hazards, navigated urban center and jungle and desert alike, and are now eating Big Macs and Double Quarter Pounders with cheese and hot French fries and washing them down with Coca-Colas under the Stars and Stripes like God intended.

I’m in Arizona again, but this time, it’s winter, and I don’t look like a boiled lobster. We drive another 250 miles to Payson, the south-central Arizona get-out-of-the-heat-for-the-weekend town that became a popular place to buy a cabin getaway with vets coming back from the Second World War. Eddie, another college buddy of ours whose parents have a place up there, is on winter break at the family cabin. He had told us we could crash for a couple of days, so we took the much-needed break. We arrive late, and stay up even later, sitting around a bonfire on a cold night, drinking and talking and breathing in the scent of high-elevation pine trees as a mountain stream babbles nearby.

By BASlyMan - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=135221393

We spend the next day riding four-wheelers and cooking out, Payson’s 5,000-foot elevation making it feel nothing like the Arizona most people think of. There’s not a cactus in sight. When we leave to make our first visit to the Grand Canyon, we find ourselves greeted with postcard vistas covered in snow. It’s a rare look into the kind of beauty Arizona, always a bit temperamental, shows to those who have the patience to unlock her secrets.

It’s a great experience, but as I make my way back to upstate New York, grabbing a ride with a couple of stoner buddies of my cousin up in Boulder, to finish out my winter break, I have no idea I will ever see Arizona again. I’ve just completed an 11,000 mile road trip in two weeks, and to me, the 48th state is just a part of one more adventure, not a place I ever intend to stay.

Little do I know.

Throughout college, I develop a fascination with Japanese culture, and during my senior year, I apply to teach English there after graduation. The thing is, I don’t want to go alone to a place so foreign, so I talk my friend and housemate Tony into applying for the job along with me. Early in the morning after a particularly intoxicated evening involving an on campus lip-sync contest, we take the long drive into Pittsburgh. The skies are overcast and steel gray, and the granite lobby of the fancy high rise office building matches suit. We enter big, brass elevators and make our way to an upper-floor suite, where we interview for the job, drink coffee, and eat all the complimentary pastries, not necessarily in that order. Tony is majoring in education and has plans to become a history teacher, so I figure he’ll be a shoe-in. I’m much more worried about me. I have very limited teaching experience. A few weeks later, we each receive letters from the company. For some reason that is never explained to us, I am offered the job, and Tony isn’t. I’m deeply disappointed. I want to explore Asia. But I’ve traveled solo enough in Europe by this point to know I want a wingman in Japan. Not wanting to return to Michigan any more than I want to go home to Upstate New York, Tony decides to head to Phoenix after graduation with Eddie, the same friend who had put us up at the cabin a few years prior.

Feeling defeated and up against a wall, I begrudgingly decide to cancel my trip to Tokyo and follow my housemates to Valley of the Sun.

Arizona is a big place, but there are only three real cities to speak of — Phoenix, Tucson, and Flagstaff. There are other towns, but these are the population centers where the vast majority of the state’s residents live, and Phoenix is by far the largest. I have never spent so much as an afternoon there, but I’m moving out there anyway. About a month after graduation, back at my parents’ place in Kirkwood, New York, I load up my old blue Pontiac station wagon with my meager earthly possessions and say my goodbyes. I’ve asked my younger brother, Matt, to come with me for the drive, and together we start out across the country. Near St. Louis, we pick up Tony’s cousin Teresa for the second leg of the trip.

After a few days of driving and a playthrough of the entire 26-hour audiobook version of Frank Herbert’s Dune, we arrive in Flagstaff around dinner time. At 7,000 feet of elevation, Flagstaff has an even milder climate than Payson. As we switch from I-40 West to I-17 South, we gradually began to descend in elevation. This creates a paradoxical effect: the sun has now set, but the deeper the night gets, the higher the temperature rises. It was so pleasant in Flagstaff that I started with my windows down, but as I pass through various rock and sand formations along the sides of the highway, I can feel the heat radiating out from them. It’s an effect not entirely unlike passing your hand high above the lit burner of a stove. By the time we’re an hour or so into the trip, I’m forced to close the windows and put the air conditioner on.

When we finally arrive at my new apartment, just north of Tatum Boulevard and Bell Road, it’s closing in on midnight. And yet somehow, the temperature is still over 100 degrees. Something in my hind brain tells me this isn’t right, but I’ve made too far to quit. I’m not turning back now.

Over the next few weeks, my travel companions having made their way back home to get ready for their fall semester, my roommates and I all get settled into our new place. Eddie has been living there for a bit already, and has brought some furniture over from his parents’ storage unit, but our apartment is as spartan as those memes you see about how single guys live. We have a single chair in the living room in front of a television on a cart. We’ve got a basic table and chairs, and Tony and I pick up a cheap metal bunkbed set for our room. Eddie’s brothers Danny and John also live with us, so we split the rent five ways. Our highest expense is probably our air conditioning bill, since we keep the thermostat at a chilly 68 degrees.

I get a job with Qwest, the local telecom company. It’s a sales position, which requires weeks of paid training. On my first visit to their offices downtown, I’m brought in with a group of about 30 new recruits. There’s a Mexican girl in the group whose name is Erica. She’s cute, if a bit petite for my taste, but I have my eye on her. I have a thing for Mexican girls. My high school girlfriend grew up in Tijuana, and my trips to the country over the years have confirmed the impression that their women are beautiful, fun, and feisty. Another girl, whose name I don’t catch, is wearing baggy denim overalls and a white t-shirt. Her long brown hair is in a tight perm, and she has her hands shoved deep in her pockets. She wears an awkward perma-smile that says, “What the actual hell am I doing here?” She’s also attractive, but I can’t figure out her vibe. She’s frumped out, and the smile is a kind of smokescreen — somehow clearly both real and fake at the same time.

A couple weeks later, when we start our training class, that larger group has been broken out into smaller ones. Erica is nowhere to be seen, but Overalls Girl is. Her permed hair, deeply tanned skin, and the style of her makeup make me think she might also Mexican, but something in her face tells me she’s actually Asian. As our class is introduced to one another, I catch her last name: Gong. Definitely Asian. She’s not wearing baggy overalls anymore, and although at roughly 5’3” she’s a bit short for my taste — I’m 6’4” — I see now that she’s actually way more attractive than Erica, now that she’s not hiding it. And that skirt she’s wearing is definitely not hiding it.

Not to mention, she has a thousand-watt smile that absolutely lights up the room.

At lunch time, on our first day of class, she asks the room, “I’m going to Yoshi’s for sushi. Anyone want to come with me?” A general question, but she only locks eyes with me, sitting directly across from her at the conference table.

And I’m caught in that gaze, like a deer in the headlights. I will go to lunch with her anywhere, any time, all the time. I know this in this instant, and it is a realization that will never let me go.

From that point onward, I never miss a chance to grab lunch with her. One day, we pack too many people into someone’s too-small car, and she has to sit on my lap in the front seat. I’m so distracted by this development (and can’t see past her in the cramped little compact) that I actually manage to close the door on her head. But despite this mishap, and the endless ribbing I get for it thereafter, we are inseparable. Every time we touch, even inadvertently, it’s as though electricity is passing between our skin.

Lunches give way to long phone conversations, which turn into evening visits to her apartment, nearly 40 minutes away from mine. But I don’t care. I just need to be with her.

She is a chronic insomniac, but for some reason, she feels safe when I’m around. Often, in my presence, she falls effortlessly asleep. I’m committed to chastity before marriage, like the good little Catholic soldier that I am, but I love that I can give her the rest she needs, and one night, I simply can’t resist staying with her in her bed all night just to hold her so she can sleep. She does not share my morals, but she respects them, and does nothing to break my resolve. When I come home in the early morning and throw my shirt over my eyes to block the light, breathing her residual perfume in with every intake of breath. At work, I leave little notes for her, at her desk, on the windshield of her car, wherever I know that she’s likely to find them. Usually, they just say, “Hi.” It’s stupid, but I just want her to know I’m thinking about her.

The first time we kiss, we’re sitting on the couch in her apartment, listening to music on her stereo. The song suggests the moment, and I lean in, and it’s as incredible of as a first kiss can be. 23 years later, the memory is potent enough to freeze me in my tracks.

She has a 3 year old daughter, and I’m not quite sure what to make of that, but it doesn’t matter. I’m already hooked. She is not religious but she does believe. We spend lots of time talking about religion and politics and culture, me ever the evangelist, her a young woman from a bad part of town with a rough past. She rides motorcycles and shoots guns and has a Chinese dragon tattoo on her hip. She’s strong and smart and funny and just so damned capable. I used to fantasize about finding a badass woman, and here I am, falling in love with one.

Her name is Jamie. It’s a funny thing, the associations we have with names, but I’ve only known three female Jamies in my life, and I had a bit of a crush on all of them.

But with the others, it was never like this.

She comes over one night and makes dinner for me and the boys. Manicotti with fresh garlic bread, salad, and a bottle of wine. It’s simple, but so damn good that I have the thought, for the first time, that maybe I need to marry this girl.

The job isn’t working out, though. As the weeks of training roll on, I become increasingly disenchanted. Some of the sales reps who are hitting their numbers tell me there’s no way to do the job honestly and make their quotas. I don’t like upselling. I don’t like not putting the customer’s needs before the bottom line. It feels wrong to me, but I’ve also got a moral stick shoved so far up my own ass that I don’t know how to be anything but scrupulous. I finally give my notice around the end of August. I can just see that it isn’t going to work out.

I start applying for other jobs. I find a graphic design place that looks interesting, and I get an interview lined up. Nothing else pans out. The heat, the relentless sun, the utter lack of rain or clouds, the washed out landscape — it’s all starting to get to me. I can’t figure out exactly where things are going with Jamie. Our time together since I left the phone company has been more sparse. It feels to me like maybe she’s pulling away. We have a lot in common, but a lot that isn’t, too. Our backgrounds and beliefs couldn’t be more different, and I’ve long had a rule against ‘missionary dating.’ So I make one of those one-sided deals with God, the kind where you bake a ‘sign’ right in for your own interpretive convenience. I tell him that if I don’t get the graphic design job, I’m leaving Arizona and going home.

And less than a week later, 9/11 happens. And everything changes again.

(To be continued)