Phoenix, 2001

Note: this is part of a series of memoir-reflections I’m putting together of places I’ve lived or spent time over the course of my life. This is not just an exercise in storytelling, but a practical means to retain these experiences, as I’ve noticed that my memories of many things are fading now as I age, the details worn down like the face of an old coin, and I want to capture them before they’re lost.

This is a free post made possible by paid subscribers.

Writing is my profession and calling. If you find value in my work, please consider becoming a subscriber to support it.

Already subscribed but want to lend additional patronage? Prefer not to subscribe, but want to offer one-time support? You can leave a tip to keep this project going by clicking the link of your choice: (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe)

Thank you for reading, and for your support!

---

In the dwindling light of a Flagstaff summer evening, I made my way through the interchange to I-17 South. The San Francisco Peaks stood tall and dark against the sunset, the distance between the beat-up, midnight blue Pontiac 6000 Safari station wagon and the foothills covered by an expanse of long grass, studded with gently swaying wildflowers.

My brother Matt was riding shotgun. Our friend Theresa, whom we’d picked up along the way, sat in the back, carefully avoiding an accidental kick to the 3-foot length of 2x6 lumber that was wedged there, keeping my driver’s seat from falling straight back.

We were Phoenix bound.

Matt and I had begun the road trip several days earlier, clocking a marathon session with the audiobook of Frank Herbert’s Dune. We’d driven from Kirkwood, New York, to St. Louis, Missouri, in one go. About 14 hours, not counting the stops.

From there, we’d made our way to Kansas City, then on to Denver, where we’d stayed with some other friends, before cutting south near the Utah border through Moab and the Canyonlands. There, amidst the red rocks carved out by the mighty Colorado, we camped for the night on the banks of that river, which sustains so much life throughout the desert Southwest.

For the life of me, I do not remember where I got the tent. Probably swiped it from my parents. I was never much of one for camping, because I like bathrooms and comfortable beds, but it was a beautiful spot, and waking up in the fresh, clean air was invigorating. We grabbed some photos by the red rocks and headed for the Arizona border.

Flagstaff, in those days, wasn’t much to look at. Not nearly the bustling ski town it has since become, with its quaint downtown and its boutique coffee shops and art galleries and restaurants. But it had trees, and lots of them, which was the last time we were going to be seeing any of those for a while.

The drive into Phoenix was strange. We left Flagstaff at sundown, while the temperature was dipping into the high 70s. But as we made our way South, the sky growing darker with every passing mile, the heat kept going up. We were dropping in altitude, moving from pine forest to high desert as we drove. I had the windows down, and every time we passed through a cliff face carved out for the highway, we could feel the heat radiating off the rocks. It was like driving past an endless series of space heaters blasting away on the side of the road.

By the time we reached Phoenix, it was midnight, but the thermometer had climbed to over a hundred degrees. It was early June, and the Sonoran desert was doing its thing. I turned the car into the apartment complex and punched in the gate code. I’d never been there before, but my buddies from school who had rented the place had it all set up. Well, as much as a bunch of 20-something dudes fresh out of college tend to set anything up.

The apartment was spartan: a single office chair and a TV on a small stand in the living room, a small kitchen table and chairs, and not much else. The boys who were already living there had a bunk bed set up in their room. I wouldn’t get a bed of any kind for days. The aesthetic was definitely “bro-coded,” if such Gen-Z terminology had existed in 2001. It just was what it was, and none of us had a problem with it. Eddie, one of the guys I’d lived with during my senior year of college, was there to greet us. His brothers John and Danny would be rooming with him in the master suite. My buddy Tony, Theresa’s cousin, another one of our housemates from university back in Ohio, was due the next day, and he and I would be sharing the other room. A third bedroom was set up to be converted into an office for those of us with computers.

Matt, Theresa, and I changed into our swimsuits and headed to the community pool. It was late, and the gate was locked, so we climbed the fence. The glow of the underwater lights, the palm trees overhead, and the heat of the night air all told us we weren’t in Kansas City anymore. Or New York, for that matter. Matt and Theresa would both be flying home in a few days, but this was going to be my new home for the foreseeable future.

---

I hadn’t intended to go to Phoenix. Never had any interest whatsoever. I was a sci-fi-loving computer nerd who read cyberpunk novels and got into anime during my college years, and my plan had been to go teach English in Japan so I had an excuse to visit and explore a country that had held my fascination for years. I was worried to go to a place so foreign alone, however, not just because it was unfamiliar, but because I was a good little altar boy, but girl crazy. I thought Asian women were exotic and beautiful, and I didn’t want to go into the heart of darkness without a wingman to help keep me grounded and away from needless temptation. So I’d convinced Tony to apply with me for the job. He planned on being a teacher, so I figured he’d be a shoe-in.

The night before our interview with the tutoring company, there was a talent show on campus. We’d signed up to do a lip sync contest with roommates and friends, and I’d had the idea to have our group of big, rowdy guys — most of them rugby or football players — perform a ridiculously girly song. I’d proposed Jewell’s “I’m Sensitive,” and the guys had groaned, but laughed, knowing it was too funny not to do. But it was a bit nerve wracking, and we’d all started drinking hours before the performance. Tony had gotten a bit ahead of us, and had had misplaced his legs somewhere outside the J.C. Williams center. He was way too soused to perform, so we got someone to take him home and took our places on the stage. The performance was a hit, because it was utterly absurd. And yeah, I have the receipts:

Somehow, for reasons I will never understand, we didn’t win.

Poor Tony had ended up having a rough night, but somehow, against all odds, he was up early, and dragged me, slightly hungover myself, out of bed. We made coffee and jumped in the car, and headed to Pittsburgh for the interview. The address was a high rise with a granite facade and brass-plated glass doors inlaid in the lobby, polished until they looked like gold. We made our way up to the 12th floor, and headed to the conference room. It was a cold, gray, drizzly day, but we still enjoyed the view from the large windows lining the suite. They had a tray with large pastries, and we helped ourselves — a bit more eagerly than we should have — and sat down for the presentation.

I don’t remember a single thing from that meeting. I know that we, along with some other candidates, sat at a large conference table and listened to them give us the rundown about the program. We then separated for individual interviews, where I started to feel imposter syndrome creep in. I wasn’t a teacher. I didn’t even particularly want to teach. I just wanted to travel. But I did my best to act the part, and a month or so later, as we were preparing for finals and starting to get ready for graduation, we got our letters from the company.

I was offered the job.

I was excited. This was actually happening. I’d traveled much of the US, Canada, and Mexico, and made my way through 11 countries of Europe, but I was finally going to get to go to Asia.

I ran upstairs to talk to Tony about it.

“I didn’t get it,” he told me. He seemed…apathetic. I was never sure whether he really wanted to go, but was that relief in his voice?

A couple days later, Tony told me that he’d decided to go to Arizona with our friend and housemate, Eddie. Tony was from the Detroit area, and I was from Upstate New York, and neither of us wanted to go home to our depressing rust belt cities after graduation. There weren’t a lot of prospects for us where we grew up. He told me I should consider coming with them.

I’d spent the next couple of days rolling that over in my mind. I was so disappointed. I really wanted to go to Japan, but I also really didn’t want to go alone. What if I hated it? What if the foreignness of the place left me feeling homesick, and I had nobody to just hang with and talk about it? What if I got myself into trouble? I was full of worries and doubts. Something in me told me that it just wasn’t my time. I went back to the guys and said I was in. I’d definitely help split the cost of an apartment in Phoenix.

Two months later, I was sitting in that pool at the Sonterra Apartments at the intersection of Tatum and Bell, feeling like I was in a place almost as foreign as Japan.

---

It was a weird Summer. I spent the next month looking for jobs I never found. At long last, I managed to get a gig with the local phone company, and was invited to show up for a group orientation before training began.

On the morning of July 16, 2001, I made my way downtown, to an office building that was known at the time as the Qwest Building — after the phone company I was about to start working for. At 26 floors and nearly 400 feet, it was the tallest building out and the third tallest building in the entire state. I found my way into the lobby, where a group of other trainees had gathered for the orientation.

Being the red-blooded 23 year old guy that I was, I cared a lot less about the orientation than scoping out the girls I might be working with. There was a pretty, petite brunette in the crowd who looked to be of Mexican descent. As my eyes continued scanning the crowd, I saw one other girl I thought was pretty cute. And as luck would have it, she appeared to be either Asian, or one of those Latinas whose look could almost could be Asian. Since these had long been my two favorite flavors of feminine beauty, I was cool with either.

This one was different, though. She was short, with long brown hair in a tight perm, wearing a pair of dumpy, loose-fitting denim overalls over a white t-shirt, her hands thrust deep into the pockets. It was a shapeless outfit, but I could see that she was physically attractive. She had this odd perma-grin on her face, and something in the look suggested that she was thinking, “WTF am I doing here?” Something about her aura, her look, diverted my attention back to the first girl. Overalls looked like she could be interesting, and she had certainly caught my eye, but she had a very different kind of energy. I found myself wondering absently if the first girl would wind up in my training class.

Two weeks later, I showed up, at a different building, to start training. Girl #1 was not in my class.

Overalls, however, was.

And I was right. She cleaned up nicely. Much more attractive than her frumpy outfit on that first encounter had led me to believe. At all of about 5’3", it didn’t take long for me to realize she was a firecracker. Smart as a whip, too. I was used to being one of, if not the best student in any given class. But when we were given assignments to read through training materials and take the little quizzes at the end, she always managed to come in first, with me a close second.

This…irritated me. But it also intrigued me. Who was this mystery girl who was not only pretty, but consistently reading and finishing her work even faster than me?

When lunchtime arrived on that first day, she looked around the conference table and told the other trainees, “I’m going to grab sushi over at Yoshii’s, if anyone wants to come.”

In a moment that is debated by historians of the topic to this day, she said this to the room, but her eyes locked on mine while she said it. She didn’t look around. She looked through me.

I felt like a fish that had just taken a gluttonous bite of a worm, only to feel the sting of the hook. That look captivated me and held me in place, and I think I would have followed her to the other end of the world if she’d told me that’s where she was eating lunch while staring into my eyes like that, the dazzling smile real this time, and not put-on.

We ate together at Yoshii’s. And as the training stretched on, we ate together at Subway. We ate together at a Chinese place down the road called “Long Wong’s,” at her recommendation. As it turned out, she was Chinese, and she knew all the best spots. We ate together pretty much everywhere.

I was a frugal, bring-a-sack-lunch kind of guy, but I wasn’t going to miss out on any of these lunches. And I was certainly not going to miss the days she came in wearing that plaid miniskirt, the one she later teased me about, saying I leaned so far back to see her walking in that I literally fell out of my chair. (I have no recollection of this event, but I wouldn’t put it past me.)

We became inseparable. I started parking my car next to hers at the office building, just a few blocks away, owned by her brother, where she’d worked building his internet service company until she’d gone 6 months without pay, and finally had to switch to a different job. She’d been a data provisioning manager for a large firm, traveling around the country migrating and designing networks. The phone company gig was a huge step down for her, which is why she’d been wearing that WTF grin on the first day.

When we would sit next to each other, the slightest contact between the skin of her arm and mine sent what felt like electricity through both of us. At night, we’d talk on the phone for hours. One day, when we piled 7 of us into a 5-seat sedan on the way to lunch, she sat on my lap, and because I couldn’t see what I was doing, I reached out to close the door and caught her head in it as it shut. She never let me live it down, but it didn’t drive her away. It wasn’t long before I started making the long drive from my apartment in North Phoenix to hers in Ahwatukee, where we’d sit on her couch and listen to music and talk for hours. She had a 3 year old daughter who was cute and funny, but they lived together alone. We talked about religion and philosophy and politics. I found out she was a political conservative with a strong rebellious, libertarian streak. She hadn’t grown up religious, but believed in God.

I soon learned she also had her share of demons.

But for whatever reason, she liked me. Big, goofy white boy, fresh out of college, with a moralistic chip on his shoulder, you would think would have driven a tattooed, motorcycle-riding former party girl from the bad side of town away. But she felt so safe with me that she would often fall asleep in my arms on the couch, not long after I would arrive. She told me she didn’t sleep much in general. But around me, she relaxed and let down. One night, as we listened to Faith Hill’s Breathe on her big 5-disc CD player, the moment we’d been waiting for came to pass, and we shared our first kiss.

I was committed to maintaining my virginity until marriage, but one night, I broke my own “stay out of danger” rule, and held her in her bed until the sun came up. We didn’t do anything. I just held her, watched her sleep, kissed her gently every time she woke up and stirred. She didn’t fully share my beliefs, but she respected them, and intentionally avoided doing anything to tempt me further. I drove home to my apartment that morning, wondering what my friends would think. We were all very much practicing Catholics, and I knew I’d be getting “walk of shame” looks, but I didn’t care. The guys made fun of me, but believed my story, and as I went to my bed, exhausted from being awake the whole night, I pulled off my t-shirt and put it over my face to block out the harsh morning sun, and breathed in the scent of her, lingering where she had been pressed against me, until I drifted off.

I hated the job. Hated being on the phone. Hated being forced to try to sell people things they didn’t need. It was the wrong kind of job for me, and I knew it, but I didn’t know what to do next, and I didn’t want to stop seeing her every day. We exchanged silly little notes, hiding them for each other in places we knew the other would find, but all they ever said was, “hi.” That was the joke. It was our joke. We would stand outside my car, or hers, staring into each other’s eyes like the lovestruck kids that we were. I’d wait for her in the morning so we could walk to the office together, and I’d kiss her perfect lips before we made our way down Indian School, past the gas station with the breakfast burritos to the training building.

But I hit a point where I knew I was going to burn out at work, and rather than prolonging the inevitable, I decided to make a clean break. I was confident that I’d keep seeing her no matter what I did, fighting traffic all the way to her place, waiting for her to jump into my arms, buzzing a little from her White Merlot, and wrap herself around me in an embrace.

I was less certain about Phoenix. I’d come at the worst possible time, and the heat was oppressive. In those days, the city wasn’t the cosmopolitan, young, vibrant place it is today. It was just entering its heyday of massive growth. Hell, the 51 didn’t even connect to the 101 back then, and the 101 wasn’t a complete loop.

I felt good about quitting, but I needed to find something fast. I started looking for new jobs. I was fresh out of school with a Communications degree and loans to pay back, but I couldn’t find anything in my wheelhouse. Phoenix was the wrong city for my industry. I needed to be on one of the coasts — although I didn’t know it yet. I found an opening at a graphic design company that sounded like it might be a good fit, and I applied. They scheduled an interview with me for the following week.

Despite my previous confidence, my nascent relationship started to feel a little strained. She seemed more distant, and I didn’t know what was going on. I told God that I wasn’t at all sure I was where I was supposed to be, or where things with this girl were going, but that if I didn’t get the design job, I was going to take it as a sign I was supposed to go back home to New York to figure things out and start over.

And that’s when 9/11 happened.

With the time difference, it was 6:46AM in Phoenix when the first plane hit, and I, being jobless, was still asleep. I was a night owl, and never got up early unless I had to. I was startled awake by Eddie, who had come running into my room in his underwear, and was shouting something about New York City having been bombed. My barely conscious mind struggled to make sense out what he was saying, and I dragged myself out of bed to follow him to the television to see what he was talking about. We were the only ones at home.

I got there just seconds before the second plane hit. I had barely started watching the news when it came barreling into the South Tower, and I almost had the feeling I was caught between dreaming and being awake.

The first call I made was to her.

She was working that morning, but they’d been evacuated from the Qwest Tower because all high-rises were assumed to be potential targets. She and the other members of our training group were all standing in the plaza outside, trying to decide if they were going back to work or had to make other plans.

I spent the day with Eddie, watching the news, going to a special impromptu Mass downtown that was packed to the rafters, grabbing burritos together from a little place off the 51 that had killer chorizo and horchatas. We drove home in Eddie’s dark green Honda Civic, the sun shining brightly, not a cloud in the sky. We talked about how surreal it all was. Kind of like how Good Friday always felt like it should be gloomy, not cheery and bright. Thousands of our fellow Americans had been horrifically killed, and life was just going on as normal.

That evening, I went to see her. We sat on the couch and watched the news. We didn’t know how to process what we were seeing, as the footage of the planes hitting the towers, then, the towers collapsing, played over and over on a loop.

I reached out to the graphic design company, and they told me that they’d been very interested in me coming to work for them, but the events of that week had put them into a hiring freeze. They didn’t know what the economic repercussions were going to be, and they were unwilling to take on more risk until the dust settled.

To me, that was the sign. I went to see her again, told her about the deal I’d made with God, and how I figured this was about as clear as it could get, and I probably needed to head home. She acted indifferent, and was emotionally distant from me the whole night. Her behavior confirmed for me that I was making the right decision. Something had gone wrong between us, and I couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

I had no idea that night, when I left, that she sat down on the other side of her front door and cried.

Eddie had spent the weekend after 9/11 in California, executing plans of his own. He came back engaged, having proposed to his girlfriend while he was there. His family threw him an impromptu party, and that was where I said my goodbyes.

In those days, I could fit everything I owned into the back of my station wagon. My computer, my desk, my small collection of clothing and books, a guitar I didn’t know how to play. It wasn’t much. I bought an American flag decal and put it on the back window. I was proud to have New York plates, as the country came together in solidarity. I didn’t know what I was heading towards, but I knew that it was time for me to go.

As I got on the road the following Monday, I had no idea I was leaving the woman behind who would later become my wife, the mother to our 8 children.

But I couldn’t resist calling her along the way. From a friend’s house in Denver. From a diner pay phone in Illinois. I didn’t have a cell phone in those days. But we weren’t nearly as done as I had thought.

But that’s a story for another time.