On the Shuttle (part II)...

Taking a bus shuttle back and forth to Phoenix, I met a lot of people with whom I wouldn't otherwise have had a chance to talk. Here is a short rundown:

(A) was an airplane mechanic working up at Sky Harbor who himself refused to drive a car or fly in an airplane. It seems a few years back, he had been in a bad car wreck (slammed by an SUV) and had barely made it. Think he even had said he had wanted to give up -- he was in great pain and the recovery was very slow -- but his son kept after him. He admitted to now being too frightened to drive and he had never much trusted airplanes.

(B) was an investigator with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague (Netherlands). He had originally been sent to the former Yugoslavia as a Canadian peacekeeper. He saw the worst of the war in Croatia and Bosnia. Afterwards, he was enjoined to lead on-site investigations of massacres for the Tribunal. I asked him how he locates hidden burial sites and he said, "Well, you know, you just get to know people -- I often meet them in bars -- and they tell you eventually .. oh, I saw a hand sticking up out of the corner of this field." While he was based in Europe, his wife (an American) had decided on Tucson when a cashier one day in a supermarket took the time to walk with them outside and point them to their destination.

(C) was the wife of a career navy man (in purchasing) who was visiting a daughter in Tucson but lived most of the year in England. Both she and her husband vehemently opposed the war in Iraq.

(D) was a young marine, who was home for a short spell to visit his mother, wife and four sisters, all based on the South Side. He had so far (fingers crossed) had a number of good experiences -- described how people in Iraq had invited the soldiers into their homes. He thought they were doing the right thing but shied away from politics. He relayed how his mother didn't leave the house for six months during his first tour of duty for fear that something might happen and she wouldn't be home to receive the call. He was soon to return to Iraq for his second tour.

(E) was a museum curator at a contemporary art museum based in Minneapolis.

(F) was a museum curator at a museum of silver based in Mexico City.

(G), one of the drivers, was a former cryptographer for the Women's Army Corps. She had served during the Viet Nam war in Singapore, where she was relaying and receiving messages that referred to the illegal bombing campaign in Laos and Cambodia (of which there was no public admission). After raising a daughter, she had moved to Tucson to be near family. Ready with a quick laugh, she says she always tells herself "I can have everything I want if I don't want everything."

(H), a former mining engineer, had two daughters serving in the military and two sons in police enforcement. While now also driving for the Arizona Shuttle, as an engineer he had taken his family to live in places as far away as Papua New Guinea and had dug tunnels 4,000 feet underground with giant boring machines (but mostly used TNT). He missed his friends from the mines, including the miners, as they all used to head off to a local Mammouth bar to share a couple of beers after work. His best friend however was from the same small French Canadian village where he had grown up.

(I) was a cross-bow hunter who would take two days to stalk a deer (always used for food). He also liked to take wildlife photos and could identify every Sonoran desert plant and animal. He did however keep a lush garden with a pool full of koi and giant bullfrogs. One day he observed a bullfrog kill a pigeon, who had come to drink at the water's edge.

The Dying Breed...

This is recollected from a few years ago, in the days when there was still a cattle ranch or two running cattle, the San Manuel mine was still going full throttle and the little town of Oracle still hadn't seen its first dollar store (we're now up to three and counting).

My husband and I were seated in a diner booth awaiting our breakfast. A man and woman walked in, faces burned red from too much sun, wind and drink, and took the booth directly behind us. They then ordered bloody mary's. When my husband slipped off to the bathroom I thought -- oh perfect, I wonder what these types are talking about. I was shortly surprised. The fellow was discussing a mutual friend who had been forced to go down to Tucson to seek work. "You know, but he's not the same. That's what happens when you go to the city and leave the open air and get around too many folks. He's just different now. Now I couldn't do that .. I need the open space."

Conversation then turned to work. It seemed the fellow had been working under a foreman .. maybe he was the ranch foreman. In any event, they were out someplace with two women (maybe one a girlfriend, one a wife) and suddenly the foreman told off the cowboy in front of the others. So the cowboy said in the softest of voices "I didn't say anything then but waited until later when we were alone. And I said don't you ever speak to me that way in front of other folks again." And the women replied "well, you done the right thing. He was out of place telling you off like that in front of your friends but, you know, you're just trying to make the situation work out alright but still it was right you let him know."

Phoenix makeover...

When Sun City first opened (back when), its advertisements promised to deliver "Your No. 1 New Life". Phoenix presents myriad possibilities for a total makeover .. to take on the skin of the perfect tan, the perfect housing complex, the perfect system of highways interjecting drivers into their nodules of choice.

I've always wondered of what might consist an entirely random existence. To this end, I would picture selecting a spot to which to move by sticking a pin on a map while blindfolded. That is because I moved to NYC straight after college without an afterthought, as if I had no choice in the matter. I suppose I had loved the city as a rebellious teenager (dragging a friend down at the age of 15, I made her walk the same 4 blocks around Grand Central Station to avoid getting lost) but it had never occurred to me that I could live anywhere else.

Leaving NY and flying into Arizona is always however something of a surprise ... one leaves the verdant forests and hills to encounter increasingly giant maroon, orange and green oblong fields and crop circles, startling and colorful abstractions rivalling the best of the abstract expressionists. Eventually the tones change — from the deep browns of Texas to the reds of New Mexico to the arid whites and yellows of a landscape one cannot imagine sustaining life. It is there that the plane descends.

How this epiphany is compounded when flying into Phoenix, where springing up out of an inhospitable desert are a million tract homes with green lawns and glistening blue pools, all. Okay, I exaggerate but it is an impression .. of pure anomie, a kind of stateless being, a piece of plankton floating on a glistening sea. One thinks of each little square as a new blank slate, on which to impose all manner of wish and desire. Re-make. Thus someone writes in the college alumnae magazine his news that, like so many couples before who moved to Phoenix in pursuit of the perfect life, he found himself divorced. In the case of Phoenix, randomness implies a life shaped not by coincidence and pattern that reflect your own experience. Randomness consists of a series of choices, but they are other people's choices -- the choices of Angelina and Brad or Martha and Oprah or even the choices of other online shoppers.

Shuttle van...

No one of course would contemplate moving to the state of Arizona without a driving licence, except former denizens of New York City who inhabit their own island reality. Thus I managed to delay driving for the two years after my arrival, which took a certain degree of intransigence given that we were living 30 miles from the nearest metropolitan center. I was abetted in some measure by the job I happened upon — at a large state university with a burgeoning population of students (currently 55k and soon to reach 90k) located some 2 hours from my home in one of the most blighted urban landscapes I have ever stumbled upon ... okay, I admit, grimy industrial has far greater appeal for me than miles and miles of fake pink stucco. My solution was to take a small shuttle van up to Phoenix every week (or down, if one considers altitude) and sleep over 2 nights — in a small studio that was once part of a 1950's style motel (complete with swaying palm trees and lima-bean shaped pool).

The pool deserves mention. Many people have pools in Phoenix but one need only experience one Phoenix summer to ask why. For pools in Phoenix do not present opportunities for refreshment. I shall explain.

A week or two after I had started work, temperatures soared to 116 degrees. There is no amount of time that one can spend outdoors when it is 116 degrees and take any comfort. The smallest tasks instead bring on waves of nausea. Too, there was no promise of cooler temperatures in the evening (as most of the desert experiences), as the pavement of Phoenix manages to trap the day's heat which is then released full throttle at night.

On the evening in question -- when the temperatures had shaved off a mere 2 or 3 degrees -- I traipsed the mile from my office to my apartment as slowly as possible, borne along only by the thought that I would soon shed my clothes and jump into a still pool full of cool water. Sure enough the pool was empty and I quickly threw off my belongings, slipped into a suit, paused for a moment at the pool's edge and then jumped.

The water was warm. Not intentionally mind you, but warm enough to steep a bag of sun tea.

to be continued

Ice-9...

A friend reports the following: About a year ago, he had taken his wife to a Phoenix emergency room. They were seated in the waiting room, watching the usual array of car crash victims on gurneys being wheeled through. (Side note: car crashes remain the leading news item for all local Tucson and Phoenix news stations. Sprawl has given rise to a new form of sport that often involves mini-vans hurtling into one another or semi's rolling over into oncoming 80-mph traffic.) In any event, it was not long before they noticed a police officer dressed in black leather jacket and black leather jack boots slowly perusing the waiting room, sizing up offenders everywhere. Black leather in a city where temperatures commonly reach 116 degrees — now that is impressive.

They also could not fail but note, when he turned around, the words "Ice-9" hand scrawled on the back of his helmet. Had he iced nine perps? Or was he the number 9 man in a unit dedicated to eradicating Phoenix of its criminal class? We will never know.

But it is fun to contemplate the degree to which Phoenecians — whether residing in their ersatz Moorish-themed gated communities or eating in their favorite international theme restuarant or shopping in their favorite string of supermalls (thus experiencing the life of an atom blown through a super-conductor) or playing cops (much like our president is playing at being a president) — collectively enact their own private fantasies.

Memorials...
Jazz great Max Roach disappeared for a year or so after Clifford Brown died at the age of 25 in a car accident (along with Bud Powell). Today dropping packages off at a local UPS, I noticed an ornate tattoo along the young shipping clerk's forearm of praying hands (as well as crude tattoos on his neck and fingers). I managed to glimpse the words "In memory" but not the name. Makes me think of the ways in which we memorialize (when the loss is catastrophic) our outer skin, a tree, the empty spaces along our highways. The same spaces (veins, arteries, branches).

Reminded me too of this past week's New Yorker publication of Iraq war GI emails. For many, the guilt they carry — at allowing friends to die (where there was no choice) or leaving friends behind to face uncertain death — is the way they will memorialize what they have lost. It is an unbearable way to keep memory kindled.

Maybe the shipping clerk has been a victim of private wars .. the kind the occur inside of houses and in neighborhoods, suffering the carnage of social disintegration. This is no doubt different than witnessing a body dismantled, gore everywhere, children dying. Nevertheless, he too cannot let go, so he has marked himself externally, visibly, although he likely needs no reminder. Guilt there too plays a role.

Two Starbucks quality assurance inspectors overheard at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport (Terminal 3)

A: Bill is very neat regarding cleanliness ... still he left a few messes I couldn't walk off on.

B: I mean if 70 percent of your chairs are clean, do you mark it all off as clean? Are they doing their job? I mean if one chair is clean and one scuffed, do I report it as messy?

[...]

B: [mimicking a co-worker] Whatever you can do I can do I can do I can do. I would like to go into his computer and see if he's up to date.

A: ... I was appalled at — I was awed — really. Not as bad as the table in the dishwasher where the garbage disposal is — hard to clean underneath. There were some .. a very identifiable filthy patch and they didn’t bother to do it.

Interview with an old cowboy...

A terse exchange from a recent historical society panel discussion:

Audience question: What local changes do you think have been good and what changes not so good?
Cowboy: Oh, no, now don't get me started, it could take all day.
[interminable pause]
Interviewer: Perhaps you might share one or two thoughts with us?
Cowboy: oh no, I'd wouldn't know where to start.
[another long pause]
Interviewer: You seem to have some ideas on this?
Cowboy: Oh no, just got too much to say.
[end of discussion]

Desert Anti-Epiphany...

Here I rest in bed looking through what was an original window of this old adobe house into the added-on living room and then beyond through plateglass with no opening through thickets of mesquite to the blue of the Catalina Mountains. The sparrows above the swamp cooler are opining incestuously, the ever-breeding brood.

And it is, in spite of its steep hills with their sharp ridges of quartz like an exposed enamel spine and violet shale and dark scumbled cactus against the light bright earth and massive mountain vistas receding against the Western light — in spite of all this, it is a place where people come with no purpose and lose their edges and themselves eventually recede against the light. Their shadows grow longer as they themselves grow paler within a landscape that at mid-day looks like an over-exposed photo. And so we blink at each other in the glare with a worn careless smile or shoulder shrug and nothing is gained but the repetition of phrases from things once read, once held fastened now loosened.

It is all a great dissipation.

Was anything brilliant ever accomplished in this place, I wonder, though others have harnessed their lives to it. The best made sporadic dashes elsewhere. There was a time of course — people here were much younger and before then the earlier settlers (well-to-do easterners shrugging the bonds of sobriety and social diktat) — when sex was a prize won at evening games and infatuations sprung endlessly — though why one and not another, or there was always another better buttered. I wonder why they bothered. Choices were fateful, some ending in death where happenstance was too highly regarded.

I try to recall the details but they leave me dull. It is beautiful here though, I tell myself.

Character 1: Driving home at night; as it is already dark, traffic has lightened. Button down shirt remains buttoned up, tie remains unloosened. Driving down one of the Phoenix freeways/loops, singing song by the Who “I’m free” under his breath. Eyes narrowed, expression remains both intent and static.

Character 2: Wife out eating at upscale brick-oven pizza café with friends, having glass of wine. Excuses herself to go into the bathroom. When she closes door her body explodes in dance in response to the piped in music. Facing the mirror, eyes half closed, her arms flail, her torso sways but her head remains erect, held on high neck. When people start knocking, she doesn’t stop dancing but face moves into tighter and tighter grimace with chin jutting forward, while eyes stay half closed.

Character 1 and 2 friends (characters 3 and 4): stand outside the back gates of a fenced in community bordering a trash recycling/deposit plant, with big green dumpsters marked “tin”, “plastic”, “newspapers only”. They are standing just inside the facility next to the gate, where a giant “No Smoking” sign hangs. . Their houses are visible just over the ridge. It is after 5, they are just back from work and still in their pressed slacks, shirt sleeves rolled up. They are sneaking a cigarette together.

Character 5: A middle-aged woman has retired early and moved to the same or another gated community as characters 1-5. She looks young for her age and is not old in any event, perhaps 58. She dresses however as if the year were 1963-65. Her blonde hair is coifed into a small pouf on top of her head, with carefully divided bangs. Her lime green never-iron polyester dress has a high collar, short sleeves and white trim. She wears pumps that might be called sensible in the city. She is attempting to walk her small white poodle with tobacco juice-colored eye stains. There are no sidewalks in this community, which is alarming as she must occasionally step onto someone’s lawn to avoid the occasional oncoming car. There are thick hedges near a curve which make sightlines difficult and this obviously makes her nervous as well. She would cross to the other side but then she would be walking with traffic.

Alright, this isn't really about the malls of Arizona per se. It is really an evolving epistolary on life in Arizona — a place that does not merely reside on a margin but embodies the very idea of margin. Or margarine .. which is how we get to the malls. More promised later...