Tucson on the Brain

“At this moment, your father would be very proud of you,” she said. It was NOT a compliment!

We were sitting in traffic waiting to turn left from Ajo onto La Cholla, following a short cut I’d learned from the realtor, and of course I knew just what she meant. (Numbers, money, nitpicking, and assigning the worst possible motives to someone I didn’t know.) Just like me to drive my wife insane while she’s already tensed up over oncoming traffic that’s going is crush her like a bug, as I argue on about a thing that doesn’t mean shit, except remembering the experience makes her feel bad. Being inculcated in the ways of vengeful gods, I paid for my transgression by promptly getting lost in southeast Tucson, although we still made it to the restaurant and got our food and all.

If I were lucky, I could blame it all on simply being here. Tucson just isn’t easy on me. The family history that unfolded in the shadow of Cat Mountain could squeeze vodka from a stone. By the time we finally arrive and step out of the rental car at the old parental double-wide, I’m already half used up. And then I have to work!

The “mobile home retirement community” [gag] where my mother’s two mobile homes are located—yes, I sold one!—is now filled with snowbirds from the North Country: Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and a few outliers from darkest Kansas. They ride around on golf carts, some in geriatric packs, from coffee shop to golf course, and then home for cocktail hour. Singles pace the streets pretending to exercise as they look out for a live one. No wonder my father liked it here. That, and he never had to mow the grass.

But this is Tucson. What you do here is, you drive. You get in the car and drive to where lots of other people are and buy stuff, and then you drive some more. Drive, drive, drive. The gas stations are always crowded, day or night: all those cars, all that gas… It’s so damned depressing. There are times, though, when the mountains and the sky, especially at sunset, is so ludicrously Arizonan, like a Looney Tunes cartoon, that you almost forgive it all, because poor Tucson just can’t help it. And then someone pulling onto the freeway thinks his turn signal means YOU’RE supposed to move and makes you want to drop the big one. You would, too, except you have to keep on driving. That’s the secret glue that holds the hologram together: gasoline and people separated from the things they need.

Naturally, I tend to bitch about this. My wife reminds me of her brother’s family in Atlanta and how they spend hours out of every day inside a car. I am somehow not comforted to be reminded of how many millions of us live like an exploited class which has no choice—the things that we accept because “that’s just the way it is,” and “people have to live somewhere,” and the cultural diversions playing constantly in the brain to make us all forget. Maybe that’s my problem: I don’t HAVE those distractions in the terrible high desert! A little Netflix and the Internet, God knows, but really just the mountains and the fight to stay alive and rise above my training. It helps so much to keep things local, focusing on what’s in front of me, living close to Nature.

In Tucson, though, that means dodging overweight shoppers waddling across vast parking lots with plastic bags of junk just to score some toilet paper and a jug of milk. Leaving places like “Food City,” we carry our own plastic bags. No wonder people don’t return the shopping carts. It’s all disposable, like the architecture built of tin and colored gravel. (They kill trailers here like graves in Mexican cemeteries. Yank ‘em out and stick in someone else.)

Sell the double-wide, John. Sell it fast and laugh about the rest. This story isn’t over yet.

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1. Tucson in the Morning
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