The Furious Spinner

Mario and I lived in Tucson from September 1985 to September 1986. We drove into town with a U-Haul filled with all our meager worldly goods (mostly books) and our cat Lockheart, towing a 1984 blue Honda. We had barely a dime between us.

We found a motel with a kitchen, parked the U-Haul, then drove around town trying to find a place to live. One of the first things we saw was a man running from an apartment building holding a very large gun. No one seemed alarmed except us. This did not seem like a good sign. We learned the Air Force had illegally dumped chemicals, so several city wells were contaminated. A man was breaking into homes around 8:00 p.m. to rob and rape. The press dubbed him the Prime-Time Rapist. The sun was so hot it burned the skin I was thinking of growing in the future.

Every place we could afford to rent was a dump. Squalid, seedy, scary. When I went to get my scholarship money, they told me I only got half of the money now and half halfway through the semester. Oh, and the bank took a cut. We had been counting on all the money to get a place to live (first, last, and a security deposit). We worried we might soon be homeless.

I was a couple of days out of a small town on the coast of Oregon, and I felt slapped silly from culture shock. I don’t think I ever got over the bad beginning.

We finally rented a tiny apartment in a giant apartment complex at the edge of town. We had no furniture—and we never got any. We slept on the floor for a long while until we got enough money to buy a futon...which we put on the floor. It raised us a few inches off the carpet. We had a tiny black and white television set a friend had given me when I was in college. We put Mario’s mother’s old kitchen table in the living room, but it had no chairs. I had my typing table (which I still use) and an old office chair. Mario set up a card table in the walk-in closet for his study, but we don’t remember what he used as a chair. We had ceiling to ceiling and nearly wall to wall bookshelves (filled with books) in the living room. We sat on the carpet to watch TV.

I didn’t like the apartment complex, but at least the apartment was clean. I never met another person, not even the people who lived around us. The lawn was grass, and it seemed like the sprinklers were on all the time, but they missed most of the lawn and watered the concrete sidewalk instead.

Around rush hour, a reddish haze would begin to settle around the Catalinas, where we lived. Mario rode his bike to work, and I imagined him breathing in those car fumes every day as we went to and from work. I was often stuck in traffic as I left school for home. Our car didn’t have any air conditioning so being in stop and go traffic was what I imagine hell is like.

I started work at my part time job as a teaching fellow soon after we arrived, but the pay was so little it barely paid for groceries. I was in school full time, so Mario had to get a full time job. He went out every weekday morning for a month, eight hours a day, looking for a job. Arizona is a “right to work” state, which seemed to be a misnomer. It appeared to mean that employers could pay you squat and make you do whatever they wanted and you were supposed to smile and say thank you. Most places wanted Mario to take a lie detector test and/or a drug test. Mario told them they could test his job performance all they wanted, but he wasn’t taking a lie detector test and they weren’t getting any of his blood or urine. (Mario has barely told a lie in his life, and he doesn’t drink or do drugs, but that was hardly the point.) Some days after he came home without finding a job, I thought, just take the damn drug test. But I never said it. I agreed with him. He finally got a job as a typesetter.

I have always admired Mario for doing that. He never complained. I’m sure he got discouraged, although I don’t remember him ever saying so. Every morning he got the newspaper, circled the classifieds, then went looking. He did this every day from morning to night day after day after day.

Now that we’re here again, Mario and I look back at our year in Tucson and wonder what we did during that year. My entire focus was on going to school and getting through in a year so that we could leave again. We didn’t like the heat or the pollution, so I think we spent a lot of time in our apartment. We didn’t notice any of the natural beauty surrounding us because of the red haze, I suppose. Or maybe because we didn’t have any money to pay for anything we never went anywhere. (You have to pay to go into most any park or to hike any of the trails in the mountains.) When we lived here, we never knew about Saguara National Park or the Rincon Mountains or Sabino Canyon. I knew about the Catalinas because we lived in the foothills of the foothills of them.

We were fish out of water here then. We never got our bearings. Do you have a place or time in your life when you look back and wonder “where was I?” It’s like we weren’t quite right in mind and body back then. We never even went to the Grand Canyon while we were here. We never drove over to New Mexico. I can remember only a couple of things we enjoyed doing while we lived here. On hot nights we liked driving up into one of the neighborhoods north of us, just a couple minutes away. We’d park our car, sit on the hood, and watch the heat lightning above the city. The lights of the city shimmered as if it were all a mirage. (Yes, just like the scene in Coyote Cowgirl.) We liked the sunsets, too. We would walk to the “trail” (i.e. sidewalk) along the wash behind the apartment complex and watch the pink slide along clouds that stretched across the sky like a giant closet full of gaudy feather boas thrown up into the air.

But I started getting sick after we had been here only a few months. All my energy went into trying to finish school and work and get out of town before I got any sicker. I blamed getting sick on Tucson. I was sure once we hit the road again, I would leave whatever ailed me behind in the desert.

I didn’t. But that’s another story.

Now I’m back here and looking at it all anew. I appreciate the area now more than I did back then, although it still has some serious problems. (The word sprawl comes to mind. And strip mining? Come on, who does that shit? There are forty-two Walgreens here, along with five Walmarts, eighteen Safeways, eleven Starbucks, and eighty-eight Circle K’s.)

I don’t know if Tucson made me sick all those years ago. I wish I had found some comfort when I lived here then. But that’s water in the wash, so to speak. Here and now I’m glad for the coyote chorus each night, owls in the palm tree, skies at sunset I can’t even begin to describe, quail coveys, empty washes, and saguaro yoga.

Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again. I never thought of Tucson as home all those years ago, so I can’t say, technically, that I’ve tried to come home. I have tried to come back to some sense of myself. I have felt at home here, at times. (Mario is here, and his presence always makes “home” a possibility for me.) Yet home has to be wherever each of us is, doesn’t it? If we can be at home in our bodies, we will be at home wherever we go.

I’m not quite home in my body yet, but I’m working on it. I’m thinking tomorrow morning I’ll go out in the desert and do a little yoga with the saguaro. That should get my mind and body right.

Labels: Arizona

2 comments

2 Comments:

I left New York City for Tucson in 1995 and stayed there until January of 2004. Having spent more than a year back in The City, I can honestly say there is nowhere else in the world I would rather live than Tucson. The haze is awful, the dust and the Mongolian dust storms kill the air, but, there is nowhere else I know that a three hour hike or twenty minute drive so completely removes you from humanity. The sprawl is awful, even in the nine years I was there, the drive out to Gate's Pass turned from a desert trail to prim real estate. So what? Tucson welcomes all, and tuns away none. The entire city has been wearing the same Tee-shirt for the last week and a half and nobody cares. I envy that you live there now. I wish I did.

By  Anonymous, at 10:47 PM  

Have lunch at mi nidito! but go early or late to avoid the crowds.

By  Anonymous, at 11:52 AM  

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