Nightfall at Old Tucson Studios: Live Racism!

After living in the city of Tucson for around eight years, my wife and I finally saw Nightfall, the annual Halloween-themed event that takes place out at the Old Tucson Studios which, if you're not from around here, is a collection of old western sets that showed up in a bunch of Hollywood movies back in the the Forties and Fifties and now serve as a setting for wild west shows and such. For the month of October they have actors in scary makeup sneaking up behind people and going “Boo!”, plus a collection of haunted houses full of horror props and other employees doing much the same thing.

It was kind of fun. I was hoping it was going to be a little scarier, though I'm not sure why I thought it would be. Parents take their kids to this, so it's not going to be incredibly gory or edgy or anything like that. But it's fun. In the place of a wild west stunt show, they had an “aliens come through an unearthed portal at a military archaeological site and plot to take over the world” stunt show, featuring army guys fighting ghoul-faced aliens, explosions, guns, and a couple of instances of fountainous bloodspray (I really love fountainous bloodspray, and the inclusion of it was appreciated). A drone camera flew over the audience, the image showing up on a giant screen behind the set, and doubled as an extraterrestrial device during the show.

There was another show we saw called Monster Kitchen, a Halloweeny take on cooking competition shows, that left me feeling deeply concerned. It brought home to me--more than constant bad news about bigoted Arizona politics or people walking around with holstered weapons in plain sight--just how fucked up this state can be. In short, the show featured four characters: a vampire who hosts the show, a witch who hates his guts, a wolfman and a Frankenstein's Monster. The vampire and the witch are clearly supposed to be white, and they're portrayed as the smartest characters. The other two, the wolfman and the Frankenstein, are broad racist caricatures. The wolfman is a “Mexican”, played as something of a cross between Cheech and standup comic Paul Rodriguez, and comes complete with jokes about border-crossing and green cards (oh, and he smokes dope, because as we all know, Mexicans love their weed). Frankenstein had on a red track suit, a sweat band around his head, and sported an exaggerated “blaccent”, made all the more worrisome because the actor playing him was obviously white (and if I'm wrong and he was African-American—a hard thing to tell under all that green makeup—then it was even worse). He shills for a sport drink called Frankengreen, manufactured from his sweat. He loves to dance and say things like “Fo' sho', fo' sho'” and “chirrun” instead of “children”. I think the idea is that he's supposed to be like an NBA player or some other kind of stereotypical black athlete.

I'll cop to being Mr. Finger Wagging PC Guy, but this stuff bothered me a little, and I think for a good reason. Not to the point that I thought I'd write a scathing email to the Old Tucson Studios or anything like that (okay, I did write one Yelp review), but definitely to the point that I had to wonder if the same show would have been considered acceptable anywhere else in the US (excluding the southeast and Texas). It's not like I'm against racial humor, provided it's funny. There are terrific standups who do race material (Chris Rock, Louis C.K., and Bill Burr come immediately to mind) but that's not what we're talking about here. None of this was very funny, or funny at all really, and maybe that's what I found to be most offensive about the whole thing--racial humor that ultimately had nothing of value to say about race, and served no other purpose than to confirm the bigoted opinions of the worst people in the audience. I understand that actors need work to include on their resumes, but seeing as this cast seemed to be genuinely talented, I think they deserved better. I hope they didn't write it.

There was a magic show, too, performed by a Vegas magician who grew up here in Tucson. Pretty cheesy stuff, like most things from Vegas, but I enjoyed the tricks. How did he stuff his wife into such a little box and then stick swords and things in it? Beats me. He also used a disco ball for lighting, so points for that.

Maybe I'll check out The Slaughterhouse next time. Nightfall was amusing, but very, very tame. Little kids might be scared (a few absolutely will—an evil clown sneaked up behind one child and scared him so bad he cried), and no one else. It's family-friendly Halloween horror, on the It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown level. I'm glad we went—mainly because we got to see Old Tucson Studios—but we won't go again. What's the point?

King Buzzo at Club Congress, July 30 2014

On July 30th I went and saw King Buzzo, frontman for the greatest rock band on Earth, perform at Club Congress. I kept putting off buying a ticket for this show, mistakenly believing it was going to be a dull evening watching Buzz Osbourne strum a guitar and croon some new material while sitting on a stool, periodically making aloof chit-chat with the audience.

Oh how wrong I was. Jesus, this man is a born showman. He played unaccompanied acoustic versions of Melvins tunes plus some stuff off his new solo EP, all while stalking and staggering around the stage, veering between demonic menace and rapturous abandon, belting out soulful, perfectly-pitched vocals in the way only Buzzo knows how to do. He played guitar as much like a percussion instrument as a stringed one, and at times seemed almost swallowed up in a passion that took over every cell of his body.

Then, after every few songs, he'd stop, and, almost as if a switch had been thrown in his brain, he'd transform into a jovial, lightning-witted, comedic storyteller, proving that, if he'd taken a different path in life, he'd have made a pretty decent stand-up, if not a great one.

Much of what he had to say referred to his over 30 years in show business, touching on the difficulties the Melvins had gaining any ground in the music industry. He described what it was like opening for Mr. Bungle while they toured in the 90's (“Rumor has it we were booed off the stage. That's not true. We were booed as we got on the stage.”), following up with how an enraged Mike Patton, after reaming out the crowd's eardrums with a solid hour of grinding, distorted white noise, gave himself an enema and shit (shat? It never sounds right) seven feet into the first few rows.

Buzzo held the audience in thrall for over an hour—I could have watched him perform for three times that. He's just that damn good.

One of the best live shows I've ever seen, and I almost considered not going. The last time I saw a live performance was a year ago when my wife and I saw Daikaiju play in a small gallery on Stone Avenue, and that was because local favorites the Mission Creeps, who've we've been acquainted with for several years, were opening for them. I missed the Melvins the last time they came through Tucson in 2009 (though we did catch them in 2008 with Big Business at Plush, now The Flycatcher), so I felt it was important to make an effort this time. I wasn't disappointed. There's something inspiring about watching someone do what they love most, and doing it well. 

Tucson Rainfest 2014

This post is coming a bit late, I know. I deals with weather in Tucson that's been going on for a couple of months now, and I wrote most of it in mid-July. Now it's September, and I'm only just now getting around to posting on this blog again after months of writing list articles for a movie website called Taste of Cinema. I just submitted my last article there, so now I'm back.

I was anxious about living through a southwestern summer the first full year that we were in Tucson. People were full of dire warnings about the incredible heat, how unbearable it was, how you had to spend most of your time indoors with the A/C on just to survive the three hottest months of the year.

Then summer came (we moved here in the late summer/early fall of 2006, so we caught the cooler end of the season, and had to wait until 2007 to get hit full in the face by the sun's unforgiving rays). It was hot, for sure, as if a giant hair dryer had been turned on a few inches from our skin. The wind blew warm and arid like the blast of an oven after you open the door. But it wasn't unbearable. I knew, as I do now, that you can't spend an indefinite amount of time outdoors in the summer; it's important to limit your exposure to short bursts, drink a lot of water, have sunscreen on hand to protect delicate skin from severe burns (which are less likely once you've developed a decent base tan, though skin cancer's always in the back of your mind).

It's analogous to severe winters in other parts of the country. It changes your routine, forces you to take the weather into consideration whenever you plan an outing, makes you aware of the inherent vulnerability of the human body when faced with natural phenomena. Yet you learn to put up with it, and over time, you kind of stop noticing it. It's hot, that's the way it is, get over it. If you don't like it, move.

That's what I would say to people if I were insufferably rude. I'm not, so I keep my mouth shut when I hear people complain about the heat. The other day at my job, I heard a customer say she always hates it when it's this hot, and has done so since 1973. That would be the year after I was born, and I'm in my early forties now. So, in all that time, she has gone on living in southern Arizona, roasting in the desert's sultry bosom and loathing every minute of it, and hasn't made a successful effort to leave. It's possible she's just one of those people who likes to gripe about anything and everything with little intention of doing much about it. It's possible she's too poor to move. Maybe she just likes the winters so much (so mild here that it they would be called spring anywhere else) that she can't bring herself to leave.

Whatever the reason, she's hardly alone among Tusconans when it comes to hating the heat. But you see, here's the thing: we don't own a car, and for me to get to work I have to ride a bike close to half an hour each way. I do this because I hate the bus; anyone who's ridden a city bus in Tucson more than a couple of times knows why this is. What that means for me, though, is a morning ride that hovers somewhere in the high eighties, and an afternoon ride home that is generally over one-hundred degrees. As a result, whenever I hear someone who's just gotten out of their air-conditioned car after coming from their air-conditioned house say, “Whew, it's hot out there! I can barely stand it!” I think, Yeah, cry me a river. Try spending as much time in the sun as I do, while riding a bicycle.

But you know what? This Washington State born-and-bred man, accustomed to the chilly, wet climate of the Pacific Northwest, doesn't mind it a bit. I got sick of being rained on most of the year by the time I was fourteen, but didn't get away from it until I was in my early thirties. Now I'm in The Land Where It Hardly Ever Rains, and I dig it. Sure, I miss the noticeable demarcation of seasons, and the absence of any large bodies of water nearby, but I don't miss being cold. I'd much rather be hot, it doesn't cause your body to seize up and shiver like a chihuahua in a meat locker. The heat and the intermittent monsoon rains are what make the Sonoran Desert what it is, as beautiful a landscape as any I've ever seen. Cicadas buzz like tiny chainsaws, lizards scurry along the ground in search of bugs and shade, students at the U of A go away and don't come back until September. The huge palo verde beetles have returned, dragging their heavy three-inch bodies around in their hunt for mates, creepy to look at but absolutely harmless.

I'm glad the rains have come back this year. We were gone last summer, and apparently it was one of the driest seasons on recent record. Temperatures soared as high as one-hundred and twenty degrees. Most of the southwest has been experiencing a prolonged drought, with the rain coming less frequently than in the not-too-distant past. This year, it rained on the Fourth of July, as well as the days before and after. That may not mean a permanent return to reliable precipitation, but it's a sign the monsoons haven't left for good just yet. When they come, bringing thick black cloud banks like rolling columns of night and hitting the city with a heavy sustained barrage, the streets run like streams and the air afterward grows as muggy and close as a wet wool shirt. I love it, it's an unmistakable sign of seasonal change that doesn't happen too often in the desert. Bring it on, bring the sun and shimmering heat and the Sonoran creatures clicking and skittering in the dust. I wouldn't want to live here without it.

A slight update: the rains have continued well into September, as dramatic and beautiful as any storms have a right to be. Thunder cracks across a sky momentarily fissured by the glow of lightning, clouds loom as dark and heavy as deranged gods, and more than once I've been caught in downpours that have left me soaked and spattered in wet sand. I try not to think about what flows in the temporary rivers in the streets—the dead pigeons and hobo pee, discarded condoms, used hypodermics. Better to appreciate the change in the scenery. We had a day about a week ago when the rain continued from morning until late afternoon, creating a lot of flooding around town. One woman died while trying to drive through a wash. You shouldn't do that, by the way. It rains so little here that people have no idea what to do—they drive as fast as they would on a dry road, wrecking their cars and making traffic in Tucson even more dangerous than it already is. I come from a rainy state, so I'm biased in terms of driving safety.

I once spoke to a woman in her sixties who said you used to be able to set your watch to when the monsoons would come. “It would rain from three in the afternoon until five, every day for a month.” She said you could rely on it, and that pattern didn't change for years. Now, it rains when it feels like it, sometimes hard, sometimes not at all, and you can't predict the time of day. Maybe it's climate change, maybe it's something else. Maybe it's a combination of the two (the maybe that gets my vote). I'm just happy I'm getting to experience the one other season that comes to southern Arizona.

Bedbugs And Rotten Apartments In Tucson

The last month or two have been an adventure. No, let me revise that: the last eight months, since the first day we moved into our apartment after coming off the road, have been a lesson in outrage and desperation. We know, now, what it means to feel hopeless, only to deliver ourselves out of the mouth of despair into semi-liberation. Allow me to explain.

We hated our old apartment on Park Avenue. We had thought, when we moved in, that we had it made, in a sense. Only $350 a month, a studio we had no problems adjusting to so far as space was concerned, about a block away from a Fry's grocery. With the rent so cheap, we'd save money in no time, take care of a lot of business we'd been meaning to finish for a while (I have dental issues that still need addressing, a bachelors degree that I dropped over ten years ago with only five credits left to go, and we're planning a trip to Europe that will be similar in many ways to a lengthy trip we took through the eastern US) and try to start a new direction in our lives.

Then the problems began. A lot of them, all at once. We don't own cell phones (we're cheap) so we typically use the land line in every apartment we live in. This apartment didn't have one installed, just a blank plate where one could go. Fine, call the property manager and tell him we'd like one installed. Shouldn't be a problem, should it? Property managers are supposed to manage things for tenants—it's in the job title. “I don't handle that,” he tells us. “You'll have to work that out with the phone company.”

Oh, so it was the phone company's building? No, but it was clear he had no interest in helping us. We called the phone company and they told us that from their end, the line looked active. Possibly there was a problem with the connection in the apartment itself. We called the property manager again.

“You know, I don't see why I should have to deal with this. Why don't you just use cell phones like everybody else?”

Wow. That's what I call commitment. What's the minimal amount of effort a person has to put out and still be called a manager? All this guy had to do was be related to the landlord, who was apparently too old to do much managing himself anymore. Job security as reliable as the tides.

I don't recall the exact chain of events after that. Eventually the on-site maintenance guy came into the apartment, fiddled with the phone wires, and left. When that didn't work either, the phone company said they'd send a guy out. A couple of days later he showed up, looked at our connection, and said it looked fine, but he couldn't get a signal. He went outside and sure enough, found that there was no connection to the building itself. He set that right and we had our phone, finally, after two weeks of negotiating.

Then the seat and seat post on my bike got stolen. I've covered this before in an older post, so I won't go into very much detail here. What I'll say is that is happened within a few days of moving in. I questioned the intelligence of leaving the bike locked to the metal railing outside the door, and especially questioned the wisdom of leaving the seat on the bike while unattended. What I decided was, I'm too lazy to remove the seat when I'm not using the bike and put it back on when I am, so I'll leave it where it is and hope the fact that it's within spitting distance of our front door, inside a fenced off property, in sight of our neighbors, will keep people from trying to run off with it.

Nope. Not even a week went by and it was gone. The shitty thing is, my bike is not a recreational toy. It's my primary transportation. We don't own a car (remember, cheap) and the transit system in Tucson totally sucks, so that bike is the main way I get to and from work, how I run errands, and my preferred type of exercise. You fuck with the bike, you fuck with my life. I rode without a seat for over a week before a local bike shop could order one the right size.

We mentioned it to the maintenance guy and his wife. His wife said, without hesitation, “It was probably one of the tenants.”

Good to know. Just what kind of people were we living around? I suppose the property manager's wife, the person who went over the lease with us and was present when we signed, gave us some kind of advance warning, no matter how unintentional. “We've evicted a number of people recently. There were people selling drugs and whatnot, so we're trying to discourage that. That's why it says no drugs on the lease agreement.”

From what we could gather, this place was a favorite living space of ne'er-do-wells of every sort. Our neighbors next door were chronic alcoholics who stayed up late every night talking loudly and cranking up their stereo until the early hours of the morning. That's when they weren't screaming at their TV while a game was on. I overheard another neighbor talking about a woman who had OD'd in one of the downstairs apartments. He also mentioned the time two naked homeless men had spent a day swimming in the pool.

As annoying as those problems were, they were nothing compared to the bedbugs. It goes without saying that the property manager's wife didn't mention those when we moved in.

Less than a week after moving in, my wife woke up with a series of bites down one side of her body. What the hell? Did we have spiders? For most of the following day, that's all we could think of that would have caused such large, red welts. Then my wife recalled a hostel where she had stayed in San Francisco over a decade ago. That hostel had had a bedbug infestation that took them months to get rid of, and the bites she suffered there looked a lot like the ones she had now.

She asked someone at the Fry's pharmacy about it. They said that generally, bedbug bites are in clusters, not spaced apart. My wife's bites were not in clusters. Maybe it was a spider after all.

A couple of nights later, I started getting bit on the feet and ankles, and those bites were without a doubt in clusters. They also itched like hell. I looked and felt like I had chicken pox from the ankles down. Every night brought new bites for both of us. This was the beginning of an ordeal that didn't end for seven months.

Neither of us had ever seen a bedbug before. We assumed they must be incredibly small, like fleas. That would explain why we weren't seeing them. At the time we had no idea that bedbugs hide in small crevices, outlets, under furniture, anywhere they can go and escape detection during the day. They also leave a telltale sign on your sheets, small streaks of blood from full bedbugs getting squished by accident as you move about in your sleep. As time went on and we realized that not only could we see them plainly but there were actually far more than we could physically deal with on our own, our sheets and pillowcases became covered in bloody skid marks, blotches, specks and dribbles, like a rusty-brown Jackson Pollack spattered on the canvas in slow motion. Most of these came from desperately squishing the little devils as we discovered them hunting for our warm human blood in the middle of the night. Even after they had already fed, there was something deeply satisfying about popping one between your fingers like an undercooked pea. Anyone who has lived through a bedbug infestation can probably sympathize—after weeks and months of being covered in itchy bites every bit as bad as those of mosquitoes, bad enough to wake you up from a deep sleep, going through life on little more than three hours of decent sleep a night, you'll be happy with even the smallest grain of revenge.

We contacted the property managers multiple times over the course of the seven months we lived in the building. Each time it took them days to get back to us, and each time the response was something along the lines of “Gee, bedbugs? Spray some poison, I guess. What do you expect us to do about it?”

It was clear they couldn't care less. It was also becoming clear that they had known about the infestation for some time, but had neglected to tell us about it when we signed a year lease. I gathered intelligence slowly, overhearing conversations between our neighbors and Richard, the on-site maintenance guy. He wanted Richard to talk to the property managers about the bedbugs, the cockroaches (I forgot to mention the hordes of roaches that paraded through our apartment at all hours of the day and night), and the leaky roof, which had apparently led to damp living spaces during the last rain storm. 

The only consolation I took away after hearing them talk was that we weren't the only ones suffering from the problem. Big deal, it was still awful, and we couldn't see any way out. A year lease meant we were stuck there for months, enduring an issue that was steadily getting worse. If we broke the lease, we knew the possible consequences: the landlord could hold us liable for the remaining rent owed. That would mean that, in addition to paying rent on whatever new place we moved to, we'd have to pay close to two grand to our previous landlord. We're not rich, and such a circumstance could very well have bled us dry financially. We decided, against our better judgment, to wait the situation out and see if there was any improvement.

I took heart when we found a note on our door one afternoon stating that the managers were finally hiring an exterminator. About fucking time, I thought. Now, at least, they were taking some kind of positive action. Maybe we didn't have to break the lease after all. Maybe things would improve.

When the exterminator did eventually show up, it was only to deal with the roaches. We put a little roach poison here and there in the apartment and left.

Richard was there. “Isn't he going to do anything about the bedbugs?” I asked.

“They're going to try to take care of the different bugs one at a time. First the roaches, and then when those are gone, they're going to work on the bedbugs.” He couldn't have helped but notice my frustrated expression. “Don't worry, though,” he said, weakly trying to placate me, “I'll give you some of the bug poison I use. I spray it around my place all the time, and I don't have any bedbugs. We'll take care of this problem, don't worry.”

At no point did he consider the absurdity of expecting other people to be happy living in a place drenched in poison. Good for him if he was fine with it. We weren't. About this time I began to feel incredibly depressed. The situation grew more and more hopeless, both my wife and I were working long days on virtually no sleep, and we had almost no way to relieve ourselves from the stress.

Things reached a point of no return in the last couple of weeks before we moved. The neighbor next to us, the one who complained to Richard about his own bedbug problem? He moved to another apartment in the building. Evidently he was such a slob that his old apartment was pretty much trashed, necessitating a remodel. Richard and some other guy, maybe his son-in-law, busied themselves tearing out sheetrock and linoleum. Hidden everywhere were thousands and thousands of bedbugs that had been breeding for years, unimpeded. Had he really done nothing in all this time to deal with them? Had he simply endured bites and bloodstains without taking any steps to alleviate his suffering? There could be no other explanation. He let their numbers grow, and now that he had left and their hiding places were being disturbed, they needed to find somewhere else to feed.

Guess where they went? We became inundated with swarm upon swarm of bedbugs, dozens of them a night, biting us with such frequency that sleep became next to impossible. We could no longer look at our bed as a place to lay down and relax—it was the place you were guaranteed to be bitten repeatedly as soon as you climbed in.

One night I went around the apartment with a flashlight, armed with a spray bottle of rubbing alcohol, which I knew from experience could kill bedbugs more or less on contact. They were everywhere, on the drapes and on the walls, crawling around on the floor looking for a source of blood, outside the window searching for openings in the screen, in the bathroom. I don't know how many I killed, but it didn't come close to being all of them. I spent the night doing this instead of sleeping, and in the morning had to work a full shift at my job.

It got bad enough that I rode my bike to the nearest Target after work and bought a two-person tent. I had left a note on the kitchen table for my wife stating my intentions. She called me at work as I was closing up the shop.

“Don't buy a tent. That's crazy.”

“Honey, I'm literally on the verge of a nervous breakdown. If I don't get some sleep I'm going to lose my mind. I don't know what else to do.”

“Do you really think it's going to work?”

Good question. I got the idea from an internet search that turned up “bedbug tents” as an item sold to keep them off you while you sleep. The tent retailed for over a hundred dollars at Ace Hardware. Hell with that, I thought, crestfallen. Then I asked myself, Why wouldn't a regular tent work just as well? As long as there are no large openings, bugs shouldn't be able to get in, and a basic two-person tent goes for about thirty bucks at a big box store.

That's how we spent the last week before we moved, sleeping in a tent set up inside our apartment. I wish I had a picture of this, but the relevant photograph was lost when our laptop died (what can I say, I'm lazy about backing up files). And it worked beautifully. We weren't bitten once, and for the first time in months we slept through the night undisturbed.

The bedbugs, denied a source of food, took to biting us during the day whenever they could.

Around this time, I visited the legal aid office downtown. I should have done that months earlier. The lawyer I spoke with confirmed my suspicions, namely that we were justified for the most part in breaking our lease over bedbugs, but there was still a danger of our landlord chasing us down for the remaining rent. It would go to collections if they chose to pursue it, and we were on our own at that point, having to go to court in order to prove our case. As much as we hated the idea, we were prepared to take it that far if we had to. She also told me that we needed a paper trail indicating that we had complained about the bedbugs over a period of time with nothing being done about it. The emails we'd sent were, to some degree, somewhat sufficient, but we'd need to also send a hard copy letter to our landlords declaring our intentions and the reasons why before moving.

Strictly speaking, that's what we did. It's just that we sent the letter the same day we moved.

Our biggest fear was that if we told the property managers outright that it was our intention to break our lease, they might decide to evict us in retaliation, meaning we'd have an eviction on our record and would have to find a new place to live in a very short period of time. Better for us to find a new place first, which we did, and move out as quickly as we could without anyone noticing.

We picked a day we'd both have off, packed our stuff in such a hurry that we had no idea what had been packed where (a big inconvenience when it came time to unpack), and I went to the closest U-Haul to rent a pickup. We spent the entire day packing and loading the truck, going back and forth between the old apartment and the new one, moving our stuff like thieves, constantly checking to make sure no one noticed what we were doing. My greatest fear was that Richard would see us and figure out what was going on, then call the property managers, who would then show up to harass and bully us. A part of me felt they were exactly the kind of people to pull that kind of shit if they felt someone was trying to screw them out of money. It was their love of money over common decency and human compassion that had led them to be the proud managers of the shithole we were trying to escape from in the first place. Along with calling all the different utility companies to get our services transferred, I had spent the previous three or four days preparing myself for a wild and dramatic confrontation that would stack even more stress on top of what we were already about to go through.

As it turns out, no one noticed or cared what we were doing. Save for one person, who asked if we were moving out as we carried the very last box down to the truck, nobody said anything to us. We'd cleaned the place from top to bottom, wiped and mopped it down to the point where it was likely cleaner than the day we moved in, and left nothing but an empty space that our lives used to occupy. I walked up to Richard's wife outside their apartment (Richard not being home at the time) and handed her the keys. She looked pretty bowled over when I told her we'd just moved out. “Does Richard know?” she asked, almost as if to say, “Are you sure you should be doing this?” At the time, we didn't care about proper procedure. We didn't care what anyone living in that building thought. Looking back, I really hope we didn't get Richard in trouble. It's not like any of it was his fault.

There was a new problem of course, one that we knew we'd have to conquer if we were going to get our life back in shape. It was inevitable that bedbugs would stow away in our stuff—there were far too many of them at the time of the move for a few of them (more like a few dozen) not to hitch a ride in our hastily-packed boxes. We panicked at the thought of being at fault for infesting an apartment. I thought of all the things that could happen to us: eviction, blacklisting, bankruptcy, homelessness. Our lives could be ruined. I saw us having to call our folks for money so we could fly back to Washington state in disgrace, moving in with our parents and trying to start our lives over from nothing (at least we had the option of reaching out to people, should the worst occur).

The first night didn't help. I was bitten at least half a dozen times by bedbugs that hadn't fed in over a week. I can't adequately describe the despair I felt the first week or so after moving in. I was sure we were doomed. My wife tried her best to calm me, let me know we could only do what we could. We did laundry constantly, put sheets and pillows in the dryer on an almost daily basis. We borrowed a steamer from her job at a thrift store/boutique, and steamed all of our furniture, all the clothes we'd packed away that couldn't go in the laundry, around the perimeters of all the rooms. I bought poison and sprayed it everywhere I thought bugs would hide. We bought a new vacuum cleaner (did I mention this move cost us over a thousand dollars in deposits, truck rental, new furniture, and other odds and ends? That was our whole tax return, something we hadn't planned to blow on a desperate escape—and a thousand dollars is a shit-ton of money for us) and used it throughout the entire apartment in the hope of vacuuming up any eggs they might have laid.

We kept all that up for three weeks, and at the end, after occasional bites that led to a renewed sense of dread every time, we beat them. I can say, without reservations, that there are no bedbugs in our apartment. We had to throw out furniture, including a hope chest of my wife's that was a gift from her father when she was sixteen, and we lived on the edge of pure hysteria for weeks, but we did it and it is done for good. We won that battle, and the last remnants of that awful place are gone. It is behind us.

Just in case you think I'm exaggerating how bad the old building was, here's another anecdote. One morning we awoke to someone banging on our window. The fuck is going on? We step outside to see black smoke raging from a downstairs apartment. Richard hurriedly unlocked the large back gate in the fence bordering the rear of the property to let in the fire trucks that were even then pulling up the alley. Within minutes a fire fighter told us to evacuate the building. We stood around in the parking lot as fire crews brought in hoses and dealt with the blaze.

Good thing the building's mostly made out of brick, I thought. That could have been bad.

A week or so later I come to find out (through a notice left on our door by the fire department) that the cause of the fire was a badly wired water heater. So I had to wonder: just how well-wired is our heater? Is it going to burst into flames on us one day while we're not at home?

A little later, my wife spoke with our neighbor two doors down. Generally we'd been avoiding this guy as he was one of the ones who partied loudly late into the night, and seemed a little clueless about neighborly behavior. But she happened to get into a conversation with him, the subject got around to budbugs, water heaters and the all around shittiness of the building, and he mentioned that his own water heater had exploded some time before while he was at work, damaging several square feet of carpet. He complained about it to the managers and they told him they'd just cut out the damaged section of carpet and leave it at that, no replacement necessary. He told them no way, you're replacing the carpet, and by the way there are a few other things wrong that I might bring up with the right people, and before long they put in a whole new carpet.

I wasn't surprised they had to be pushed to take care of the problem, and that was the least of my worries. What bothered me was the idea that our own water heater might do the same thing while we were out, pretty much destroying everything we had. That poor kid lost I don't know how much, I just hope he had rich parents (probably not, if that apartment was the only place he could afford). If it had happened to us, we would have been totally fucked.

Whatever, it's over. The managers probably even now commit acts of evil that set the karmic ledger more and more heavily against them. If I believed in reincarnation, I'd let myself think that they might come back as bedbugs themselves, or roaches, and mine would be the foot that steps on them. Unfortunately, that isn't the way life works. Bad people commit rotten acts against others all the time and get away with it—it has always been thus and it always will be, I'm afraid.

What gets to me is that there are still people living in that building who, for whatever reason, can't get away. Most of the other tenants were poor, elderly, screwed up on drugs or booze, crazy, living on SSI. One guy downstairs had no legs, presumably no job, and say around sometimes outside his apartment looking forlorn and desperate. There was someone else (or maybe it was him) who screamed his head off all night, hollering words that made no sense, were just meaningless syllables of rage spit into the night to vent a fury brought on by the fact that his life was hell and he was trapped in it for good. It was depressing to hear, and depressing to see the way neighbors never smiled, never said hello, didn't seem to want anything to do with anyone else. There was a constant haze of anger hovering over the place. Most tellingly, there were no families, no one with children, which was probably for the best—I can't imagine what it would be like for a child to have to live in such an environment.

So I think about those people sometimes, who couldn't get away. I didn't speak with any of them, really, because they were often surly and unresponsive (so was I, after a while), but I get why they were pissed. Their lives have little hope of getting better, and the fact they have to settle for living in a bug-infested nightmare is just one more example for them of the way things are probably going to go for a long time to come. There is something very educational about living among the impoverished, in that it doesn't allow you the luxury of looking away, or pretending that the suffering of people whose poverty is destined to follow them all the way to the grave doesn't exist. In a city like Tuscon, in the poorest county in the state of Arizona, the desperate and the wretched are a common site. I'll always try to remember a little bit of what we went through whenever I see them. 

Even More Freaky Tucson Landmarks

And now for more funny/unusual/admirable things a person can find just sitting around in the city of Tucson.

This giant Easter Island head used to live at Magic Carpet Golf on Speedway Boulevard until that place closed several years ago. Now it stands in front of The Hut, a bar on 4th Avenue. It's nice that somebody found a use for it beyond smashing it into gravel-sized chunks and tossing it in a landfill. Also, for people with sentimental memories of that particular miniature golf course, this huge head (which everyone insists on calling a “tiki head” in spite of the fact that it doesn't bear any resemblance to actual tiki designs) will serve as a permanent reminder—provided The Hut doesn't close—of a bygone time in Tucson, now serving as a landmark for a place where U of A students can get tipsy on beer and cocktails while trying to get laid. So really, not all that different from miniature golf.

All hail this weird thing! I have no idea what this is or who put it there. It's quite a thing, though. You can find this on 1st Avenue just a block or so south of the Pima Library. Metal sculpture isn't uncommon in Tucson—there's a place called the Sculpture Resource Center near downtown where projects like this sometimes come into being. Maybe that's where it's from. I don't know. I like it because it's a jungle gym with metal flowers on it—how often do you see that? Not every day, I can tell you that much.

Paul Bunyan. So what, right? Lots of towns have a big Paul Bunyan standing outside of a business, especially if it sells timber or pre-cut log cabins or something. I have to admit I have a soft spot for this kind of thing. Don't ask me why, but I like cheesy Americana. It's not like I'm a big flag-waving, truck driving, red-blooded patriot in the Toby Keith vein, but if I go into a mom-and-pop diner with antique farm implements on the walls alongside varnished circular sections of logs painted with airbrushed bald eagles and American flags, I'm positively tickled. Again, I can't even begin to tell you why that is. And big Paul Bunyan statues fit right in there. I think I like the idea that they embody a piece of American folklore, a part of our storytelling history that we've kept alive. I feel the same way about chainsaw art of Bigfoot.

After somebody stole my bike seat, I took off for BICAS to buy a new (used) one. For some reason, I couldn't find it, even though I've been there several times. While riding around the neighborhood seatless, I came across this metal sculpture. Judging from the weathering, I assume it's bronze. The dual fish were the first thing to catch my attention. Then I changed angles and saw this:

There's a horned toad hiding between the fish. I really like this piece, but I find it a little confusing. I get that the horned toad represents the desert, but what do the fish symbolize? The only place you'll find fish in southern Arizona is at a sushi restaurant. Do they refer to the now-deceased Santa Cruz and Rillito rivers, that maybe once had fish in them before they turned into dry riverbeds? I suppose it's possible. No matter what the sculpture is trying to communicate, I like the design. Animal sculptures are the best.

So what's the best animal sculpture in Tucson, after the Snake Bridge? Maybe it's this Tyrannosaurus Rex next to a McDonald's on the corner of East Grant and Tanque Verde. Up until recently, I thought this was another remnant of the same miniature golf course our booze-purveying friend from Easter Island came from. Not at all; the owner of the McDonald's has a son who was a huge fan of Jurassic Park, like any healthy child. So he commissioned a T. Rex from a company that had a connection to the construction of the animatronic dinosaurs from the movies, for $55,000. Some kids have very charmed lives. I like this thing for two reasons: first, as I think everyone can agree, dinosaurs are cool. And second, it's nice to see a McDonald's do something to set itself apart, considering McDonald's restaurants come in about two designs, the exact same ones you see all across the United States. A dinosaur statue such as this one adds a personal touch you rarely see at chain restaurants, or chain businesses in general. So kudos to you, wealthy McDonald's owner who buys his kid super-expensive presents. You've given us something we can all enjoy, even if we go out of our way to avoid McDonald's greasy, weird-tasting food.

An Empty Building Makes Me Want To Write About Gabrielle Giffords' Shooting

I was on a bike ride and hastily snapped this picture of the building that once served as Gabrielle Gifford's Tucson offices. That was, I assume, up until about a year or two ago. Now that she's left the House of Representatives, the building has a For Lease sign out by the sidewalk.

I first heard about the shooting while we were in Hawaii. We were at the Starbucks in the town of Waimea because we needed to do laundry and the laundromat there was the one closest to us (only a 30-minute bus ride away from our little shack out in the sticks). I happened to look at the rack of newspapers and saw the headline on the front page. I cracked open the laptop and sure enough, there were a slew of stories about how the Arizona representative and a number of other people had been shot by a gunman armed with a 9mm. pistol and an extended clip, some of them fatally.

The story shocked me for two reasons. Most obviously, because there had been a mass shooting in the city we had left only months before; and also because there was this weird feeling that some of the city's cross-eyed lunacy had reached halfway across the Pacific Ocean to touch us in a coffee shop in the middle of a small, sparsely populated Hawaiian town.

There was a lot of talk in the aftermath about how the hyper-conservative political atmosphere of the time led to the tragedy. I have to admit that's exactly how I felt when I first heard about it. Obama hadn't been in office a week and the Tea Party was calling him Hitler. Fringe right-wingers were getting semi-serious consideration in the media, when ten years earlier they had to be content with handing out self-published pamphlets at gun and knife shows. At a time when people were muttering things about secession, the overthrow of a “tyrannical” government, and an allegedly socialist Democratic party, it didn't surprise me that a Democrat had been shot by a wacko. The way that left-leaning news outlets and opinion-makers charactarized the event as a real life manifestation of the violent eliminationist fantasies of the extreme right proved to be premature in light of the gunman's obvious schizophrenia. What the shooting seemed to prove was less that the radical right wing poses a real danger to life and limb (as far as I'm concerned, they're just noisy and obnoxious) and more that background checks on firearm purchases are a great idea, along with better medical care for the mentally ill. Guns and crazy people go together like jackhammers and dynamite.

I was in no way surprised, though, that such a thing had happened in Arizona. Mass shootings happen all over the place these days, but it took Arizona for a politician to get shot. This place is so libertarian people deliver their own mail. It's no secret that politics here are totally batshit. What did The Daily Show call it, “The Meth Lab of Democracy”? Yeah, that's what the state is known for, that's its claim to fame. Stuff like SB1070 (the Show Your Papers law for those of you who weren't paying attention then), Sheriff Joe Arpaio tormenting prisoners for his own amusement and racially profiling random brown people, the Tucson Unified School District banning Mexican-American studies from the classrooms, as well as making it illegal to mention any texts that present a pro-Chicano point of view, all of that goes a long way toward making Arizonans look like a bunch of assholes. Plenty are, and a disproportionate number get elected to the legislature, but most are sincerely decent human beings. But does anyone hear about the good stuff? No, it's all racism and attempted political assassinations. If it wasn't for the sunshine and medicinal pot, no one would want to move here.

Public Art on Tucson's 4th Avenue

This is part one of what I intend to be an ongoing series on this blog showcasing interesting sculptural work, graffiti, miscellaneous objects of interest, and other trippy stuff around Tucson.

All up and down 4th Avenue, a commercial district/tourist trap emphasizing small boutiques, bars and restaurants, and resembling in some ways a miniturized version of the Haight in San Francisco, you find lots of sanctioned, professional graffiti art—or is it considered graffiti when it's not illegal? I don't know. Some of it might not even be done with spray paint, but it all adds the kind of bohemian vibe businesses on the avenue like to present.

Some of these have been around for years, others went up in the last year or so.

I'll start with this great collection of images just off of 6th Street and 4th. This is some of the coolest mural work in Tucson right now. I don't know the name of the artist or artists, though some of the work is signed with the crew names.

 

 

 

Here's a rattlesnake and a Day of the Dead-style skull on the outside of a place called Creative Ventures.

 

 

These Spy Vs. Spy guys guard one side of the Magpies Pizza.

 

 

Did you love the 60's and 70's?  Do you wish you were born earlier than 1991 so you could have seen classic rock before it was classic?  Hippie Gypsy knows how you feel.  The exterior of the building is a love letter to an era.

 

This mural has been on the southeastern corner of 4th and 6th Street for a long time. I think it depicts local characters from over the years. It's shown in two parts here, top picture the left side, bottom the right.

 

A medusa head stares from the wall of Medusa Kabob House (side comment: this place used to be a terrible restaurant called The Casbah, where the staff was stoned and the food was the worst kind of vegan).

This would make a great tattoo. It's on the upper wall on the south side of ZOE Boutique.

These patriotic images are on the side of Miller's Surplus, naturally.

This is on a wall on Stone Avenue, just before the downtown underpass.

Here's a woman worshipping produce on the side of The Tasteful Kitchen on Stone (I seem to have wandered away from 4th Avenue).

And finally, this stuff on the side of an art gallery on the northeast corner of Stone and Speedway.

 

Some of these are better than others, but isn't that true of everything? It makes for a better urban environment, as far as I'm concerned, and there's a bunch of it all over town. I'll post more as I collect more pictures.