Some Personal Tuscon History

In late 2006, my wife and I moved to Tucson, AZ from Washington State. She wasn't my wife at the time; after dating for about eight months, we decided to move out of state together and see what developed. She had plans of possibly attending the University of Arizona, but wasn't really sure if that would happen or not. What she knew was that she didn't want to keep living in Washington, the place where she was raised and had had enough of by the time she was sixteen. Off and on she'd lived in Missouri to attend Stephens College, Oxford, England to attend college there, and in San Francisco for a few years. Despite her efforts to get away, at some point she would always come back to Washington, and she always hated it.

I didn't hate it so much, but then, I'd never really been anywhere else. It's where I was born and raised, where I was more or less educated, and all I knew of America and the world. Like most provincial people, my perspective on life was grossly limited to the things I was used to and the people I'd known since I was young. There was home, and there was everywhere else. I considered everywhere else to be largely out of reach. That kind of provincialism and limited scope was precisely what my then-girlfriend despised about the part of Washington where we lived, and it amazes me to this day that she saw enough in me to want to hitch her life to mine.

It was a big move for me to uproot myself from the place I knew and start a new life with someone else in a city neither of us had ever been to and knew very little about. My parents thought I was crazy. The responses of friends and acquaintances ranged from cautiously supportive to outright resentful. The band I was in at the time especially seemed to take my leaving as a kind of betrayal, and I found I had to cut ties with those people if I was going to maintain my sanity over the course of the move.

Through August and September we moved into a guest house behind another house that was in the process of being renovated, on a side street off of Alvernon Way. I don't remember exactly how big it was, but it couldn't have been more than 425 square feet, if even that. The living room and bedroom were the same space, a tiny kitchen connected to that, and off the kitchen was the bathroom, all set in a straight line. It was small, but comfortable, and we made it work for a little over seven months before moving to a one-bedroom close to downtown. We had access to the washer and dryer in the otherwise empty house in front of us, a gas range, and a dry, hardscrabble yard. The security deposit was an unheard-of $150, and our rent was $450, electricity included. To put that in perspective, apartment managers in Washington typically want a deposit the size of the rent, plus the rent for the previous month and the month you're moving in. 

The low cost of living is one of the things that has, over time, kept us coming back to Tucson. After living on Hawai'i's Big Island for a year, we returned to Tucson. And now, after more than a year on the road traveling through the eastern United States (a trip you can read about on easterntrails.blogspot.com), we've come back a second time to begin the next phase of our lives. In total, we've lived here for the better part of five years, with a projection of another two years before we leave again.

The reason for the low cost of living is obvious once you've spent about a week in the Tucson metro area. The city is very poor compared to many other American cities, and it resides in the poorest county in Arizona. As a result, the rate of crime is high, a fact we discovered two weeks after moving here.

The laundry room in the empty house had a door that didn't lock. Normally, one wouldn't be inclined to think of that as a problem. We'd gotten into the habit of sometimes leaving our laundry in the dryer overnight with the intention of taking it out in the morning. One morning, I went out to the laundry room and noticed something unusual. The load looked a lot smaller than the one I had put in the night before. The towels were missing, and there were fewer socks and underwear than I remembered. It took me a minute to realize someone had stolen half our load. I was confused; who the hell steals laundry? TV's and stereos I can see, but underwear? When I told my wife, she was as surprised as I was, but eventually concluded that anyone who would go through the trouble of stealing socks and towels out of a stranger's dryer probably needed them more than we did.

It was a bad neighborhood. Not bad in the sense that there were roving gangs of armed thugs (though Tucson does have those, mainly on the south end), but bad in the sense that you couldn't go a day without being panhandled by a meth addict or alcoholic. In a residential area a couple of blocks off a main thoroughfare, that's pretty bad. Prostitutes are common enough in the business districts between Oracle Road and Alvernon Way that any woman walking alone stands a chance of being propositioned, particularly by men in big pickup trucks with the names of the construction companies they work for clearly emblazoned on the doors. It wasn't until years later that I found out the block inside Grant Road, Dodge, and Alvernon—our neighborhood―had some of the highest numbers of meth-related arrests, which would explain the rows of up to twenty cop cars I'd see sometimes parked up and down Flower Street.

And there was the night a stranger showed up in our yard sometime before midnight, pacing around and talking on a cell phone. From what we could make out, it sounded like he was talking to a 911 dispatcher. We went outside to question him, and it was immediately obvious he'd been drinking. As he explained it to us, he'd been hanging out with a female friend when her boyfriend showed up and started beating on him. “That guy's crazy. We weren't even doing anything. She told me she wasn't with him anymore, so I don't see what he's so mad about.” He said he was calling a cop in case the guy came looking for him. We told him that was fine, but he needed to do it somewhere other than our yard. As this was going on I recalled hearing, about fifteen minutes earlier, a lot of loud, angry shouting down the street. I assumed the man in our yard had been involved. A few moments later, a police officer showed up, after going back and forth a couple of times looking for the address, and started asking the man some questions. It was one of the few times I'd been glad to see a cop. We went back in the house, glad not to have to deal with a drunken idiot anymore.

It took a few weeks for me to realize Tucson has a good side that offsets the general seediness you encounter daily. In November of that year we attended our first Day of the Dead procession, dressed in a tuxedo and wedding dress with our faces painted in skull makeup, to march along with a motley crowd of skeletons, demons, giant clown puppets and ghosts along 4th Avenue and through downtown. We saw a movie at the Loft Theatre, the coolest movie theater I've ever set foot in, devoted to foreign and independent film, cult favorites and B-movie oddities. Tucson has restaurants of nearly every type; I ate Vietnamese for the first time here, at a well-known eatery called Miss Saigon (which I'm currently boycotting because they badly screwed up a spring roll order for our wedding reception, but don't let that stop you from eating there). Our favorite at the moment is Mother Hubbard's on Grant and Stone (also the location of a decent Asian import store called, creatively, the Grantstone), a diner that specializes in southwestern ingredients and makes the majority of its food from scratch. 

This is a blog about Tucson, the Tucson I've known over the last seven years and Tucson as I live in it today. Some posts will read like essays, others like journal entries. All will reflect impressions and opinions of the city I have adopted as my home. I'll try, though it won't be easy, to say as many good things as bad about this addled, off-center, borderline wild west town. After all, as the title of the blog says, Tucson only kind of sucks.