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Once, Grand had been the highway from Phoenix to Los Angeles. Railroad tracks still ran beside it. Now Grand would take me to Indian School Road where I turned west again.
Indian School was another bleak six-lane Phoenix raceway across flat land bordered by pawn shops, payday loan offices, tattoo parlors, strip joints, empty buildings with for-lease signs out front, and even an outfit in a defunct Wendy’s that promised money in exchange for your auto title. Little shrines decorated the joyless landscape, commemorating the loss of loved ones in a traffic mishap. Off on the curvilinear side streets were the cinderblock houses of Maryvale.
This was Phoenix’s first mass-produced single-family-home development, John F. Long’s American Dream in ranch houses built atop former fields of cotton, alfalfa, lettuce, and beets. It was the opposite of Willo, but in the 1960s it was new, with all-electric kitchens and backyard pools.
Builders such as John Hall, Ralph Staggs, and Elliott Whitehouse copied Maryvale on various scales all over the Valley. Del Webb built Sun City. They drew an Anglo middle class and retirees from Back East and growth paid for itself. That’s what the city leaders said.
The last of that generation, Whitehouse, had died only a year ago.
Some areas fared better than others. In Maryvale, the Anglos moved out and the poor Hispanics moved in. Many of them were followed by successive waves of illegal immigrants that staffed the hotels, restaurants, and lawn services. It was suburbia aging badly, a linear slum.
People called it Scaryvale.
I found what I was looking for south of Indian School on Fifty-First Avenue, a shopping strip hard against the bank of the Grand Canal. The canal itself looked nothing like its namesake in Venice or the massive channel in China.
Carrying water from the Salt River Project dams and reservoirs in the mountains east of the city, this canal was bounded on both sides by a maintenance road, forty-five feet or so across total. It was the oldest in the system, one of the first Hohokam canals cleaned out by Jack Swilling in the 1870s. Like the Arizona Canal to the north, it extended all the way to the Agua Fria River.
Shady cottonwoods once bordered this Grand Canal, but the mighty SRP had cut most of them down by the time I was born. In some nicer areas, people hiked along the maintenance roads, but most who drove across the canals daily never noticed, never thought about the miracle of being able to turn on the tap without worry.
The shopping strip, thrown up in the eighties, was two-thirds empty. Its anchor tenant, if you wanted to call it that, was called El TobacCorner, a nice little Spanglish mash-up name. A red sign bordered by blue flashed “open.”
But I didn’t turn in yet. I drove across the canal and continued on for almost a mile, checking the rearview mirror. Without signaling, I accelerated and spun left into a residential street, wound around past falling-apart homes, and rolled slowly back out to the main thoroughfare. Nobody seemed to be following me.
The parking lot of El TobacCorner was nearly empty. One dirty pickup truck and a tricked-out Honda lowrider sat directly in front, beneath the digital sign that urged passersby to “Have a Smoky Day.” Otherwise, half an acre of asphalt was badly in need of business.
I parked in the first row away from the shopping strip, facing toward the road.
Shadows approached and I tensed, reaching for the Python.
Dogs. A pack of five mutts trotted past the Prelude and kept going east. With the combination of people losing their homes in the recession and the immigrants moving out, or deeper into the shadows, Phoenix had a serious stray dog problem.
Another night in paradise.
A bell by the double glass doors and an electronic beep somewhere in the back announced my arrival. I was the only customer.
Del Shannon was singing “My Little Runaway” on the sound system. The shop was brightly lit and the first thing you noticed were walls covered with large colorful posters advertising Zig-Zag, Marlboros, Kool menthols, and brands I didn’t know. I doubted they carried Lindsey’s brand. Only on a second look did I notice a drop ceiling dating from the Carter administration with yellow stains from water leaks.
The shop was laid out like an “L,” with rows of waist-high, glass-fronted display cases running on either side of the long end and tall cases and a cash register closer to me. A four-sided, vertical plastic case held Zippo lighters with all manner of artwork. One showed a figure with a skull head drinking a glass of wine.
Behind the cases, the walls had been drilled to hold clear racks showing more product—individual packs of cigarettes, e-cigs, rolling papers, gum, and chewing tobacco.
That last made me think momentarily of Orville Grainer up in Ash Fork.
But only momentarily.
A big man sat on a stool ten feet away at the long end of the “L.” Beside him was a comic book. He was ethnically ambiguous, at least thirty, at least three hundred pounds, and dressed like a baby. In other words, the giant, sagging T-shirt and long-short pants gave the effect of a four-year-old with short legs and long torso. The look was completed with a cholo cap turned sideways and a riot of aggressive tattoos on each arm and one climbing up one side of his neck.
These ubiquitous outfits accompanied a society where most of the men, at least, seemed to postpone adulthood indefinitely. I thought about photos of working men and even criminals fifty years ago, how they would be in suits and ties. When Americans read books besides Harry Potter. But there was no time to linger on that thought.
The big head cocked and he spoke over Del Shannon. “Lookin’ at something?”
I thought about responding to his growly question. He looked like a clo
wn. I was looking at a clown. His intention in all the “body art” couldn’t have been to make people look away. Then I remembered Lon Cheney’s observation that “there’s nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.”
I looked away and approached a woman sitting in a low chair behind the register.
She was Anglo and might have been fifty, with gray hair that looked like a bathroom rug, a dead-fish complexion, mean porcine eyes, and a sleeveless size twenty-five housedress decorated with sunflowers. Only her head and shoulders were visible. Her hands were beneath the waist-level nook that held the register.
