Back To The Summer We All Drove Out To Arizona
I left my heart in Arizona. The weird part is I’ve never actually been there.
I listen to so much music, both for work and to try to maintain diversified tastes that can inform new experiences in life, that when a song really grips me, I clutch it tightly. It’s like a beautiful balloon: You want to behold it and keep it close, but the more you handle it, the more air escapes, rendering it saggy and deflated. But you can’t help it. You’re drawn in.
One of those songs right now for me is called “AZ” by the band Now, Now. I’m not entirely sure why I can’t get enough of it, but it’s likely partly because it sounds a little like Jay Som’s fantastic “The Bus Song,” which I also adore. Past superficial sonic similarities though, “AZ” just conveys a mood that I find myself wanting to return to — purple, humid, and dreamy. Oddly not much like the actual arid AZ desert at all.
But what would I know about deserts? I’ve never visited one, in Arizona or otherwise. My first time in L.A., my brother and sister-in-law took me on a hike along some red rocks, lovely and rustic but decidedly not desertlike. (The blue Pacific flanked our route the entire time.) Perhaps that’s why I’m so drawn to desert scenes. Their orange-hot, desolate landscapes are so foreign, miles from the cold steel and pavement of New York or any city (and the bumbling copses of the suburbs). Vegetation is limited to intermittent spiked green jags. It’s a beautiful escape. It’s a postcard.
Last month, I spent a Saturday at the botanical garden in the Bronx, mingling with magnolias and breathing a more fragrant kind of city air for once. The storied orchid exhibit, for which I waited in line an hour, was wonderful, unfurling through a seemingly mile-long greenhouse. Indoor climates shifted to accommodate their colorful inhabitants. The warmest room was, of course, the desert; the cacti stoned me. Who knew there were so many different kinds! Many people, surely, and not even just those who’ve made botany a primary interest. But this, paying attention and marveling at tiny details of green things, was all new to me. It helped that I wore socks with tiny cacti printed on them that day, just by coincidence.
Not even a month later, I moved offices at work, mandatorily fleeing the wide, trendy comfort of SoHo/TriBeCa for a Times Square skyscraper. (The panoramic views are better, sure, but leaving a loft by corporate decree wasn’t exactly my favorite news to discover upon a return from time off.) Our team’s desks still bare and unsettlingly pearly, my boss organized a jaunt down to Manhattan’s flower district to pick up some living things to inject chlorophyll and color into our new lives. Again, I was drawn to the cacti — well, the succulents, I’m still not really sure of the difference? — so I picked one out about the size of a soup cup and potted it. I almost wished I’d held out though. Every other spot down West 28th Street had these wild Super Mario Bros.-looking cacti, green prickly stems with ruby-red bulbs on top. Some were even pink and peach colored! The exoticness had captivated me once again.
A quick Google search reveals these are called ruby ball cacti or pink moon cacti — the latter of which excited me most because of Nick Drake. I have yet to look up whether or not they’re native to Arizona. But I reserve the right to romanticize them and fit them right inside my fantasies to go west and hit the desert.
Why do these feelings linger, anyway? All the normal reasons, I’m sure: craving adventure and excitement and a change of scenery. And no landscape looks as wildly different as the blank canvas of an Arizonan desert. When I picture it, I imagine a feeling as much as a vivid image of water canteens and head protection and rivers of sunscreen.
I don’t picture cities, even though Arizona obviously has them. And from what I’ve heard, they’re fairly flat and sprawling, slate sidewalks without a scuff and highways rushing like rapids. I know there are colleges in Phoenix and Flagstaff. I know the Gin Blossoms hailed from Tempe.
And I know whenever I want to feel a particular kind of emotional pull, I put on their song “Still Wondering Where Those Bastards Are,” a grimy acoustic rip of which can easily be found on YouTube (and I pray it never gets removed). It’s driven by singer Robin Wilson and guitarist Doug Hopkins, the electric pair who wrote the band’s biggest early hits. Hopkins was a magnificent talent, both as a writer and performer. He was also, unfortunately, a drunk, and was canned from the band shortly before they blew up. He eventually took his own life, a sad postscript to the sea of jolly and jangle still bursting from his songs “Hey Jealousy” and “Found Out About You.”
A different tune always scratched my itch: “29,” composed by rhythm guitarist Jesse Valenzuela. There’s this puncturing noise on the chorus, right after Robin sings, “Only time will tell / If wishing wells / Can bring us anything.” It’s hard to tell quite if it’s a sliding guitar or a processed vocal. It might be both. I don’t care. Somehow, the longing in it captures my craving to find a sandscape and bury myself in the heat.
When I moved to New York for the first time as an unhip 22-year-old, I didn’t have a job, so I spent too much time on the couch watching DVDs and looking at Twitter, forlorn about this whole “music writing” thing. (I found out later that it’s easier than I thought — you just have to actually write!) The little time I did spend on my laptop was devoted to fucking around on GarageBand recording lo-fi covers of Radiohead’s “Climbing Up the Walls” and emailing my best friend, who lived back home in Rochester. In one particular message, he unspooled for me the entire tragic Doug Hopkins story and included a link to “Still Wondering Where Those Bastards Are,” a simple gesture that ended up meaning a great deal to me in the long run.
Not long after, he moved to Tucson. At the same time, my brother and sister in law had also made a home there, having moved slightly east from L.A. Funny how that works out sometimes.
In Tucson, my pal Nick, a gifted poet and an eternal student of humankind, lived with his professor-mentor, who had risen above tenure and taken a provost gig at a tech school back in Rochester. Eventually, this guy (a wonderful rotund, white-haired and generous man named Stan) split his time, and retreated to Tucson for the harsh winters. He had Nick come out to keep learning, to keep reading, and most importantly, to keep writing. Nick got a dishwashing job, despite living in his benefactor’s large home, and kept a few notebooks. He sent me photos from the desert, smiling in front of ancient rocks, surrounded by cacti. Once, he even sent me a postcard designed and illustrated by a celebrated local artist. The desert kept calling.
Maybe it’s genetic. My dad’s mere weeks from retiring after almost 40 years of criminal defense work, and in a few months, him and my mom are celebrating by trekking due west to Disneyland (like a couple of Drapers). It’s about a week’s drive, so they’ve got stops lined up — they’ve done this once before, a few years ago — and one of them is, naturally, the Grand Canyon. That wondrous yawn of rock opens for 277 miles, and they plan to drink as much as they can. I’m already excited about the photos I’m sure to receive; they’ll nicely complement the ones I took with my mom in front of artificial (but convincing) landscapes at the natural history museum when they visited me in New York last month. As we paused to examine the snowy wolves and the large desert cats, she laid out their entire travel plan to me, and I heard excitement in her voice where I often hear apprehension or uncertainty. It gave me hope.
Another pal I know spent a lot of time in Arizona as a kid despite being born in the plush green of Northern California. He didn’t much like the desert, but he hated New York more, he eventually found out. He’s in L.A. now. Sometimes it seems like the major players in my life are rotating through a minor pocket’s worry of locales. On Independence Day four years ago, we stood on a verdant cemetery hill overlooking fireworks splashing the sky across Syracuse. His arms were swollen red with bed bug bites and we shared an umbrella in the pesky July rain. Later we talked about jazz and protopunk. I haven’t caught up with him in a while. I should see what’s up.
Arizona haunts me. There’s no reason, just a series of coincidences. Maybe a reference in a song here or there. Back to bed now, a desert dream maybe. Back to the heart of it all. But what song? Maybe something from an album I loved as a teenager called This Desert Life.
Or maybe “AZ” for the thousandth time. That’s the crazy part — it still hasn’t gotten old. Just like the desert escapism my mind keeps replaying.
