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clothes that were stylish back home but would brand me as a hated easterner out here in
the desert, where the frat-boy uniform was cowboy boots, button-down oxford shirts,
and jeans with button ies. I’d have all I could do not to become a gure of fun. My
numerous misgivings about coming this far to study in what amounted to a foreign
country must have been obvious to my mother. She might even have suspected I’d have
done a straight-up swap to be enrolling back at SUNY Albany, where I’d know people
and could hop on a bus and be home in Gloversville in an hour. So when my mother said
that I was now her rock I assumed she was just expressing some kindly sunrise-sunset,
swiftly-flow-the-years sentiment meant to buck me up in the face of new challenges.
She wasn’t.
THE COFFEE-SHOP MELTDOWN in Phoenix turned out to be the nadir. Somehow my mother
gathered herself, and we returned to Scottsdale, to the home of the people who were
putting us up and in whose yard our detached U-Haul now sat, its ball hitch burrowing
into their desert landscaping like an anteater’s snout. My mother found an excuse to go
straight to bed, where she slept around the clock. Bright and early the next morning,
though, we set about crossing items o her revised to-do list, at the top of which she’d
now written JOB.
The rst major piece of the puzzle to fall into place was an apartment. Phoenix, a
stunningly horizontal city, was even then deeply committed to both unplanned sprawl
and the primacy of automobiles, policies that remain unquestioned to this day as far as I
know. New apartment houses with acres of parking were springing up everywhere in an
attempt to keep up with the inux of midwestern snowbirds. Their construction was
shabby, but to easterners used to the grit and grime born of punishing winters they felt
new and clean. Several complexes that were only half built oered a free month or two
to anyone willing to sign a year’s lease, and that put pressure on older, established
properties to cut similar deals. My mother picked a place on Indian School Road that
was reasonably close to most of what she’d need, though of course nothing was walking
distance, a moot point since there were no sidewalks. Perhaps because it was so hot and
gas was nineteen cents a gallon, people preferred to get in their cars even when their
destination was just a block or two away.
She could’ve gotten by with a studio apartment, but my mother rented a one bedroom
so I’d have at least a couch to crash on when I visited. She had to come up with the usual
rst and last month’s rent, but after that her next check wasn’t due until November,
which seemed a long way o. To her surprise and delight, almost everybody in the
complex was newly divorced and recently arrived from somewhere else, men seeming to
outnumber women three to one. All of which made sense when you thought about it. In
most divorces it would be the man who found himself without a roof over his head, and
most of these guys wanted to put at least a few miles between themselves and the wives
who’d told them to hit the bricks. Nobody seemed to have much money or to care much
about it. There were a few flashy sports cars in the parking lot, but just as many beaters.
In the interior courtyard was a large swimming pool with a communal grill where
people congregated in the evenings after changing into bathing suits and grabbing a