Welcome (Back to) the Old Pueblo
“You’ll be back,” Luke said, taking a drag of his cigarette. “Everyone always comes back.”
We were sitting outside at Cafe Paraiso on University Boulevard. It was the first week of May in Tuscon, which meant it was easily 90 degrees, even in the afternoon shade of our table’s umbrella. Anthony, my friend and soon-to-be roommate, had just told Luke we were officially moving to Los Angeles at the end of the month. The day after our graduation ceremonies, we were packing up a giant U-Haul truck and driving out west.
Anthony and I laughed at Luke’s response. We were both well aware of his own inability to move away from the area: it was our understanding he had been working on his undergraduate degree for the better part of 15 years. I can’t remember now where Luke used to try to move in order to escape Tucson or what major(s) he was attempting to earn. I do remember his gravelly voice, leathery tan skin, and indeterminate age. Looking back on it now, I could have dubbed him the Keith Richards of U of A undergrads.
While I myself felt unfocused and lost with my impending walk with a cap and gown looming, I assumed even I would be able to finish my bachelor’s in less than 15 years.
“I love Tucson,” I professed, “but it is just so small. And LA is so cool!”
It would turn out this childish, naive depth of description of Los Angeles was as refined and realistic as my plans for making a living there.
Luke just squinted at both of us in his Eastwoodian way before taking another puff of his cigarette, “You’ll see. You’ll be back.”
And for the record, I was right: it would not take me 15 years to complete the four semesters of Spanish I needed to get my bachelor’s degree. Nine years later, I was finally done.
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The first few times I visited Tucson as a teenager, I went to chase after a boy I had a crush on. But soon I had transferred my crush to Tucson as a whole. Although it was only 100 miles from Mesa, where I had spent the prior twelve years of my life growing up, it felt a world apart. Mesa’s booming growth made it feel like a novice city, with some new stuccoed strip mall being thrown up every week. Tucson lured me in with a facade that was not shiny or newly manufactured. Things were well-worn and long-established: when he moved me into my dorm or apartment at the beginning of each school year, my father would point out things to me that had been in Tucson more than 20 years prior when he had gotten his English PhD at the University of Arizona. Other than the Mormon Temple, my high school, and some bronze statues downtown, I couldn’t think of anything in Mesa that was more than 20 years old.
Tucson seemed to be full of interesting folks: queer people, people with tattoos, artists, hippies. You could actually walk to things in the University area, which was largely impossible in the car-centric suburb I had spent my childhood in. Another thing I didn’t realize I appreciated about Tucson until I left it was its casualness: no one seemed to take themselves too seriously. Shorts, t-shirts, jeans, sandals were the expected dress code.
Most of all, Tucson was mine: it was my first home I was making away from the house I grew up in. Two months before I was scheduled to start my first semester at the university in the fall of 1998, I had already packed most of my belongings in the same trunk my father had packed to move into his undergraduate dorm. I had survived my adolescence, despite my mother’s best attempts. I was escaping. My father still loved Tucson, excited to tool around town with me whenever he visited, checking out new coffee shops with me since I was still too young to go into bars. And my mother hated Tucson, which was also a plus. I sincerely hoped she would never visit me. Ever.
But by the time I was wrapping up my four years at the U of A, I was showing signs of taking Arizona for granted. I was tired of stucco, turquoise, cacti, bolo ties, and anything with a fucking kokopelli on it. (Side note: the kokopelli was appropriated from indigenous peoples native to the Southwest and misused as a design flourish. I did not and do not take issue with the people to whom the kokopelli actually belongs, but to the people who decided it belonged to them instead and hey, it was totally appropriate to slap a sacred fertility symbol on all manner of tourist tchotchkes, even baby bibs.) And despite how much I had loved Tucson, I had failed to find my path forward there. It was time to try somewhere new. The star-studded boulevards and sandy beaches of Los Angeles were an excellent choice for a stark contrast to Tucson, Arizona.
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On a cloudless day this past December, Basil and I got in the car for his inaugural trip to Tucson. Ever since we had begun dating three and a half years prior, Basil had lovingly endured my waxing poetics about the sunsets in Tucson, the coffee shops in Tucson, the hiking in Tucson, the restaurants in Tucson, and (most frequently) the beautiful mountains surrounding Tucson. I had been dying to take him there all of the time we had been together and the day had finally arrived.
It had been many years since I had taken the drive along I-10 from Phoenix to Tucson. Phoenix has continuously been one of the nation’s fastest growing metro areas for decades, slowed down only temporarily by the economic meltdown of the late aughts. I had heard rumblings from acquaintances still living in the area many things were continuously changing under the pressure of this growth, including the I-10 corridor. One of the things I had always loved about the drive to Tucson was the open expanses of desert along the way. The thought of it being lined with housing developments on Basil’s first trip made me frown.
I have driven that route so many times I can tell you how many minutes are left in the trip in either direction from any landmark along the way, whether it’s a sign for the Gila River reservation, the long defunct Family Fun World amusement park in Eloy, or the ostrich farm. Like many of the things I worry about, my fears that the I-10 corridor would be unrecognizable were unfounded. 90% of the trip looked exactly as I remembered the last time I had gotten to see it.
When we arrived in Oro Valley, the town just north of Tucson where we would be staying, we got there just in time to stand on the balcony of our room and watch the sunset. Holding hands with my old man while the colors against the Santa Catalinas changed from orange to pink to purple was alone worth the journey.
The next few days we drove all around Tucson, taking in the old (Antigone Books, Casa Video, Yoshimatsu), the new (Exo Cafe, Tumerico), and the closed down (The Safehouse, Cafe Paraiso). I was relieved Basil liked Tucson, as I had been obsessing for months leading up to the trip about how I was going to make it seem as cool and wonderful to him as it was in my mind. He had told me approximately 1,000 times to quit worrying about it — of course he would like it. It felt as if I was taking him home to meet my family, except I was just taking him home to meet my favorite old home.
And because Dad wasn’t there to tell his stories about Tucson, I played Bruce Springsteen’s Live on Broadway album in the car to conjure up his spirit for Basil and I. I imagined my father sitting in the back seat as the sodium lights of Speedway Boulevard shined through the windows of our rented Camry, nodding in approval.
The time we had to spend in town went by as quickly as a margarita at happy hour. When it was time to pack up and head back to Phoenix to catch our flight to Ohio, I was already thinking about what we would see when we came back next year.
I have come to conclude Luke was right: for me, Tucson will always have an unavoidable draw. I try to train myself to live in my heart. I appreciate all of the things I have learned by moving to different parts of the country. And I will be able to stay anywhere Basil is willing to go with me. I don’t know if I will ever get the pleasure of living there again, but I continue to hope that returning to the Old Pueblo will always feel like coming home.
