There is no greater potential shame than being caught at a Redbox in the middle of the night.
Choked on Speedway Blvd, main thoroughfare of Tucson, rests the Circle K. One
of many. Out in front, facing the street and the reams of traffic, is the machine. This puts your back to the road. That’s bad enough. As you scroll, 24oz. Tecate sweating on the sidewalk, you can feel the eyes behind you. Inside every passing car is one
of your exes, driving home with some new and perfect lover. They all see you. The blade is cool on the back of your neck. Bums are pissing between the dumpster and the building. Circle K has no public restrooms, but one ideally dark alley. This must have been considered in the economic assessment of the franchise. Restrooms use water, cleaning them uses water. This is the desert. We’re touchy about water.
One of the bums zips up, does a jaunty shiver, hops on a mountain bike. Crunching gravel. Into the void with a brown paper bag. The poor bastard. This is how we feel better about things, finding our proper place in the pecking order. Shame transfer. The shit always trickles downstream. Like rain, like irrigation.
And it works. Until you hop on your own mountain bike, dropping your beer. Fall- ing down. Puddles.
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Paco called me early. He said he would.
“You still wanna go to this water rights thing?”
I didn’t understand the question at first.
“Where time is it? I do.”
“Time for me to pick you up. Be ready, we’re late.”
I put the phone down and groaned. I got myself up. Water, right. I reached for one of the glass jars under the desk. A yellowish liquid swished inside. Strike one. I checked the other two. They were a deeper hue, both filled to the brim with foamy old urine. Seems I put my penis in the wrong jar last night. They all look the same. An honest mistake.
I now have three chamber pots.
I opened the door and gave the light that specific squint, a little ditty called “You Got Drunk in the Desert and Its Payback Time.” A common song in Tucson. For going on two months, I’d been squatting my practice space. I had decided that this was all I needed: four walls, zero noise restrictions, and 24-hour access. No running water, no toilet, no place to cook aside from a shallow fire pit. The only shade came
from one thriving salt cedar in the large courtyard, aided by gallons of my own special brew.
Goldie, my ‘84 Plymouth Voyager, sat beneath the low-hanging branches, bald wheels sagging in the dirt, AZ plates long gone. The dust had begun its conquest
of the dashboard, and I could see spider webs between the passenger seat and glove box. The sun hurt my eyes. It was already hot, but the soil around the tree was dark. I reached through the willowy foliage and, one by one, emptied the three jars onto the trunk.
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When you’re hungover, broken-hearted, down and out, food stamps cancelled, license suspended and flat tires besides - there is no better cure, nothing to truly put your woes into perspective, than to attend a meeting on Indigenous Water Rights.
We arrived during the first speaker and took seats against the wall. A law professor stood at the podium, addressing an audience of Hopi elders, Navajo activists, ecolo- gists and geologists, legal advocates, university affiliates, students taking note. Natu- rally, we all wore Wranglers. Paco’s father, employed by the Diné and married into a Shiprock clan, was our ticket in. A bane of DOJ lawyers, a good man. He’d been threatened, shot at, shit-talked and libeled, sideswiped and suckerpunched. Gener- ally inconvenienced. All while trying to help the Navajo keep their water.
Later, I asked him about field hydrology. I was interested in being paid to work outdoors.
“Go for it,” he said. “Get out there and see the land while you can. It’s all dying.”
I held a paper cup of coffee in one hand, a stain- less steel bottle of water in the other, and tried to get it together. The first professor gave way to a second professor. This one spoke enthusiasti- cally, spoke well. He got the room riled up. I thought about myself. He spoke of injustice and sovereignty. The elders nodded, and the white academics nodded at them nodding. I thought about the bed, and the gap between our bodies. Little needles accumulating over time.
I went to sip my coffee and spilled it on my shirt. I looked down at the stain, there was nothing to be done. I looked up. A Diné man was in front of the dry-erase board, weeping.
His tribe is unique amongst the others, in that they have documented, legal rights to their water. So, when Los Angeles or Las Vegas or Tucson or some other unnatural megalopolis that has overshot its carrying capacity wants a sip, takes a sip, they’ve bureaucratic grounds to call bullshit. Needless to say, there’s plenty of bullshit going
around. This is an old battle. Broken treaties are nothing new. The difference now is water. This isn’t oil, or copper or natural gas. That shit runs out, well, it’ll be tough on a few industries, but the species will make due. No more water means no more nothing.
In the Southwest, it is undeniable. So we worry the future. We wring our hands and gaze upon our mighty works in despair, because the future looks fuckin bleak. Looks familiar. It brims with the frothy, golden export of our union:
Consequences.
A singularity looms ahead, splattered with and built upon these consequences. We are not only moving towards it, but now, it is moving towards us. When we meet, when we are one in that catastrophic embrace, it will lean its pelvis into us and whis- per our own words, tenderly,
“If I can’t have you, no one will.” ----------
I flushed the urinal and went to the sink. Splashing cold water on my face, I avoided the mirror. I let the faucet run and closed my eyes and placed my forehead on the speckled marble counter, thinking and not
thinking, about a lot, about nothing. I opened
my eyes and saw a wadded up paper towel on the floor, next to my boots. One was brown and the other black. This morning, I had managed to put on two different shoes. It figured. I couldn’t help but grin. I couldn’t help but chuckle and mumble “well...piece a’shit...”
Still bowed, I reached out my hand and shut off the flow. I felt better, I felt guilty. I felt like
a fool, but a fool who knows he is a fool and is therefore, somehow, less of a fool. I raised my head and saw my face and laughed a little more. Then, upright, shaking my head, I moved to the door and gripped the handle and pushed out and nothing happened. There was a word next to
my hand, and it said PULL. So I pulled and the door gave way with the force of two men, striking my mismatched boots. Through the crack in the
doorway was one of the elders, his hand on the same door. I let go and stepped back, allowing him to enter the bathroom.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He gave me a once-over, up and down, then met my eyes.
“For what?”