State by State

by Matt Weiland

  Popular T-shirts worn by Minit Market patrons say more than a physical description of them could. The commonest shirts bear product endorsements: Corona, Bud Ice, Coors, Miller Lite, Joe Camel, Metallica, Playboy, and the American flag. There are also attitude shirts, of course. One I ran into most recently proclaimed THE ONLY JOB I NEED IS A BLOWJOB.

  Under the Minit’s fluorescent tubes are illuminated some of the starkest artifacts of bottom-barrel culture: flashy, metallic lottery tickets, lighters and lighter cases emblazoned with naked vixen and fast cars, many varieties of smokeless tobacco and condoms, packets of magical energy pills promising vigor and youthfulness, aisle upon aisle of pastel-colored foods that will outlive us all. Behind the counter, employees tend to be haggard, pasty, and greasy-haired, with slashes of black eyeliner or blue eyeshadow liberally applied. It’s always women working these low-paid jobs, some old, some young, all beaten-down looking. Even at Subway, also housed in the building and with a more rapid staff turnover, there are very few men and never one over twenty.

  All of us in Picture Rocks live near the national park, yet the Minit doesn’t draw much tourist car traffic; most of the trucks, ORVs, and motorcycles cramming the lot on an average Saturday afternoon have local plates. But we’re also on a well-known biking route, and packs of healthy, tanned cyclists often descend on the Minit on weekends in their expensive, Day-glo gear and helmets, looking as foreign as a legion of itinerant Frenchmen. They hydrate quickly and hop on their bikes again, clearly anxious to get back on the road.

  It’s true that the Minit isn’t the only establishment located at the “four-way,” as we locals call it. There’s also a produce stand run by a guy named Kermit, known for his friendliness and eerie imitations of cat sounds, which amuse and mystify my daughter, and sometimes a lady who sells pies from a van. Across the street is a bar called the Wagon Wheel, complete with a large antique example of same on the dusty façade. And a little ways down is a family-owned hardware store manned by a clan that likes to boast of their prowess at vermin-killing. (Triumphantly massacred vermin I have personally heard about from clan members include Sonoran desert, a.k.a Colorado River, toads, which barely eke out a living in this arid place and are visible only around monsoon time; snakes, including but by no means limited to those that are venomous; and small antelope squirrels that look just like chipmunks.) These places are powerful in their own right, but the Minit is a far more populous locale, always with lines at the cash registers, always bustling, the center of it all.

  At first I tried to embrace the Minit. Clearly I was the interloper. Unlike most of the natives, some of whom were descended from families that had worked the nearby open-pit copper mines, I had a postsecondary education, was a refugee from the Big Apple, and owned a house bought with money inherited from my mother. I didn’t want to be a class warfare cliché with my dismissal of all those Kools and Kid Rock CDs and necklaces bearing the flowery, gold-washed words ANGEL/SLUT. I told myself I could reach an accommodation with these items. I tried to develop a companionable familiarity with them; I referred to the store fondly as the Mullet Market, started drinking four-packs of Red Bull, and sometimes stood in the parking lot for long periods doing nothing but smoking, quaffing my Bull, and leaning against the faded hood of my pickup watching traffic. Though not an Avra Valley native, I figured, I could at least show solidarity with the lifestyle.

  Still, as the weeks and months passed the Minit’s stultifying effect became undeniable. Every time I talked to someone else waiting in line at the register—at the Minit, you always have to wait—I felt a sense of either horror or oppression settling over me, suffocating my intention to be open-minded. Whether it was the Hummer driver inveighing against the cyclists who dared to slow him down, the woman with psoriasis who pulled her whining son by the ear and spat on the floor, or the stooped old guy who told me while paging through a tabloid that the Olsen twins, then thirteen years old, were lying sluts but great pieces of ass, there was always something in the Minit that set my teeth against it. And frankly, it didn’t take more than five or ten of these monolithic encounters to seal the deal.

  The arrogant middle-classer looks at bottom-barrel culture and deems it vile, its proponents inferior. The condescending liberal is similarly repulsed by the language and leanings of that culture, but ascribes its proponents’ tastes to their environment: the dropout rate, deadbeat dads, the corrosive influences of drugs and alcohol, the motorhead lifestyle, television. It’s an uncomfortable position: on the one hand, you don’t want to be a pig; on the other, you don’t want to be a sucker.

  Then too, my yuppie inclinations were rising stubbornly to the surface. When I started trail-running and stopped smoking, I felt the parking lot no longer welcomed me. Without a cigarette dangling from my lips, I failed entirely to fit in, lost whatever pretensions I might have had to a hardscrabble jadedness.

  And when I traded in my cheap, beat-up truck for a perky little Prius, the breakup was final.

  The Minit ethos dominates the valley. Big trucks with massive light bars and reactionary bumper stickers roar by, beer bottles and cigarettes flying out the driver’s-side windows; men on my own street hone their shooting skills in their front yards; and park rangers’ vehicles, sheriff’s cars, and Border Patrol vans are common sights clustered together on the side of the road, mostly collaring DUIs and the poachers who steal wildlife from the park—snakes and lizards are targets, as well as saguaros. College graduates are in a small minority, and news readers are few and far between. It’s a forty-minute commute to the average job in Tucson, which makes the settlements here a strange hybrid of rural outpost and suburb.

  Regular shoppers who can’t afford to buy the gas to get into town often enough for groceries sustain their families on the inventory of the Minit, the Wagon Wheel, and—over the past couple of years at least—Kermit’s produce stand. Nestled among the soft hills and purple mountains is a significant meth-manufacturing industry, spawning bad behavior and periodic sudden fires. The public elementary school suffers such a high rate of absenteeism that it’s in danger of being shut down; also it seems to have a small evangelical church attached to it. The valley boasts dangerous back-country routes followed by illegal immigrants coming up from the border. And there’s a high rate of violent and property crime. Burglaries are frequent—we’ve had more than one.

  My house is sixteen miles from the city limits, with rolling parkland and a mountain range in between; nationally our zip code is best known as the home of a world-renowned desert zoo, with half a million visitors a year, whose stated mission is to “encourage people to live in harmony with nature.” And sure, there are a few people around here who try to do just that. But far more people are doing exactly what they want: to rip it all up. They want to widen the slow, rolling roads, make them straighter and bigger and faster. They want to raze the vegetation around their houses—vegetation that will not grow back in our lifetimes—and pave their driveways and yards. They buy their houses on quiet dirt roads but instantly want to lay down asphalt: when a couple of our neighbors moved in, they went door to door right away circulating a petition to pave the road. They made their rounds in a hulking F350, which sat empty and idling loudly in our driveway while the man stood at my door talking.

  Newcomers divert the natural washes off their property by building large concrete dams—without, of course, the permits technically required under obscure federal statutes like the Clean Water Act. They ride their off-road vehicles into the nearby national monument—on the other side of the valley from the park—tearing up the fragile sand-and-shrub ecosystems and killing off tortoises, birds, and other animals. Kids under ten years old drive their ORVs to the Minit on weekends, sharing the road, when they’re not veering off it onto the dusty shoulder at high speeds, with cars going sixty miles an hour.

  Our neighbors rip the ancient cactus out of their yards with large earth-moving machines because cactuses have spines, and they don’t want those; they prefer
to plant orange trees, oleander, and bougainvillea. They slap down cheap tract houses on earth denuded and packed down by cattle grazing, making the doublewides that came before them look like marvels of restraint; they build garages bigger than their homes and then plop down prefab sheds the size of airplane hangars in the backyard to house their motorized thrillcraft. More and more of the breathtaking desert is quickly converted to its opposite, joining in hideousness the flattened, weedy patches of agricultural land formerly used to grow cotton, the ragged cones of mine tailings spotting the flatlands, a municipal airport where hang-gliders alight, and at the northern end of the valley a giant, polluting cement plant.

  It would be far too much to ask that people live here because they love it. That would be, in fact, to assume free choice was operant in their ending up in this place, as it was for me, with the benefit of a nest egg from my family’s farm and a livelihood that allows telecommuting; that would be to assume a kind of perfect society. (Many of the new homeowners obviously did come here by choice, in fact, among them plenty of middle-class retirees; but there are also longer-term residents who seem to be here chiefly because they can’t get out.) None of the ripping up, none of the “custom homes” that are anything but custom or the drivers who run over rabbits and quail on purpose should surprise me. This is simply what happens at the tail end of the American frontier, at the last gasp of water’s engineered abundance, in the final moment of hopeful expansion before the crash. This is business as usual outside the hugely sprawling, ephemeral cities of the West.

  But it does surprise me, or more accurately, it hurts. All of the ravening, the sad ache of its waste, occurs side-by-side with the peaks of the beautiful park, the canyons and arroyos, the saguaro and ironwood groves. The animals that live here and have existed, in some cases, for twenty million years. When the storms come, in August, we can sometimes see seven different lightning storms at once from the balcony of my house, massive cloud banks receding across the valley into the mountains—the Waterman range, the Silverbells, the sacred peak called Baboquivari. We’ve watched mass migrations of tarantulas and caterpillars move across the valley, by the tens of thousands. At night, the Milky Way streaks overhead; I can stand in the yard and gaze up at its soft infinitude as a mild breeze moves the branches of the palo verdes and bats flit through the warm air.

  I know my presence here is no boon to the place. It would do far better without all of us—without me, self-conscious and trying to walk softly; without my harder-living compatriots; without the ugly hubbub of all of us bringing our litter and noise and concrete to paradise. But I can’t help myself. This, to me, is the closest I’ve ever come to the eternal and the sublime; this valley tells me that when it’s time for me to die I don’t need to be afraid. I can die happy, because the world is stunning and the sky will go on forever.

  ARKANSAS

  CAPITAL Little Rock

  ENTERED UNION 1836 (25th)

  ORIGIN OF NAME From the Quapaw Indians’ word “acansa” meaning “downstream”

  NICKNAME The Natural State

  MOTTO Regnat populus (“The people rule”)

  RESIDENTS Arkansan or Arkansawyer

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 4

  STATE BIRD mockingbird

  STATE FLOWER apple blossom

  STATE TREE pine

  STATE SONG “Arkansas”

  LAND AREA 52,068sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Pulaski Co., 12 mi. SW of Little Rock

  POPULATION 2,779,154

  WHITE 80.0%

  BLACK 15.7%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 0.7%

  ASIAN 0.8%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 3.2%

  UNDER 18 25.4%

  65 AND OVER 14.0%

  MEDIAN AGE 36.0

  ARKANSAS

  Kevin Brockmeier

  They appeared in the spring of 1991, suddenly and in great numbers, like dandelions colonizing a meadow: thousands of green bumper stickers with white letters reading “Speak Up for Decency.” At first, no one was quite sure where they came from. You would glimpse one in a Kroger parking lot, then a second pulling out of a Super Stop, then a third pausing to make a left at a stoplight. The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh you would notice as you drove to work or school the next morning, and the eighth through the seventeenth as you drove back home. There was one in every cluster of cars, it seemed. They were impossible to miss.

  It was not long before a response emerged: thousands of yellow bumper stickers, designed according to the same template, but this time reading “Speak Up for Liberty.” Soon you found as many of these on the road as you did of the originals. Car for car there were probably a few more Decency supporters in the city, but sticker for sticker the two were running at a dead heat, since some cars sported multiple Liberty stickers—it wasn’t remarkable to see as many as a dozen papered across the back of a van—while most of the cars with Decency stickers featured only one.

  I was eighteen when all of this took place, a senior at Parkview High School, Little Rock, Arkansas’s arts and science magnet. It was a place where the Liberties far outnumbered the Decencies, a haven for dancers, actors, painters, misfits, hipsters, skaters, straight edgers, band geeks, boys with makeup and girls without. We were the only school in the city (very probably in the state) with a preoperative transsexual in the student body. One of my friends wore a cape and a beret to class most days and was never once beaten up. Even at Parkview, though, you could find the occasional Decency in the parking lot, on a pickup truck or an El Camino, nestled far back by the bus roundabout.

  It appeared—though who had noticed it before?—that they were engaged in a kind of combat, Liberty and Decency, or at least that they were preparing for engagement, like two duelists marking out their paces. In Arkansas, it seemed that this was simply the way of things: We were always preparing for engagement, without ever quite entering the fray. We were a conservative state with a predominantly Democratic legislature. We were home to both Tony Alamo of Tony Alamo Christian Ministries and St. Janor Hypercleats of the Church of the Subgenius. Throughout the eighties, we had voted in large numbers for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, yet we were readying the stage to send our young liberal governor to the White House. As a people, we were not so much divided as we were emphatically self-abnegating. The bumper stickers were merely the latest symptom of this disorder. And although they never became a subject of widespread debate in the halls of my high school, as they did in the editorial pages of our competing state newspapers, the Arkansas Democrat and the Arkansas Gazette, there were glancing references made to them all the time. I remember overhearing conversations about where you could buy the bumper stickers and who was behind them, how you could rearrange the letters, along with jokes about Speaking Up for Potpourri, Speaking Up for Tennessee, Speaking Up for Retirees.

  Nobody knew exactly how the dispute had originated. At least I didn’t. If it seemed one week that half the people in the city were speaking up for decency and the next week that the other half were speaking up for liberty, well, that was no more mysterious than the process by which everyone suddenly began listening to the same album or using the latest piece of slang—which is to say profoundly mysterious, but not particularly exceptional.

  I have since learned the broad outlines of the story: how the “Speak Up for Decency” campaign was initiated by members of Fellowship Bible Church, one of Little Rock’s largest and most influential nondenominational evangelical congregations, in response to what they perceived as the superabundance of violence and sexual promiscuity in the media; how among the targets of the campaign was Spectrum Weekly, a local alternative newspaper that carried 900 numbers and gay personal ads in its back pages; and how Spectrum’s marketing and circulation director initiated the “Speak Up for Liberty” campaign after someone began badgering the paper’s advertisers and emptying its distribution racks.

  My friends and I had heard of Fellowship Bible Church, and we had read Spectrum, but at the time we knew none of t
hese intricacies. We could certainly see that the Decency backers and the Liberty backers were arrayed on opposite sides of a conflict, though, and we were able to intuit the fault lines—roughly, that:

  The Decencies were religious (though there was nothing innately religious about decency).

  The Liberties were secular (though there was nothing innately secular about liberty).

  The Decencies were symbolically if not actually concentrated in West Little Rock, the new-growth area of the city, with all the most recent chain stores and restaurants.

  The Liberties were symbolically if not actually concentrated in Hillcrest, the old-left neighborhood of the city, with all the little cafés and boutiques.

  The Decencies were bothered by profanity, homosexuality, and the bullying immodesty of American culture.

  The Liberties were bothered by repression, censorship, and the bullying sanctimony of American culture.

  The Decencies had, around 1988, been at least slightly irritated by Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, but resisted the provocation to see it.

  The Liberties had, around 1988, been at least slightly irritated by Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, but resisted the provocation to skip it.

  The Decencies would, around 1996, attach “Promise Keepers: I ♥ My Wife” stickers to their cars.

  The Liberties would, around 1996, find it amusing to contemplate replacing the little red ♥s on the “Promise Keepers” stickers with little black ♣s.

  The Decencies placed their confidence in early mornings, good manners, the 1950s, and the family as a nurturing ground for children.

  The Liberties placed their confidence in late nights, outspokenness, the 1960s, and the family as a nurturing ground for adults.

  At heart, the Decencies distrusted where we were going.

  At heart, the Liberties distrusted where we had been.

  Both the Decencies and the Liberties held that they themselves were best defined by where they placed their confidence. Both the Decencies and the Liberties held that their opponents were best defined by what they distrusted. And, of course, both the Decencies and the Liberties believed in the bumper sticker as a platform for social engagement.