How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy? (Phoenix Noir Book 1)

by Graham, Barry

  I clung to Mara in the dark, and I wanted to be a little kid again, as little as I was when I believed in magic and didn’t know that my mother hated me and my father didn’t care about her or me. Mara held me and whispered to me kindly. Then she fell asleep. I lay there perfectly still, not wanting to wake her or have her move and stop holding me. Her breath came out in a sweet-smelling snore. Her body gave off heat like a radiator. I thought about the universe inside her head. I imagined that the rug on the floor by the bed was magic. I imagined waking Mara up, and us sitting on the rug and it rising off the floor and floating out of the window, drifting gently and safely into the sky. Mara and me holding each other and looking down at the silent blinking of the city, Mara laughing, the night swirling in the still calm of her eyes. Birds flying past us, staring at us in disbelief. Mara kissing me, saying, “This couldn’t happen with anybody else but you.”

  Now, with all that happened, that fantasy is part of the history, hers and mine. It’s like it actually did happen.

  It took a long time, but I eventually fell asleep. When I woke in the morning, I was still clinging to Mara. She was awake too. She kissed my forehead. “You okay?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I have to go to work.” Suddenly my heart was in my mouth, bursting with panic that she wouldn’t want me to stay with her, that she’d just put me up for one night. Then she said, “So I’ll leave a key for you on the living room table, in case you feel like going out. There’s some pasta and pesto left, but if you want something else there’s a Trader Joe’s down the street. I’ll leave some money by the key.”

  “Thanks,” I said, trying hard to hide the pathetic wave of relief and gratitude that washed over me.

  She must have seen it anyway, because she again asked, “Are you okay?”

  And again I said, “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “Okay.” She kissed my forehead again, and got out of bed. “Go back to sleep.” She tucked me in and ruffled my hair.

  I did go back to sleep. I slept until around three in the afternoon. I think I must have been making up for all the nights spent in my car, sleeping for a few hours at a time, waking up paranoid and jumpy, trying to get comfortable curled on the back seat. I’d probably have slept for even longer if I hadn’t been wakened by the phone ringing, then Mara’s voice on the answering machine.

  “Hey, Andy. It’s me. Are you there? No? Okay, maybe you’ve gone out or you’re in the shower or something. Well, I’m just calling to see how you’re doing, and if there’s anything you’d like me to get for you on my way home. Maybe I’ll call again. Anyway, see you in a couple of hours, babe.”

  I didn’t want to get up. I lay with the blanket pulled over my head and tried to make the minutes stretch into hours. It was only the fact that I’d have been embarrassed to be still in bed when Mara got home that made me get up. I started to put on my clothes, but they stank, so I just wore the shorts I’d slept in.

  Mara showed up at around five-thirty. She looked almost normal, dressed in a blouse and skirt, the tattoos on her legs hidden by black tights. She worked as a receptionist for a law firm. Although she had tattoos all over her body, you couldn’t see any of them when she was dressed in officewear. She told me once that her tattoos didn’t need to be seen. They weren’t fashion statements, but indelible markings of her personal history, occult meaning, protection, identification.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  “You’re not wearing much.”

  “My clothes aren’t very clean.”

  “No problem. There’s a laundry room here in the complex. I’ll take them now. They’ll be clean and dry in an hour.” She gathered the clothes, and some of her own, and took them away. She came back a few minutes later. “Have you eaten?” she said.

  “No. I slept most of the day. I didn’t realize how tired I was.”

  “Once your clothes are dry, we can go and have dinner somewhere.”

  “Okay,” I said, though I didn’t like it.

  Mara changed out of her office clothes and into a tank top and shorts. She made some coffee and poured some for me. Seeing that the contents of the kitchen were undisturbed, she said, “Have you had anything at all? Even coffee?”

  “No. Like I said, I slept.”

  When my clothes were dry and it was time to go out, I couldn’t go. I panicked, and couldn’t say why or what I was afraid of. I curled up inside my head, at the back, and looked out at Mara from there.

  She put me to bed, and I lay with my head under the blankets. She went out and got some food, brought it back and fed me. Then she lay close to me and held me. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, babe,” she whispered in my ear. “And I don’t know how to help you. So in the morning I’ll take you to the hospital. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled. Right then I’d have agreed to anything.

  She took the morning off work. She had to call various places to figure out where to take me. We ended up at a place on Thomas Road called the Southwest Behavioral Health Urgent Care Center, which is where you go if you have no money and no health insurance.

  A receptionist told me to sit down and wait. Mara really couldn’t afford to take the time off work, but she stayed there with me in the waiting room, and I was glad she did. It was full of people crying, talking to themselves, acting the way I felt inside. One woman, accompanied by her family, seemed demented and terrified. Her husband and kids had obviously brought her there because they didn’t know what else to do. They seemed as scared as her.

  I realized that all that separated me from the people there was that I was mostly able to cope. I was only different from them in that I was able to get up in the morning, feed myself, do what I had to do. But inside I was the same.

  I felt tiny.

  There was a guy in a white coat who was being aggressive with some of the patients, showing the kind of attitude you might see near closing time a bar, when people who failed to get laid have decided to look for a fight instead. Logically I knew that I could have beaten him senseless with just one hand, but I was frightened by him. Trying not to cry, I looked at Mara and said, “You won’t leave me here, will you?”

  “What? Don’t be stupid.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “Of course I won’t. You don’t think I’d do that to you, do you?”

  I shook my head, but I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything.

  Finally, my name was called. I’m not sure what position the woman I talked to held. Maybe she was a nurse. She took my details, asked what was wrong with me. I explained as best I could. She told me to take a seat again, and that a psychiatrist would see me as soon as possible.

  “I don’t know if I want to see the psychiatrist,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m scared.”

  “What are you scared of?”

  I nearly started to cry. “That you’ll keep me here.”

  “Do you think you should be in a hospital?” she asked gently.

  I shook my head like a little kid.

  “Well, we wouldn’t keep you here unless you really needed to be here.”

  “I saw a man out in the waiting room being really mean to people. Is he the psychiatrist?”

  “No. He’s a nurse.”

  The shrink I saw was actually okay. He wasn’t overflowing with compassion, but he wasn’t scary. He talked to me for a short while about my symptoms, then gave me an appointment to see another shrink in a few days’ time. Before I left the place, they made me sign a statement that I wouldn’t do anything to harm myself before my next appointment. Even though I had no impulse to harm myself, signing it made me feel slightly better.

  Mara was born to be a parent, judging by the way she dealt with me as days turned into weeks and I stayed at her place. She didn’t have to wipe my ass or change any diapers, but aside from that I was as much an infant as any newborn.

  I turned out to be suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder—PTSD to those of us in the club. It’s a common condition among people who’ve been in uniform, which is why so many Vietnam vets are living out of shopping carts. I was also diagnosed as having depression. The shrink prescribed Prozac for the depression, Haldol for the PTSD. The effects of the Haldol scared the shit out of Mara—it just took away all feeling, so I could hardly talk or form a thought. I asked the shrink about reducing the dose, but he wouldn’t take me seriously. After a while I reduced it myself by cutting each pill in half.

  I was able to collect disability from the military. Mara helped me look for an apartment, but she didn’t rush me out of her place. I got in touch with Tim Wolvern and he interviewed me for the Phoenix Weekly. Then he suggested that, instead of him running the interview, I should write an article about my experience of being homeless. I did. He published it, and it brought in quite a bit of mail and seemed to generate some debate.

  As I got mentally and emotionally stronger, I somehow turned into a journalist. I started writing music reviews for the Weekly, and Tim ended up hiring me as a staff writer. There was no difficulty in finding stories every week—the city was a social and political dung-heap. Joe Arpaio, the County Sheriff, was a crypto-fascist clown who enjoyed massive popularity. What he was most admired for was his “Tent City” jail, full of misdemeanants awaiting trial who shouldn’t have been in jail in the first place. So many people died in Arpaio’s custody, and the conditions in his jails were so outrageous, that Amnesty International began taking an interest. And most local media portrayed him as a hero, “America’s toughest sheriff,” a real-life Dirty Harry going to war on crime. If you consider traffic violators and petty thieves to be criminals, maybe the claims were true.

  At the same time, Governor J. Fife Symington III was indicted on 23 criminal charges. As Symington awaited trial, and Arpaio’s men murdered people, the fourth estate did its best to feed the collective denial that anything was wrong. It sometimes seemed like I’d died and gone to Investigative Reporter’s Heaven.

  One of the things that helped me get better was meeting Laurie. She was the bass player in Mara’s band, Blonde Psychotrope. She was a Zen Buddhist, and kept telling me I should learn to meditate. It took me a while to get around to it, but finally I let her teach me.

  I’d always imagined meditation as something mystical, something otherworldly. But Laurie taught me that it was simply about awareness, about being where you were and doing what you were doing. Laurie rarely described herself as a Buddhist; instead she would say that she practiced mindfulness. Following her instruction, I realized that the state I had always gone into when fighting could be something to practice, a way of living my life. When fighting, even to the death, I’d always felt an abiding peace and calmness, the peace that comes from absolute focus. Now I understood that I should bring that focus to everything I did. When taking a shit, I needn’t be thinking about paying the gas bill—I should just be focused on taking a shit.

  Amazing how the biggest thing in your life can be so simple, seem so small. I didn’t join a monastery or even a Buddhist group, though I sometimes went with Laurie to meetings of her group. I just set up an altar in my bedroom—a board resting on two bricks, with a Buddha statue, candles and incense. Every morning and every evening I’d sit in front of it for a half-hour, just sit there and be aware of my breathing, my heart beating, blood circulating, bowels digesting food. At other times during the day, when things were getting too much for me, I’d stop what I was doing, find somewhere quiet—or demand silence from whoever I was with—and meditate for ten or fifteen minutes.

  I was a dirt-digging journalist for only about eighteen months, but in that time I became pretty good at it, good enough to win a couple of minor local awards. Reporting isn’t brain surgery. You just have to be willing to comb a lot of documents and talk to a lot of people. But I knew I wasn’t going to be in the business for very long. The things I had to witness were tearing me apart, and it was terrible to know that even though I could tell the stories of people who were suffering, no one would care and their suffering would continue.

  My career began to end in November 1996. A woman called the cops on her 16-year-old son because he was out of his head on drugs and she couldn’t handle him. Six cops arrived, and when Julio Valerio lunged at them with a bread knife, they shot him 24 times, including a blast from a shotgun. The newspaper coverage of his murder was unbelievably low-key. The murderers received no disciplinary action. A small vigil was held in memory of their victim. It was mentioned in the papers, but what the press really made a meal of was the march that took place in support of the murderers. There was hardly any outcry at all. It was clear that, in the minds of the citizens, a kid isn’t a kid if he isn’t white. People talked about how Valerio had a string of felony convictions, how he was bad news, how the cops had done a great job. There was talk of how much danger the cops had to face working the graveyard shift in South Phoenix. Nobody seemed to think about the people who actually had to live there.

  The only real published objection to the murder was in my series of articles in the Weekly. I received a few letters of support, and there were some phone calls to the paper. I wrote back to the people who wrote to me, asking them to write to the police department and tell them how they felt.

  Nothing came of it. The cops kept their jobs, but I didn’t keep mine. A couple of days before my last article, I was driving home from Tempe. It was around midnight. I saw that a cop had pulled a driver over to the side of the road. The suspect was a young woman. I watched helplessly from my car as the cop shone a flashlight in her face, holding it just an inch or two from her eyes. This is where we live, I thought.

  I told Tim I was quitting, that I didn’t think my work was doing anything to help me or anyone else. He tried to talk me out of it, but backed off when I told him that the things I had to witness were depressing me so badly that I was worried I might crack up again. He wished me well and we stayed friends. I still wrote the occasional music or book review for him.

  Not knowing what else to do, I read a few books on home improvement and then started my handyman business.

  By that time I was with Janine.

  I met her because of Laurie. Although she played in Mara’s band, Laurie wasn’t a total punk. She had a kind of musical dual personality. There was a hippie under the pink hair-dye and ripped clothes. She’d go home after snarling her way through a gig at a punk show, and listen to a Joni Mitchell album before going to bed. Finally, she gave in and formed a band of her own, as a kind of side-project. A gang of sensitive neo-hippies, they played acoustic songs about lost love and the natural world.

  Their first gig was at Higher Ground, a coffee-house in Tempe. I couldn’t think of an excuse not to go, and I was afraid that if I just blew it off Laurie’s feelings would be so hurt she’d have to write a song about it. Mara had no such qualms, and didn’t show, though she’d told me she’d be there. So I sat at a table on my own, drank herbal tea and tried to keep my face straight at the sight of Laurie actually wearing a dress.

  The place was busy, though most people weren’t paying much attention to the band. One woman was, though. She applauded enthusiastically at the end of every song, and didn’t leave her seat once during the set. She was on her own. She was tall and blonde and looked kind of like Olivia Newton-John in Grease after she decides to become a slut, except that she was wearing a flower-patterned top and a fringed skirt.

  We made eye contact a few times. I smiled at her and she smiled back. I wanted to talk to her, but I wasn’t sure how she’d respond. I was uneasily conscious of how I looked—all two hundred pounds of me, cropped hair, earrings, my tank top and shorts showing off my muscles, my tattoos—the military ones I’d had for years, the Tibetan ones I’d gotten more recently. I couldn’t tell whether an approach from me would please her or scare her.

  Eventually she leaned over to my table and said, “You know the band?”

  “Yeah. Well, kind of. The bass play
er’s a friend of mine. That’s why I’m here. I don’t know the others.”

  “You like them?”

  I wasn’t going to bullshit her, especially if it was obvious bullshit. “Not really. They’re good, but it’s not my kind of thing. Laurie plays in another band with another friend of mine, but it’s pretty different from this.”

  “So what kind of music do you like?”

  “Punk rock, mostly.”

  She smiled. “I’d never have guessed.”

  “Laurie doesn’t usually look as mellow as she does tonight. She normally dresses more like me.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Andy.”

  “I’m Janine.”

  When the gig was over, I introduced Janine to Laurie. They talked for a few minutes, then Laurie said to me, “We were going to go get some dinner. You coming?” Seeing me look at Janine, she told her, “You’re welcome to come too.”

  “Great,” said Janine. “Thanks.”

  We went to Ichiban on University Avenue. Then Janine went home with me.

  We talked for hours, then went to bed. She said, “I’m too tired to do anything. Let’s just sleep. Unless you want to jack off on my stomach.”

  “Would you like me to?”

  “Yeah. That’d be nice.”

  I knelt over her, a leg on either side of her. She stroked my hips and thighs and played with my balls as I rubbed my cock. After I came, I lay beside her and rubbed my come into her skin, from her stomach to her tits. She whispered, “That’s it. Rub it close to my heart.”

  After a few weeks of going to see movies, hanging out in cafes, driving into the mountains, spending hot days and nights fucking in every way you can conceive of that’s legal (and a few ways that aren’t under Arizona law), she suggested that I move into her apartment. I did.

  She had never had a job or needed one. Her parents had died and left her a house and a trust fund. She’d sold the house and moved from Santa Barbara to Phoenix, where the cost of living was low enough for her to live on the trust fund.