of the town, and I have no idea why. It’s not far from a place called Fool
Hollow. Founded in 1871, it sits on Route 60 in the mountains of eastern
Arizona at an elevation of 6331 feet. Brutal winters, cool summer nights. This
used to be Apache country — their reservation is just to the south. Show Low
goes its unnoticed way surrounded by some of the wildest geography anywhere.
Thirty miles north is the Petrified Forest, a lush, dense wood turned to desert
stone. The Hopi Mesas are 110 miles northwest, vistas of surreal formations,
where the eyes of a Salvador Dali or a Georgia O’Keefe would be at home —
hardly a tree anywhere, and the arid ground catches the light so delicately
that colors appear and disappear on its surface at the slightest change in the
sky.
Draw a fan from Show Low west to east for 200 miles, and you map dozens of
extinct volcanoes, lava fields, ice caves, ruins of ancient cities, and a
crater where a rock came burning from space and left a hole thousands of feet
deep and a mile wide. Its impact killed every living thing around. Less than a
two-hour drive east from Show Low is the Great Divide — near which, on a
cliff-face, is a message carved in an ancient dialect of Phoenician about 2,000
years ago. A sailor too exhausted to run anymore wanted it known that he was
the only man left of his crew, and that Indians would kill him soon.
In a land of so many wonders, I didn’t think to ask why that little town was
named Show Low. But at the Chevron I did ask where you could get a good
hamburger. One guy had just moved from Iowa City, and he didn’t know. I asked
why he’d come. He didn’t know that either. He had a scared face. Whatever he
was running from, Show Low wasn’t comforting him any. The others had lived
there all their lives. They recommended the McDonald’s. When they saw my credit
card they said something I hear a lot in such gas stations these days: “Any
relation to Ace Ventura?”
“He’s my son.”
Used to be, I’d stop in a little town, ask where to eat, and the gas station
guys would point me toward So-and-So’s Cafe. Greasy food, but you could strike
up a conversation at the counter. Once you got the locals talking, the
suspicion in their eyes would usually soften. The younger ones would be thin
and almost anyone over 30 would be fleshy, except for a certain kind of
waitress who would always be skinny, as though eaten from within by
something that wanted to get out of town and never would.
There aren’t many of those cafes left. Lately the locals point me to the
Denny’s or the McDonald’s. Even the young are chubby now; and for some reason
people in fast-food joints don’t talk to strangers. Maybe it has something to
do with how the money spent at So-and-So’s Cafe would stay in town; the place
belonged to them, there was a strength in that, so they had their pride. The
same folks work and eat at the McDonald’s now, but they don’t know the names of
the owners far away, and their money leaves town just like the strangers. Their
sense of strength, their sense that their little town is unique and their own,
is gone — and with it, a capacity for hospitality. Now The Wall Street
Journal reports that, along with the Christian cross and the Moslem
crescent, McDonald’s golden arches are the most recognized symbol in the world.
Is it possible to measure how many fewer conversations there are between
strangers?
And let’s remember that when the McDonald’s opened, nobody put a gun to
anybody’s head to go there instead of So-and-So’s Cafe. Choices were made, a
way of life was betrayed, and nothing was ever the same.
It was dinner time, the McDonald’s was hopping. Orders flew for “10 Chicken
McNuggets,” “6 Big Macs.” Route 60 is not a major road; Show Low isn’t a
tourist town. These were local families out for supper. But there were odd
touches. The joint served Bigelow teas: Earl Grey and all the herbals, just
like big-city coffee-shops. And jazz on the speakers! A sound you never used to
hear on any road between L.A. and Austin. I wondered about the manager.
What longing for a world beyond Show Low had selected tony teas and jazz to
gentle the degradation, the sameness, the greasy odor, of 60-hour weeks (a
manager’s lot) in a McDonald’s?
There was something else new in Show Low, and all over the Southwest, this
trip: Many women over 30 wore the severe, close-cropped haircuts that in big
cities you usually see on butch lesbians. I’m not going to touch that one,
except to say that something is changing out there.
The place was crowded with fat folk of all ages. Their pastiness was a
uniform that said, “I am of these people.” And it was a camouflage that said,
“You must get past this look to know me.” Just like the muscular thinness of
white L.A., or the black garb of bohemians everywhere. Only two weren’t fat,
weren’t saying, “I am of these”: a dark-haired boy and a blonde girl, both
about 14.
They were ahead of me in line. He said to her, “I pled not-guilty to two
charges and guilty to one.”
“They’ll send you to AA,” she said.
“I won’t go.”
“If a judge orders you to AA, you’ll go.”
I didn’t catch what came next, but then he said, “I have a six-pack.
It’s ugly when a girl has a six-pack.”
“You owe me so much alcohol!” she laughed. “You owe me four beers.”
They got their Big Macs and went to a booth. I got my McChicken and sat one
small round table away from them. The boy was telling her what had happened:
“`What are you doing?’ the guy says. `Are you gonna hurt me?’ He says that to
five guys with knives!”
I liked his face. Hers, too. He was intense, intelligent, quick. She was
savvy, and had an easy, I-can-handle-you way with him. I doubt they were
lovers. Teens aren’t that loose with each other when they’re lovers. They
seemed blessed with that lovely boy-girl bond that can happen at that stage,
two kids gentle and confident and reckless with each other, able to say
anything and everything, an intimacy fueled by dammed-up sex. They spend months
skirting the dangers while relishing the feelings (usually the first real
closeness they’ve known), then lose it all when they finally kiss.
These two were “bad” in their town. Tough. And, from his story and the way she
relished it: dangerous. Yet they shined. It would be a mistake to minimize the
danger they put us in (in return for the danger we’ve put them in), and a
mistake to minimize their glow. With four of his home-boys he’d pulled a knife
on some guy. He didn’t say why, or if he’d cut the guy; but he’d gotten caught.
I suppose in his mug-shot he looked as cold and dead-eyed as all the pictures
of kid-thugs you see in the papers. But here he was fresh and alive, lost but
not yet ruined. And here she was, loving the danger of him in a land that tried
to teach her that to be safe was to be good — when she could see, right there
in her Show Low McDonald’s, that to be safe was to be fat and smell of fries.
They spoke too softly for me to hear for a while, and then she said, mocking,
“Don’t talk about Dylan, Bob Dylan!”
“You ever heard `Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ by Bob Dylan?” He said it quietly,
almost desperately.
Come put my guns in the ground, I can’t use them anymore… It’s gettin’
dark, too dark to see. I feel I’m knockin’ on Heaven’s door.
Extinct volcanoes. Meteor craters. Apache ruins, and ruined Apaches. The words
of an ancient Phoenician way off course. Forests turned to stone. A kid telling
his friend that his life is over, he’s knocking on Heaven’s door.
I finished my coffee and left that town. Eight hundred miles down the road,
near the Llano River in Texas, the son of a dear friend — Vincent, age 13 —
said to me: “Our soul is the only key to the gate.” He had gotten that sentence
from his solitude and his deepening integrity. I said to him: “You haven’t
wasted your time. On that foundation, you can build anything.” His eyes looked
far beyond me, far beyond himself, and deep into the enchanting and frightening
mystery of the world. With the same audacity that one reaches for a knife,
another reaches for the truth.
What separates them? The luck of good parents? Fate? The thought that it’s all
arbitrary is crushing and probably true. All the more reason to recognize the
possibility that the reach for the knife began as a grasp for some kind of
truth, however mistaken, however terrible. How else can we save them, or even
speak to them, if we do not honor the root of their impulse?
I thought of that boy knocking on Heaven’s door, and that girl on a dangerous
journey all her own. (“You owe me four beers!”) And Vincent’s eyes and
words. I remembered words of a Boris Pasternak poem: “The root of beauty is
audacity, and that is what draws us to each other.“
Vistas so sensitive to light that they change color all day. Murderous rocks
falling from the sky. The soul is the only key. n
This article appears in January 19 • 1996 and January 19 • 1996 (Cover).