In people’s minds, the street came to symbolize the boundary between the “safe” and the “dangerous,” meaning the white and non-white, the privileged and non-privileged, sides of town. And most people I knew would away from it. Except for one excursion.
Three friends and I once drove there on a Friday night during our senior year of high school. We were bored. It was late. We’d been drinking. Someone suggested we “yell at the hookers.” Friend 1 found the idea amusing. Friend 2 found it titillating. Being a reliable risk-taker who had yet to develop a more inclusive sense of empathy, the prospect of a dangerous adventure thrilled me. The lackadaisical Friend 3 went along for the ride.
It might have taken ten minutes to drive from Friend 1’s affluent north Phoenix neighborhood. There, as one car in a series of slow cruisers, we drifted past figures shuffling in front of the neon signs. Men slouched at bus stops waiting for customers, not buses. Women stood beside payphones engaged in pretend conversations. We started yelling out the windows. “What’s up honey?” “Looking for a good time?” I knew it was cruel. We were mocking the unfortunate. It makes me cringe to think how a bunch of us white kids thought this was exciting: the danger, the grime, the empowering knowing that we’d sleep that night on the safe side of town. Knowing it didn’t change my behavior, but every day these women faced actual danger and survived in a culture that perpetually demeaned and repressed them. Whenever some stranger grunted on top of them, whenever they got arrested on Van Buren, they faced the fact of their limited means and thwarted aspirations, sacrificing part of the youthful visions of their future selves in order to make a living. These women probably grew up wanting to do something rewarding or different with their lives. Now they were here, enduring the added insult of high school boys’ callous curiosity.
For some reason, Friend 1 stopped his Bronco beside a tall woman in a miniskirt. The gray spandex terminated along the seam of her butt cheeks. She leaned toward the passenger window and said something about a ride. Then she climbed into the back seat and scooted between me and Friend 2.
“Who’s going first?” she said. She looked at me, then at Friend 2. Friend 3 wouldn’t turn around. The smell of cigarette smoke and perfume filled the car. I caught Friend 1’s terrified eyes in the rearview.
Friend 2 said he’d go and the rest of us said no thanks, we’d changed our mind and will let you out right here. “Oh no,” the woman said. “My time is precious. You think you can go wasting it with this shit?” We apologized in whiney voices and told her we’d drop her off wherever she wanted. When I turned to check her out, I noticed the bony cheeks, pronounced Adam’s apple and thin over-treated hair.
Someone started arguing with her, and soon our overlapping chatter reached a furious pitch: we aren’t paying, we don’t want anything, no something for nothing, get out, please get out now.
She said, “I got a pistol in my purse, honey, so don’t you sass me.”
Adrenaline flooded my insignificant body. Her right thigh pressed against mine. I looked at her purse. It sat on her lap. I wondered, was she bluffing? Who would she shoot first: us in back or them in the front? I kept my eyes on her long veiny hands. If she reached for that purse, I vowed to grab her wrists and wrestle it from her. Instead of a struggle, someone said okay and handed her some bills. We pulled into a side street where she lifted her towering frame from the seat, leaning so far over that her square ass passed inches from my face before it slipped into the night.
We deserved much worse. Her time was precious. And you can’t go around treating people like that. My parents had taught me better, yet driving away from Van Buren that night, my friends and I didn’t discuss our failure to respect these women’s humanity. Instead, we laughed about the incident because, terrifying as it was, it made us feel like survivors, tough and triumphantly returning from this imagined battlefield. Like most teenagers, we loathed our hometown for its asphyxiating boredom, and we refused to see ourselves as anything more than victims of tedium, searching for excitement. This is why discovering Googie on Van Buren years later felt like a revelation: finally there was something interesting to do in Phoenix.
Like most twenty-somethings, I wanted nothing more than to escape to some place cool like San Francisco or San Diego. Googie transformed Van Buren from the skuzziest to the most interesting place in town, which transformed Phoenix into someplace bearable. Granted, VB offered none of the innovative eateries captured in Hess’ book—no Coffee Dan’s to photograph, no bright, verdant interiors like Pann’s or Ship’s. But in Phoenix, looking at the burned out skeletons of vacation destinations seemed better than getting stoned at a friend’s house, watching TV, or going to the mall, which were my usual entertainment options. I imagined a local newspaper headline: “Kid Finds Something Interesting in Capital’s Most Notorious Crime Zone.”
So I’d park, and men in baggy uniform pants and white tees would change direction to walk toward my car. “What’s up man?” they’d say. If I passed them while driving at my slow investigative pace, they’d spot me peering and think I was interested in them rather than the motels behind them. They’d say, “Whadyou need?” I’d shake my head, say, “No thanks man, I’m good.”
When I came back with the camera, I photographed the buildings from the sidewalk. Stepping from my car felt dangerous. The whole act felt invasive. It attracted attention. People watched me from motel windows and the steps of nearby trailers. I kept a two-inch knife in my pocket, but the sidewalk offered the red light’s main form of protection: exposure. Cars whizzed past. Sometimes pedestrians: a teen in a wife-beater with a tattooed neck; a grown man riding a child’s BMX. I’d nod. A few nodded back. Eye contact seemed bold enough to double as a warning: I see you, so don’t mess with me. Some people eyeballed my 35mm. It was my grandpa’s. Mom had given it to me when he passed away that summer.
Other locals greeted the camera with suspicion. They peered from behind curtains, crouched smoking on porches and squinting at me. Since I wasn’t there to make a purchase, I assumed they thought I was a NARC or some unwelcome source of trouble. When one East Indian man stepped from a motel office and into the frame, he waved me off. “No photo, no photo,” he said. I apologized, explaining I was interested only in the architecture. He shook his head and yelled louder, but the sidewalk was public property, so there was nothing he could do about it.
A skinny shirtless man once leaned out of his unit at the Arizona Motel. “Whata’you up to?” he said. His body was a tangle of sinewy muscle, skin pulled taught across stomach, arms and neck. A large mattress set on the side of his wall beside a few wooden boards. I told him I was photographing the architecture. When he asked if I was with the paper, I said no, and he said he was a scrapper. Not like a fighter, he explained. He owned a pickup and kept regular routes collecting any spare parts or metal he could sell to a dealer. “You want to see something worth takin’ pictures of,” he said, “man, scrapping is it.” Still convinced I was a reporter, he offered to let me ride with him for an article he said I should write. His life intrigued me. I told him I might take him up on that later.
If motel units’ doors were open I could sometimes see into the rooms. Usually an unmade bed was the most visible detail, the corner of a mattress exposed below ruffled sheets. Other times people sat on the bed’s edge, staring at a TV. Like the prostitutes, these residents were someone’s children. At some point they had recognized how luck determines one’s chances in childhood, and the way circumstance unwittingly narrows one’s options in adulthood, squashing our innocence as we accept the fact that some of our dreams are either no longer feasible, or require too much effort to work for. I recognized this, too, but I’d benefited the other way. When I told the scrapper that I might take him up on his offer, I meant it. I wish I’d meant it more. Now that I see how empty buildings are without