I drove west on VB, through the decreasing addresses toward downtown. In the bright sunlight, ancient images raced through my mind: the Dalmatian, the barbed wire, Newton’s weedy lay out. Familiar buildings flashed on the roadside: the city’s first Denny’s, the drug-dealer Circle K, an old liquor store with a neon sign. Finally, I thought, I get to see Newton’s again, and this time I was going to capture it on film. My heart thumped in anticipation. My fingers drummed the steering wheel, but as I sped up VB, I saw an increasing number of vacant lots, and my fingers drummed less from excitement than fear. Where motels once stood, there was now bare dirt, and weedy squares littered with beer cans and broken glass. Dry, bent palm trees and partial cement foundations broke their desolate monotony, and a deep part of me knew what I would find at 917 East.
Expecting what I found on 9th Street didn’t make it any less wrenching. Newton’s was gone. My camera lay on the passenger seat, and in the Inn’s place stood Camden Copper Square, a high-end, two-story, gated condo complex. Trimmed palm trees decorated the property, standing sentry along the black metal fence and tan, stucco walls. The copper-colored letters on the sign called it “An Apartment Community.” I knew what it was: the new face of redevelopment, designed to attract the young executives and well-to-dos who’d started frequenting the bars and restaurants popping up throughout downtown as part of the city’s coordinated revitalization project—“infill” and “mixed-used” urban planners call it, “gentrification” to others.
I turned into the Camden on what was still labeled 9th. A callbox hung from a stucco island dividing incoming and outgoing traffic. When the man in front of me waved an ID before a sensor, an automated security gate entrance opened and his white Acura slipped inside. Rather than follow my natural impulse to sneak in, I turned into the adjacent visitor lot. What was there to see? These kinds of condos were a dime-a-dozen in Phoenix. They’d surrounded me my whole life.
I parked in a narrow space by the front office. Two white teenage girls sprinted down the sidewalk laughing, trying to make the light. In the park across the street, Hispanic kids in red shorts and tank tops kicked soccer balls back and forth. Three young urbanites in tight black jeans strutted toward Central Avenue and some vision of a downtown night life beyond, maybe a bar, maybe a tour of the galleries in the nearby arts district.
The Hyatt Chalet Motel across the street, renamed the 7 Motel and fenced for as long as I could remember, was gone too. It was now a dirt lot. Something upscale would soon stand there—a sushi restaurant, a wine bar with polished concrete floors and exposed duct work. The Googie starburst, asterisk, sputnik—whatever name you assign that signature ornamentation for what looks like a fizzing sparkler—were, as Hess described, a symbol of “energy caught in the act of explosive release, like a coruscating diamond.” Yet Van Buren’s energetic vernacular decayed so quickly that it seems never to have existed. Wildwood, New Jersey of all places has the Doo Wop Preservation League, a 501(c)3 nonprofit founded in 1997 to preserve and increase awareness of the area’s Googie architecture. LA has the Los Angeles Conservancy’s Modern Committee. Since 1984, they’ve saved priceless Googie structures like Ship’s coffee shop, Pann’s and the Wich Stand. Phoenix lacked any comparable mobilization.
I locked the car and walked across the street. I had always told myself that I’d sneak into the 7 Motel to photograph it from the inside. I never did. After the dog cornered me, I quit visiting VB all together, yet I kept telling myself I’d try again next weekend, next month, sometime soon. At least with my camera, I could have fixed local preservationists’ error by filling the historical gap. I was ideally positioned to document it. Now here I was, another thirty-something carrying childhood regrets, a man in a lot staring at a new condo building, trying to stare the past back to life.
We reached the Canadian border at two a.m. with the PCP hidden in Dean’s insulin syringes and the weed buried in the peanut butter.
During the previous three weeks that July, Dean and I had driven my dad’s minivan from Phoenix up the Pacific Coast. Unshaven, studded with mosquito bites, and stinking of alder wood smoke, we hiked and camped in Redwood, Mt. Rainier, and Olympic national parks. There, far from humanity, we scaled precipitous sea stacks, touched orange sea stars in tide pools, and watched seals watch us from the breakers. While tripping on mushrooms near what was then the world’s tallest tree, I perched atop an enormous fallen redwood log whose upturned trunk stood ten feet off the ground and studied a deer browsing the tangled understory. When I slipped on the mossy bark coming down, I fell face-first into ferns. Dean crouched on a nearby log, snickering maniacally. “I am tripping so hard,” he said.
We were close friends, in our early twenties and halfway through college. This was precisely why we’d come: debauchery and comic misadventure. But also, the more time I spent outdoors, the more I realized that nature was more than scenic beauty and the physical challenges of rugged topography. As strange as it sounded even to me, being in wilderness awoke me to something woven into the fabric of the universe. The air in natural areas like Redwood National Park felt threaded by an enigmatic buzzing, not a measurable force like wind or gravity, but the nagging, low-frequency suggestion of scenery within the scenery, a secondary landscape. I told no one about this sensation other than Dean, and even then I struggled to describe it.
“It’s the sense that there is more to reality than what we see,” I kept saying during the trip. “That some meaning lurks behind the obvious phenomenological level.” Dean nodded and asked questions, but my explanations failed to clarify. “It’s like peripheral vision in the mind’s eye,” I explained, “out there on the cusp of perception. Like shadows. Rustling leaves.”
Hearing myself say this aloud, I feared it sounded nuts. Back in Phoenix, I’d sometimes wondered if thoughts like these signaled the onset of a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia. But when I stepped back into a moist old-growth forest, the sensation returned and dispelled my concern. This perception of a nonphysical component of the physical world was real. Was it God? Heaven? Parallel dimensions? Had I been gifted with the powers of a seer?
As a friend, Dean tolerated my incessant yammering. As a fellow outdoorsman, he was attuned enough to nature to entertain challenging cosmological possibilities. “I don’t believe in God per se,” he said. “I do believe that things have a spirit, a life force, if that makes sense.” His mom attended church every Sunday but didn’t raise him Catholic. Yet, he was adamant: “There is definitely a larger force in the universe. I just don’t know if it’s a Christian-type god.”
Whatever it was, I wanted a direct encounter with it. So when the people we were staying with in Vancouver came home with PCP on our last night in British Columbia, Dean and I bought some.
Twenty Canadian dollars got us two gelatin capsules of white powder. My friend Christie’s roommates sold it to us. They’d let us sleep for three nights in their white weathered bungalow. It had tilted front columns and a warped, creaky porch. They listened exclusively to techno music by day, hit after-hours clubs at night. Dean and I could do without the techno, but Vancouver was beautiful, our hosts friendly, and we didn’t want to leave. But with seven days to drive back to Phoenix and funds evaporating, we had no choice. We devised a plan. That night we would travel as far south of Bellingham, Washington as our weary bodies would allow and then sleep in the van in a hotel parking lot. We’d been doing this the whole trip to save money: sleep in the van, “shower” in gas station bathroom sinks, cook food on our camp stove. After three weeks on the road, we’d paid for only two motel rooms.
We bought the PCP after midnight and started the long drive south. The van’s wheel wells, spare tire, and carpeting seemed the most obvious hiding places. Dean figured the last place border agents would look was inside his insulin syringes. At a gas station along the highway, he removed the needles from two of them, placed the