Leaving Arizona /The Long Goodby

[JerryHofschneider]

I had to get out.

Things were falling apart, the crackhead was getting dangerous, the cops were on my case. In addition,there were family problems and I had to get back to Florida or I'd lose my job.
Tupac was dead, Jon Benet was about to get that way, OJ's trial was starting and Bill Clinton was poised to win another term.
Phoenix no longer held the fascination it once had, and my shoulder was mostly healed.

I drove the big Ford panel van to Sky Harbor but there were no convenient flights, and the planes didn't go to my town anyway. The only alternative was Greyhound.

The adventure had come to a screeching halt and it was time for a change, a quick one.

--In early October 1996 (God, could it really be 20 freaking years ago???), my friend Leo, the source of all adventures, stopped by to see how I was doing.
I had just been in a minor wreck--as a passenger in my girlfriend's new Camaro--and had taken medical leave from work to allow my injured shoulder to heal up. I was doing OK, and Leo talked me into going West with him on a wack trip, one where he was going to buy a truckload of carnival stock and sell it on the streets of Phoenix.
He said that he'd pay for my return from Arizona, that he needed me to help him drive his big Ford panel van-- (--and his travel trailer, the "Prowler") out to Phoenix. He was meeting his wife and son there and didn't want to take the trip alone, and since I was out of work for a few weeks, it would be better therapy than sitting around my house gobbling pain pills.
Plus, I could make some money and have a good time.
How could I refuse?
Besides, what could go wrong?

We left the on the first day of the new month of October.
Along the way, Leo suggested an interesting game--each time we crossed a state line, we'd fire up a J. By the time we got to New Orleans, we were looped. (Check out a map--Interstate 10 crosses 3 state lines in 120 miles between Florida and the Big Easy, and we were doing 75 of those miles every hour).

We partied on Bourbon St, crashed in the street-parked Prowler in the Garden District, arose at dawn and hit the Texas joint just before lunch.
We got lost in Houston traffic and blew a power steering pump in Segovia, Texas where we spent the night. There is nothing in Segovia, Texas except a truck repair place and interstate 10. Nothing else.
I slept in the travel trailer, Leo in the back of the truck. It was 30 degrees. The pump replaced, we crossed Texas that day, stayed in a New Mexico motel that night. It was 20 degrees now as we smoked our way past the N.M. line.
Finally, Arizona, our final state line and the last of the stash.
Just north of Tucson, in the middle of the arid Sonora Desert in the dark of night, it rained for the first time on the trip, and--why not??-- the damn wipers failed in a near tropical torrent. We pulled over at an amazing cluster of balanced rocks, something I never knew existed, and watched as the highway flooded.
We got to Phoenix at dawn.

Neither Leo or I had ever been to Phoenix.
He had directions to a truckstop where the stock truck was parked.
It was a 55-foot trailer, filled to the roof with stock--leftover stuffed animals from the Arizona State Fair--Coca-Cola bears, Tweetys, Red Dogs, Disney-labeled things and teddybears of every size and configuration, thousands of pieces, and Leo's plan was to find a busy nearby corner and set up a display, then sell bears and play it out until we got kicked out of the spot. Then we'd go set up somewhere else.

We would live free, like gypsies, making tax-free money in a new and exotic place as we piled up some fresh adventures. I'd stay a week, help him get the thing set up then go home and have some healing time.

Knowing nothing about the city, we found an abandoned gas station at McDowell and 83rd in W Phoenix, right off the Interstate. We strung wires from a light pole, hung about a hundred pieces of stock from the wires and watched in fascination as traffic went out of it's way to park and buy things from us.
First night there, we sold about a thousand dollars worth of stuffed toys. My end was 30%.

Leo and his wife (--and their 2 year old son) rented a furnished apartment on Camelback, I settled in to the Prowler on McDowell. Leo tapped into the electric line of a billboard, so I had lights and TV and a working fridge to keep my beer cold, and the display was brightened by about 200 Christmas lights.
Each night, I'd tear the display down, count my money and crash in the cozy Prowler.
Each morning I'd have breakfast at Burger King across the street and I'd reset the bears. Another fine day at the office.
I was a well-off squatter in Phoenix, which was great fun, a hell of an adventure and interesting therapy for my injured shoulder. i felt like I was really beating the system, and it brought a daily smile to my sunburned, cracked-lip face.

I came to think of Florida as my "other life", where I had to battle commuter traffic twice a day, wear a necktie, get locked up in a cave of an office and make complicated, competitive deals with my insurance clients as I guzzled corrosive coffee, grew an ulcer and tried to stay invisible to my SOB of a boss.
In Phoenix, I rolled out of a travel trailer at dawn, had a relaxed Double Croissant across the street, fired up a morning joint with my boss and sold plush toys to an eager customer base--and I was making more money at this than at my "other" job.
Life was good

I was making about $200 per day, selling things. Leo would come by with fresh stock and spell me for a few hours and I'd go shower at his apartment then explore Phoenix in the box truck.
I went to Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's studio ( I'm a huge Wright fan, so it was like visiting Jerusalem or Mecca to me). This had been a lifelong fantasy, and here I was, prowling around my hero's studio.

Another time Leo and I drove up South Mountain, walked and climbed about two miles of rocky paths and looked down through the brown smog and into the city below. Quite the thrill to a Florida boy who lived in a smogless, humid, boring flat land.

Then, I found this amazing natural formation, the White Tanks, just West of Phoenix Metro and climbed all around it, getting a fine Native American high.

One afternoon I stopped at the local Saturn dealer ( on Camelback) and drove the EV-1, GM's pioneering electric car. A year or so later, GM killed the car and destroyed all the examples. Only a few people were ever able to do what I did that afternoon.
I still have the brochure from my visit. It's worth a ton of money to a collector, I've found out.
I was having a ball, making money, exploring a new place, staying high. A week's diversion was turning into an extended stay.

Leo, his wife and I climbed Squaw Peak at night, explored Scottsdale by day and did a pub crawl of the sleaze bars on Grand Ave near downtown on a Saturday. We'd work all day, then party at night.
He hired a drifter to work the display when I was gone, a guy with the nickname "Johnny Slash".
Johnny was a fool for crack, something that I never touched, and one night he convinced Leo into letting him stay in the Prowler with me. Johnny had no home.

It was Johnny brought the curse down upon us.
The second night he was there, cops raided the Prowler and busted Johnny for possession. Luckily, I was at Leo's apartment when he got the call from another of his workers, and he and I raced to McDowell and rescued the Prowler and the stock, moving it all to another ex-gas station at Camelback and 53rd in the middle of the night.
That night, three weeks into the adventure, I called my Mother, just to touch base. Mom had fallen and broke her ankle, and asked if I could help her out. She had no idea that I was 1,800 miles away.

I also called my boss.
He had stopped at my apartment to see how I was doing and couldn't find a trace of me. I told him I was staying at my Mom's while I healed. I don't think he bought it.
Things were getting complicated.

Somehow the cops found us--or they re-found the Prowler--and one night as I was tearing down the Camelback display, they stopped to question me about Johnny Slash.
Assuming that I was a confederate of Johnny's, they rousted me and found about twentytwo hundred dollars in small bills in my backpack, my earnings from the sale of many bears.
They laughed when I told them how I came to have so much cash. They saw it as drug money.
No way they were buying the bear story.

Naturally, with that much loose cash, it made them think of me as a dealer, probably Johnny's crack connection. They told me that I was also running an illegal business and that i was going to spend time in the Phoenix lockup if they ever saw me there again. Fortunately, there was nothing illegal in the Prowler, not even a warm beer.
The adventure had turned sour and was over.

Leo gave me $400 travel money, and I borrowed the truck to go buy a plane ticket, but nothing convenient was available. I HAD to get out of town --NOW-- so I drove to the bus terminal, just next to the airport, and got a ticket on an Eastbound Greyhound, out that night.

What followed was the ride from Hell, but that's another story.
A major blizzard followed the bus right across the country, causing numerous delays. Travel by Greyhound is misery compounded, and when the weather is nasty the misery grows exponentially-- but it got me home 2 days later, on the first day of the new month of November.
The bus station was two miles from my place, so I walked home in the dark and humid Florida night, a huge change from the bone-dry and nasty cold Arizona night I'd recently left behind.

I spent a few days with Mom, then went back to work. It had been a paid medical leave so there was a month's pay waiting for me. I had a pocket full of cash from the Phoenix trip, a mostly healed shoulder and a hell of an adventure behind me, but I couldn't tell anyone, not Mom, not the Boss, not my girl--nobody.

Leo showed up at my apartment about a week before Christmas. He asked to borrow a few hundred to get him by.
Shortly after I left, he told me, Johnny Slash bonded out of jail then got into a knife fight with his crack dealer at a sleazy Grand Avenue bar, then went back to jail.
Leo, meanwhile, had gotten into an argument with his wife. They split up and she and their son stayed in Phoenix selling teddybears while he came home to Florida, nearly broke. ( She lived there for a year before they got back together).
Finally, two weeks before Christmas, the police had busted him for theft of electricity at the Camelback site and confiscated the Prowler where he was living after the split. It was now time for him to flee Phoenix, and on the way back the panel truck had a transmission break in Tallahassee.
It took almost all his cash to repair it, and he had to live in the back of the truck for 2 days while it got fixed.

I'd gotten out of Arizona just in time, it seemed.

[frapjap]

Man, you can't make this %&$* up.

Its tough to even do those things this day in age.

[Jesda]

Wow! No one would ever believe a story about illegal teddy bear dealing.

This should be a film.

[MinisterofDOOM]

This should be a film.

It'd make a great Coen Brothers screenplay.

[float_6969]

Great read for my morning coffee! Thank you!!!