A Funky Sunset Rainbow

Craig Pelkey-Landes

I’m sure the sun bore down on the water, refracting like a crystal charm dangling from somebody’s rearview mirror. It was the Valley of the Sun, so what the sun was doing was a foregone conclusion. But I don’t remember really.

Phoenix in those days was hot yet languid, on its way to being grandiose and sprawling, spilling out of nowhere onto the receptive desert, over the dry river beds, around chalky-pink mountains, drowning a swath of cholla, saguaro, and prickly pear cactus. The desert will surely drink it back up someday, but the spill is in stop-frame right now, and we were even closer to the beginning of the film loop back then.

Things were starting to get out of hand, but it was still a sleepy town of maybe 800,000 souls, depending how broadly you defined “metro Phoenix”—did Chandler count? Buckeye? The boom started in the raging days of automobile monoculture, so human scale got hosed. We became creatures of endless strip malls and mile after mile of subdivision housing. We were a puddle not yet stagnant, teeming with life. 

So the sun was there in force, and we were pacing ourselves, Tim and I. Tim’s house was where we hung out. He had built a quarter pipe that backed up to the garage—I could never get up enough speed on my clunky Zorlac Craig Johnson model skateboard that felt like a water logged two-by-eight compared to the boards today. Even back then, Tim’s Santa Cruz was like a ballet slipper next to the Zorlac. Nothing nimble about that Zorlac. We’d ride from the end of the cul-de-sac onto Tim’s driveway, but the sloping curb would slow me down. I wasn’t a poser exactly, but never made it to the top of the quarter pipe, never came close to doing an ollie or whatever tricks were called in 1983.

And that was just the front yard. Tim’s family had cable, so we watched MTV, read back issues of Reggae and African Beat, and made banana fritters in his kitchen—Irie, Mon!

No, it’s not what you imagine, teenage boys turning the kitchen into a war zone (that was Jeff’s house, but we had nothing to do with the wreckage in that kitchen, and it’s another story altogether). We were serious about those fritters, frying them up perfect golden brown, putting the flour, sugar, and other ingredients away after we had used them, washing the mixing bowl, all the while laughing and badly singing something like “We’ll be Forever Lovin’ Jah.” We left Carl’s Jr. burger wrappers all over the front porch, but the kitchen we left sparkling. Banana fritters were a religious experience that summer.

That summer, we divided our time between Carl’s Jr., Tim’s house, the occasional punk rock show with at least five bands on the bill (with names like the Meat Puppets, The Sun City Girls, and my personal favorite: Jodie Foster’s Army), and when we had a set of wheels, Zia Records, for cheap used albums.

Today was a Tim’s house day. We were easing our way between skating, TV, and the pool. The development Tim’s house was in had microscopic backyards with high stucco fences. The entire backyard was taken up by the pool. Like I said, we were pacing ourselves that day, not a thing to do. I didn’t have a shift that day at the bottom rung of a storefront telemarketing operation. I wouldn’t have many shifts there, as it turned out. Those folks flew the coop before I could cash my first paycheck.

We were just hanging by the pool at this point in the afternoon, the summer between junior and senior year. College was in the plans, but those plans wouldn’t be enough to fit on the inside of a matchbook. So we watched the water glisten (I imagine), and listened to lousy radio, in those days before indie rock got airplay anywhere but two-block frequency college stations.

I remember feeling elation that day, water lapping all around me as I floated on an inner tube. Something halfway decent must have come onto the radio, Bowie or maybe even The Clash. Elation doesn’t come when you listen to Journey or Loverboy.

It was my last carefree day, and knowing that, I enjoy the memory of it all the more. Not long after this day, I moved with my parents to Pennsylvania, to a different kind of suburbia, north of Philadelphia. I think my memories of Phoenix have caused a sense of place, or the lack thereof, to thrum on low reverb from back to front to back in my consciousness. The American Southwest—wind scoured lowlands against mountains coming as if out of nowhere, the odd tumbleweed now and then, a certain awe for Almighty-ness in the rock formations and evidence of the forces of nature on the overall landscape—now there’s a landscape that offers a sense of place. This is juxtaposed against the bland sameness of the strip-mall strewn landscape.

Thanks to that bland sameness, Phoenix did not, from the perspective of a punkish kid, have a very strong sense of identity. Back then I didn’t feel a “Phoenix” identity, but I was pretty sure I had an idea of what Phoenix was not. It was not the la-la land of L.A. It didn’t have the animist spiritual hum associated with Santa Fe. Not as naughty as Vegas. It wasn’t even as distinctive as other towns in Arizona: not the home of hardcore granola types, like Flagstaff. Not the groovy Mestizo culture of Tucson. Just plain vanilla Phoenix. It was a place to move to and get an okay job and soak up the sun.

And yet as I look back, identity has seeped into my bones as a child of the southwest, a reverse migrator from that very specific place smack dab(ish) in the middle of the Arizona desert. I think this rootedness I feel in Phoenix

is something more than what human ingenuity has put into it. You can plop down a Bennigan’s and a Don Pablo’s, a Fry’s grocery and a Woody’s Macayo every square mile, but you can’t escape the landscape. Squaw Peak, Camelback, the dry Salt River bed, South Mountain, the White Tank mountains to the west, they are not just dry bones, they put some flesh and feeling into Phoenix, they don’t let us sit around. They beckon us to climb them, they become a jagged frame for the dust and smog induced, mind-bogglingly beautiful sunsets. They give this place a soul. They still stir my soul.

The sprawling, morphing exurb; the sunshine; endless miles of concrete to skate, beauty to be found if you spied a break in the numbing order of beige houses/beige strip mall/beige houses; people who held the capacity to relax once they were off the roads (highways were mayhem, just like anywhere else); great Mexican and Thai, and Japanese food; a million ways to cool off; a vibe that’s too snide to be effervescent, but too pleased with life to be totally jaded. This is what has shaped me in my blood and bones. This is a funky sunset rainbow of brown, turquoise, blood orange, hazy dazzling purple. This is my town.

—Craig Pelkey-Landes, Perkasie, Pennsylvania, who hasn’t been to Arizona in ages, and who is glad the kids of Perkasie have a skateboard park.