“Mesa” translates to “high table land” in Spanish. And a table it is-- flat, functional, unceremonious. Mesa, Arizona sits about 20 minutes east of Phoenix, nestled among other tables in a neat little diner of despair. We, the kids whose parents never cared about us, called it, “The Valley.” Mountains and sandy peaks surrounded us, and far off the Grand Canyon loomed in her ominous depth. You could move in any direction, but you could never rise, never fall—not physically anyways. Those sensations had to come from a chemical. Injected into the veins, inhaled through an opaque glass, dealt by scorpions in dirty corners.
Mike knew how to get to all of those corners and who inhabited them. The Valley lay out in long, straight planks, the grooves dirty from frequent travel, lit at night with a fervor mimicking the desert sun. If you follow the tracks long enough, you eventually find dark pools and jagged canyons to wander into for a little while—to escape the stink of the asphalt and inhale a new kind of vapor.
Mike knew everything about everything. He knew about Rand, and introduced me to Vonnegut. He knew how to score on searing streets lined with orange trees, and taught me how to roll a joint on his bed, his screenless window open to the hot, perilous air of those unsupervised Arizona nights. He knew what to say to make me laugh, to make me love him when he asked to kiss me in a deserted plaza, and he introduced me to a version of myself I had never known before. He knew how much cough syrup to drink to get high enough to call me at school from his backyard pool, his brain boiling from the artificial venom, and he tried to introduce me to meth on our first date, his paraphernalia neatly strewn across his dark bedroom floor.
I declined. The desert was a new oasis for me. I was 15, on the edge of adulthood and I was high on my newfound sense of freedom.
Mike and I skittered like salamanders, back and forth down the long, straight streets to find a corner of our own. We whispered like criminals and laughed like jackals in the night, our cackles echoing off the stucco walls surrounding my dirty apartment complex pool. Sometimes, after his days of parallel pacing down the hot Mesa streets, he met me after school by the church across the road. I laughed when he put his cigarette in the Virgin Mary’s stone mouth. Mike’s mouth on my mouth fired my soul to stone. I was strong when I was with Mike—resilient as the desert Mesquite, until he began to crack.
Not every creature can thrive in the desert. The monotony of endless steps down the same straight lines, a steering wheel stuck at ten and two, grew too burdensome for many in The Valley. Round little tablets pushed away the perpendicular lines. Fat little paper sticks sent a frenzy of smoke through the stationary air. Mike’s crystal ball banished the banal predictability of suburban life in the desert.
I had never been in one place long enough to grow stagnant. Packing up and leaving had always been an option for me; it was always in the back of my mind. But the children of The Valley had inherited the sand and the sun. They grew from drops of water, sweat through the barren monotony of the summer heat, and rejoiced at the rare fruit of the Saguaro on their tongues.
However, Mike soon needed something else, something more. He needed to get high, really high. He climbed the ASU Mountain that peers over the bustling hubbub and twinkling downtown lights. His sunken eyes scrutinized the empty faces, and he wondered how they all could not know what he knew. On his descent, an idea, black as the Desert Kingsnake, flashed and bit into him, pumping a new kind of poison: maybe they all knew what he knew.
I never climbed the mountain with Mike, nor did I follow his descent. My resiliency faded into stubborn fear—I became afraid of Mike’s heights and he resented my plateaus. I wanted to stay and laugh with the jackals in the stink of asphalt. I stuck to the streets. I stopped going to Mike’s dirty corners.
Mike decided that the pills were too round and that the smoke was too chaotic. He yearned for something reminiscent of his old life, and chose the stick straight syringe, pounding heroin into himself until he couldn’t breathe. Heroin reminded the corner cronies of home. Except Heroin didn’t hide in the corners. Heroin walked down the streets and hung from the lampposts. It loitered in the Circle Ks on the street corners, and it sat in the passenger’s seat at the Sonic drive-throughs.
Michael died behind a dumpster from a Heroin overdose. He did it on purpose so he didn’t have to go back to prison. I guess the bars in his cell were too straight. I suppose he was tired of his plateau and barren wilderness. Or maybe he had tried to climb higher, and had fallen, scuttling on his back like a beetle down onto the sticky, hot pavement, where the smell of asphalt permeated the air.
