than our world now. Maybe a nuclear utopia is no more outlandish than the modern idea that fast internet connections and shared information will somehow improve all human life, giving voice to the voiceless, eradicating ignorance, and erasing humanity’s religious and political divisiveness so that people across the world all see that we’re far more alike than we are different. Every age has its grand delusions, and every era, like every person, is defined as much by its accomplishments as by its fantasies, the ones we dream and the ones we fail to achieve. As we age, our own dreams wither and our vision of all possible futures narrows. If we live in the same place long enough, the streets we drive, the buildings we pass, will bear the markings of our lives, and sometimes carry painful reminders of our youth, our thwarted ambitions, and people who have died, along with the condemned husks of our former selves. Maybe that’s just the cynic in me talking, the hardened aging realist who has seen the street of dystopian dreams, the place where the future once imagined now lays in ruin, because the future finally arrived.
In the Phoenix New Times article “Tough Row to Ho,” reporter Susy Buchanan accompanied police on a 2004 roundup of Van Buren prostitutes. In a group of handcuffed sex workers, one named “The Troll” sobbed beside a blonde, giving the cops a story about wanting to straighten up her life, pleading with them that, if they’d just let her go, she’d return to school in Colorado and become a beautician. The blonde eyeballed her disapprovingly and said, “You a ho! It ain’t never gonna be straightened up. Once a ho, always a ho. Get used to it.”
East VB was such a fertile dump that sex workers from cities across the county traveled there to work. Just as it had in its days as a resort destination, it had earned a local and national reputation. On a typical night in the 1990s, a driver could spot twenty to fifty girls, women and men dressed as women pacing the cracked sidewalks. Black, white, heavy, thin, all the clichés were true: they wore short skirts, high heels, big hair, gaudy makeup and tight, low-cut tops that revealed deep cleavage and fatty midriffs. While most were middle-aged, some of the women cops arrested were in their sixties and seventies, old enough to have vacationed there with their parents as children.
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
