My holdout throughout the pandemic was the house in east Phoenix which I shared with my three roommates. The house had a backyard so lush that it made the water conservationist, the desert-dweller in me blush. The sprinklers were constantly leaking and at one point our neighbor popped his head over to ask what was going on, since it was seeping out into his yard. We always were one step removed from the landlord and we had to communicate through the property management company. Our original gardener was a capable man who commanded a small unit of landscapers to touch up the gravel and blow the leaves in circles and mow the grass and adjust our sprinklers and so on. Eventually our direct relationship with those coming to and from our yard deteriorated, and we had no idea when to expect our landscapers nor whom to contact directly, so by the later months of our lease, we had a small grass jungle in the middle of Phoenix.
As I was cooped up at home, I would frequently go out around lunchtime into the Arizona heat with no shirt and no shoes and step out onto the clover grass bordered by small palms and yellow bells. I would lay out a blanket and swing around kettlebells and listen to The Rat as he hacked at 2x4s with his circular saw, crafting yard furniture or workbenches. At one point he made us a nice ladder which we used to get on the roof and watch sunsets, complete with grilled Food City chicken and avocados. I would do my afternoon circuit after I had written software in the effective hours of the morning. My mind was clear and I was strong at keeping it clear—it was easy in this state of the world with few personal distractions. There was nothing for me to consistently worry about; my family was healthy and I had no overarching angst over what I was doing with my career or my dating life or my passions.
In the mornings I would practice Spanish with my ever-smiling tutor from the Canary Islands. She spoke clear Spanish with a smooth accent. I learned a lot of Spanish slang which I later came to realize was slang. She encouraged me to speak about my painting and my other interests and describe my city. We would talk about zapatos de gato and surfeando and obras de arte and she would tell me about Tenerife and her biking trips throughout the islands. Her passions and radiance influenced mine and I felt that I was making progress to the eventuality which I held clear in my mind: learn Spanish, take a break from my job, and travel to South America and Spain.
Many of my days were the same and I was lucky. I felt fortunate that the houses east of us had great big trees which were the perfect branch-swaying spectacle for watching the peach-faced lovebirds and grackles. We would hunker down on the expansive blue couch that we put under the patio and The Rat and I would make a pot of Chemex to split it in the early morning. We would crack open the sliding glass door with our mugs in hand and feel the still-cool Saltillo tile on our bare feet and we would sit on the wooden chairs and talk about all sorts of things before the sun had cast its heat into the valley. We would savor the feeling of warming air in the Arizona valley, still cool enough to appreciate a hot cup of coffee, but apparent that the heat was on its way. The Phoenix weather has a charm in which you can feel the gradual changes—people claim that there are no seasons in Phoenix, but it’s clear that sometimes it’s hotter than hot, and other times it is just hot. It is satisfying to notice the morning glow creep up over the days and it makes it easy to rise at dawn.
The Rat and I would hold our ceramic mugs and try to spot the blue mud dauber that had taken our yard as its territory, which indicated to me that we had spiders unseen. The dauber would crawl around as a shining emerald jewel and explore our backyard, running around in circles, and The Rat and I would chat and warm up for the day. We would watch the black carpenter bees and hear the buzz of hummingbirds, soaking in the feeling of the air and the riches of our idyllic, localized ecosystem. There was no sense of urgency around anything for any of us in that house. Time and progress were put on hold due to the pandemic. We had time to drink coffee and relax before starting the day and we would go for long walks to the Ethiopian Cafe for a ginger coffee and smell the creosote and eucalyptus on Wilshire Street in the old Phoenix neighborhood. The mornings evolved as the season heated up and I would wake early and we would all pile into my 4Runner and take a half-mile lap over to Dunkin Donuts. The four of us always referred to Dunkin Donuts in some bastardization like “donkey don’t-hurts” or “dumb-key done-yurts” and it became a morning routine to hit the drive-thru to get cold brews and sour cream donuts or Beyond Meat sandwiches. I would wear a mask just for the short interaction with the cashier and strip it off to taste the first sip of the cold, rich coffee in contrast with the hot morning air. I would get chills while listening to the roar of the chunky tires as we screamed out of the drive-thru onto Thomas and down 40th Street.
We would hop out of the truck and stomp over the grass in our front yard and jump the small fence to our front door. Jacob would leave for work and I would often go out back with The Rat and Sam and drink coffee until nine. The Rat would go back to writing and I would slowly get up from my perch and go take a meeting then get to work—it was already hot as hell at that hour, so getting up and working through the middle of the day was only natural. I would peck at my keys, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, writing software for a few hours. I had no sense of when we might return to the office.
The streets around us were all residential, so it was easy to wander around with no destination in mind—in fact, as many houses in Phoenix are, it was the opposite of walkable. The maze of suburbia was apparent. The house itself had plenty of space and a small Arizona room which I had claimed as painting space for half of the year. I made a few of my favorite pieces while camped out in that corner. The Rat and I had rescued a large desk with drawers from bulk pickup a few blocks away, and I made good use of it; I would squeeze tubes out onto the glass top and the space gave me liberty to explore, not being committed to any one concept of color at a time, so I went wild with the paint.
The Arizona room itself felt like home. It was amplified by the morning glow and there were days where I would pick up painting early. I could watch the insects take their morning slowly just as I would, remaining as lethargic as possible until having soaked up enough sun. I felt like the dawn, a nascent time in which I had no concept of real responsibilities or existential dread or the length of the day before me—I could live with creative purpose with no sense of productization, no value-extraction, no means-to-an-end. East Phoenix was a refuge of close friendship in a time of sudden danger and violence. It was simplification in the event of restriction.
Eventually the time came: I took a break from my job and went to Ecuador and Spain. The pandemic was still somewhat ongoing, but it felt to be on its way out. The time spent traveling was well worth it, but it was isolating—I made drawings and wrote poetry and read in cafes and spent nights alone in my apartment with sandwiches made of baguettes and jamón ibérico. There were many great stories from Ecuador and Spain, but those are for another time.
Now I was living further west in Phoenix in limbo before moving to San Francisco. My apartment was by the VA on Indian School and 7th Street. It wasn’t anything special, but it was a place that would let me rent for three months. I never did up my apartment very well, but it was enough to get into the groove with which I was familiar. I slept on the floor and put some holes in the walls to hang up my painting collection. My painting setup was a bit silly; I had my Best easel in all its grandeur in the corner, joined by a small folding camping stool and a cooler with an old black glass desktop to serve as a palette and a surface for tubes of paint.
I spent my mornings rushing a bit more, making a cup of Chemex and staring at my painting from the prior evening. I was in the midst of getting situated with the new code at my job, learning the ins and outs of the Python code and trying to understand where all of the essential functions lived. I churned a little on the introductory projects and then took a break for lunch and spent time pecking at my painting. I spent the early evenings with more work as the guys were all operating quite late and I felt that I had to keep up. I went to the climbing gym and ran errands then continued to check in with work.
Somehow I felt like most of my time was spent setting up my apartment and getting situated in this space which I knew was temporary. I took the art which I bought from Spain and put it up in an array next to the drawing (mentally titled) Sensei which was intended to be junk that Jared had sent in addition to returning his key to our old place. He drew a lumpy man with hair in a bun who had a parrot on his shoulder with extremely long, curvy legs. The expression of the man and the parrot were the same—their stoic, sharp eyes seemed to see through me but they perpetuated a calm control. The man reminded me of a well-traveled teacher. I put the piece in a black frame and hung it up next to the prints which I had purchased in Real Alcázar.
I drove to the Sprouts in Midtown. I bought mostly healthy groceries—frozen fruit for smoothies, a few chicken breasts and cuts of salmon, broccoli and spinach, jasmine rice, peaches and mangos, tortilla chips, a baguette, and a case of La Croix. I drove home and the 4Runner crawled up to the second level of the parking garage. I walked from the second level of the garage directly into my unit and threw my keys on the counter. I unpacked the bags and put the meat, the vegetables, the case of La Croix and the fruit in the fridge. I singled out a mango and took out a cutting board and it felt natural to me to take delicate care to remove the produce sticker from the mango before washing it. This will be its final resting place, after all, so it should be put down in as natural of a state as it comes. I cut the mango into cubes and sucked at its flesh and stared at my easel in the corner and watched the movement of the fiddle leaf fig as she swayed under the ceiling fan in contrast with the stillness of my painting. My eyes cast lines and traces into the painting and I imagined what sort of burnt sienna or amber would fit into the landscape which coerced its way into the nooks of my mind, seeping out of the blanks in the canvas. I was salivating over the mango and over the concept of casting a soft glob of paint over the surface of another color, excited to see the piercing intensity of the crimson as it cast through the new layer which I would stroke into its protruding bulge, breaking and mixing the tension at the edge of a knife.
It was a long time that the unit of eight of My Only Friends La Croix saw only darkness. Upon the first beam of refrigerator light against his shiny existence, My Only Friend La Croix was met by me. I cracked into his head, pulling my finger into his tab with just as much force as necessary. My Only Friend La Croix knew nothing of where he was, for My Only Friend La Croix had been kept shoulder to shoulder with his seven brethren since his birth. Life outside by the box must have been beautiful for My Only Friend La Croix. Each of his seven successors must have felt the same, closely followed by his reincarnation, only becoming My Only Friend when plucked from the crate in the fridge. La Croix was surely beaming in anticipation of taking place of his predecessor; next in line, he waited in the dark, still and silent, not knowing what was to come. He felt the cool air, unencumbered by cardboard against his aluminum skin. My Only Friend La Croix knew something profound was to occur in his life when he could see but momentary flashes of light, brief escapades to him in which he would catch me friend plucking a peach from the fridge or standing and contemplating my level of hunger. My Only Friend La Croix saw me, and I saw him, and we made the conscious choice to lead our lives together.
I took the first tangerine La Croix and set him on the shelf above the sink and put some Rels B on my speakers and floated over to my easel and palette and automatically snatched a dark tube and pulled into it hard and cast a dark glob over the black reflective palette. I scraped under the paint with the knife and flipped the knife and pressed it down into its place, mixing pigment and oil, mesmerized, until I had a flat layer of burnt sienna. I pushed into it with the back of the knife—rapidly back and forth, watching the ridge that it formed each time, as fluid tectonic plates crash into each other and propel their upper cruft towards the sky. I pulled an avalanche of soft mixing white onto the palette and pierced out a small fleck of the paint at the tip of my knife and I mixed it into the dark and struck the knife back and forth and I scraped a large swath onto the back of the Holbein #14 and I stood up and squinted and cast it into the canvas. I felt no remorse nor hesitation in the second stroke and added more and more paint and I swung my arms as an ape does in the jungle from branch to branch, unconscious and unthinking, exerting himself with a face relaxed.
I took a step back once there was no more paint on the palette and I squinted at my painting. I stared at it and imagined that I was the paint and how I would like to be treated with such brutality but the moment passed and I was again unthinking, simply processing the changes and potential of the canvas.
I felt a presence tap me on the backs of my shoulders. The wave crashed over me and I had the sudden thought as to where I could have left My Only Friend La Croix. I was no longer painting and my hands felt radioactive and I turned to see that I was not alone in my sweat, for My Only Friend La Croix was sitting at his perch, beaded with condensation from the tip of his L downward where his cool fizzy water remained, his shining silhouette along the countertop, bright orange skin in contrast with the drab white kitchen cabinets. I felt parched and I pointed at him and apologized mentally for forgetting him for so long as I existed in my trance. I floated over to him and raised him to meet me, elevating myself with his bubbles and quenching my thirst. I set My Only Friend La Croix back in his place and continued.
I painted and painted until I had finished several cans and I went to lay down on the floor and covered myself in my grey comforter and fell asleep, half-dreaming of the images of painting ripples as they folded over another.