The Further Adventures of the Millennium Rambler
The Loved One and I went to the Sonoran desert to wait for the end of the world.
On Christmas night 1999, less than week before Doomsday, the big story on the Phoenix news was the fake snow that a movie-effects specialist had spread across his front yard. (The second story was a suspicious package that a local family had received from Germany, a package that was promptly destroyed by the bomb squad. It turned out to be a music box from the family's German nanny.)
After the news, I put Kathryn to bed, jumped into the rented car and went looking for the underbelly.
Befitting a metropolis that blossomed in the desert in the go-go 1980s, Phoenix design is a mix of faux-adobe and post-modern buildings with a dash of leftover roadside whimsy.
Civic boosters might tell you that the zenith of Phoenix architecture is the elegant Biltmore Hotel, which was built by a Frank Lloyd Wright protege in 1929. It's the splendid locale where Wesley Snipes meets Angela Bassett in "Waiting to Exhale." In real life, you won't see many naturally dark complexions among the patrons at the Biltmore, but you will see a lot of tanned golfers enjoying the $40 Sunday brunch and a wall of photographs attesting that the Biltmore has been visited by every American president since Herbert Hoover.
Near the Biltmore in wealthy Scottsdale is the cradle of nuevo-Southwestern architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West. It's a school for architects in the Wright tradition of horizontal design and environmental sensitivity. But I was equally interested in the theme motels of seedy Van Buren Boulevard and the Flinstonian bowling alleys of suburban Mesa. An Enterprise Rent-a-Car office could have passed for a tiki bar, and an old motel called the Buckhorn offered mineral baths and a taxidermy museum in a Wild West milieu.
Phoenix and Tucson have room to grow, so all the kitsch artifacts of mid-century tourism haven't been bulldozed. (What a pleasure to spend a December evening at the world's largest drive-in movie theater, a nine-screener.) But just like in the kindred Sun Belt kingdoms of Las Vegas and L.A., preservation is the enemy of progress, and when Arizona runs out of space for new condos, the old stuff will have to go.
To see the Old West in a better state of preservation, we had to leave the country. Our roundabout route from Tucson took us to the insulated Biosophere 2 laboratory ("the world's most interesting building") and past a UFO-themed hotel in Gila Bend, Ariz., then south through the Sonoran desert.
Across the border, the cinder-block buildings of Sonoyta, Mexico, are tattooed with L.A.-style graffiti and the streets are lined with farmacias selling discount Viagra to American daytrippers.
Sixty miles south of the border is a photogenic fishing port on the Sea of Cortez. The maps call it Puerto Penasco, but it's such a well-established weekend getaway that the Yankees insist on calling it Rocky Point. The highway to Puerto Penasco is a moonscape--NASA actually operated a training facility nearby--broken up by RV parks, roadside shrines and squarish billboards for Tecate beer. At the end of the highway, at the end of the desert, Puerto Penasco opens up like a decrepit carnival.
The small city is buffered into distinct zones, including a stretch of hotel-packed sand dunes, an enclave of American-built villas, a cluster of seaside crash-pads, and a locals-only neighborhood where the dirt streets, stray dogs and 30-year-old American cars are reminiscent of Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" (complete with posters of a mustachioed bossman on every street corner).
But the main tourist area is called the Old Port, a hillside district where vagabond children sell Chiclets and fishermen wave their still-wriggling shrimp at the passing cars. The crown jewel of the Old Port is the swank Vina Del Mar Hotel, which was reputedly built by Al Capone. It has a kidney-shaped pool with a swim-up bar and a restaurant that juts out over the rocky, pelican-dotted shoreline.
Cruising through the Old Port, imbibing the smells and the polyglot fervor of dockside commerce, I listened to a radio station that was playing Mexican big-band music of the '50s, and I felt like I was in Havana before the revolution.
But even in Mexico, it's hard to find an experience that's untainted by American excess. Puerto Penasco attracts a lot of spring-break kids from the Arizona universities, and thug culture, both foreign and domestic, manifests itself in noisy ATVs and rap-blasting Jeeps.
The nadir of our visit was at a dockside cantina, where a table full of tourists wearing Indiana Hoosier sweatshirts started shouting the words to Paul Revere and the Raiders' "Indian Reservation." ("Cherokee people/Cherokee tribe/So proud to live/So proud to die!") Apparently, it never crossed their minds that the friendly people serving the margaritas were indigenous North Americans.
I felt like a gringo.
****
At 3 a.m. on New Year's Eve, I turned to the television for preliminary reports of the global chaos. For some reason, our Mexican hotel room had a satellite feed from the ABC affiliate in Nashville, Tenn. ("Widespread hoarding, George Harrison stabbed -- those stories and more after this preview of First Night Nashville.") For seven hours, I studied the millennial midnight as it arced across a hemisphere: eerie New Zealand, athletic Australia, forward-marching China. (Let us linger for a moment in Djibouti, where ABC cameras found huddled refugees in no mood to party.)
There were no signs of disruption. But why take chances?
By the afternoon, I was racing through the Sonoran desert to the Arizona line, tuned to the distant AM frequencies like a ham-radio operator in a mobile fallout shelter. From Salt Lake City I heard that everything was going smoothly in the Greenwich time zone but that a bank robber had hostages in Olathe, Kan. I was distended in time and space, simultaneously stretched between two countries and two centuries within the streamlined cocoon of a rented Mercury.
Just before sunset, a white guard waved us through the American border without checking our trunk for explosives. At an Arizona crossroads called Why, the kind of town where they've been hoarding provisions since 1945, the millennial countdown clock at the gas station was running out of digits.
Phoenix would be a good place to rise from the ashes, so we checked into a Motel 6 and reconnected with ABC. Dick Clark assured us that things were going smoothly in Times Square. But could we really trust Dick Clark?
We rushed to downtown Tempe for the finale of a gigantic street festival that was sponsored by a multinational snack-food company. Standing among a quarter million tanned and hearty revelers, I felt like an alien invader. As the 12 o'clock fireworks exploded overhead, the only meltdown was a human one, as the crowd erupted in horny chants and sporadic fistfights between whites and Latinos.
We rushed past the barricades, hurried back to the hotel and turned to ABC for understanding. Power-pop guitarist Jon Brion was playing "Auld Lang Syne" atop the great totem of the Hollywood sign (a spot where I'd had sex with some of my favorite people). Still reeling from the scuffle in downtown Tempe and flashing back to the LA riots (which I witnessed as a homeless junkie), I remembered my favorite image of the apocalypse: the ending of Nathanael West's novel "The Day of the Locust," where the proles at a movie premiere go on a rampage, trampling each other underfoot.
He was on the right track. But Nathanael West, like George Orwell, the prophet Mohammed and the author of the Book of Revelation, didn't know about computers.
(Originally published, in different form, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 2001.)