WATTYS LONG LIST. He's got three polyamorous, pole dancing moms and his world is the stuff of which teen boy fantasies are made. But when he falls for a feisty cancer patient who is about to die, he truly learns how to live.
I kept looking for any song that wasn't the song I end this chapter with, to express the way these kids probably when the enormity of what they'd just done finally washed over them after the craziness they'd had to endure to get there. But...in the end, it just fit. So forgive me. As they hope they'll be forgiven when they get back to Tucson. OH--and brace yourself for the fierce poem a few paragraphs away. She doesn't mince words, the woman who wrote and recited it. But it expresses Colt's strong feelings for the border land he grew up in.And voices like hers deserve to be heard, too...
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Mexico. Damn.
It's so cool and so fucked up at the same time. And I love it soooo much.
See, I don't think most people really understand life on the border. You hear all this crap on TV, politicians yammering about it all the time on the news and whatnot. And you can tell they don't know squat.
They're saying what they were told to say. What they think they need to say to win over whoever votes for them. It's not based on anything like reality.
But I live here. And that border is what you hear people call a "double edged sword." On the up side—and I'll save the down side for after we cross it--the people who were here before there even was a border are partly why tourists come out here. And fall in love. They literally gave this area all its flavor.
It's not just the food, though. It's the way we do things, see things. Feel things.
It's the love we have for the actual land itself. Native Arizonans, the originals and the descendants of the earlier "transplants," see the desert like their own personal church. Outdoorsyest suckers on the planet, I swear. Even in the heat, we're out truckin' around.
But it's not about a Fitbit. In Tucson, a lot of people walk because they kind of have to. There's piss poor public trans out here. So you hoof it and hope for the best.
But also, on any day, any time, you may a real old Mexican man or woman sitting on the porch, gazing at the mountains all reverent. Or a steady stream of everyday people strolling up "A" Mountain or the trails that go up into the other mountains. Before, during or after work, they trudge up these little footpaths just to sit and look out over the city and breathe for a minute.
The views keep us sane. Humble.
Yeah, you've got the sporty people, the joggers and bike riders and all that. We have this huge bike race that the whole town shuts down for every year. And that's cool. It brings in money and anything that lets us show off a little is fine by me. Although I don't want us to grow too much bigger. We're already starting to get too citified in some places.
We shut down for Rodeo Week, too, though. Or we did. The schools cut that down a few days a while back. But that's Mexican, too. The first real cowboys out this way were from there, not the white ones in the movies. And then the Black ones came. White folks didn't even want to wrangle their own cattle. It was mostly brown people at first.
