Arizona! You Won’t Believe It!

Michael Downs reviews Richard Grant’s “A Race to the Bottom of Crazy: Dispatches from Arizona.”

By Michael DownsSeptember 26, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• Nonfiction

• Cultural Studies

IT WAS a hot July morning, and we three cyclists were getting broiled riding the shoulder of an Arizona interstate, 30 miles into a bad decision. My friend Dan fell behind, shouting over the roar of passing semis: “We’re crazy! This is crazy! We’re going to die!”

At 20, he was the oldest, and the first to admit what all of us had come to realize about our plan to cycle more than 100 miles from Tucson to the Chiricahua Mountains where we would camp: we weren’t going to make it. Dan’s barking laughter annoyed me. Hadn’t we committed to this adventure, to testing ourselves? But at the next exit, Tony agreed with Dan, so I caved. We found a lonely convenience store, and I called my dad from a pay phone. We spent what remained of our few days off from shifts at McDonald’s hanging out at Tony’s backyard swimming pool.

“You can’t spell crazy without AZ,” goes a joke attributed to writer Jon Talton and repeated in Richard Grant’s new book, A Race to the Bottom of Crazy: Dispatches from Arizona. Grant posits a special relationship between the Grand Canyon State and lunacy, but this book, readable as it is, avoids questions that it raises: Is Arizona crazier than Arkansas or New Jersey? If so, why? Does the inspired lunacy that led to Biosphere 2—a $150 million effort built north of Tucson to practice living on other worlds (an example not included in Grant’s book)—resemble the craziness of the QAnon Shaman, that horn-hatted conspiracy theorist who attended high school and community college around Phoenix? Grant doesn’t approach questions that might explain Arizona in any meaningful way.

The book begins with Grant’s homecoming to Tucson where he once lived as a swashbuckling journalist. Now, nearing 60 years old, he is settling down in what he calls an “unimpressive provincial city” with his wife and four-year-old daughter. What follows is a mix of journalism and memoir.

Perhaps what sold the book to its publisher were outrageous stories like the one from 1981 about the “petty drug dealer” who blazed away at a saguaro with a shotgun until an arm fell off, killing him. Grant delivers such tales episodically and in the narrative voice you’d hear from the host for a TV series called Arizona! You Won’t Believe It! These episodes often entertain, but Arizonans and maybe others will find them familiar. No reader with a passing attention to national news will be surprised by Grant’s documentation of QAnon and MAGA shenanigans in Arizona.

It’s when Grant moves into memoir that his book has its greatest potential. His daughter, Isobel, has clearly charmed the author, and she charms the reader too with her exuberance, creativity, and feistiness. She enlivens every page she populates, and Grant’s love for her is apparent. When a septuagenarian Trumpist unloads a shotgun at the parked cars and buildings of the Tucson charter school that his daughter attends, though on a different campus, Grant writes that she “didn’t know anything about the shooting at the other campus, because the administration had decided not to tell the students about it.” He continues, “I didn’t mention it either because I wanted her to feel safe. She could tell that something was slightly off because I hugged her so tightly and had tears in my eyes and found it difficult to let her go.”

Nonfiction doesn’t require unforgettable characters, but they help. Grant has more than a few. Charles Bowden, a legendary Arizona writer and Yoda to Grant’s Luke, comes across as smart, obstinate, and ornery, with a healthy dose of misanthropy—a “bachelor who worked and drank and smoked and never cleaned.” His house is “a ramshackle arrangement of books, magazines, newspapers, files and notebooks, ashtrays and wine jugs,” accompanied by “beetles and spiders and other insects that he regarded as housemates, fornicating figurines made by Indigenous artists in Mexico, a black-and-white poster of Janis Joplin, and his desk.” Bowden, who died in 2014, is in Grant’s recollection a desert creature, obsessed with the border country and its people. Grant convincingly argues that Bowden’s best writing involved his dangerous work chronicling narcotics cartels in Mexico, pages that burst with life because of their proximity to death. Through his description of Bowden’s obsessions, he presents a kind of craziness that he admires and even emulates.

Grant notes, for example, that as a younger writer he decided to pursue his own version of Bowden’s work in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains south of Arizona. There, in a nightmarish world of hillbillies, drug dealers, and lawlessness, Grant faced death when a man said he’d kill him as easily as you might swat a fly, “to please the trigger finger.”

Why did Grant risk himself so? “I became seduced and fascinated,” he tells the reader. It’s a reason, sure, but no real introspection comes with it. Grant isn’t here to explore psyches or understand the human condition like Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild (1996) or Anthony Loyd in My War Gone By, I Miss It So (1999). As Grant fails to scrutinize Arizona and crazy, so too does he neglect to dissect his own life in any satisfying way. “Looking back on the compulsion to keep pushing my luck in dangerous places,” he writes,

I can remember the feeling and how strong it was, but it no longer makes any sense to me. Not because I’m older and wiser and less robust, but because of Isobel. If I went off courting danger again and got myself killed, where would that leave her? Not only would she lose her father. She would also be entirely justified in thinking that he threw his life away like an idiot.

Why did that feeling ever make sense? Grant won’t tell the reader. His gaze is too often outward, and, for a book that aspires to memoir, too seldom inward. How, one wonders, would he explain to Isobel how he lived before she came along, if she asked? Would he still be living that reckless life if she hadn’t been born?

Grant’s descriptions of desert landscapes, especially at night, show great appreciation for the place and its “rugged forested mountain ranges rising out of the desert like islands in the sky, the hundred-mile views in the clean parched air.” But his love for Arizona isn’t without a serving of doubt. He laments underfunded schools and Arizona’s lack of community, attributing the latter to eight-foot backyard walls and what some have called Arizona’s “churn.” Of Arizona’s residents, 60 percent come from elsewhere, and for every three who arrive, two leave. “Transience is Arizona’s defining social characteristic,” he writes.

Dan, Tony, and I were among those transients the summer of that doomed bike ride. My parents had moved us to Tucson when I was 12 years old, in an effort to improve their job prospects. As a young journalist with a Tucson daily, I covered high school sports, which taught me that Arizona does offer community, though it may not be so visible to the casual observer. I’ve since moved away; journalism, as Grant would affirm, is often a transient profession.

Tony’s family had moved from the Bay Area when IBM transferred his dad to Tucson. Dan came on his own, after reading Carlos Castaneda’s books about a (likely fictional) Yaqui shaman. He eventually left McDonald’s and moved from apartment to apartment, crappy job to crappy job. For some years, he made his home in an abandoned coal tower at a railyard near downtown. Then authorities came, arrested him, and committed him to the county mental health facility. He escaped days later and died that same night from suicide, laying his head on nearby train tracks.

Crazy in Arizona, as elsewhere, is complicated. It’s easy and maybe fun to tally the ways that a place and its people are extreme or bizarre or unhinged. What’s harder is to understand why those people are on the list, and why those of us who write it might find our names there too. What connects Bowden to the Biosphere creators to the guy who shot up a cactus to Phoenicians who water their grass lawns to the author himself? In his book, Grant puts himself in an excellent position to explore those questions. That he doesn’t makes A Race to the Bottom of Crazy unfair to the state he now calls home.