Another Journey: Day 2

Day 2--Sunday, May 11, 2008--Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day, sweetheart!

The day begins with an old friend. Rick and I grew up together, and when I joined the Marines as a buck private he had the audacity to get an appointment to West Point. We stayed in touch for a while but lost contact over thirty years ago, only to reconnect because he heard mention of my being there and sent a message to the manager of Changing Hands, the bookstore last night.

A couple of hours over orange juice makes for a quick race through three decades, but I've got to make tracks for Tucson. Now living in a house he built in the wonderfully named Carefree, Arizona, he seems to be doing well. Rick still has that same off-beat sense of humor I remember as a kid. And now that he knows of the yearly reunions of the club that protected and sustained us through our school years, he'll try to make it to the next one.

Back on 10E out of Phoenix, I'm reminded that the sheriff of Maricopa County is that cheap self-promotion machine, Joe Arpaio, the media-hog who dubs himself "America's Toughest Sheriff." I spent a day at his prison a few years ago with the old Bill Maher show and found him to be every bit the "megalomaniac, liar and bully" Harper's Magazine labeled him. Popular with the voters because he plays on their fears, his bluster and bravado keep his name in the press and get him reelected. It's like Cheney and Bush playing the fear game with terrorism. Given to heaping abuse on those under his control, Arpaio plays into the idiotic notion that you can correct the behavior of inmates through humiliation and brutalization while diverting potential law-breakers with the threat of dehumanization. Scorned by human rights groups and those who champion decency, Arpaio is a blight on the very idea of "corrections" and an insult to intelligent law enforcement, just one step out of the cave and moving in the wrong direction.

Leaving the Superstition Mountains behind, I head down the long, flat highway through the Sonoran Desert toward the sharp, saw-toothed Santa Catalinas and, beyond them, Tucson. Along the way the occasional slopes to each side are dotted with a huge population of what to the casual observer might look like strange, tall beings waving hello. The Saguaro cactus is said to appear nowhere else on earth but in this southwestern desert.

I figure the least one can do is wave back.

Suddenly this car, to which I'm only slowly becoming accustomed, begins a rhythmic beeping. Alarming enough, because a sudden outburst of beeping can't mean anything good as one is racing down the highway, it becomes even more frightening as the beeps speed up, getting closer and closer together! In the movies, this means a bomb is about to go off. Frantic, I look around and see no signs of distress or alarm on the dash or anywhere else; I check my cell phone, though I know that's not it; and I begin to slow and pull over as the beeps reach a crescendo and, just as suddenly, stop.

Goddamnit! This car is messing with me! This is unnerving as hell. Then, panic subsiding, I move back into the lane and resume speed as I go over everything I can think of that might be responsible. Finally, on the far right side of the dash I see a red light indicating that the passenger seat belt isn't fastened. No one being in the seat, I hadn't thought to fasten it, even though I did set one of my bags there. It's a light bag, but could that be it? And why, if so, did it wait until now to yell at me? Did it let me know when I started out and I somehow missed it? Was it stewing about it all this time and then suddenly decided to give me hell? Man, this car is one temperamental sucker! I'm going to have to be careful.

Credit where due, I did discover something very interesting about the car--actually very cool. In the middle of the dash is a screen that, if you mess with the buttons around it, gives you all kinds of confusing information, complete with even more confusing diagrams. It'll tell you how much mileage you're getting at any given moment; it offers a very complex picture of the power train, apparently explaining the system by which the car is sometimes powered by battery and sometimes by the regular-old-fashioned-internal-combustion engine. These things are just obscure enough to drive a newcomer to the world of hybrids a bit crazy, yet intriguing enough to pull your attention away from the road and get you killed. But that's not the cool part. The cool part is when you pull up the funky plastic knob on the short stick and put the car in reverse (after, of course, putting your foot on the brake), the screen in the center of the dash becomes a picture of what's behind you! So you can see where you're going as you back up. Very cool! Though because the picture is a bit distorted, I still prefer to turn and look out the back window. But it is cool.

Coming into Tucson I make my way to the Barnes & Noble Bookstore where I'm to do my thing--this one an afternoon gig. Since it's Mother's Day I doubt there will be a large crowd, but one never knows. Being a bit early, I check in and then go to a bar across the parking lot to watch most of the first half of the Lakers/Jazz fourth playoff game. Tied at the half by one of Kobe's impossible shots. (I later learn we lost in overtime.)

Back in the store, I was surprised to find a very nice crowd of over a hundred people, including some from the Coalition of Arizonans Against the Death Penalty and a few others with whom I had worked in the Sanctuary movement in the 1980s. The movement, started by John Fife, minister of Tucson's Southside Presbyterian Church, a Quaker named Jim Corbett and a few nuns, priests, other clergy and lay-people, believed that those coming across the border fleeing murder, torture and mayhem in El Salvador and Guatemala deserved to be treated humanely and given shelter--as international law requires--rather than labeled 'Communist' and sent back to their deaths. The Sanctuary movement became a modern version of the "underground railroad" from the days of slavery, ultimately involving more than five hundred churches and synagogues nationwide. And for their trouble, these simple, decent people were arrested, tried, convicted and, probably because of embarrassment on the part of authorities forced to carry out the Reagan Administration's paranoiac anti-Communist zealotry, sentenced mostly to five years of probation.

Today, John Fife and many of these people are still at it, having formed the Samaritan Patrol, part of the No More Deaths movement. They go out and provide food, water and sometimes directions to impoverished people attempting to make their way across the desert in search of work. The goal is to protect these poor folks from death by dehydration or starvation and occasionally to provide witness and help them avoid confrontation by Minutemen and others inspired by the racist raving of the Lou Dobbses, Bill O'Reillys, and Tom Tancredos intent on saving America from "mongrelization."

Again, we spend an hour and a half or so talking about my book, Hollywood, the death penalty, politics, this bloody awful war and a lot of M*A*S*H.

To read other entries in Mike Farrell's book tour diary click here.