Coming Home

Coming Home

January 1980

After living in Hollywood for five years my wife, Mary, and I decided we’d had enough of big city life. The Hillside Strangler Murders, police helicopters shining spotlights into our apartment, the crowds, traffic jams, choking smog, and the frequent wildfires in the surrounding foothills; were enough to put to rest our love affair with Southern California. We would miss the beach, though. By early 1980, we were ready to move back to Arizona.

Mobile homes (or ‘tornado magnets’ as weathermen call them) are ubiquitous in the Arizona landscape. Given that it seemed natural that our first time home purchase would be a mobile home. The mobile home park in Chandler we moved into was originally farmland that came complete with built-in vermin, and included two devil children next door. We chose Chandler over the less sophisticated town of Apache Junction. AJ’s name alone goes a long way in explaining the town lore claims of a Native American curse over the town of because it sits on top a sacred Native American burial ground. The Junction had  a population of about three thousand rednecks, a dozen biker gangs, drifters, and a few dozen feral cats. It was not our first choice but sadly, it was in the running. Chandler had a population of thirty-thousand, a significant drop from Los Angeles, but still, better than Apache Junction. After our years in California, we felt as if we were in an alternate reality and trapped in Li’l Abnerland; farmlands, herds of grazing sheep, rutted dirt roads, and aromatic dairy farms. We settled on moving our new home on wheels to a state-of-the-art, romantic spot named Sunshine Valley Mobile Home Park located a mile south of Chandler proper. The park was situated adjacent a forty acre cotton field that was regularly sprayed via a low-flying helicopter with pesticides that wafted over the park. Granted, we were familiar with being poisoned by pollution in Los Angeles, but not directly with pesticides. At least the police helicopters in Hollywood only spied on us. With this new twist, we had the added bonus of being spied on and poisoned

With the first summer in our new quarters approaching, I spent a Saturday preparing my double-wide’s set of rooftop evaporative coolers for the coming high temperatures. Fear of heights came into play, but once on the roof I was okay, if I didn’t look down. Installing cooler pads and recirculating pumps was a new experience, but it wasn’t as daunting as I anticipated. Feeling manly after my roof top encounter, I spent the rest of the afternoon hunting and chasing my gopher. Yes, I had a gopher. It wasn’t a pet in any sense of the word but rather a pest. But, it was a highly industrious pest that had built a duplex in my lawn and was taking on renters. The gopher hadn’t hurt anything—yet, but it was annoying. I considered borrowing a shotgun or importing a dozen hungry coyotes, but I ended up searching the local library reading up on gophers and home remedies for ways to make them move along. One solution I found was simple enough: soak some socks in olive oil, and then stuff them into the openings of their mounds. The aroma from the oil was supposed to waft into the pest’s underground home and get it to leave, or at a minimum, put it in the mood to order a pizza. My lawn was covered with tiny white tufts of old gym socks soaked in oil, sticking out all over as if it was part of a poorly laid out minefield. Being a clever sort, I used bricks placed on top of the socks to keep the gophers from pushing them aside. Needless to say, this approach didn’t work; but it did attract a lot of sideway glances from my neighbors. A second solution I found that seemed like a reasonable idea at the time but wasn’t a sensible plan in reality, was dumping crystal toilet cleaner into their mound holes and adding bleach to create a toxic gas. The deadly fumes meant for my gopher sent me running. The gopher remained unharmed. Peaceful coexistence ensued.

The children next door were a matching set right out of The Bad Seed. The boy was likely possessed by demons and anxious to prove it to me with our daily staring contests to see who would crack first. His little sister was passive-aggressive, alternating her time between serial crying jags and ripping the heads off of her Barbie dolls and burying them under the granite in our side yard. Our lot was her personal cemetery. I resorted to placing edging bricks between our lot lines and adding little decorative wire fences as a type of ‘halt, do not enter’ warning. That, and the caster bean bushes I planted with their poisonous seeds had no deterrent effect. This is when I considered something more sinister, but I felt the penalty would be too severe for the reward. I settled on waving my arms and yelling at them whenever I spotted them in our yard. Learning to live with non-human and human pests was my only option. Welcome home.