*This excerpt is from chapter three of Where When It Rains, which tells the story of Riley, a young man who had been on the path to becoming a professional skateboarder before a head injury took him out of the game. Intent on remaining involved, he tries his hand at skate photography, only for circumstance to draw him into taking nightlife pictures instead. Set in mid-aughts Phoenix and examining the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, Where When It Rains takes the reader on a heartbreaking journey across a desert both physical and spiritual. 

 

After a photo session, I always ended my night drinking somewhere. Usually at one of the skate houses where too many young men lived in too few rooms. Where the cigarette burned carpet was never vacuumed and the piss-stained shower was never scrubbed clean. Following Ernie into that condo, with its intentional selection of matching furniture and framed art hanging on the walls, I felt like I’d stolen something. Like of course I’d be caught. Every bit of available space was occupied by a body, and as we pressed through them, heads turned to view us and then turned away again because we were nobody. The kitchen and living room were part of the same great room, and moving towards the fridge where we hoped we could find beer, a girl in a tight cheetah print top with her hair teased out and sprayed in place saw us and yelled, “Oh, my God! Ernie!” She opened her arms and stepped close to him. Bright lipstick. Thick eyeliner. A bottle of champagne held by the neck like a dead goose. They hugged.

“Hey, Kaitlin,” he said as her chest touched his.

“It’s been forever,” she said, the word forever coming out as if it were three words and not one. “Want some?” she asked, offering the champagne. Ernie lifted the bottle high and took a swallow. White foam burst from his mouth and he held his hand against his lips to restrain it.

“Who’s this?” she asked, a painted fingernail alternatively pointing at Caleb and me.

Ernie wiped his mouth with his wrist and told our names and Kaitlin welcomed us. She explained that the beer in the fridge was fair game but to leave any liquor bottles the fuck alone. Also not to smoke inside.

“Do you know who’s here?” She ignored us to focus on Ernie again.

“Who?” he asked.

“Jordan!”

“Jordan?”

She rolled her eyes and pushed Ernie’s shoulder. “Jordan Bell! Remember?”

“Oh!” Ernie said. “Yeah, I remember her. Sorry, it’s just been a long time.”

“You absolutely have to come say hi.” She took Ernie by the hand and he didn’t resist her at all as she tugged him away, yelling as their bodies were swallowed by the crowd that Jordan was going to be so blown away to see him, the words so blown away spaced and emphasized as if they were all of equal importance. Caleb said “Beer?” and I said “Beer,” and together we inched toward the refrigerator. We each took two cans of PBR, snapped the first one open, and drank. Not saying anything. Just sipping. Watching.

The party was undeniably fashionable. Effort everywhere, even in the tossed and tousled hair that was massaged into apparent ad hoc position and then crystalized by creams and gels. Overwhelmingly, the look about each person was that of a penthouse punk. Tattoos on the visible skin. Tight jeans. Faded Tees. The occasional blazer on a guy or pair of brightly colored heels on a girl. Everyone rough at a glance but tailor fit upon inspection. There was a clear intention to look poor without having to suffer being poor. To appear battered while being wholly intact. High end heroin chic, like grad students who wanted jobs at rock labels or art galleries.

My third and fourth beers in hand, I squeezed through the crowd as it leaned and shifted to the music and headed for the balcony. My cigarette makings were in my camera bag, and removing them I stood against the stucco wall as I sprinkled a pinch of shredded tobacco into a rolling paper. A woman was leaning over the railing looking out on the night until she noticed me behind her and she turned to face me. “I could never figure out how to do that,” she said.

Smoothing the wet glue strip onto the paper beneath it, I held the finished cigarette up and said, “I’ve had a lot of practice. Want one?”

She stood in shadow, but I could see by her outline that she smiled. “Sure.”

I held out the cigarette and she came forward to take it. When she had it in hand, I said, “One dollar.”

She dipped her head. “Take debit cards?”

“Cash only,” I said.

As I set to rolling another cigarette, she examined the one I had given her and said, “No filter?”

“Nope.”

“Isn’t that hard on your lungs?”

I was pinching and rolling as I answered. “Yeah, but that’s probably a good thing.”

“Why?”

“So I don’t smoke too much.” I put my cigarette to my lips and patted at my pockets for my lighter. Finding it, the woman raised her cigarette to her mouth and I beckoned her toward me. I clicked the lighter and lit her cigarette and then my own, seeing her face for the first time in the brief orange glow. Breathing smoke, we retreated to our starting positions, her against the steel railing and me against the wall. We were quiet for a moment and then she tapped the railing at her hip and said, “You can stand next to me.”

I shook my head and blew out a cloud. “No, I can’t.”

She laughed. “You can’t?”

“It’s too high,” I said. “I have vertigo.”

“For real?”

“For really, real.”

She turned and looked behind her, examining the drop, then crossed the gangway and leaned against the wall next to me.

“I’m Michelle,” she said, transferring her cigarette to her left hand so she could offer me her right.

“Riley,” I said, shaking her hand.

“Where are you from?”

“How do you know I’m not from here?”

“No one’s from here.”

I blew a stream of smoke. “Chicago. You?”

“Milwaukee.”

I held out my fist, “Midwest love.”

She touched her knuckles to mine.

I liked Michelle right away. She was dressed differently than all the other girls at the party. Fashionable, but not pretentious. A well fit denim coat over a long dress that fell to her heavy boots. Long necklaces. Bracelets on her arms that jangled when she lifted her cigarette for a drag. She was tall and trim and pretty. Best of all, she could spar with words without being aggressive. She was funny in a way that felt like home. We talked for a while about where we were from. Where we worked. Who we knew. When my last beer was empty, I said I was going in for another and asked if she needed a drink. She said no, but waited for me to return and when I did, she asked me how long I’d been in the valley. I said it had probably been about six months. I was feeling the buzz of the alcohol and the music and the night air so full of perfume and hairspray and chlorine and whatever floated up from those bushes with small red flowers, so I said something that made her laugh, not because it was funny but because it was naive. Something about the energy of the valley. Something about how it was probably impossible to be depressed there.

Her hands were in her jacket pockets and she didn’t look at me as she said, “Oh, it’s possible.”

“Coming from the dreariness of Chicago, I don’t see how.” My gaze was fixed on the shifting palm fronds out beyond the railing and the black starless sky behind them.

“Give it time,” she said, looking to that same black place. “This is just a city, Riley. The same as any other. It’s just people going to jobs, and paying bills, and falling into routines.”

Waving my beer can like a conductor's wand, I said, “But there’s something else to it. It’s hard to explain. It’s a vibe.”

“A vibe?”

“Yeah. Something I can’t put into words, but that I can feel.”

She gave me a look like I was an idiot but that she forgave me all the same. “Stick around,” she said. “You’ll change your mind.”

“Betcha I won’t.”

“Betcha you will.”

“Fifty bucks!”

“Fifty thousand!” She shoved my chest.

“Deal!” We shook hands with an exaggeration of motion.

“You better be good for it,” she said, releasing her grip.

“I’ve got it on me.”

She laughed, then we stood quietly looking away at the night, neither of us in a rush to fill the void. A camera flashed to our left. A group of girls were huddled together while another aimed a small camera at them. Reviewing the picture on the glowing LCD screen, they bemoaned it in turn, complaining about their red eyes and how the flash made them look ghastly. They lined up for another attempt, and by the time they were expressing their dissatisfaction with the second photo, I had my own camera in hand.

“Do you want me to take it for you?”

They assessed me silently, unsure of why I was speaking to them. But in the end my professional rig won over their curiosity and a black-haired girl said sure and the group of them all squeezed together for a third time, shoulder to shoulder. With a fast lens and an open aperture, I released the shutter several times. Showing the girls the pictures, they lit up, overly satisfied with how they appeared.

“Katie, you look so good,” one girl said of another.

“No way. I look like a goblin. Gina, you look totally hot,” another girl said of the first.

“Shut up. You’re fucking gorgeous. I’m the one who looks like a bloated corpse,” the last girl said.

After they took turns degrading themselves and highlighting the beauty of their friends, one of the girls finally said, “This picture is seriously good. It looks like it should be in a magazine.”

“How can we get this?” Another asked. “Do you have Myspace?”

I was typing my email address in a text message when one of the girls took my arm and dragged me into the condo. She was loudly explaining to someone I couldn’t see that I had an epic camera, and she spun me to face an awaiting couple, demanding that I take their picture. The girl sucked in her cheeks. The guy pretended not to notice I was there. I pulled focus on them and released the shutter. Before I could even get their contact information, I was yanked across the floor to where a group of girls sat piled on the sofa, one in fishnets and combat boots lying across the laps of four others who sat tightly together, all of them with wild, large hair, dyed by the layers or spotted in the manner of a leopard’s fur, two with piercings in their lips, one with piercings in her cheeks, all of them with tattoos running at least halfway down their arms. I took several shots of the group and was then further pushed and pulled through the room, my shoulders gripped from behind so I could be pointed at the right set of subjects, a human tripod. Dragged about by drunks, filling my memory card with pictures of everyone in attendance.

Not by her own request, but because of the interest so many others had in being photographed with her, one young woman ended up before me more than any other. She was strikingly beautiful. Tall, with hair dyed a perfect primary red, she had razor hips that peeked out over the top of her skirt and high cheekbones that were just as sharp. She wore a yellow tee shirt with the sleeves and neckline cut away. Her arms were tattooed from shoulder to wrist and her breastbone was inked with the image of a raven in flight, wings spread wide beneath her collar bones, in its clutches an hourglass, within which a vortex of sand slipped through the bottleneck of the time piece and fell grain by grain into the lower bulb where was depicted a desert scape. Backdrop of mountains. A saguaro. A sunset. I couldn’t see this tattoo in its entirety that night. Her shirt covered most of it. Later though, I would come to know it to the line.

The demand for my camera ended with the same spontaneous indignance as it had begun. A murmur of voices on the balcony rose to a commotion. Something was happening. Some spectacle that triggered a bubbling excitement in the inebriated mass. Bodies shuffled toward and through the door as if some gravity had caught hold of them and drew them out into the night. I followed, but only after replacing my camera in my backpack which put me at the rear of the line. On the balcony, I gathered from the rising clash of drunken exclamations that he was nuts, that no way was he going to make it, that sure he could, that it actually wasn’t that far. The mob turned where the balcony wrapped around the side of the building. Ahead of me, everyone was taking turns climbing an iron ladder and stepping onto the roof where they disappeared from view. When my turn came, I gripped the rungs and breathed out. Looking directly forward, I hoped I could make the climb, but after ascending only three steps, the whip and toss took hold in my skull. I closed my eyes against the mania of the ladder before me spinning hard to the left, which I knew it wasn’t, yet I’d seen all the same. With paced breathing I retreated downward, and when my feet were back on hard ground, I let my grip remain on the ladder until my brain again agreed with the simple up and down of reality.

From the roof there were only a few voices. The crowd had hushed. Desperate to glimpse what was happening, I hurried along the balcony to the far end where the L shaped building hooked to the right. A chant came loud.

Caleb! Caleb! Caleb! Caleb!

I was able to see him there. Small against the black sky. Peeking over the edge of the roof, his eyes measuring the gap before him the way he had measured so many sets of stairs, so many drops from a higher parking lot to a lower. I kept my back to the wall as my heart began to thud. Caleb walked backward slowly and I knew he was counting the steps, calculating the necessary stride in reverse, having decided on the placement of his final foot. I considered texting him. Telling him not to do it. But I knew he wouldn’t pull his phone from his pocket. He’d probably already handed it off to someone else. Even if he read my warning, it would have little power against that thunder of voices hailing his name. And then it was too late. The chant went quiet. Caleb took a running leap. My every muscle went rigid as his arms windmilled against the air, his legs pedaling an invisible bicycle until at once his limbs fell tightly in line with his body and he was like a man in a coffin. His shoes hit the surface of the water and he was gone, plunging fast to the bottom of the pool. The splash he made sent a wave in all directions that lapped over the terracotta lip and onto the pool deck. He stayed under for some seconds and when his head surfaced a cry came up from the roof. Arms were thrown into the air with the involuntary hysteria of a revival. Applause followed. And cheers. Caleb swam slowly to the edge of the pool. Raised himself to a knee. Then his feet. Sopping, he wrung his shirt. Pushed back his hair. Looking up to the crowd that had encouraged him to throw his life away, he pumped his fist, and finding me where I stood alone, he smiled. I shook my head but couldn’t help but smile back, swallowing my envy.

The revelry on the roof died before Caleb crossed the courtyard for the stairs. I waited for him on the third floor landing. His shoes squeaked as he trotted to me, leaving wet waffle prints in his wake that vanished as soon as they were deposited. “You’re insane,” I told him. We clapped our hands together and pulled each other in, shoulder to shoulder.

“I knew I’d make it,” he said.

“I’d hope so.”

Someone gathered an iPod and speakers from the condo and transported them to the roof. The party was up there now. Out of reach. Caleb had gone back up to see if Ernie needed a ride home. Taken with his brief celebrity, he stayed there for a while. I couldn’t blame him. I wished I was him. It was something I could have done and would have done in another time. From the roof there were voices and laughter and music, and above it all, a black sky robbed of the cosmos by the haze of orange city light. Legs dangled over the edge and the amber glow of cigarettes danced and swirled like pixies, giving evidence of people who were but silhouettes from where I stood, and when they flicked their butts outward, their fire gained in brightness for the space of a second as it found velocity against the air, tumbling then vanishing before touching ground. Beneath them all, I stood alone, smoking and counting the only lights that dared cross the wide night. Blinking from the wings and tails of commercial airliners, pinpricks of white grew into false stars one by one as they cleared the sharp pinnacles that palisaded the valley, a steady stream of them drawn in from the east, stretching back to the places everyone wants to escape. Back to the great plains and the great lakes where the west is still a thing imagined.

Michelle found me there and stood beside me, rolling her eyes at Caleb and his stunt. At the encouragement it had assembled. At my blithe shrug when she spoke of it. At herself and everyone else there gathered, drunk and so joyously adolescent under that great twinkling funnel of hope. Yesterday's refugees. Young and alive and beautiful. Proof of concept. Or so convinced.