Welcome to My Half Life

Today, May 10, 2021, is a unique day in my life. Yesterday, I had spent the majority of my life in New York, and tomorrow I will have spent the majority of my life in Arizona. That means that today will be the only day in my existence when I can legitimately say I am half New Yorker, half Arizonan.

Yes, it’s true. It was 25 years, 9 months, and 28 days ago that I officially became an Arizona resident. And it was 25 years, 9 months, and 28 days before that, that I came flying out of my momma’s womb and landed in Brooklyn, New York. I am at a chronological crossroads in which I am a perfect geographical hybrid. What does it all mean?

New York is my heritage, my roots, the first half of my journey. It is my family, my lifelong friends, my schooling, my coming of age. It is where I learned what pizza is supposed to taste like, and how to build a snowman, and how to write like a Madman. It is cockroaches, and muggers, and gridlock traffic. It is clubbing until 4 a.m., and movie theaters within walking distance, and bagels and the New York Times on Sunday mornings. It was all of these things for the first 25 years, 9 months, and 28 days of my life, and yet remains all of these things – and a thousand more things—today and always in my heart, mind, and soul.

Arizona is my present, my future, the rest of my journey. It is my wife, my kids, my newfound friends, my adulthood. It is where I found my mature creative voice, performed improv and community theater, and learned how to ride a bike. It is scorpions, and dust storms, and 120-degree heat. It is ubiquitous Mexican restaurants, unparalleled scenic beauty, and Friday movie nights in front of the big screen TV with my family. It has been all of these things for the past 25 years, 9 months, and 28 days of my life, and will continue to be these things – and a thousand more things – today and always in my heart, mind, and soul.

Chronologically speaking my life is currently split in two, with one foot on each side of the continent. As of tomorrow, the calendar tilts toward the West. But the reality is that these two geographic locations, these two lives, are woven into one life—my life. The parts make up the whole, and all parts embrace my soul. I am not half New Yorker, half Arizonan. I am fully both.

 

Tales of a Scorpion Hunter

This essay is not for the faint of heart; or the squeamish; or anyone who might be repulsed by vivid descriptions of battles between humans and predatory arachnids. So if you think you may be grossed out by what you are about to read, I would suggest clicking away from this blog now. And if you opt not to heed my warning and end up losing your lunch on your lap, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, I never encountered a scorpion—cockroaches, rats, and wise guys with bats, sure—but scorpions, never. In fact, my only exposure to scorpions in my youth was through James Bond movies, which gave me the distinct impression that all scorpions were the size of salamis and their stings would kill you instantly. But I never much concerned myself about these creatures, because I never thought I would be in a location exotic enough to encounter them.

Not long after I moved to Arizona in 1995, I finally came face to face with a scorpion, but it was dead and encased in glass in a souvenir shop in downtown Scottsdale, so it posed no threat to me (unless another patron picked up the container and smashed me in the head with it, but I didn’t consider that a real possibility.)  Indeed, I actually found them kind of cool looking and decided to buy some for my three oldest nephews who were nine, eight and six at the time. When I went back to New York a few months later and presented the souvenirs to them as “real live scorpions” (even though they were clearly not alive) they were all very excited. At the same time, I gave their younger brother, who was two, a stuffed animal and he started sobbing, “But I want a real live scorpion,” making me feel like an awful uncle. Clearly, though, the scorpions were a hit.

The souvenir scorpions seemed like a hokey reminder that I lived near the desert. But where I lived there were sidewalks and pavement and buildings, so really, the desert, and any critters that might live there, seemed a world away. It never occurred to me that desert creatures might happily wander into the urban landscape, so encountering a scorpion that was not under glass never crossed my mind. And for eight years I lived in this utopian fantasy.

In February of 2003 my wife and I bought a house in Chandler. Previous to that we lived in apartments in Tempe and Mesa, but now we were homeowners and were quite excited about it. Everything seemed perfect until one night a couple of months after we moved in…

We were settling down for the night. My wife was brushing her teeth and I was heading to my side of the bed to go to sleep. As I approached, something on the floor near my nightstand caught my eye. I focused on the small, orange-brown object scurrying about and my brain, at first, could not register what I was looking at, seeing as how it wasn’t dead and under glass and all. Then I suddenly realized that what I beheld was a deadly, venomous creature, which should only exist in spy films and tourist shops, yet was somehow waltzing around on my floor. It was about one-inch long. I stood there, petrified.

When my wife came out of the bathroom and took one look at my face from ten feet away, she said, “What is it? Scorpion?” How she came to that conclusion so quickly, I’ll never know, since we had never seen a scorpion before and didn’t really sit around talking about them. I guess my facial expression just screamed “Scorpion!” Whatever the case, her talking to me snapped me out of my trance and I quickly picked up the small plastic trashcan nearby and whacked the scorpion with the bottom of the can. The scorpion, for its part, appeared amused by this gesture, and I think it gave me the finger before attempting to scurry away. I then flipped the can over and trapped the scorpion, while my wife and I had a fevered conversation about what to do.

“You have to kill it with a hammer,” she said.

“I do?” I asked, incredulously.

“Yes. It’s the only thing that will crush the exoskeleton.”

“Oh.” What a strangely scientific response that seemed to be. “Okay, grab me a hammer,” I said while I sat on the trashcan, half expecting the scorpion to gnaw its way through the plastic. My wife went running to the garage and came back seconds later with the hammer. I took it, slowly stood up, and removed the can. There was the scorpion.

Do you remember the scene in Home Alone when Joe Pesci is lying on the ground with the tarantula on his body and Daniel Stern is standing above him, wild-eyed, holding a crowbar high over his head, trying to summon the nerve to crush the dread creature below? That was pretty much how I felt as I held the hammer aloft. I took a few deep breaths and then brought down the tool with all the fire and fury I could muster.

SQUASH. The scorpion was no more and I was emotionally exhausted.

My wife and I hoped that this incident would be a one-time anomaly, but sadly, that was not the case. From this point forward we would start seeing these critters several times per month. We hired an exterminator, which helped only marginally, but mostly we left a hammer lying around on the kitchen counter for on-the-spot executions.

Each scorpion sighting became less stressful than the one before. Whereas the first sighting brought the reaction of, “Oh my god, we’re all going to die!” by the time we got to our 20^th sighting the reaction was more along the lines of, “Oh great, another one.” I knew that I took these creatures completely for granted when I had this exchange with my brother, Mark, who was calling from New Jersey:

Mark: (Probably talking about Oscar predictions.)

Me: Oh, hold on a second. Just need to do something real quick. (Puts down phone, picks up hammer, bashes scorpion crawling on wall in den, picks phone back up.) Hey, sorry about that. What were you saying?

Mark: What was that noise?

Me: Just had to kill a scorpion.

Mark: I’m sorry, what???

Me: There was a scorpion on the wall. Just had to kill it real quick with a hammer.

Mark: There was a &%!#$ scorpion on your wall! How are you so %*&@# casual about this???

Me: Oh, it’s no big deal, we get them all the time. They don’t actually kill you. If you get stung, it’s about the same as a bee sting.

Mark: Why the &*%%^& are you living in Arizona?!?

And such was our casual lives with scorpions in Chandler. But about three years after we moved into our house my wife became pregnant with our first child and it suddenly occurred to us that maybe it wasn’t the greatest thing to have several scorpions per month scurrying around the house with a baby scurrying around the house beside them. So we got aggressive.

We had our house fogged.

We got a new roof, because we were told they could be getting in through the shingles.

I spent an entire day putting caulking along every baseboard, every vent, every window, every crack, and every crevice in our house.

We hired an exterminator that specialized in scorpions.

We bought a second hammer.

And lo and behold, the scorpion sightings became much less frequent. Instead of several times per month, it became once or twice per year. But, because the frequency went down, the anxiety upon seeing a scorpion went back up. Whenever one was spotted (often by our cats who consider them exotic toys) the whole household would go into crisis mode. Like the time, three years ago, when I was sitting in the bathroom doing my business when my then 7-year-old son came running into my room and started banging on the bathroom door, shouting, “There’s a scorpion in the kitchen!” I came out as quickly as possible and headed to the kitchen area where I found my sons standing on the dining room chairs with my wife shielding them as though she were warding off a knife-wielding intruder. In the kitchen our cat, Dobby, was looking intently at something in front of the oven. You can guess what it was.

I grabbed my trusty hammer and strode toward my foe in battle posture. As soon as I approached, it ran under the oven. An evasive maneuver I was not expecting. So I got a yardstick to reach under the oven and coax it out slowly. But as soon as I stuck the stick under the oven the thing came charging out at me at a speed I didn’t think possible by such a diminutive creature. Startled, I fell onto my butt and dropped the yardstick as my family screamed in unison. I quickly recovered and viciously thwacked it with my hammer as though I were Thor defending Asgard from the Frost Giants. But I hit the thing so hard it flipped into the air and hit me in the arm causing my entire family to scream in unison again, this time with me joining in. The creature was dead, though, so it caused me no bodily harm—just some minor psychological damage.

This incident marked the most bizarre encounter I’ve had with a scorpion up until about a week ago. It had been a long time since we had seen a scorpion in our house; probably well over a year. I was sitting at my computer and my wife was sitting at hers when suddenly I heard her say a bad word. My wife rarely says bad words, so it caught my attention.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, and as I did, I looked over at her. She sat there looking up at the ceiling with a very pained expression on her face. I followed her gaze to the ceiling and then I said a bad word, too. There, about five feet from where I sat was the largest scorpion I had ever seen in our house. The thing was like a foot long…give or take nine inches.

I ran off to get the hammer and a stepstool. I came back, positioned the stepstool just so and started mentally psyching myself up for the battle.

Okay, I should pause here and give you one last chance to abandon this blog entry before it gets real ugly. Truly, I debated whether or not to even write about this incident, lest I give my readers the heebie-jeebies for life. Maybe do a crossword puzzle instead, because we are about to enter Stephen King territory, here. Okay, for those few who are still with me, here we go…

I got up on the stepstool and was now about ten inches away from this massive arachnid. I’ve killed scorpions on ceilings before, but it’s never easy. The angle is always awkward. Once, about six years earlier, I didn’t hit one on the ceiling quite right and it ended up falling down behind my desk in a spot that was unreachable and unseeable. I never saw that one again and it had me looking over my shoulder for months.

The key to killing a scorpion on the ceiling is hitting it firmly and squarely and not pulling the head of the hammer away too quickly, lest it fall to the ground and run off to get reinforcements. So, I took a few deep breaths and then—POW—smacked the beast hard, right in the middle. It wriggled for a second or two and then stopped, which is when I felt comfortable about pulling the hammer off the ceiling. But then—and no, I’m not exaggerating for macabre comic effect here—the head of the scorpion started running across the ceiling. To be clear, the creature was now in three separate pieces—the tail was attached to the ceiling, the body was attached to the hammer, but the head just took off on its own. I jumped off the stepstool, stunned and looked at my wife—a rictus of disbelief and horror was transfixed on both of our faces. After a few seconds I realized the only logical thing was to destroy the head, as though I were in some sort of scorpion-zombie flick. As I started up the stepstool my wife said in anguish, “Don’t go back up there!” as though she were in the same flick. I’m not quite sure what she thought might happen to me if I went back up there, but I decided to take my chances. After all, I had a hammer and the scorpion only had a running head. Terrifying as that concept was, I didn’t see how it could do much to me. So I got to the top of the stool and—BAM—crushed the mutant head. This time it wasn’t going anywhere—foe dispatched. I cleaned off the ceiling and my hammer and curled up into the fetal position for a while.

So goes my life as an Arizona scorpion hunter. It’s a thankless job, and at times horrifying, but I’ve gotten good at it and I wield my hammer like a pro. Next time I see one on the ceiling though, I might just call Thor.

Twenty Years in Arizona

Twenty years ago this month I became a resident of Arizona. I landed at a Motel 6 in Tempe, before moving into a one-bedroom, furnished apartment in Mesa, whose monthly rent was a little less than half that of the tiny studio apartment in which I had been living in Manhattan’s Upper East Side for the previous three years. I was excited to be in Arizona after a seven-week road trip that took me through 17 different states. (I realize you can get from New York to Arizona in three or four days, but I decided to take the scenic route.) And 20 years later I’m still excited to be here.

Certainly, I can write a small book about my time in Arizona, but since I don’t have an agent, publicist, or crazy, stalker fan, I’ll just focus on a few highlights of my time in Arizona so I can keep it to regular blog size. Let’s go sequentially, shall we?

The Really Early Days

After seven weeks of living on the road at campsites, youth hostels, and the back seat of my Oldsmobile Delta 88, I finally settled into my small, neat apartment overlooking a swimming pool. And after the initial excitement of getting to my destination wore off, I was bored out of my mind. After almost two months of hiking (summited Harney Peak, highest point in South Dakota), sight-seeing (went to the football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio), and partying (got drunk at the Steamboat Days festival in Burlington, Iowa) I suddenly had nothing much to do. Mostly I spent my time watching Court TV, because the O.J. Simpson trial was in full force and, well, it was better than watching daytime soaps. I also wrote a lot—freelance articles for MAD, a screenplay I never did anything with, and journal entries about…the O.J. Simpson trial.

After a few months living off my savings and an occasional MAD sale, I thought I should probably get a part-time job to have at least some sort of steady income. I drove up the block, stopped at the first “Help Wanted” sign I saw, walked in, told the boss I used to work at MAD Magazine, and was hired on the spot. I was now a short order chef at a hamburger joint called The Longbun Grill. As a vegetarian this was, admittedly, an odd career move, but I needed some cash and the place was a 90-second drive from my apartment, so it worked out well. Whenever the boss asked me if I wanted to try the burgers or the bratwurst we made, I told him I was allergic to meat. Somehow he believed me. I worked at The Longbun Grill for about five months and then my freelance income picked up enough that I was able to quit.

The Theater Days

Supporting oneself as a freelance writer may sound romantic, but it can be a lonely lifestyle. I spent the bulk of my days writing and/or staring at walls trying to come up with something to write about. I spent the bulk of my evenings watching sitcoms and/or trolling in AOL chatrooms. I didn’t have much in the way of in-person social interactions, other than the once per month I went to the office of my apartment complex to pay my rent. Yes, it was fairly pathetic.

Eventually it occurred to me that I should participate in an activity I enjoyed that afforded the opportunity to interact with other humans on an ongoing basis. I enjoyed reading, but it turns out that trying to chat someone up who’s reading in a library generally does not go over very well. I enjoyed watching movies, but it turns out that trying to chat someone up in a movie theater goes over even worse. Finally, I hit upon something—acting. I’d done it for years in school, but never in my adult life. As it turned out there was a community theater a couple of miles from my apartment and they were having auditions for a play called Night Watch. I auditioned and got cast as a New York City police lieutenant. I’m sure my accent—mild by New York standards, but thick as a calzone by Mesa, Arizona standards—is what got me the part.

Acting again, after about a seven year hiatus, was exhilarating. Even more exhilarating, however, was that I suddenly had a social life again, after about a seven month hiatus. Hanging out with my cast mates on a regular basis was a blast. We often went out as a group after rehearsals and performances and, because of the close proximity of my apartment to the theater, we had a cast party at my house on the final night of the show. (I could tell the party was a success, because when I came back from a beer run I found out the cops had been to my apartment while I was gone to tell us to turn down the music.)

Over the next four years I became ensconced in the local community theater scene. I bounced from show to show, theater to theater, playing a variety of roles both big and small. I found many a kindred spirit in the Arizona theater world and made many a lifelong friend along the way. After doing about a dozen shows I decided to try something a bit different and joined an improv group called Comedy Sportz Phoenix. I found improv even more exhilarating than traditional theater, due to the fact that it was all unscripted so the next line in the show was anybody’s guess. This was both exciting and terror-inducing, and I loved it. I found even more kindred spirits in this setting, but more importantly, it was during this timeframe that I also found the woman who would become my wife.

The Romance Days

Nicole does not perform improv (at least not on a stage in front of other people) but she sure does enjoy watching it. We met as coworkers at the University of Phoenix (I was temping there to supplement my sporadic freelance writing income) and became great friends. She soon found out that I was part of an improv comedy troupe and came out to see one of our shows. She laughed at every joke…and loudly…and contagiously, so that there were no dead spots throughout the entire show. Everybody in the troupe loved her, because she was like our own personal laugh track.

After that first show she came to another, and another, and another. Eventually I started wondering if she was coming because she liked to laugh or because she liked me. Then I realized the truth was probably somewhere in between—she was coming because she like to laugh at me! Finding a beautiful, intelligent woman who laughed at everything I said was my dream come true, and soon we started dating. Five months later we were engaged and seven months after that we were married, less than a year after we started dating. (I realized once I found somebody who laughed at my good and bad jokes equally, I had to seal the deal quickly.)

For the next six years after we got married we ate out a lot, went to lots of movies, entertained often, traveled frequently, and generally had a great time. Then we had kids.

The Family Days

Okay, okay. I know the last sentence of the previous section sounds bad. I don’t mean to say we haven’t had fun since having kids—certainly we have a ton of fun. Of course, we don’t eat out, go to the movies, entertain, or travel anywhere near as often, but we sure do play with Legos—lots and lots and lots of Legos.

And we sometimes go to the city pool. When I grew up in New York, summer break was a time to play outside with friends, but here in Chandler, Arizona, where the average temperature in July is 105-degrees, playing outside is the last thing you want to do, unless you have a pool, which we don’t. So we often go to one of the City of Chandler pools—most often one called Desert Oasis. It’s really a lovely pool—as long as you’re not grossed out by the thought of what the toddlers running rampant in the pool might be evacuating into the water.

And that, my friends, is a very, very high-level synopsis of my last 20 years in Arizona. I feel remiss having skipped stories about karaoke singing, scorpion hunting, and searching for (and finding) decent pizza, but you’ll have to wait for my book to find out about those things. But first I have to find an agent, a publicist, and a crazy, stalker fan. Oh wait, I already have one of those—and I married her! I’m one-third of the way there!

The Price of Guacamole

Growing up in Brooklyn in the 70s and 80s, Mexican food wasn’t really a thing. Well, I guess it was a thing, but not a thing that I had any exposure to other than through an episode of The Odd Couple when Oscar ate tacos and aggravated his ulcer. It wasn’t until the early 90s when I was living in Manhattan that I tried Mexican food for the first time. There was—and according to Google, still is—a restaurant in the Village called Caliente Cab Co. that I ate at with friends a few times. I enjoyed it and thought it was quite exotic, but considered it the kind of place one would only eat at on special occasions. I could probably count on one hand the amount of times I had Mexican food before I moved out to Arizona.

In Arizona, Mexican restaurants are ubiquitous—sort of like pizza joints in Brooklyn. “Exotic” is no longer the word I would use to describe Mexican food. We eat the stuff a couple of times a week, but only at a restaurant every other month or so. This, of course, means that Mexican food is on our regular menu at home. We do burritos, quesadillas, and of course, Oscar Madison’s favorite—tacos. We also do taco salad, which is essentially a taco in salad form. (Note: that last bit of clarification was for my New York readers, many of whom are not wise to the ways of Mexican food. I know that many of my Arizona readers likely rolled their eyes and thought, “We know what a taco salad is, you yutz!” If you’re a reader from another state, I formally apologize for not addressing your level of Mexican food awareness within this parenthetical note.)

On taco salad nights we usually include avocado in the mix. Over the past few years avocados have quietly become one of my favorite foods. I’m not a trained food critic, so I can’t quite describe the flavor of an avocado, but I’ll just put it this way—they’re freakin’ yummy. While there’s no denying that avocados by themselves are delicious, one thing you can do with them to heighten their deliciousness is combine them with salsa and sour cream to make guacamole. Finding the right combination of these three ingredients to make the perfect guacamole is tricky—the kind of thing that mystical elves in an enchanted forest might be skilled at—but somehow my 8-year-old son has a knack for getting the combo just right to make what he now calls his “famous guacamole.” So on taco salad nights my son’s “famous guacamole” has become a hot commodity.

On our most recent taco salad night my son suddenly decided to become entrepreneurial with his guacamole. Once he finished mixing his prized concoction he offered it up to the rest of his family for a penny a serving. My wife and younger son took him up on the offer but I passed at first—not because the price was too rich for my blood, but because by the time he got around to making the guacamole I had already finished my taco salad and was full. When I politely declined my son’s offer, he apparently thought I was balking at the cost, prompting him to say, “Okay, instead of a penny you can dance for your guacamole.” I stifled a laugh and decided to have some guacamole after all, at the original price of one penny, as I didn’t feel much like dancing.

After dinner when it was time for my older son to collect the penny from his brother, I heard the younger tot try to renegotiate the deal. “Can I do a dance for you, instead?” he asked. The older boy agreed and 30 seconds of freeform dancing sans musical accompaniment ensued.

Ultimately, the price of my son’s guacamole is pretty reasonable. At all the local restaurants it costs much more than a penny and I’m pretty sure they won’t let you do a dance rather than pay for the stuff. Of course, I don’t know this for sure, because I’ve never asked. Maybe next time I’m at Rosita’s I’ll see if I can do a rumba in exchange for my guacamole. Probably won’t work, but at least it’s got a better shot than offering to do the tarantella for an order of garlic bread in Brooklyn.