Tucson Salvage: Demons, street homilies and a homemade trailer

They converse about God and Jesus as savior and the kinds of things you might imagine between an old guy who drives around town in a Pathfinder hauling a homemade wooden trailer he sleeps in and a sunken-eyed 33-year-old dude so spun on G his parched-mouth fusion of wild metaphors and non-sequiturs has a speed-train vernacular unto himself. These two just met, and are deep into the subject.

The guy with the trailer is Charles, just “Charles.” He’s in full-on pulpit form.

“I pray every day; that’s why I’m listening to you.” That’s John talking, if I heard his name correct. “It’s the machinations of the apparatus. I got a psych test passed. I’m all right.”

They’re outside a Fry’s grocery store, on a Grant Road corner of tranq dope and G.

Charles is mid-60s, bouncy jowls, with a body that scarcely shows the strain of one who crashes nightly in an air conditioning-free wooden box. He’s dressed like a boy, or, perhaps, someone keyed in to daily assiduousness in a home garage: cargo shorts, turned-down clean white socks and sandals, a T-shirt thinned from countless washings. A camo-colored safari hat and neck shield tops his head.

John sits a few feet away against a white wall dividing the Fry’s property from the street, short dark hair, concave cheeks. His heavy blue hoodie, black pants and bulky kicks reveal a guy burning up. His head and hands are free to the sun, darkened skin in bloodless features. Needless to say, on summer days in the desert the heavy, heat-compressed noon weekday already feels like some Beelzebub gag, or, as Charles points out, a hastening of end times. He’s fond of the New Testament’s Matthew gospel.

“If this isn’t the beginning of sorrows,” he said, “I don’t know what is.”

Charles clearly understands John is spun out, yet continues to engage him like an easy chair. “He’s not Santa Claus, you can’t pray for a new car …”

“You gotta decode that info, none of us are different,” John said. “You gotta feed them demons, the lord is watching out.”

Charles lifts an ice chest slowly from the back of the trailer, places it on the curb, and drains water from it to the street. There is a peaceful ritual to his chore.

The sweat drips from these two. John talks Lucifer as demon god. Charles wipes his palms across his red, white and blue Freedom Rock fest t-shirt, and continues the homilizing.

“Who chases those demons away? The Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ. You’re a young man. There are government programs, you could get training, a place to live and an education, probably for free!”

“All that free shit is mind control,” John said.

Charles’ patience is tested.

“The government could help, you could get up, get cleaned up, and get yourself a job, and a life.”

“I’m just trying to stay out of jail,” John said, stiffening in displeasure. He drinks violently from his cup until the water is gone. “I try to do better every day. God watches over me, but Lucifer is always there.”

A foreboding air hangs around John. I feel for him. Desperation fills him with immense pain, and that pain along the way became his normal and that normal is rejected by about everyone he comes in contact with. Stay high man, he figured, there is temporary confidence there and, besides, what else is there? He lives in fear, paranoia, and he does not come off as an easy mark, does not want to expire in handcuffed wrists.

“I’ve been to the can three times,” Charles said, conceding his truth with a genial shrug. “I was a bonehead.” I wonder if that explains the man’s obvious acclimation to levels of discomfort and frustration.

Charles produces a fresh bag of ice from his trailer and pours it into his icebox. John stands and asks for a few pieces for his cup. Charles obliges. Satisfied with the gesture of generosity, John saunters off up the sidewalk and into battle with the severe sun, likely the least of his problems. He moves toward Grant Road, stops, turns, addresses Charles and me, and said, “I love both of you guys, no matter what.” He turns and continues on, a dark figure under yawning blue.

Charles looks at me, said, “You know this guy?”

“Nope.”

Charles is standing at the back of his trailer and with an appraising squint knuckles the hardwood slats and said, “I live in this.” A peak inside the tiny trailer shows a study of personal organization, hangered shirts on a valet pole in the back, some kind of makeshift sleeping arrangement and a multiform of life-surviving items, bags, clothes. The Pathfinder is crammed with his things, a number of Clive Cussler paperbacks press against the back window atop boxes.

I’ve seen Charles’ homemade trailer-Pathfinder combination in all parts of Tucson, in parks, grocery-store parking lots, rolling down Dodge Boulevard. I wondered of the owner. Did he live in the thing? I could never approach the guy because he was always moving, even followed him once to nowhere and felt like a creep.

Charles points at a trailer tire, explains it’s a brand new one he’d attached after the last was slashed. Said he refused to pay a $20 fee to a street gang he calls the Chainies, who demanded money for allowing him to sleep in his trailer at the Fry’s parking lot overnight.

“They’re running drugs and women down Campbell to Fort Lowell Road, thick as bugs at night. Where are the cops? Don’t get too cute with them. They’ll come after me and you. People don’t like that in their face, especially if they’re on the dark side.”

“Look,” he continues, “they’ve given their lives to Satan. They only way they can be cured is by a chaplain or minister or rabbi or …”

Charles is tied to parking inside many sour parts of the city, and said he can’t wait to leave again. “I’ve got to get out of here, somewhere. Every couple of years I leave.”

He hates Florida. “It’s gone. It’s just an armpit. Bikers rule that state, gangs run the dope on the street. All gangs up the coast. I said, ‘Jeez, where are the police?’” He’s driven the trailer to the east coast, and to California and Montana.

He’s got the money, he added, to bail, and mentions some kind of loan about to go through. He’ll take to the road in the Pathfinder and the homemade trailer with that blue-colored bike attached to its outer left side.

How did he land in Tucson?

“My dad retired here, and I followed,” he said, and catches himself. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

It’s back to the savior and the apocalypse. He’s approachable, friendly, even if he favors talking to listening.

I get him off subject, and he dives into the intricacies of the 4-foot by 8-foot trailer — his hex-screw choices, the $400 he spent on wood, the old frame, the sinking antiquated hitch, for which he can’t get replacement parts, and the necessary welding to keep it road-worthy. There is duct tape on a few top edges to repair minor storm damage. “I just stuff cut-up pieces of Levi’s in there.” He built the trailer 15 years ago. He reveals this in a manner of deep satisfaction. It is evident he builds well with his hands. The trailer looks like it would work nicely as a float, if ever there was an old-timer’s parade strictly for DIY projects.

A small, faded heart tattoo graces his right forearm; to me, it is a little gesture of love of some kind. I ask him about that. He talks about Matthew 24 instead; the world’s destruction in upcoming days; war, starvation, lawless chaos, climate change and viruses on a scale that only the invisible man upstairs can stop to save us all. “I converted in the joint,” he added, “I’m so glad I found this out.” He talks of war machines and China and Russia and Putin. Said, “The end might come down that way.”

But any appeal of his words wears off quickly, like anyone who prattles on and on about God, it becomes insufferable.

This guy could be many things, a registered sex offender masquerading as a street prophet, or a retired guy on an endless hunt for peace in the white-noise debris of the outside world, minding his business unless it involves, it seems, orating the gospel to anyone who’ll listen.

I said, “May I ask where you shower? Any children? Ever been married? What kind of work did you retire from?”

“I don’t want to talk about my personal life,” he snapped. He pulls on his shades, added, “to protect my family.” With that, he hurries to the driver side of his Pathfinder, the quick movement suddenly out of character. He climbs in, fires up the old, oil-throwing motor with the three catalytic converters, and the mini-caravan pulls out into the street and around the corner, and is gone. Not 10 minutes later he’s driving through the Fry’s parking lot, randomly, slowly, eyeing things, looking for something.

This article appears in Aug 10-16, 2023.