Remembering Chuck Bowden

In the end, we are remembered for two things: Who and how we were as people, and the work we did in our time. Chuck Bowden was a bundle of contradictions, gruff and kind, professorial and red of neck, hermit and prophet. He drove his friends to despair, but never so much that he lacked for friends on whom to practice.

Others will talk about all that. I want instead to speak of Chuck's work, at least some of which, I suspect and hope, will last long after all of us who knew him are gone.

I edited four of his books in the 1980s, lightning-hot and righteously indignant cries of love and pain, each a great leap forward from the one before it, a startling evolution of form whose central message remained constant up until the end: The world is a fucked-up mess, Chuck told us, and we are all complicit in its destruction—some more than others, some more thoughtfully than others, but all of us guilty. At the same time, he continued, the world is a fine place, and though none of us is worthy of its heartbreaking beauty and though we will probably lose in the end, it is our job to do whatever we can to save it from the monstrous machines that are devouring it. With which we, beg pardon, are devouring it.

Each of his readers will have a favorite among his published books. Mine is "Blue Desert," which ranks up there in that grand library of Southwestern literature that embraces such books as "A Desert Country Near the Sea," "The Forests of the Night," "Blood Meridian," "The Secret Knowledge of Water," "Sunshot," and "Where Clouds Are Formed." My runner-up favorite, though, is an imaginary book that we all want in our collections, one that he never wrote but that we spoke of often, made up of mad meditations by way of riffs on lyrics by Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and Townes Van Zandt. For whatever reason, it never materialized; Chuck never put himself in the running as a lyricist, instead lighting off to look the devil in the eye and tell the tale.

Rock 'n' roll's loss was literature's gain, and literature gained much from Chuck Bowden's tenure on this green and wounded planet. He will be missed—ever more so, I think, as the worst of the world he described resolves itself into the best the future has to offer. Travel well, Chuck. Nos vemos.

It is Bowden's sick sense of humor at play, I know it. I have spent hours since he died being interviewed by shaken journalists and baffled radio people. All I do lately is go on record talking about how awesome Chuck was. I can hear that bastard's raspy laugh.

Yeah, I think he'd see the humor in dying in his sleep after his legendary (mythical?) bushels of death threats and assassin sorties looking to collect his head. Narcos and sicarios must be gnashing their teeth all over Sonora and Chihuahua. And his lovers and exes weep. But I think—check me if I'm wrong—that Chuck would not be interested in mourning. I think he would approve of my plan to wear a "Fuck Chuck!" T-shirt so talk shows leave me alone.

You Baja Arizonans knew him far better than I. I knew him as well as I could. I knew Chuck through his generosity and competitiveness. He bought 40 copies of my first book to give to people. His next-door neighbor wrote me to say he introduced her to my writing. He greeted me always with great humor and a reading list and news of some new atrocity in Mexico because he did not approve of my loyalty and love for Mexican border culture.

Might not have been a bromance, but he never forgot that I made him cry the first time we had a beer. I asked him to tell me about Ed Abbey. Tears, and an "Aw hell," and he vanished down Speedway. I don't think either of us ever forgot that.

I can't prove it, but I think Chuck was influential in my getting a Lannan Award for "Devil's Highway." He was there when they handed me the check, and he lifted his glass of vino ... and left without a word.

Ultimately, that was what it was about, wasn't it. The writing. Legends, persona, abyss, danger, women, booze, ciggies, guns, assassins—it was about the writing. Nobody could sling it better. Nobody loved it more. Loved it enough to help competitors realize their dreams.

And this new little gesture of his—forcing me to sell a few last copies of his books. I loved Chuck, and one day, maybe I'll cry in a bar when a kid asks about him. Adios, cabron.

The first time I met Chuck Bowden was over the phone. I answered to hear Chuck's unmistakable voice, as if he were chewing on marbles and swallowing a slug of whiskey at the same time. He said, "Listen, I don't know you but a friend (Jim Harrison) dropped this manuscript on my front step and said read it. I did. I think we should meet."

Soon I was spending long afternoons in Chuck's office at the back of his house on Ninth Street in Tucson. Usually the conversations were more one sided, with Chuck spewing out his thoughts on human nature. He was never boring and always generous with his time and advice, most of which could be boiled down to some version of "No one really knows anything, but I guess that's what makes us keep digging." He came from the Midwest but loved the underbelly of the Southwest where whores serenaded drug smugglers and street walkers still believed in ghosts that wander in the night. He detested the politicians that hid behind their glass buildings and thought gated communities were the sign of the end of times. As much as he may have denied it, Chuck spent a lifetime trying to level the playing field.

He didn't name drop famous writers, although they were amongst his friends. Instead he talked about the people he spent his quality time with, people who lived close to the land or at least close to the razor's edge of life. Ranchers, cops, criminals and people who knew things, like scholars, librarians and anthropologists. He carried the torch, however reluctantly, once held high by his friend Edward Abbey of giving a voice and shape to the Southwest. He went to New York on occasion but could really care less how the publishing world perceived him. He just wrote and wrote and wrote, and his books read like a man singing ancient verses from a secret vault only he knew how to find. He relished in our imperfections and challenged others to see those qualities as the truly valuable aspect of the living.

Charles Bowden did something that is incredibly hard to achieve in writing. He told the truth and nothing more. He had a method to his prose. He learned everything about a topic and then stripped it all down, only concerned with telling the essence of the truth.

He will be remembered by many and studied by even more. For those who have never read Mr. Bowden, I envy the day they open that first book and discover a unique voice that not only paints a picture of this place we call home, but taps into the narrative of being truly awake.

Nobody could write about Tucson like Charles Bowden because nobody could quite defamiliarize it like him—to write about its desert civilization in ways that were completely truthful and yet strange and mystical.

Bowden was moved here from Chicago when he was 12 because his father Jude, a lawyer, was fascinated with cowboy literature and wanted to move his family to the "wide open spaces." The rocks and air and plants of the Southwest made an immediate sensory impression on Bowden and he wound up a chronicler of Arizona himself, though not in the arrows-and-teepees style that his father had adored. His thinking was shaped by the headstrong adventures and conspiracy-mongering of the 1960s, a decade in which he plowed through the UA in less than four years (a feat nearly impossible today) with a degree in history, attended anti-war marches, watched Janis Joplin sing on the streets of San Francisco, smoked his share of marijuana, then did work toward a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before flirting with a life of scholarly comfort teaching history at the University of Illinois–Chicago Circle. That last gig was not for him.

He moved back to Tucson, bounced around various jobs at the UA before landing at the Office of Arid Lands Studies, where he was fired for producing a introduction to a bibliography of water policy that was just too rangy and lyrical. That unwanted document was the seed of his first book, "Killing the Hidden Waters," published by the University of Texas Press. It also marked the public launch of the Bowden sentence—his immediately recognizable mixture of the sensory, the prophetic and the doomed.

About a cave of bats near Morenci, he wrote this: "The sound tightens now, a shrill spike of screeches and squeaks. The mites scramble across the skin. The larvae writhe like shiny stones at our feet. We stand inside a brief island of life, a hiding place of our blood kin." In the hands of another writer, this scene might have come across as purple or composed under the influence of Queensrÿche. But Bowden made it work because of his ferocious sense of connection with the natural world, and his way of forcing the reader to see herself as a part of it.

He could be mordantly hilarious. A buffet dinner in Laughlin is a "casino cheap feed." Of a woman in a SUV he writes: "It is not easy being both rich and original." About a load of cocaine dumped into the Sea of Cortez that killed two hundred porpoises, he wrote: "The law of the sea has always been there is very little law at sea." He said of himself that he "was born to fill the cheap pages of newspapers," a reference to his stint as an inverted-pyramid-shunning crime reporter for the Tucson Citizen in the early 1980s, a time when he almost single-handedly made child sex crime a major issue of local discussion and when he drove himself to the edge of sanity by contemplating kidnappings, throat-slicings and 8 year olds with gonnorhea of the mouth. "I have entered a world that is black, sordid, vicious," he wrote in Harper's, years later. "And actual. And I do not care what price I must pay to be in this world."

His personal life was famously disarrayed. Until he found his partner of 10 years, the graceful and patient Mary Martha Miles, there were layers of pork grease on his kitchen windows to make them translucent. He was used to sleeping in his car and letting mail pile up for weeks. Few people ever saw him wearing anything but a brown safari shirt. He could exhaust and bore and frustrate some of his closest friends with his monologues on what was right and wrong with the world—tangled discourses peppered with obscure philosophical references and quasi-paranoid theories in which you were not expected to speak but listen to The Great Man hold forth. They got worse later in the afternoons as he got drunker. The same impersonal lusts that perverts held for children was what Bowden felt for grown women—this is part of what drove his post-Citizen crack-up—and he justified his peccadillos with appeals to evolutionary appetites. He had multiple girlfriends of the wrong kind, both secret and open; a love of cigarettes, thick coffee and liquor ("strong waters," he called it); a yen for disappearing into the desert for weeks at a time; a compulsive need to push himself and his body's engine until it hit what he called the "red line" of extremes. But under the image of a rawboned priapic ecowarrior was a yearning for a life of tranquility, a seeking of decency, a deep conservatism of humane values.

This irreconcilable tension fueled his best work. In "Blood Orchid," his wandering but brilliant meditation on the human conquest of America, he wrote: "Now I dream of the soft touch of women, the songs of birds, the smell of soil crumbling between my fingers, and the brilliant green of plants that I diligently nurture. I am looking for land to buy and I will sow it with deer and wild pigs and birds and cottonwoods and sycamores and build a pond and the ducks will come and fish will rise in the early evening light and take the insects into their jaws. There will be paths through this forest and you and I will lose ourselves in the soft curves and folds of the ground."

The last sentence is telling. Did Bowden have a death-wish? Did he want his own downfall, even despite his lusty ways and bottomless need to get it all down on paper? He would have shared this brew of libido and thantos with John Keats and—arguably—his friend Ed Abbey. Going over repeatedly into Mexico (the parts not listed in Lonely Planet) to ask probing questions of assassins and drug couriers is not playing the right side of the actuarial tables. There were said to be enough connected people in Juarez who would have liked to have seen him dead that all he needed to do to commit suicide would have been to have gone over in broad daylight and walked down certain streets. He treated his own body like a skateboarder treats asphalt. I rarely saw him without a cigarette either fired up or ready to go and his tolerance for vast quantities of red wine of any quality (he was not picky in this department) was enough to inspire as much pity as awe. Yet he was up at 3 a.m. most mornings at his word processor emptying himself, feeding that base craving, which for him was stronger than the pull of food, sex, wine, friendships or the reckless marches through the Cabeza Prieta desert that he used to consume for weeks at a time. He was drowned in the beautiful sentences, which were his supreme repository of self-adoration—he almost never wrote in any style other than the first person—and yet his greatest generosity to everyone who came across him and will continue to find him.

 Bowden is lost in the soft curves of the ground that he cherished. He gave the city a narrative it desperately needed: He helped us see the "hidden waters" of love and blood that create what we see around us. Tucson will not be the same now—not just because he is gone, but because he was here.

Chuck Bowden was a ferocious and tenacious writer. His words could have the intensity of a Tucson monsoon. He was also mischievously funny and loved to irreverently poke at people and institutions. As he famously pointed out to me, with a sly smile, "Given enough time and film, even a chimpanzee could win a Pulitzer."

There was no such thing as "halfway" with Chuck. It was always "balls to the wall," and there was no mute button. He and I froze in February's ice-filled Paria Canyon, and fried our brains trekking from Yuma to Palm Springs. In both cases we were recreating forced marches from a different time. Chuck wouldn't write about experiences gleaned from journals without enduring the hardships himself. He seemed to revel in the suffering. Reading his words, you knew he'd been there.

For a photographer, he was the perfect collaborator. There was no hype, because he didn't need to imagine. He was there. That translated into a level of trust I've never had with any other writer. He also had a photographer's eye for detail. One time in the Goldwater Bombing Range on a long march, I watched Chuck literally interview a tire on a wrecked car half buried in the sand after he pointed to the sidewall's name—"Life Saver Radial." He loved images and was such an amazing wordsmith, and he'd tailor and edit to accommodate my images.

That's not to say we didn't argue. At times we nearly came to blows over some perceived slight, like me not reading his copy soon enough. Espresso and red wine soothed both egos, and we always soldiered on.

For a time Chuck lived in Alamos, Sonora. He would eek out a living writing for USA Today and race to Tucson periodically to file stories. On one such race back to Alamos, jacked up on caffeine, Chuck tried to pass a slow moving pickup on the winding road to Alamos. Suddenly the truck stopped dead in the middle of the road, and the driver came walking back to Chuck's truck­­—with his hand menacingly behind his back. Chuck was sure he was dead. Suddenly the large Mexican man produced a beer and said, "Relax, gringo!"

A normal person would have soiled himself. Chuck was elated and began scribbling one of his favorite quotes. That's what Chuck did. He "hoovered up" such moments that no one else saw. He was funny, profound, profane, irreverent and honest. He was incredibly loyal to his friends.

While in the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix with my life slipping away, I decided to contact Chuck to urge him to write my obituary. He said he would, and a couple of days later I opened my drugged-out eyes to see Chuck's hulking frame bent over my bed. I had just received new lungs after an eight-hour surgery at St. Joseph's Heart Lung Institute. Not believing what I was seeing, I asked him, "Why are you here?" Not missing a beat his retort was, "Generally when someone asks me to write their obituary, I'm told, there could be a problem."

I smiled. Such was his loyalty.

I knew him as more than a genius, though no doubt he was. He was a friend. He was also a prophet, preaching to the great "unwashed." He didn't suffer fools and always gave you his opinion—whether or not you wanted it. My guess is that whenever you're seeing a massive monsoon storm ripping across the desert full of bluster, if you listen carefully, you'll hear Chuck's thunderous, raging profanity. Savor the moment.

Chuck and I spent a lot of time together when he was writing "A Shadow in the City." We had met through a former DEA higher up, who had directed him to talk to me about what it was like to work long-term undercover cases, where you actually got to know the traffickers, their lives, their families, and their reasons for what they did. Both of us were very cautious, very suspicious. He wanted the truth. He wanted me to reveal to him the darkness of the big heroin traffickers' world. I told him this was it. I was finished. I had seen enough loss and carnage and the complete failure of our war on drugs. It hurt too damn much to care ... but we both did.

What he wrote was really about the human heart. In his frightening, beautiful poetic way he revealed his own need, as well as my own need, to find meaning in the chaos. He asked that we look deep within our hearts and confess that our frustrations are from a lost sense of spirituality. He asked us to admit that to feel whole, we must feel the pain of our fellow humans and to help them or at least be their voice in the darkness. That caring is the medicine that heals the soul.

I introduced him to "Man's Search for Meaning," the writing of Viktor Frankl, who survived the death camps to help so many understand that there is dignity in their pain and that the pain can be transformed into good. My friend Chuck was the voice for the unwanted, the hurt, the forgotten, and the impoverished. He took their pain and asked us to remember that they are there—they are part of us.

Chuck introduced me to the beauty of the desert—so hostile, yet so incredibly beautiful. He believed, as I do, that the stars have a healing effect on us. In the magnificent beauty of a starlit night, a person can feel so tiny, yet a part of something more vast and eternal. He knew that we come from stardust, and our souls long to return.

Men like Chuck are rare. He was just visiting this damn place. I know he is at peace now, with the desert night stars. His soul is free, his pain is gone, and I, as you, will miss this beautiful friend.

Chuck was innately inclined to the erotic. The lyricism of his prose and the sensuous descriptions of landscapes, plants, animals, buildings, food, drink, and people—especially women—prevented me from ever describing him as "hard-boiled." That may have been his beat, but it wasn't his heart and soul. He hated pornography of any kind because it kept him from the truth, from what was real. It ran counter to his personal aesthetic grounded firmly in the natural world. "Porn," he said, "is for people dead from the neck up."

Chuck held a deep appreciation for photographers and photojournalists who could capture realistic images portending something inescapable. He liked collaborating on projects with them and showing their work to everyone he encountered. I don't recall a single time when he didn't bring out a fistful of photographs during a visit, and will never forget his sheer exuberance when he introduced me to the work of the Juárez photographers.

He loved Antonioni's film "Blow-Up," about a London fashion photographer who explores society's less glamorous side with his camera in his free time. He suspects he may have witnessed a murder after looking at blown-up shots he had taken in a park. The photographer becomes consumed with passion for his work, examining and re-examining, questioning what may or may not have taken place amidst the grass, trees, sunshine and shadows. The lack of certainty engages him and he is obsessed. Everything else in his life is eclipsed and no longer matters to him. Although Chuck didn't share the protagonist's contempt for women, he was Antonioni's hero in the flesh.

I paid him a visit early one afternoon in April 2008. We sat in the backyard and he talked about his current project. I had worked with Chuck for four years early in his book publishing career and was intimately familiar with listening to him process raw information and explore the narrative. We drank red wine while he talked and I listened. The stories were dark, disturbing, violent. He went to Safeway to buy more wine. There was a notable lack of humor that afternoon and I was concerned. When he returned and filled our glasses, I asked him, "Do you think all of this is getting to you?"

"This is what I do." He shot me a sideways look. "You follow?"

"I've known you for a while and I know this is what you do," I replied. "But this is unrelenting."

He shrugged.

I feel totally inadequate writing about Chuck Bowden. Probably how you would be if asked to compose a tune to be played at Mozart's memorial or discuss physics at Einstein's funeral.

Chuck could write like no one else I have known.

He pulled from the same toolbox of words that we all use. But he had a way of lining up those words and putting them together that told a story magnificently. There was nothing extraneous, nothing wasted.

Chuck was a master storyteller whether he was writing about his beloved Mount Lemmon, ruthless killers or Tucson paramedics' frantic attempts to save the life of a man who had a heart attack on a Tucson sidewalk.

Chuck wrote many books, but I have a special affinity for "Frog Mountain Blues," which this year is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Working with Tucson photographer Jack Dykinga, Chuck explored the history of Mount Lemmon ("Frog Mountain" to the Tohono O'odham).

So 11 years ago, when the Aspen Fire slashed across Mount Lemmon, charring the community of Summerhaven, I asked Chuck to revisit "his" mountain and write an update for the Tucson Citizen.

A sample of what he found:

The forest itself is a remnant from the last ice age, a green whisper of Canada floating over the Sonoran Desert. For 10,000 years, this tangle of pine and fir and spruce persisted as the earth warmed and the rains declined.

We've managed to damn near murder it in one century.

Here is how we did it: We suppressed fires in our effort to protect the forest, and by that act we let fuel loads—doghair thickets, deadfall—build up until fire escalated from being a natural cleansing agent of undergrowth that did not trifle with mature trees into a lethal crown fire.

Anyone who knew the mountain realized it was doomed by this act. Building Summerhaven on top was about as bright as laying out a subdivision inside an oil refinery. 

Wow.

Chuck wasn't your typical newspaper reporter. But that says more about the shortcomings of newspapers than it does about Chuck. He was the kind of reporter and writer that newspapers need if they are to attract and hang on to readers.

Chuck's skill with words masked the fact that he also was a persistent and prodigious reporter—an extraordinarily keen observer of what was happening around him.

It's a cliché to say that Chuck left his footprints on our community. But that is what Chuck did—literally and figuratively. I'll think of him every time I gaze up at our Frog Mountain.

Charles Clyde Bowden—"Chuck"—was a friend of mine for almost 20 years. We met early in my political career due to his love for the Pima County Public Library System. Chuck was a part-time resident of Arivaca, and the Diane Caviglia Library located in that small town was on his agenda.

Knowing that to solve a political problem, Chuck needed politicians. He invited the chairman of the Board of Supervisors and me to meet with family representative, Ronnie Caviglia, and hash out the details and the cost of the improvements they were requesting. Chuck was an able lobbyist and did most of the talking. After quick agreement, the business ended with a cork pop and the social hours lasted well into the night.

Born in Joliet, Illinois, Chuck then grew up in the bungalow belt of Chicago's Southside. After middle school, his family relocated to Tucson, Arizona. The Sonoran Desert had to be a dramatic and profound turning point in his life, but I know Chuck also had a fondness and nostalgia for the urban rhythm of Southside life because we bonded over our familiar and similar feelings about Chicago.

I grew up just an elevated train and a bus ride from the Calumet High School that Chuck would have attended had the Bowden family stayed in Chicago. In fact, I played football against Calumet High School years later for "rival" Chicago public high school, Morgan Park. In the Southside neighborhoods where you heard that "to reach your full potential, you need to leave here," Chuck was one giant step ahead of me, yet I arrived in Arizona just as soon as I could.

I know what Chuck felt when he saw his first shooting star or smelled his first stand of creosote after a monsoon rain in Tucson. What you stand on here is "holy ground," he said. Cold weather transplants are like religious converts. "Eco-fitness" was Chuck's year-round passion. He loved the desert and its radiant sun that allowed him a full year to roam in his newfound paradise, instead of spending six months living behind the Chicago storm windows of a drab winter bungalow belt.

Chuck was my political beachhead. I landed hard in a Pima County mine field in 1997 and Bowden showed me a path to the sunlit, upland fields where the business of politics should be taken seriously and not personally. An introduction over an Arivaca library led to a decades-long friendship and inspiration to preserve and protect not only libraries, but much of the sensitive desert via the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan. Chuck was all in on the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan and the Save the Scenic Santa Ritas, among many other environmental causes. He was a friend of the desert and a friend of mine. May Chuck Bowden rest in power!

It strikes me as bizarrely ironic that someone as peripatetic as he, who would be just as at home with a drug kingpin in Sinaloa or wandering alone in the Pinacate Desert, would end his days—in of all places his bedroom—taking a nap! Yet, Chuck was a man of contradictions, never one to take the expected route.

Here’s how I met Chuck—as a 20-something year-old NY-based literary agent in the mid-‘80s, who stumbled upon his writing in City magazine and then devoured everything by him I could get my hands on: “Blue Desert,” Frog Mountain Blues” and “Mezcal.” I wrote him a fan letter, and several weeks later a manuscript arrived, titled “Red Line” with a brief type-written message: “Here, take a look at this and see if you can go deal with those demons of hell—publishers,” it read.

When I think of Chuck, I think of music, a pervasive theme throughout his life, his home, his truck. Unlike most of us, who listen relatively indiscriminately to a wide variety of sounds and songs, he would consume the oeuvre of a particular artist for days on end: Billie Holiday, Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, Robert Johnson, Miles Davis, Emmylou Harris. It was like being in Picasso’s blue period.

OK, this must be Chuck’s Coltrane period, and we’d listen to “Alabama”, "Spiritual,” “A Love Supreme” endlessly, ’til the music was seeping out of our pores in tandem with the wine. But always, there was the recurring theme of the blues and siren cries of helplessness, lust and longing—the most visceral, unflinching and close-to-the bone and heart the better.

A few years and books later, I ceased to be his agent, but never, I felt, his friend. When, I found myself in a time of life when I was “walking alone in a deep, dark wood,” he invited me to hang out with him in Arivaca, in a cabin south of town, where he was holed up trying to write down his impressions from a recent assignment—covering a reunion of former officers of the Argentine military junta responsible for the disappearance, torture and murder of thousands. “Nunca mas,” he kept saying—“never again!”

After one of the simplest yet most delicious dinners ever of grilled steak and asparagus and oceans of red wine, we sat on his porch while the nearly full moon scudded between clouds overhead and dozens of Blackhawk helicopters scoured the canyons for drug mules: “they’re out there—it’s a perfect night for it.” he said as Miles Davis’ eerie trumpet solo on “Sketches of Spain” wailed from the stereo and over the dark hills.

The first time I meet Chuck he is sprawled across the ancient shag carpet in my tiny mid-town apartment with paint peeling off the dirty white walls. It’s a job interview for City magazine, the oversized black and white monthly he is starting with Dick Vonier. He flips through my portfolio of B&W street portraits while I ply him with endless cups of industrial strength coffee.

The space I occupy argues for betterment, a solid job, and health insurance. Chuck just came back from the Cabeza and he said, “Yeah, I was there wrestling sheep.” I didn’t have the nerve to ask what that meant, I just pretended I knew what he was talking about. I did a lot of that around Chuck. I was terrified of him.

He said, “You have tiny feet.” The comment comes from nowhere, though I was surprised enough to remove one grey suede cowboy boot to make sure. Size 6.

The deep baritone is layered with pleasures that haven’t yet become true compulsions, as he locks and seduces with blue eyes that stare and decide who I am.

Oh, one more thing he asks, as our cigarette smoke molds dragons between us, “have you ever been fired?”

“Yes,” remembering the cheese store manager screeching at me to permanently leave after a boyfriend tried to ram my car through the front window.

He said, “Good, I wouldn’t hire you if you hadn’t ever been fired.”

I’m assigned the calendar section but after I write a column on the contents of my fridge, I’m promoted to features. I am the hungry student, writing until my fingers cramp. It is a master class by Chuck Bowden and Dick Vonier. Chuck is the water and I am the sponge. Write your notes fresh, no matter how tired you are. Stop with the adjectives. Show, don’t tell. Threaten yourself with honesty. He is driven by verbs, by action. On paper and in life. His appetites—for good food, for his red wine, for women, for sex—he chased them all to the gates of hell.

Vonier just rolls his eyes. “If he misses one woman, it drives him crazy.” (As if he isn’t talking about himself).

Chuck and Dick head to local spots where they redline copy until you can’t see black ink. I wither in fear as Chuck says, “We just need to lop off your malapropisms.” Chuck and Dick both insist: “We hired you because you weren’t corrupted by journalism school.”

In my times around him, he revises my present and alters my future.

In the early days, when we aren’t in coffee houses, we head to his backyard, his sanctuary, lush and green. The place is near 800 square feet, with concrete floors and filth from corner to ceiling. The toilet has more rings than an old tree. Minimalist and spare, but lyrical, like the language Chuck writes. He has a big white shaggy dog that contributes fur, simple brown wood bookshelves, and a bed on his floor. More dust.

He can’t be bothered with house tending. This changes in 1997 when Chuck does something extraordinary. He falls in love and brings Mary Martha to live with him. She scrubs all the dirt away, even points to a scar on her hand, from a pin hole leak in the gloves where the caustic chemicals burned a piece of her flesh from the calcification of that damn toilet. Afterwards, when men visited, they ask Mary Martha, “Can we see the bathroom?”

Chuck keeps monk’s hours. Often he is asleep by 8 p.m. and awake at 3 a.m. Then, in the afternoons, colorful characters, from prostitutes to professors, come listen to Chuck hold court—tuned to his own frequency and periodically he’ll check in and ask with a rhetorical flourish, “Do you follow?” It is his signature. (Even if you didn’t, it was still a contact high just to be near Chuck.)

Once in his groove at City magazine, Chuck went on a romantic binge with Mexico and never came back. It is his calling, his true love. I never underestimate his physicality, his 6-foot-4-inches guaranteed he gets the story, any story. Dark tales with desperados that require big loaded guns hidden throughout his house.

And despite two daily packs of unfiltered cigarettes, and the low and deep cadence that is his voice, described as everything from sandpaper to gravel, his delivery is as important an instrument as his fierce intellect.

When outlining tips on how to submit queries to City magazine, he writes, “We print stories, things that are alive. We figure no story matters unless the writer cares about it…Don’t come to us with a quick and dirty ten pages on Indian basket weaving, how to put locks on your doors to keep the bad guys away, or the problems and opportunities of Tucson traffic. If it’s just a gig, if you don’t care, we won’t care and neither will our readers.”

And then, like the teacher and master he is, ends with “In this business, when you know it all, you are finished.”

I believe the many tributes to Chuck Bowden in the last few days miss a few basics—and I think Chuck would agree.

Chuck was basically a man of the Left, but he was born in Chicago, so he realized early on that the game is not on the level and that helped temper his ideological proclivities.

Check the jacket photo on his 1989’s “Red Line,” about his long walk along the Arizona-Mexico border. He’s wearing a cap that features a 1911 Colt crossed with a Ruger .44, paying homage to both wheel-gun and semi-auto. It reads: “Rednecks for Social Responsibility.”

I gave him the hat. It was small payment of what I owed him for giving me my first regular gig as a columnist in the late, great monthly City magazine.

Chuck’s ability to cover a story thoroughly and grasp what others missed was on display in his City magazine coverage two major Arizona scandals of the 1980s, the trials of financier Charlie Keating and the impeachment of Governor Ev Mecham. Chuck was fair to both of the indicted. He showed an almost perverse respect at times for Keating, whom he considered a clever if shallow rogue, but check his description of then freshman Senator John McCain at Keating’s trial:

“Why was he called, someone shouts. He suggests the reporters ask the prosecutors…. And then he lurches down the corridor towards the elevators with that machinelike walk that suggests he is some kind of wind-up toy wound- up perhaps by his father the admiral or his grandfather the admiral or perhaps by all those Navy officers at Annapolis. No Matter. He looks like a man who will never know who he is or care…”

Chuck also recognized the GOP establishment’s role in the Mecham impeachment was motivated by something other than good government.

I drove Chuck and then City magazine reporter Norma Coile to an interview with my old friend, former Congressman Sam Steiger, a principal figure in Mecham’s administration. Chuck and Sam hit it off at once and the interview was a cover story in City magazine.

Chuck always called himself a reporter and refused the title journalist. His degree was in history and it showed.

Many focus on Chuck’s later works on the border, which grew increasingly darker as the situation got no better. I’d prefer to remind everyone of his superb sense of humor. I can’t find the actual quote, but the following paraphrase is a rough example of something I’ve repeated for more than 20 years:

Tucson was basically settled by a bunch of losers whose wagons broke on the way to California. They ripped off Indians, swindled Mexicans, and a hundred years later their descendants sold the land to out of town developers for big bucks giving us the world’s largest accumulation of stupid millionaires.

When I think of Chuck, the word prodigious comes to mind, for he was a prodigious and original thinker, a prodigious reader and had an amazingly prodigious memory. The first thing I read of his was a Tucson Citizen account of the copper miners strike in Ajo and I thought: Holy Shit, who is this guy? He writes for this paper?

I've known lots of smart people in my life—some of them may even have been geniuses—but there was no one quite like Chuck. I looked forward to reading everything he wrote and, though I was sometimes disappointed, I was always startled by the brilliant passages—original in thought and writing—that left me shaking my head in wonder.

I also owe Chuck a debt of gratitude. When he and Dick Vonier were running City magazine, Chuck accepted for publication just about everything I submitted and encouraged me to keep on. City mag paid peanuts, but I was able to sell second rights to every one of those pieces for several times the money.

And when I look back at some of that work, now more than thirty years old, I'm proud to say it's some of my best. Chuck made it happen.

One afternoon fifteen years ago I called up Charles Bowden, whom I had never met.

He answered the phone with a low, growly voice.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said.

“No bother at all,” he said. “I’m just sitting here staring at the wall, cursing the world.”

I’m not making that up. He really said that.

I was in my 20s, just starting to call myself a writer, and wanted some advice about the essay I was working on, and probably some publishing tips too. I’d just done a master’s degree worth of research about children in the border town of Nogales, Sonora and had stayed in contact with some of the kids and their families. On a recent visit the children I knew had come running toward me, shaken and afraid. That morning a 12-year-old boy had brought a gun to school and fired it, killing a classmate.

I was trying to write about how in the U.S. we got in a huff about what Mexico sent north across the border—undocumented workers, cocaine, marijuana—but too often turned a blind’s eye to what we sent south—subsidized crops, barely a trickle of Colorado River, and, now, firearms that ended up in the hands of 12 year olds. I told Bowden I’d been deeply moved by his collaboration with unknown Mexican street photographers documented in Juárez: The Laboratory of our Future, a book about how political and economic tensions between the U.S. and Mexico touched down—often with gruesome violence—in that border city. It is time for everyone to talk despite the thickets of racism, of foreign-policy considerations, of the growing and ominous military presence on the border, of the barbarism festering in our agencies that expresses itself in the mistreatment of illegal immigrants from Mexico. It is time to talk because silence only makes matters worse, bodies cold, murder sanctioned, and poverty invisible.

After a long silence, he said, “I think I know what you’re after. Why don’t you come by this afternoon? We’ll chat.”

A woman with a pretty smile and a Southern accent greeted me at the door and led me to his studio. We sat on a back patio, silhouetted against a dark screen. It was early fall in Tucson and still hot, and Bowden told me if I’d come a few months earlier at dawn I’d have seen the explosion of night-blooming cereus. It opens only on the hottest nights of the year, black evenings when the air is warmer than your body and you cannot tell where your flesh ends and the world begins.

“This garden keeps me sane,” he said.

He empathized with my sadness and frustration over the child with the gun and said covering the border had shown him more than he’d ever wanted to see. Nothing shocked him anymore. He told me to just sit down and get to writing and to keep writing until I was done.

We also talked about the desert. I had recently started backpacking in Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge, a wild expansive place I knew he knew. I might have I told him about how my friend Janet and I would sometimes wear bright pink lipstick while hiking there and that I too wanted to write about beauty and desolation, just like the booted good old boys of the Southwest who ran around there, but that I wanted to write a woman’s account, to undo that place from the male gaze. The lipstick, I thought, was a gentle jab at that history, a hot pink joke.

But I don’t think I knew back then how to have that conversation with a writer like Charles Bowden, who was one of those booted boys and spoke in adages and had the kind of confidence I wanted but wasn’t sure I’d ever have. And, like the woman who’d greeted me at the door, I was polite, and I’d already invited myself over.

So I asked him what he thought about when he was out wandering in that vast stretch of desert.

“Not much,” he said. “I go there to not think.”

I nodded, pretending to understand.

A few days after my visit, I read “Torch Song,” Bowden’s essay about his work covering sex crimes for a Tucson newspaper. In it, he juxtaposes the dark world of crime with the sometimes-confusing world of consensual sex, blurring boundaries between what is sanctioned and what is forbidden, between our pain and our desire. In the core of our being live impulses, and these impulses are not always bright and not all as comfortable as an old shoe.

The essay left me agitated and vulnerable. I fixated on the parts where he sleeps with all the women therapists. While I had not fantasized about us fucking on his cement floor, I wondered if he had harbored any desire for me, the young writer who’d called him out of the blue and so eagerly gone over to visit, and that made me uncomfortable. We all share a biology and deep drives, and what we have created—civilization, courtesy, decency—is a mesh that comes from these drives and also contains and names them. He had, I remembered, walked me to my car.

I didn’t see Chuck again for another 10 years.

I never did write about the school shooting in Nogales or about the lipstick in the desert, though I eventually published essays about the border and continued to backpack in the refuge until drug smugglers made it too dangerous. Eventually I understood what he meant about letting the wilderness dry up all my thoughts.

I formed a writing group with a handful of women who became my friends, and one of them was Chuck’s then-partner, the woman with the nice smile who’d greeted me at the door so long ago. One evening she invited us all over for drinks. By then, we were privy to the kind of information you get from being in a circle of women writers, from watching your friend’s body language, from paying attention to the things she doesn’t say. It wasn’t a secret that Chuck drank, and by the time we all got to the house he’d already had several. I did not introduce myself as the writer who had come, many years before, to learn something about the world, and if he remembered me, he didn’t say so. He interrupted everyone a lot and didn’t listen very well, and I left feeling irritated by him.

I feel a little badly including that part of the story. No one wants to bad-mouth the dead. But to gloss over the truth would make me, in Chuck’s eyes, a wussy writer. Offering the truth, no matter how uncomfortable, was what he did so well. He once said that to not say something that needed to be said was a crime.

It’s strange to think we can be shaped and influenced by writers we may not like very much off the page. Or maybe not so strange. Charles Bowden the writer sought out so many unlikable, abhorrent things—border violence, drug trafficking, child sexual abuse, the destruction of the desert—and let them shape his prose. Thank God for that.

When I first became a writer, I thought that what I needed to learn from someone like Charles Bowden was how to traipse along the border, chase criminals, walk for days on end in the hot desert, dig up skulls, and poke at the viscera. But now I know more about subtlety and language and that leaping across terrifying chasms often means sitting at my desk a little longer, returning there the next morning, and the next, and writing my way through, over, across.

By now I’ve reread “Torch Song” over a dozen times. I believe it may be the most courageous essay ever written. It is brave because of what its author reveals and names about himself, his own transgressions and desires, however uncomfortable, angry, or sad they might make us, his readers. That’s the kind of transparency that helps us understand ourselves as human, that guides us right up to the borders that separate us from each other and from our own deepest fears and then nudges us across them.

From Charles Bowden, I learned that as writers, if we have any kind of desire for revealing the pain and ugly of the world and for trying to heal it, not only must we seek out that which makes us furious or misunderstood or ashamed, but also we must tell the truth about it. The whole truth. Which might mean peeling off our own clothing and standing naked before the world, without apology. At the end of the day, that kind of vulnerability and viscera could be our most worthy and transcendent offering.

On the shelves of the Arivaca Library is a row of books whose subjects are so crucial to understanding our Mexican border country, the lives we live here, and our future. They are hard to read, hard to believe, yet they tell it like it really is. Some years ago, Chuck Bowden took on the life-long job of reporting the dark truth. These are his books. I never knew him until I came to be librarian at the Caviglia-Arivaca Branch Library in 2000. Chuck was well established in Arivaca then. Back in the late 1980s, he had been coming out to visit his friend Chris Clarke and write in the peace and quiet of his ranch. The locals had been politicking for a library and from them Chuck learned how important it would be to have one out here in this border outpost. As a reporter, Chuck loved libraries, so he took on the mantle of patron, working his magic in the smoke filled rooms of Pima County. Thank you, Chuck. We do so appreciate our Library.

I’m grateful for those afternoons that turned into late nights sitting in his back yard, drinking red wine, and listening to that voice. It was a privilege to be there when you knew Chuck was working on a piece out loud, testing the structure, testing the sound, sometimes sitting back and letting the birds and the insects and the panting dog and the desert hum fill the air. You got the feeling you were being let in on the truth at such times. It was up to you to follow it. Chuck followed it. Chuck followed it and he wrote about it and we’re all the better for it.

Before you get the impression that they were solemn, academic affairs, those evenings in the yard. They weren’t. Chuck’s beat was a grim one - sorrow and death were regular companions - but he was resolute in acknowledging the joys of life. Whether it was food, drink, music, or other, earthier endeavors, Chuck’s passion existed side-by-side with his outrage. He refused to become numb. A few moments I was privy to:

Chuck collapsed on his couch, utterly exhausted after returning from Aspen where he had been assisting Hunter S. Thompson at his editor’s request. As he struggled to stay awake, he confirmed and dispelled some of the mythology surrounding the good doctor. Through it all, the fax machine whirred, churning out message after message bearing the notorious gonzo logo. Hunter was clearly in an agitated state, the faxes alternating between lavish compliments and outrageous threats. Chuck didn’t seem to care either way.

Chuck leading me to his new computer with a gleam in his eye. He wanted to show me one of the features. The screen saver was a random series of primary colored raindrops splattering across the black. It was called something like “Acid Rain,” or “Nuclear Raindrops.” Whatever it was, it tickled Chuck immensely and we watched the drops splatter for a few minutes accompanied by his throaty laugh.

Chuck in his tiny kitchen recounting the cooking class he’d taken in Italy with Marcella Hazan. His impersonation of the culinary icon hunched over a simmering pot of red sauce, her cigarette ash dangling long and precariously over the top yet never falling, was comic perfection, and led to another deep round of laughter.

I will miss that laugh. I will miss Chuck and those long nights in the yard. But while his absence leaves a huge void, his words remain. If you haven’t read the man yet, then shame on you, put this down and seek him out. Trust me, you will be better for it.

I loved talking with Chuck Bowden. You had to hold your own. He was not diplomatic. He would never say things like, “It’s ALL good!” He didn’t believe in making things pretty or softening sharp edges. But it could get tense. Once, over dinner, he made a friend cry. I agreed with Chuck’s argument, but I disliked his tone of voice. I blamed the alcoholism. (And the patriarchy of his generation).

Chuck was dramatic and funny. One time I came over to the house he had shared with his former partner, writer and editor Mary Martha Miles. I wanted to talk about photography, and my upcoming doctoral research in Ireland.

“Europe’s dead!” he announced. “Why would you go there?”

“So you’re saying you’re going to miss me?”

“I’m saying this is the place to live.”

The borderlands. The first time I met Chuck was at the signing of his book, “Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future.” I told him I had just moved to Tucson and that I admired his work. He signed my book, “Darcy: welcome to the laboratory!”

Before leaving for Europe I stopped by to say farewell. I returned the photography books he had lent me. We watched a video of a filmmaker he respected. We were talking about something contentious of which I can’t remember, and I used the word, “problematic.” Chuck stopped cold.

“What are you saying? Don’t use shit-ass academic words that mean nothing! No. It is not problematic. It is detestable, it is wrong, but it is decidedly not problematic. You need to say what it is. Say what it is.”

He was right, and to this day I am grateful for the reminder. I only need to say what it is. Say what it is. How to say what it is?

Chuck was generous. On that last evening he gave me a copy of a photography book with perfect, glowing images from the Grand Canyon. Chuck had written the forward. He signed the book for me: “Well, it doesn’t look like this—thank God!”

Rest in peace, dear Chuck.