Remembering Chuck Bowden

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.