NIGHT IN AN ARIZONA INN
McCarthy, Abigail
NIGHT IN AN ARIZONA INN Abigail McCarthy It is a typical motel—on the fringe of a city and designed to serve passers-through, yet marked in subtle ways by some eddies of the spirit of the...
...Whether it is breakfast or dinner, occupants eat in the permanent night of its windowless restaurant...
...I remember a reporter beaten to death—an outside reporter—in Phoenix...
...Only one seems a bit stagy—a man in sombrero and leather jacket who leans against a post shifting a tooth pick in his mouth as he speaks...
...As it warms up the sound comes on first—a commercial, "In Arizona it's Dr...
...It is long and low (but, of course, motels are that by function...
...Had he learned it, acquiring the accent and intonation from an early teacher, from one of the FBI priests or nuns as they call the foreign-born-Irish who staff the church...
...There is none of the forced ease of the auto dealer in the previous commercial, reading so painstakingly from the teleprompter...
...It takes thousands of feet of film to make it possible to winnow out so many effective takes...
...Stop by —no need for an appointment...
...It holds interest...
...Bonanno, reputed head of the Mafia, secure in his villa on a hill in Tucson, are the target of all this...
...Does he perhaps look shifty, untrustworthy, un-Arizonan, when close up...
...The picture burns in the mind, however, as it was meant to do, and the pleased face of the sombrero man with the tooth pick— on the screen again now—underlines the message...
...I've spoiled more sales telling people that," she adds...
...Upstate...
...but always the western staples, trout and mahi-mahi...
...How is Arizona to deal with this crime wave...
...The interchange is completely natural...
...When he is seen full-face, it is always in a long shot so that it is difficult to see his face clearly...
...I'm from New York myself...
...I marvel at the professional expertise behind the program, too...
...The skillful cutters and the candidate make that clear...
...It's outside crime, you see...
...Boy, do I like it here," she says emphatically in reply to my question...
...Pollution...
...Enforcement is weak, even though there are 17,000 fingerprinted real estate agents in Arizona...
...the black and white picture on the screen brings me bolt upright in my chair...
...The waitress is one of the new Arizonans who arrive daily...
...The menu items, too, speak of the west—steaks a bit thin and criss-crossed by the marks of the grill, omelettes just a little oily and always accompanied by fried potatoes, garbanzo beans...
...When the man leaves the table for a few minutes his wife leans toward the visitor, speaking urgently, evidently picking up a topic she had launched earlier...
...Current issues like the need for fuel are led into by pictures of the beginning of change like the coming of the first automobiles...
...I have missed the candidate's name but, as a connoisseur of such productions I am immediately impressed by his resources...
...I ask her when she approaches me...
...When his father comes in, he could just say 'hello, Dad,' you know, just acknowledge he's there...
...So-and-so for dentures...
...The commercials seem to run largely to the touting of automobiles and health products...
...The architecture can only be called rancho moderne for lack of any adequate term for its mixed ancestry...
...Its exterior shows an effort to fit it into the desert city...
...Well Arizonans dealt with their first crime wave...
...Anything bespeaking the other side of the mountains from "back east" and all history, other than that of the west, is foreshortened and lumped together...
...That's dolphin," explains the waitress to the man at the next table, and laughs a little at his disapproval...
...NIGHT IN AN ARIZONA INN Abigail McCarthy It is a typical motel—on the fringe of a city and designed to serve passers-through, yet marked in subtle ways by some eddies of the spirit of the place...
...There is more—about the enlargement of the state prisons necessitated by Arizona's new crime laws, about the need to make prisoners raise their own food and work for their keep...
...I was out in the sun by the pool this morning when they called from home...
...I have heard her fending off the approaches of the French businessman at another table...
...English is clearly his second language...
...The voice-over, silky again, disclaims the need for vigilante tactics but stresses firmness, etc...
...It looks like what we came here to get away from has caught up with us," says one elderly woman...
...These are shots of sturdy pioneers and wide dusty Main Streets...
...I like the clean air, the crisp mornings...
...Even sophisticated crime like land fraud, he says, is committed by absentee owners of vast tracts of undertaxed land...
...A man bound hand and feet hangs from a rough gibbet...
...It is not clear what the speaker wants of her guest except, possibly, sympathy, but she speaks with feeling and one recognizes one of the preoccupations of the retired, one of the subjects which go round and round in the mind no longer busy...
...It's so hard on him being out of the business...
...He still wears his hat, evidence of the haste of mob justice...
...Too many people coming in who don't really want to work...
...Perhaps she is hard of hearing...
...Unemployment...
...So does the heavy neoTudor furniture and the "Olde Englishe" menu type...
...It is staffed and surrounded by the people who live there...
...And down on the border in towns like Douglas there's a real problem...
...You need someone else to show you the town," she says cheerfully...
...I like walking about the streets without fear...
...A full-length program preempting a network slot in prime time...
...The scenes are interspersed with stark black and white pictures of old Arizona...
...This is the tell-tale mark of the modern west...
...Her guest—sister-in-law, cousin?—is vague in answering...
...These fleeting encounters and impressions stay with me as I gather up my copies of the local papers and go back to my room and the traveler's friend, the color TV...
...I can only guess at the sum involved...
...Just a country girl," she says cheerfully, acknowledging the gap between Manhattan and the small town outside Buffalo which she tells me is home...
...I think...
...But I am puzzled a bit about the candidate...
...He is always shown halfface as he talks to these varied citizens of Arizona...
...Somehow I feel that trespassers other than Mr...
...I snap off the set...
...The talk turns to the current concerns of Arizonans...
...The menu notes claim a New England colonial heritage for both inn and restaurant but the brown plastic leather aprons of the bus boys and the waitresses speak more of Jamestown and Virginia than of "Plimoth Plantation...
...Smiling, very chicano (or Mexican) in appearance, he had astonished me with his brogue when I came in, "Take this table, ma'am (pronouncing it "mom"), the other is durrty...
...There is quite a lot of talk about crime...
...Its roof approximates Spanish red tile...
...Of course, it could be the work of outside gangs, he interjects sjlkily, not of the illegal aliens...
...The brick and stucco walls are buff and faced with the two-story galleries of the old Southwest...
...It is a good thing that I know more about this beautiful state of red rock and canyons than I have learned tonight...
...There is fish, of course—shrimp and crab (flown from California or Mexico...
...Within it is relentlessly something else...
...its services are impinged on by local custom...
...What is wrong with his face...
...The people at the table are obviously "snowbirds," the Arizona term for winter residents and regulars entertaining a visitor...
...There's another blizzard headed there...
...The bus boy may be another kind of new Arizonan or perhaps one with an old history...
...I find I have tuned into the middle of a political documentary—Arizona is gearing up for its primaries for state office...
...Crime...
...He is, I suppose, one of those harbingers of the foreign capital which, I have read in editorials, is changing the economic structure of the country...
...One man the candidate and his wife met had been robbed seventeen times...
...It is skillful...
...The camera goes from face to face of Arizonans telling what they like about the state...
Vol. 105 • April 1978 • No. 8
