by Kevin Lichty
Another driver and I watch a woman dying on a street corner in Phoenix. The driver is a floater (or a sweeper), she is taking packages from my van. The woman on the corner is trying to stay under the shade of a palm tree, but the sun is directly overhead and the palm tree offers nothing on a day where the temperature will reach over 120 degrees. Her body wants to fold in on itself. She sways at impossible angles, blanking and coming awake, blanking and coming awake. On a day like today, the concrete can reach temperatures of up to 170 degrees.
Where am I? The other driver’s eyes tell me. When you are used to living and delivering in the suburbs, all those quiet manufactured neighborhoods, it can be jarring to enter into the city where there appears to be no order. “I’ll stay with you until you finish organizing your van,” I tell her. Later, after the other driver leaves, I pull a Gatorade from my cooler and hand it to the woman dying in the sun. She blinks at me, grabs the drink, and cradles it in her arms then stumbles away down the street.
There were 645 heat-related deaths in Maricopa County in 2023, most of them unhoused individuals. It is late September. The temperature is 118 degrees inside the city. The Ferris wheel of the state fair watches over the neighborhood I’m delivering in. I can hear the screams of the children on the Super Loop. An unhoused man approaches my van while my door is open. He looks inside, at the step leading up into the cabin. “Can I get a ride to the state fair?” he asks.
“You aren’t allowed inside,” I tell him. This is both true and also for both of our safety.
“Can you give me direction then?” He asks. He looks down at the row of houses, at the street that seems to stretch on forever with no break.
“You have to walk all the way to the end of that street and take a right,” I tell him.
He shrugs his shoulders, walks off.
Later, another woman stops me and asks if I have anything to drink. “I reach into my cooler and offer her a bottle of water. It drips from the ice bath. She takes it.
“Any snacks?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t have anything left to eat.”
She looks skeptically at my cooler, at the plastic bag that rests on top, but it only holds trash. On hot days, I drink over 180 ounces of water during my route, and any water I give away will have to be replaced anyway, so it is pointless to withhold food if I had any. The kids who play in the street also like to ask me for snacks and Gatorade, but their asking is different than this asking. “I’m sorry,” I say. She puts the bottle to her cheek, walks away. The Ferris wheel turns above the houses.
Like most cities, Phoenix is constructed from a juxtaposition of scarcity and abundance. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between the two. The remnants of what might have been a church or a monastery or a mission crumbles amidst the red dust behind a chain link fence. A hand-built tower in the shape of a shiitake mushroom takes over a house in a residential backyard. Apartments are constructed from old shipping containers, one house on an industrial street adjacent to a scrap yard reminds me of a hidden area in a Fallout game, with its rusted nine-foot-tall heavy metal gate and cartoonish finger pointing at the button to open the exit. I delivered there after dark once and it only reinforced the feeling. I could have stood behind their bunker walls and felt safe and warm and alone bathing in the light from the caged in lanterns surrounding me. A Cabbage Patch doll sprawls across the handlebars of a bicycle, a pile of used needles lies on the ground next to it. A woman wearing a black sequined head wrap steps from behind a taxi as I pass, throws one arm toward the sky, lifts her chin at me and belts out the refrain of Handel’s Messiah as I pass. An unhoused woman kisses an unhoused man’s cheek, puts her arm through his elbow and they walk, arm in arm, into a liquor store together. A man wearing surgical tape as a shirt walks through the Historic Woodland District. A man in a silver SUV is chased down the street by another man. The SUV stops. The man inside rolls down his window leans half his body out, points and starts yelling. The man on the street smiles, pulls open his shirt and reveals an elaborate tattoo on his chest and belly, bares his fangs. I brace for a gun to appear, but one never does. An elderly man sits under a tent in his driveway next to a massive foil-covered metal pot over a flame, a cardboard box sign reads “carnitas.” A mother sells tacos and fresh bionicos from a hand-built stand in her front yard after dark, fairy lights and music are her only advertisement, her kids watch cartoons loudly inside. I watch a postal worker walk back to his mail truck with a Styrofoam container. A derelict food truck sits in an empty lot, a hole burned through the ventilation system shows the fire damage on the inside, a week before the outside picnic bench style seating in front of it was filled with customers, now a huge cut hole in the front of the trucks reveals its burned guts. An el pastor rotisserie sets up on a street corner. A pigeon feasts on the half-moon remnants of a crusty bun, across the street two men prepare to share a freebase. A Chinese restaurant on 7th Avenue only has a bar-clad takeout window facing the street. The massive indoor seating area is boarded up. There is always a line at the window. At night, carloads of people eat on the street. Two young men test out a customized MX-5 by spinning donuts in the middle of an intersection. They do five complete perfect revolutions and then calmly drive the car back into their shop. An old motel is converted into a commercial center filled with micro-stores: a custom bikini maker, a two-seat tattoo parlor, a chiropractor, a psychic, tiny boutiques where the dresses are wheeled outside every morning on racks, a magic shop promises vibration shifting ambiance crystals. A woman has a spirited conversation with a ghost outside a corner store. Close by is Merry O’Nette’s Puppet Palace Peepshow Review (est. 1967), her murals lovingly preserved. I want to imagine this place as a kind of high concept Flash Dance-stye show with “all strings attached,” or maybe David Lynch style as an Avant Garde burlesque, one that was too ahead of its time, too experimental, too high concept, with dancers too artistic to survive its location. Even though this place was never real, just the suggestion of a peep show that never existed is all my imagination needs as I drive around it, look at the disturbingly suggestive Betty Boop style marionette women shushing me with their lollipop lips and doll eyes. The silver dome of La Luz Del Mundo looms over me wherever I go.
An abundance economy spills over from the homeless missions on 12th Avenue. A man in a wheel chair with a dozen Hungry Howie’s pizzas is being pushed down the street. A block north of the welcome center food trucks set up, give away barbeque, tacos, fruit cups. On days when the trucks are there, the street becomes a festival ground and they wave at my creeping van with their plastic forks, their gnawed bones. A man on a bike asks if my van is fully electric. This is a common question, but he seems riveted by the answer: “so it runs on the same concept as a Tesla vehicle then?” I nod. He nods back. This feels like a profound encounter. I deliver 12 large packages to the Andre House receiving room. I have to use a hand cart to wheel them up the ramp. A woman puts on her mightiest high-brow accent and tells me: “oh good, all my packages have arrived.” “As always, mistress,” I reply. She gives a bow. A woman in a red sequined ball gown wanders in and out of the cooling center wailing for her lost phone. Their phones are their connection to the world—to each other, to important government services, to me, to their parole officers—already tenuous, severing it could be a death sentence. There is more than sadness in her voice.
I deliver to the welcome center mail room almost every weekend. Sometimes the packages are for the unhoused. When they are, they are usually waiting in line at the window. They stop me as I am walking in and ask if I have a package for X or Y person, show an ID card on a chord around their neck. A security asks me when I am exiting “Ready to go back into the chaos?” I wanted to tell him that the chaos is all that matters, that in the chaos is where all the living happens, but instead I said “Always.”
“You’re a delivery driver, of course you’re always ready.” He jokes and opens the door. I walk out into the chaos. A man walks toward the center carrying a liter of cheap whiskey in a plastic jug. He isn’t trying to hide it. He swings it with every stride. This is sharing whiskey.
Next to the mission is a cemetery for pilgrims and veterans.
I deliver to a Circle K locker. A young woman hides on the shadow side, exchanges packages with a man who comes from behind the building as I scan the bags in. An elderly man sits on the concrete next to the door of the convenience store. He gives advice to a man in his early twenties, newly unhoused. I walk into the store for some air conditioning and to buy Gatorades, two for the men, one for the woman hiding by the locker, and one for myself. When I hand the Gatorades to the two in front of the store, I tell them to be safe and don’t drink them too fast. The elderly man says, “that’s the truth right there.” The young man nods. The girl by the lockers has disappeared.
After dark, I prefer to finish in the Woodland District. Quiet. Dark. Regular rows of early 20th Century houses, some chopped up into apartment units. The street lights are barely bright enough to light the asphalt below them, the occasional string of fairy lights leads to a generous wrap around front porch, and who doesn’t love being hugged by a wraparound front porch.
Separated from Van Buren by a tree-lined small strip of grass called a park by the city and Adams by several government office parking lots, the Woodland District is an island. It feels in some ways like my father’s hometown—a Dough Boy statue in the town’s square, a Lion’s Club that served a pancake breakfast every Sunday, one restaurant, one bar, one gas station—except for the skyline of downtown illuminating the horizon. I can reach my hand out and touch the skyscrapers. The streets are empty, or mostly empty—a dog barks from behind a door, a person drinks a beer on their porch. An old church radiates like a theoretical white hole ejecting piety, nostalgia, reverence on the corner of Woodland and 9th Avenue with its large brick façade, high sloping roof, its steeple, its cathedral arched doors. A path winds around the outside. At night it is illuminated by soft yellow ground lights. I want to jump the fence and walk that path, to linger within its fantasy of solitude, wander in contemplation, arms behind my back, splash through the little pools of light. But I cannot linger, lingering is death on route, so I drink in my fantasy a few seconds at a time. When I am done, when the last package leaves the van and the overhead lights of my cargo bay illuminate a set of empty shelves, I stand in the beam of the headlights, breathe in the silence, before I call dispatch.
These are the invisible communities of the city, where all the living takes place. They are the lungs of the city, the limbic system. Whenever I hear someone say that this city or that city sucks, whenever another delivery driver says delivering in the city is horrible, I want to ask them if they’ve passed through the interstitial tissue of the city and if so, how they were not changed or recharged or felt more alive having gone through it? I suppose maybe they don’t find all this abundance, the mess, the chaos of living beautiful. What is a city anyway without the grit, the dirt, the anguish, the pain, the wonder, the surprise, the slapdash improvisation of it all? Perhaps all they want is the veneer. Later, back at the station, two men with flamethrowers burn another smile onto a van.
About the Author: Kevin Lichty was born and raised in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. He received an MFA in Fiction from Arizona State University where he currently teaches composition. His work has appeared in Pithead Chapel, Broad River Review, Hawaii Pacific Review and elsewhere. His debut novella, The Circle That Fits, was published by Driftwood Press in 2022.