My mom did come back. I was happy to see her, but I wasn’t the same kid she’d left behind. I’d had that first toke of weed when I was twelve, and I’d liked it. I was getting into fistfights now and then. I hated to see anyone mistreated and I enjoyed smashing my fist into the face of people I didn’t like: bullies, racists, dumbasses.
The following year, my mom’s birth father, who lived in Prescott, was diagnosed with cancer. The doctors were giving him six months to live. She wanted to be near him at the end, so she announced one day that we’d be moving to Arizona. She went on ahead the spring of my eighth-grade year. I graduated middle school, then packed up and followed her, a week after the Fourth of July.
I didn’t want to go. In fact, I was dead set against it. To a SoCal kid, Arizona is like something out of the Middle Ages. I’d been to Prescott once with my grandma a year before and I’d thought to myself, I wouldn’t make it even one year in this town. Now I was going to live there.
“Are you kidding?” I yelled. “There’s nothing in Prescott except rattlesnakes and hillbillies. What am I supposed to do there?”
My mom reminded me that it was her last chance to be with her dad.
“Besides,” she said, “it’s a chance for a fresh start.”
I laughed bitterly. Fresh start, my ass.
Grandpa and Grandma drove me to Arizona. When we stopped for food in one of the mountain passes, I could feel that the air was thinner. My heart raced a bit.
The closer we got to Arizona, the more depressed I became. As far as I was concerned, there was a whole lot of nothing east of LA. Roads winding through snowcapped mountains. Town names like Bullhead City and Fort Mohave. We passed through places that looked like they closed after dinner. No kids. No sidewalks. No damn beach.
When we rolled into Prescott, I thought, Oh, hell no. The “downtown” (later I would learn it’s called “Whiskey Row”) looked like something out of an early John Wayne movie. The whole town seemed to be a bunch of dirt roads and cowboys. People were seriously walking around wearing ten-gallon hats, like it was 1876.
I felt out of place before I even got out of the car. I will never live in a little hick town like this, I said to myself. I need sand and water. I’d inherited my beach-bum genes from my mother and I loved heading to the ocean and just letting the waves ease my mind. The desert heat and the high altitude wiped me out.
I spent the first couple of days sleeping, depressed about moving to this back-of-beyond place and starting over again. After a while, I began exploring the town, or what there was of it, and tried to get my bearings. It was shocking how different Prescott looked to me: I was used to hanging out with blacks, Mexicans, Samoans, and anybody else who’d fallen into California’s melting pot. Here it was mostly Caucasians. But not my kind of Caucasians. These people, I thought, are straight-up white.
Prescott teens hunted in the hills around town with crossbows and rifles. They knew how to quarter and skin their prey before taking it home. If they bought a pickup truck (and what else would they buy?), they knew how to take apart its engine and fix it. They rode broncos and bulls at the town’s annual Frontier Days, the world’s oldest rodeo, then drank at the bars along Whiskey Row. The local heroes weren’t skateboarders or rappers. They were the cowboys, the roughnecks, the undersize 170-pound linebacker from Prescott High who got a Division I scholarship because he was the toughest goddamn player in the state.
I spent the summer hanging out at the skate shop across from our apartment block. I was looking for friends, but it didn’t happen. Californians have a bad reputation in the small mountain towns of Arizona; either they’re rich, arrogant snobs who pay $3 million for a mansion in the hills, or they’re poor SoCal rejects who smoke weed and don’t pay their debts. It was tough to live down that reputation.
In August, I went to Prescott High as a freshman. Most of the kids there’d had their friends since third grade. They’d all come up together. I was the outsider with the laid-back accent who wore pulled-up black socks, Vans, Dickies shorts, and flannel shirts. You could say I was a bro dude—half my style borrowed from the black guys and gangbangers of SoCal, half from the surfers in Oceanside.
It didn’t go over so well. The other kids were dressed in Wranglers, cowboy boots, cowboy shirts. My clothes were wrong. My hair was wrong. My voice was way wrong.
So I fell back on what I knew: partying. When I was thirteen, I had my first drink. Sailor Jerry rum and Coke. It was back in Oceanside over winter break. I was hanging out with my brother and his wild friends and they offered me a cup, and then another. After my second, I puked my guts out all over the pavement. My mom had no idea.
I was already a little wild. My philosophy was: Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. I wanted it to be known that Brendan McDonough never backed down from a fight, never saw a party he couldn’t take over, and never said never.
The first friends I found at Prescott High were exiled Californians like me. We formed our own clique. I started staying out late, partying in the hills around town. The hills were a good party spot because it was easy to see any cops coming up the roads. They rarely bothered us there anyway. We’d look up at the stars, pass around a joint, and talk shit.
Through freshman and sophomore year, my drinking and drugging behavior got crazier, my friends got sketchier, and my grades dropped like a rock. My mom was truly unimpressed with me. Not only was I repeating her worst mistakes, I was topping them. I’d stumble in at two a.m. on a school night, ripped out of my mind.
“Brendan!” She’d come storming into my room. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” My mom could really tear into me. I argued for as long as I could before I passed out, and then she was talking to a corpse.
But I had another side to me that I like to think I inherited from Grandpa. I still carried within me an old-fashioned sense of duty. If he was in line at a grocery store and there was a single woman who couldn’t pay for her groceries, he’d slip the cashier fifty dollars to cover her—he was that type of guy. He looked out for other people; to him, that was just part of being a man. I’d absorbed that growing up.
In middle school, I’d volunteered to go to LA and work in one of the big homeless shelters there. I went along Skid Row with some other volunteers handing out sandwiches, offering people a place to sleep and shower, and doing anything we could to get these men and women back on their feet. Skid Row isn’t some romantic hobo camp, believe me. It’s hard-core. A lot of addiction, bipolar disorder, random violence. I wasn’t a churchgoing Christian, but I knew about Jesus and I really wanted to live out his message. At the shelter, I bathed and cleaned the feet of homeless men and found them new shoes from truckloads of shirts, socks, and sweaters donated by DC, a skate clothing company. Some of the men cursed at me as I did this; others thanked me humbly.
I was grateful for the chance to help. It doesn’t matter how bad your life gets, there’s always someone else who’s got it worse.
In Prescott, I went to little out-of-the-way trailer parks, one of them occupied by World War II veterans who’d fallen on hard times, and cleaned up their yards and landscaped them, putting in trees that would blossom and give the people there something to be cheerful about. I volunteered for the Special Olympics. And at Prescott High, I made a point of standing up for anyone getting bullied. Nothing pissed me off like a bunch of idiots or gangbangers tormenting a kid who was weaker than them.
I never gave in. I took a lot of pride in that.
Still, I was lost. I didn’t know if I wanted to be a drug dealer or a priest. Both had their attractions.
The truth was, despite my good intentions, the party monster side of me always dominated. And it only got worse. My mom was working at a plant nursery and took side jobs doing landscaping. She’d managed to rent a house for us by working her ass off, but she was too damn tired to control a six-foot teenager with a mind of his own.
So the party monster won out.
There was one last thing, besides the cowboy boots and the pickup trucks and World’s Oldest Rodeo, that was different about Prescott. You lived with fire. It was always on the edge of your life. Sometimes you’d be walking to school and you’d smell smoke. This was different. It tasted like burned pine needles and scrub oak. The wild.
Prescott did regular controlled burns in the hills around town to get rid of the dry and dead brush that could endanger the city if it was hit by lightning or touched off by ricocheting bullets (everyone in Prescott went target-shooting in the hills). The smoke would come down the slopes and settle in the streets. You’d be in school learning geometry and you’d start choking on these invisible fumes. Or there’d be a real wildfire and you’d hear the sirens blaring all over town, and the local news would be full of people talking about how close the flames were.
I was a beach kid from Oceanside and I had no idea what was going on. To me, “nature” meant fresh marijuana.
Still, fire was always with me then. It was like a signal from over the hills that the sun sank behind every night. Despite the buildings and the Thai restaurants and the shopping malls, it said, You are living in the wild. One day, sooner or later, you’ll come face-to-face with the natural world. And the natural world does not play by human rules.