Remembering Chuck Bowden

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.