Diary of a Cochise County Newbie
By R.J. Cohn
April 3 – Just moved into my new house in southern Arizona’s Cochise County. God, it’s beautiful! Sun’s always out, sky’s constantly blue, and the people are incredibly friendly, especially my neighbor Hank who’s giving me lots of advice. After decades of frigid cold and snow, no more studded snow tires, Sorel boots, cutting wood or thermal underwear. Should have moved here years ago. I love this place.
April 11 – Got stung by the weirdest-looking thing with two pincers and a pointed tail that looks like a miniature monster. God, it stings. My ankle is red and swollen. Hank came by, gave me some stuff to put on it, said not to walk around barefooted. Claims there are lots of these "scorpions" here. Advised me to get the house sprayed by a pest control company like he does. I think it’s just an isolated incident.
April 16 – What an experience! Was walking Pepper in a park at 4 a.m. when he started barking his brains out at what looked like a gigantic hippopotamus and 10 baby hippos. Ugliest things I ever saw. Went after us like a tank, chased us out of the park. Hank said they’re an endangered species called javelinas that wander in from the mountains. Told me what to do when I encounter them. Hank knows a lot about everything.
April 22 – Stung two more times, on the elbow and wrist, by these scorpions. Arm feels like it’s on fire. Helpful Hank said I should get a “scorpion flashlight” that shines an ultraviolet light and search for them at night in my yard like he does. Told him I have better things to do. I’m getting sick of Hank.
May 1 – Skunks are stinking up this whole area. Not only are they piling up dead on highways, but along with these gross javelinas, they’re everywhere at night. This place is like Africa! Mr. Know-It-All said I should scatter mothballs in the yard, boil a chopped onion and a jalapeno, add cayenne to two quarts of water and strain it into a spray bottle. What an idiot. Like I’m going to go around spraying skunks. If Hank offers any more advice, I might just spray him. How does he know so much?
May 16 – Will these blasted scorpions ever leave? Weather-stripped and duct-taped every door and window from top to bottom. They’re still pouring in like a parade, coming up from the sink and bathtub drains. Who can live in a place like this? Only Happy Hank, who just waved while washing his little turquoise Mini Cooper with a recyclable water machine. I’m thinking of keying the entire right side of his car.
May 30 – Bitten head-to-toe from every kind of mosquito that ever lived. Bites turned into huge welts. Itching is intolerable. Nothing, including Calamine lotion, Benadryl cream and an anti-itching gel, gives any relief. But here comes Helpful Hank again with his worldly wisdom, telling me he can whip up a homemade concoction of honey, baking soda, oatmeal, tea, garlic and onion he guarantees will bring instant relief. Told him if does, I’ll shove it down his throat.
June 8 – While Everyone’s All-American was searching for scorpions with his magic flashlight last night, I loosened the bolts to the fender of his Mini Cooper. Best thing I’ve done since I’ve moved to this Godforsaken desert.
June 30 – Will the freaking mosquitos ever stop? Now a thundering rain is pounding with such force that the street looks like a river. Been without hot water for two days. Basement got flooded, water took out the pilot light on the water heater. Happy Hank said these “monsoons” are part of summer life, and I should have installed a sump pump. One more word from Mr. Perfect, and he’s going to need a new set of teeth.
July 12 – Tornado-like winds tore off half the roof. What civilized person could live here? Estimate for a new roof, sump pump, hot water heater, plus new water lines for the entire house (plumber said old ones are ready to collapse) is verging on $17,000. Hank says his cousin can do it cheaper. If his family sets one foot on my property, there will be violence.
August 4 – Will the heat ever stop? Every day is boiling, hotter than the next. AC unit broke in this infernal heatwave. Here comes Happy Hank in shorts and sandals, cool as a cucumber, says he knows how to fix it. Decked him with a right cross, then keyed both sides of his Mini Cooper. Squadrons of police cars are racing down the street.
August 15 – It’s nice and cool in this room, and the little white pills they keep giving me make everything wonderful. Just can’t figure out why in the world I’m strapped to this bed.
Chopping Wood and Carrying Water at 75
By R.J. Cohn
Late into my 75th year, I began powerlifting with a vengeance.
I’ve tried to find a reason why someone halfway through his 70s weighing 158 pounds would suddenly want to see how much weight he could stack onto a bar, bench press it over his chest and keep doing it and doing it until he hit a benchmark of 240 pounds.
I’m usually pretty good at figuring out things that I set out to do – even the irrational ones – but this one escaped me.
If there’s anything I’ve learned at the 3/4 century mark it’s this: Sometimes it’s best not to overthink what you’re doing, especially half-baked choices.
I have been going to gyms on and off since I was 13, and though I never had a big body, I pounced on free weights, cables, isometrics and fitness machines, hoping to become shredded and stacked with a muscular frame from stem-to-stern.
I kept fit, but like thousands of American boys stung by the promise of Charles Atlas and the posters of Schwarzenegger, I never attained a Mr. America-bod of my boyhood dreams.
Though I enjoyed the chop wood-carry water process of weight training, powerlifting never grabbed me. I didn’t possess that kind of bulk or strength despite the hundreds of protein shakes stuffed with wheat germ, molasses, yogurt and everything else that was supposed to bulk you into a mythical figure.
Looking back, bench pressing 135 or 145 pounds was about as much as I could muster as a kid. But I continued to chop wood, carry water in gyms until the routine became regimental, dull and monotonous, and I felt like I was just plodding through a 45-minute workout. And so I stopped and did other things.
Until I turned 75.
Maybe it was walking past a small, nondescript gym and looking in the window that gave me a “remembrance of things past” moment, a tipping point at a place of age where the challenge of challenging myself one more time around took hold with the fierceness of a two-fisted clench I hadn’t felt in years.
It wasn’t about seeing what was left in the tank; it was about chopping wood, carrying water again, only this time seeing how much wood I could chop and how far I could carry the water.
Just for the sheer sake of doing it, age be damned.
Benching 145 pounds at first seemed pretty good, and I began a 45-minute routine designed to increase strength.
At 170 pounds a few weeks later, I thought I’d better find a spotter.
Several months after that when I was benching 3 reps at 225 pounds,I realized I didn’t need one. I also noticed my vital signs – heart rate and blood pressure – had dramatically improved. A notoriously terrible sleeper who was lucky to manage 4 or 5 hours, I was now sleeping soundly through the night.
When I benched 240 pounds, I wondered how this was possible and was stunned by what was transpiring. How much further could I possibly take this? I kept recounting the poundage on the bar to see if my math was wrong.
But it wasn’t.
Lying beneath a metal bar loaded to the hilt with 45- and 25-lb. iron plates while taking three huge breaths before lifting this monstrosity was no easy feat. Was benching 250 remotely possible for a 158-pound guy halfway to 80?
“Everything’s possible, mate,” an Australian powerlifter in his 30s I trained with told me.
“This isn’t a race. It’s one foot forward, sometimes two. Sometimes you’ll have a lousy day under the bar, other days you feel can push it through the ceiling. It’s part of the process, part of the ride.Take it for what it is.”
Now at 76, I’m still chopping wood and carrying water, going one foot forward, sometimes two and taking it for what it is, knowing that the process and the ride matter more to me than what I can lift over my head.
Somewhere in all of that is my triumph.
Where Have All the Pay Phones Gone?
By R.J. Cohn
I have been searching high and low, on every street from Sierra Vista to Benson, even pursuing a tip that took me to Portal, near the Chiricahua Mountains, on a quest to find a working payphone.
But I might as well have been hunting with a penlight for the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine in the Superstition Mountains.
It wasn’t so much about making a 10-cent phone call to Aunt Marguerite in San Simon. I’m on a hunt to adopt this relic of history, much like ADOT’s Adopt-A-Highway program.
Where have these once ubiquitous utilities gone? Where are these marvels of communication that dotted the American landscape like billboards? Pay phones were on every street corner, at every desert outpost, in saloons, restaurants, bus terminals, and yes, even at Walmart.
They were the bulwark of civilization, offering up a breath of hope for making one desperate call in the night. They were everywhere, like nail salons in strip malls, as familiar as your face in a mirror, a rope of rescue, sometimes in the middle of nowhere.
Not long ago, there were more than 2.1 million pay phones in the U.S. Today, they’re almost like artifacts, outnumbered by the Amur Leopard, an endangered species that calls northern China home.
Pay phones have become so rare that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) stopped requiring audits in 2018. In that same year, an estimated 100,000 pay phones remained in the U.S., with roughly a fifth of them in New York. Four years later, New York City removed its last one, though some private pay phones remained on public property. Whether they were working or not, four full-sized booths still stood in New York’s Upper West Side in 2022.
With more than 97 percent of Americans carrying mobile devices – the vast majority of which the Pew Research Center says are smartphones – it’s hardly surprising that pay phones have virtually vanished, as obsolete as the Fuller Brush man.
But my search for a working pay phone, smeared with graffiti and a torn phonebook on a lonely desert patch of mesquite, has a more personal connection than simply nostalgia.
When I was a young, hotshot reporter writing to meet unrealistic afternoon and evening deadlines for large metropolitan newspapers, pay phones were how I made my living.
You could cover breaking news 35 miles from the newsroom, 15 minutes from deadline, and rush to a pay phone to call in the story. It was an exhilarating feeling, reading your story of a bank robbery in progress, cradling a payphone against your ear, while narrating it to a transcriptionist who typed faster than the wind.
By the time you got back to the newsroom, your story was running through the rollers in the pressroom.
Now, cities where banks of pay phones used by young hotshot reporters who aren’t young anymore, have been transformed into Wi-Fi corners, embracing a smartphone-centered era of technology.
It was inevitable.
It’s not just big cities like New York where the death knell of pay phones sounded long ago.
Arizona is right up there with the big boys. The FCC says there has been a 95 percent decline in the number of operating pay phones in the Grand Canyon State since 2016, which translates to 1,695 phones, down from 33,363 in 2000.
There remains a slug of them still around. Independent companies that saw these antiques still had monetary value purchased them from providers like Sprint and Verizon, operating them in places lacking cellphone or landline coverage like Yosemite Valley, where they became extremely profitable. In 2015, independent payphone companies reported $286 million in annual revenue to the FCC.
Arizona does boast several oddball phone booths that have created a buzz, like ‘The Alien Phone Booth’ in Heber-Overgaard with a wood-carved alien, where Travis Walton made a phone call after allegedly being abducted by aliens in 1975. There’s also ‘The Superman Phone Booth’ in Lake Havasu City where people can take a selfie, dressed as Superman.
Even our own Cochise County has managed to tiptoe its way into the jumble of payphone parodies. A resident poet in Bisbee turned a once-operating phone booth by the Jonquil Motel in Tombstone Canyon into a “Telepoem,” where you can put change into the coin slot, dial a number and hear the poem of your dreams through the receiver.
But these are goofball things, a slap-in-the-face to the once-cherished payphone that deserves better than a cheesy parody. That’s why I’m looking everywhere I can to adopt a working payphone that has to exist somewhere in Cochise County.
I feel I owe it more dignity and honor than having it tossed in a rubbish heap, or resurrected as a tawdry tourist exhibit on the banks of Lake Havasu, or as a gimmicky “Telepoem” in the playland of Old Bisbee.
Give me a call – preferably from a payphone – if you’ve seen one around.
I’ll grab the adoption papers and be there before you drop another dime in the coin slot.
Who Says These "Cures" are for Women Only?
By R.J. Cohn
Cracked, smacked, whacked and hacked, my fingers look absolutely brutalized, as if they’ve endured forced labor in a Siberian gulag in the dead of a winter for 20 years without gloves. Trying to restore a 115-year-old Craftsman-style house for nearly a decade, my fingers have taken a beating from hammers and reciprocating sawzalls, clobbered from 2-by-6’s that have imprisoned more splinters around the edges of my cuticles than I can count.
And my toes?
Calloused and scaly with bunions galore, they look like they’ve been persecuted, beaten by a stiff riding crop and forced at gunpoint to walk across the frozen north. Regardless of how much ointment and salves I slathered on – from O'Keeffe's Working Hands Cream to Vermont’s Original Bag Balm for chapped goats’ teats and cow udders – my fingers and toes are still a mess.
I’m downright brutal to them.
They deserve a lot better, these flexible appendages that hold and carry things and get me from one point to another. A friend who builds homes for a living year-round in Flagstaff – the coldest city in Arizona with one of the snowiest climates in the entire U.S., where temperatures drop to 17 degrees – has the smoothest hands for a carpenter I’ve ever seen. He’s roofing six high-end houses in a subdivision in December and starts his day when it’s 22 degrees outside. Not a mark or a blemish on his fingers. He saw mine and whistled.
“Dude, you need to get a manicure at a nail salon,” he said. “How can you even hold a fork with those sore dogs? I bet your feet are even worse.”
“A nail salon?” I said, looking at him sideways. “You gotta be joking.”
“I’ve been getting them for years, tough guy,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to roof or nail drywall in sub-zero weather without them. Give your fingers and those 10 little piggies some love.”
After I partially hammered a nail into my forefinger, I decided it was time for a pedicure, as silly it sounded. My fingers were so beaten I had difficulty even getting the key into the slot of the ignition switch.
I walked into Vinh and Nikki Bui’s Pure Polish Nail Salon, held my hands out to manicurist Clara White as if they were diseased, mustered my best Beatles improv in a muddled Cockney accent, saying “Help me if you can, I’m feeling down and I do appreciate you being ‘round, help me get my feet back on the ground, won’t you please, please help me?”
Oh, did she have work to do.
I sat back, remembering a photo of 7’1” Shaquille O’Neal with his 22” feet crammed into a pedi bath before getting them painted with sparkles in a nail salon, an industry market data said was worth $6.5 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $22.6 billion at the end of this year. They’re seemingly everywhere, in every strip mall and shopping complex from one end of the country to another. Sierra Vista lists 26 nail salons. In three months, 15 more could pop up.
No one ever laughed at the Lakers big man who won four NBA championships for a painted-toe pedicure, or the Cowardly Lion for a stopover in Oz for a pedi and mani while looking for courage, so I figured it was time to drop my stigma of men going to a nail salon and let Clara restore my battered fingers and toes.
“I’ve seen worse,” she said, adding gel to the warm pedi bath I put my feet into, watching them glow in the warm water.
A half hour of scraping, sponging, buffing and cutting enough dead skin from my cuticles that could stuff a teddy bear, I saw the half-moon portion around my toenails for what seemed like the first time. After Clara sugar–scrubbed them – chased by a warm-lotion massage before placing a hot towel over them — I was ready to propose on the spot.
If that wasn’t heaven enough, she put me in another realm during the pedicure with an exfoliating scrub, oiling, buffing and shining my nails before massaging my battered fingers with a lotion made by angels.
“I’m never leaving,” I told her.
For men who jump and sprint and pound their feet on a wooden floor like professional basketball players, pedicures are as essential as conditioning.
But you don’t have to be a Shaquille O’Neal to be smart about your feet and fingers. They’re your personal assistants and need to be nourished instead of neglected like I’ve been doing.
“Some guys look down on it ’cause it’s girlie or whatever you want to call it, but I’ve done it from the beginning because it’s like taking care of your body,” former NBA star D.J. Augustin once said. “It "It makes a big difference.”
Does it ever.
If I could book another one next week, the week after and the week after that, I’d be in footie heaven for the rest of my life.
