I call her Hoodwink.
I met her on a dating site, back when I was fresh meat in Tucson and didn’t realize that the “dating pool” here is actually a retention pond for sewage runoff. She was a short little Hispanic woman, possessed of a unique, frantic energy that drew me in like a moth to a dumpster fire. She was flaky, she worked nights, and getting her to commit to a date was like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall.
But eventually, she lost her job. Which meant she was available.
We slammed a couple of drinks, and the next thing I knew, she was at my house. She resisted at first—the token protest of the “good girl”—but eventually, she succumbed. And just like that, she became the Tuesday Girl. A warm body. A release valve. A weekly appointment in my calendar of quiet desperation.
I would pick her up. 15 minutes each way. I made sure she never memorized the route to my house. I didn’t want her knowing where the escape hatch was.
And every Tuesday, on that long drive, I got the report from the front lines of her life.
She is forty-five years old. And she lives in a house with eleven people.
Eleven.
They aren’t “kids.” They are full-grown adults who refuse to launch, some with babies of their own, all trapped in a gravitational pull of poverty and bad decisions. The front yard looks like a used car lot for vehicles that don’t run. It looks like the kind of place where you buy meth or get stabbed, possibly both.
She would show up to my house dressed like she was auditioning for a role as a truck stop “lot lizard.” Tight clothes. Spandex. “Tucson Chic.” It was so bad I had to institute a Dress Code. “Casual,” I told her. “Jeans and a t-shirt. Do not look like a prostitute when you walk through my front door.”
But the wardrobe was the least of her problems. Her life was a goddamn carnival of felonies.
One night, her brother starts running his mouth at her sister. He grabs her. The sister calls the cops. He’s already on probation, so off he goes to jail. Just a typical Tuesday.
Another night, her 13-year-old and 16-year-old daughters decide to go joyriding to Phoenix at midnight. They get pulled over. It’s the third time that week. And Hoodwink? She gets pissed at the cop. “Why are you harassing them?” she says. “It’s fine.”
Then came the Drive-By.
Someone drove by her house—slow, deliberate—and lit the place up. Bullets in the wall, shattering the windows of her bedroom, putting holes in the lawn-ornament cars. The police came, shrugged, filed a report, and left. They never found the guy. Hoodwink just put some duct tape over the holes and kept going.
And the house itself? It’s trying to kill them.
The plumbing backed up. Every time they ran the washing machine, the water would flood the laundry room. She put a note on the machine: Do Not Use. But in a house of eleven illiterates, nobody reads the notes. Someone ran a load while doing the dishes. Boom. A foot of standing water. Now they live in a mildew kingdom.
I asked her about the rent. “My first husband bought the house,” she says. “I assume he’s making payments.” She assumes. She doesn’t know.
But here is the kicker. The piece de resistance.
The electricity is off.
They owe the power company $4,000. So the grid cut them loose.
There are eleven adults living in that house. Eleven able-bodied human beings. And not one of them—not a single goddamn one—can scrape together fifty bucks to keep the lights on.
They are living by candlelight and flashlight, wading through mildew, dodging bullets, and waiting for the next disaster.
And the disaster arrived in the form of her youngest son. A high schooler.
For four months, this kid had been bringing a gun to school in his backpack, trying to find a buyer. Word got out. A group of other feral kids jumped him, beat him senseless, stole the backpack, and then—for good measure—ran him over with a car. Nipped his leg, sent him crashing into a tree.
He goes to the hospital. The next day, he goes back to school. The school, rightfully terrified, does a cavity search. They call Hoodwink. She doesn’t have a car, so she walks two miles to the school, ready to fight. Not to discipline her son. No. To yell at the teachers for accusing him.
“Where is the gun?” she asks him later.
“I threw it in a bush,” he says.
Case closed. No discipline. Just, “We need to find the boys who ran him over.”
I’ve been dabbling with this woman for four months. I haven’t trained her to be a “Tantra master.” I haven’t trained her to do anything other than open the door on Tuesdays.
And every week, she gets bigger.
She’s gained forty pounds since I met her. She’s stress-eating her way into an early grave. She doesn’t take her blood pressure medication. She survives on a diet of Tequila mixed with Dr. Pepper—a cocktail that sounds like it was invented in a prison toilet—and refuses to eat meat.
She is depressed. She has no money. She sits in her dark, candle-lit, mildew-smelling house, watching a TV that runs on a generator or a prayer, getting chubbier and chubbier.
It’s not just a “bad life.” It is a study in entropy.
She counsels me sometimes. She talks about the burden of watching her grandkids. Her son just got out of prison. Her other son is heading into prison. Her youngest is an arms dealer. Her daughters are joyriding felons.
And she’s just… there. Floating in the center of the toilet bowl, waiting for the flush.
I keep her around because she’s low-hanging fruit. Because she’s easy.
But mostly? I keep her around because she is a living, breathing reminder of exactly what happens when you let the chaos win.
She is the Ghost of Tucson Future. And every Tuesday, I look at her, and I pack my bags for Vietnam a little faster.
