Summer was drawing to a close, and once again I needed to decide what to do with my life. I opted to take two classes at Pima Community College just to get my parents off my back and maintain my allowance. I was still living at my parents house in the foothills near Campbell Avenue and Skyline Drive, commuting to the downtown area everyday in the VW Super Beetle I had received for my sixteenth birthday. (Man, I loved that car.)

One class was Creative Writing and the other the History Of The Southwest. I figured both of these would be a cakewalk – which they turned out to be. I continued to visit Don Pedro and A.C., while still going to see punk shows and hanging out downtown and on Fourth Avenue with Jorge and the sisters – whose names I now recall were Dana and Penelope. I got to know most of the guys in the popular bands at that time: the Pedestrians, the Suspects; and later the Serfers, the Giant Sandworms, and the Phantom Limbs. Jorge was my passport into the music scene and the after-parties, and Dana and Penny were our constant companions. I even began to develop a "thing" with Penny (the blonde one). A.C. was my dream, but Penny was the irresistible reality.

You knew that you had made it socially when you were invited into the ladies room at Tumbleweeds. Girls would pull band members in there with them, and all manner of scandalous behavior would ensue. You might hear coke snorting in the stalls or see a pair of fishnet-clad knees on the floor. My first visit was at Penny’s behest, and I looked around wide-eyed at the chicks fixing their make-up in the mirror and gossiping with each other. As Penny took my ladies-room virginity that night, I noticed that she was dressed much as Ana Socorro dressed for school – the plaid skirt, the white blouse, and the knee socks – but for very different reasons. It was an object lesson in post-modernity, the sincere versus the ironic.

It was like the second-hand work shirts that guys would wear to shows, with name patches like Ernie or Gil. But there was this one guy who wore his real work shirt with his own name on it. He was a mechanic by day and handed out hundreds of stickers for B-12 oil additive. The stickers wound up on guitars and amps and became a sort of cool code word. So many layers of irony – co-opting the ordinary and making it hip or risqué. But I must admit that when Penny knelt in front of me, I responded profoundly to the corruption of her innocent trappings – and she had perhaps the most lascivious smile I have ever seen. And no, I didn’t think of Ana Socorro while all of this was happening – in case you were wondering.

Jorge seemed mystified by my visits to Don Pedro and A.C. He understood my attraction to Ana Socorro but thought Don Pedro was just a crazy old man. Jorge also believed that if Raul Castellano discovered my visits, I would be forbidden to return -- with a threat of violence if necessary. My friendship with A.C. would be seen as a sort of back-door threat against the family, and the strained relations between Raul and Don Pedro would get even worse. Jorge said there were rumors that Raul had beaten Don Pedro during an argument not long after A.C.’s mother had died. Raul had thrown Don Pedro down the stairs, resulting in the spinal injury that confined him to a wheelchair. If not for Ana Socorro, Don Pedro would have been banished from the house entirely. As it was, Don Pedro was moved into the back of the house where the servants lived, and he and Raul maintained an icy peace.

One of my projects for the Southwest History class was to record the oral history of a longtime Tucson resident. These histories would be archived at the Arizona State Historical Society, which had just begun this program. There was a list of suggested people who had volunteered to be interviewed, but I knew right away who the subject of my project would be. Don Pedro loved being interviewed on tape, and I soon gathered enough information about his personal history in Tucson. But Don Pedro went off on plenty of autobiographical tangents, covering periods of his college experience in England, his visits to Europe and Asia, his childhood in Guadalajara, and his days as a stamp dealer in Mexico City. I ended up with many hours of recordings which I have transcribed over the years. I turned over the Tucson-related material to the Historical Society, but the other material I keep stored in a filing cabinet with the intention of someday writing a biography. Since I doubt I will ever get around to this task, here are some particularly salient passages from Don Pedro’s oral histories.