WARNING: This conversation may not be appropriate for all listeners.
Journalist Richard Grant has a fascination with transience. Over the course of his long career as a travel writer, he’s explored parts of the world that seem to attract people in transition, including the Mississippi Delta, East Africa and now, Arizona.
In his new book, "A Race to the Bottom of Crazy," Grant turns the camera on himself, documenting his recent return to Tucson, where he first lived when he was in his 20s. The book chronicles his transformation from a rebellious young writer into a doting father, and his rediscovery of the state where he found his voice as a writer.
Along the way, he profiles a rogues’ gallery of infamous Arizonans — some of whom, as Grant recently told The Show, weren’t cut out for life in the desert.
Full conversation
RICHARD GRANT: David Grundman was, I know he had, I think he'd done some time in jail. He was a drug dealer who had ripped off his own customers back in, I think New York state. And then he drifted out to Phoenix.
He was working in a restaurant and he one day with his friend packed a shotgun and some shells and they drove out into the desert. And he blasted away at this saguaro cactus and one large limb of the saguaro cactus detached from the gunfire and simultaneously impaled and crushed him to death. He's sort of a Arizona anti-hero.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah, there's a few of those in the book. But, if I may, we, we see this dynamic of how capable one is of existing in one's surroundings echoed throughout the book. And there's a sequence that I, I really loved where you go off on a reporting trip to the Sierra Madre mountains. And when you get there, you encounter this culture of lawlessness that seems to really test the limits of what you feel like you can handle.
GRANT: Yeah. Well, I definitely found my limits in the Sierra Madre. So the Sierra Madres is kind of like this wild West that exists on Arizona's back doorstep, and it begins just south of the border. You can drive down to Douglas, you can see the mountains there.
And it's one of the biggest production areas in the world for heroin. And when I was there, they were flying in tons of coke from Colombia into these little airstrips. And it had a phenomenally high murder rate. People say it was about drugs, but it, a lot of it was about sort of wounded masculine pride. People were getting killed for refusing to have drinks with other men.
And after a couple of months, I was hunted through the woods at night by these two kind of Mexican hillbillies and was very, very lucky to get out of there. I was running from trucks through the woods and running across the river from these guys who appeared like they wanted to kill me.
DINGMAN: I mean, that's not the only run-in that you have with outlaws and kind of outlaw culture in this book. And it seems to me that one of the things you're writing about is not just yourself, but also why Arizona is such a haven for both of those things, outlaws and outlaw culture.
What do you think it is about our state that, that makes that shoe, or perhaps cowboy boot, fit so well?
GRANT: Well, I mean, it's, it was sort of there in the history, but it's also there in the mythology that Arizona in particular is, is mythologized, kind of rugged individualism. Like no one tells me what to do.
And I remember I was living off the grid down near the border in a, in a, near a place called Arivaca. And the county wanted to put in a sheriff's substation. And the town almost to a man and woman rose up and opposed the idea of having law in their community even though they were kind of desperate bunch of artists and cowboys and drug smugglers and vegetarians with AK-47s.
But all of them were united in this belief that they didn't want, they didn't want a share of substation. I remember one guy got up in the meeting. He said, “a man can only stand so much law.”
DINGMAN: I'm really glad you brought up Arivaca because the Arivaca sequence is fantastic. And one of the things that made me wonder is how much, when you were living in places like this, even though you were there to report on lawlessness or, or sometimes just to be adjacent to it while you were writing other things, if you ever thought of yourself as a kind of outlaw?
GRANT: I wanted to live with as little policing around me as possible and as much personal freedom as I, as I could find. That was very important to me when I was younger. And that's one of the reasons why I went to live in Arivaca. It wasn't really to write about the place, it was to, it was to live there, kind of on the margins of society that appealed to me very much at that stage of my life.
And I was very happy there living off the grid on this ranch 8 miles from Arivaca, couldn't see another light at night.
DINGMAN: Yeah. There's a really moving sequence in the book where you go back there many years later, and it's gotten much more lawful than it was when you were there. And, and you seem quite crestfallen at that.
GRANT: I shouldn't, I shouldn't be, but I just had such vivid memories, especially this one bar the La Gitana. I mean, the kind of classic La Gitana story, there's this guy named Chance that I used to be friends with. And he went in there with this long duster coat with a sawed -off shotgun in the inside pocket and he flung open his coat and the shotgun jumped out and landed butt first on the floor of the bar and discharged into his armpit. And then this tattooed arm like fell on the floor. And you could always see the blood stain of that arm on the floor. And there was a biker named Mugger who would pull out people's teeth on the, on the pool table with a pair of pliers. It was, it was that kind of bar.
But when I went back it was, it, it had all been cleaned up and there was families eating there and it was just a real shock more than anything. I was just so shocked.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, speaking of, of outlaws, there's one in particular who plays the role, I think in the book of sort of like the patron saint. And I'm thinking here of Chuck Bowden.
GRANT: I think he's the most interesting writer that Arizona has. I mean, he was originally from Chicago, but he basically came, came to Arizona, I think, as a teenager. And just unlike anybody else that I've ever met.
He was cranky. He was brilliant. He was like, enormously well read, enormously intelligent, erratic. He lived, he lived in squalor, one of those people that never went into mass production. I've never met anybody else like him. And he just helped me out a lot when I was starting out as a writer and I will be eternally grateful for that.
DINGMAN: It's clear, you know, from the book, how influential he was to you in terms of the types of stories that he pursued. And it seems like that influenced the types of stories that, that you wanted to pursue. And he says, at one point, you know, you ask him why he wants to go cover this really horrific cartel violence, because it's so dangerous. And he says, well, like I'm a reporter, it's, it's my job not to turn away.
And there's a lot of quotes and anecdotes from him like that in the book, but my favorite is quote, “it's going to be a bloody mess, but we have to believe in the future. Every bird on earth is going to mate and build a nest next spring.”
GRANT: Yeah, that's, that's just Chuck all over the place because he had this very dystopian vision of the future. It was basically going to be a clash between limited resources and unlimited human appetites. And this was gonna reach, reach a kind of violent inflection point.
But he also, he wasn't, it didn't make him pessimistic or depressed. He just, he just had such a love of, of life in the world. He really disapproved of people that just gave up and didn't, didn't fight for the future and didn't believe in the future.
DINGMAN: You know, speaking of all these aphorisms and quotes that Chuck bestowed upon you throughout your life, you say that Chuck is the person who convinced you that writing matters. Why does it matter to you?
GRANT: I think if you've got any talent for it, especially non-fiction writing that it's incumbent upon you to just try your hardest to describe the way things are partly just to record how they are. Partly, maybe hopefully to help other people understand things a little more deeply. I feel like I've got just enough talent that I ought to put in the work. I guess that's what, what Chuck persuaded me of and then it does matter in some small way.
