Goldberg: By the time I get to Yuma

By Tod Goldberg

I'm walking the yard at the Yuma Territorial Prison trying to figure out how I would have fared as a 19th century crook when a man walks up behind me and whistles through his teeth. From the sound of it, I'd say the teeth in question are all in the back.

"Last time I was here," the man says, "they still had bloodstains on the walls in the cells. 'Course, that was back in 1968. Guess they don't want to highlight that anymore."

I turn around and see that the man is about 70 and has a malleable cast to his face, as if he's half-man/half shrinky-dink and has the ability to periodically pop himself into the oven to rearrange his features. My thoughts about his teeth turn out to be fairly true as well: He's missing four front teeth, which is always a sure sign of a life lived wrong.

Across the yard, I spy my wife and her aunt checking out a refurbished cell that has been made to look exactly like it did in 1879, minus, of course, the sweating and screaming prisoners who were housed outdoors in the broiling Arizona desert prison. Mr. No Teeth follows my gaze and then makes a noise between a grunt and a belch.

"Now what we got there is some primetime viewing," he says.

"That's my wife," I say.

"Which one?"

The safe answer here is absent to me. It departed, along with my good judgment, the moment I got into my car (along with my wife and her aunt) and drove across the desert in search of...Cracker Barrel. For the uninitiated, Cracker Barrel is a chain restaurant that serves "down-home" food of a distinctly Southern variety, which is a long way of saying you get biscuits with every meal and the words "bagel" and "lox" are strictly verboten. About three times every year, my wife and her aunt make a pilgrimage to Yuma to eat the food they loved growing up in the South and to, I suppose, take in the sights. I'd never gone on this journey before because, well, I just don't drive several hours for food, unless the food is accompanied by hot girl-on-girl action.

For my wife and her aunt, however, Cracker Barrel represents a life they already lived, which then opens up avenues of breakfast conversation that consist of five basic storylines:

1. The time my wife's aunt got stoned and did something nefarious with a drag queen named Greg.

2. The time my wife, as a child, did something and ended up getting left outside all day by the same stoned aunt.

3. The time my wife's mother got involved with that church group and tried to save the world from people like my wife's stoned aunt.

4. That time when my wife's grandfather accidentally killed the family pet(s).

5. The time my wife's stoned aunt was arrested for _______. (My wife's aunt is now a productive, nonstoned member of society, with all her teeth to boot.)

Knowing that the conversations of the day were likely to hinge on these themes, I decided to do a little searching online to see what there was to do in Yuma between meals and soft-focus Southern Gothic memories. What I learned was that, officially, there is nothing to do. Oh, there's a movie theater and a Barnes & Noble and even a Cold Stone Creamery, your basic signs of intelligent life, but other than that, the town's enduring commercial claim to fame appears to be an Old Town section that is mostly filled with "antique" (read: used clothing) shops and young men on skateboards. In fact, unemployment numbers for the city generally vacillate between 15 and 35 percent, which is the legal definition of living in a shithole, ergo, the kind of place where a prison is the main tourist attraction.

It's noon now and my day has consisted of the following activities: driving through nowhere towns like El Centro and Westmoreland; thinking about the wisdom behind Golden Corral, a chain restaurant that offers all-you-can-eat discount steaks; eating the Barrel's vaunted eggs and grits, except I didn't eat the grits because they taste a little too much like dirt; and, now, standing in the middle of a prison talking to an old man who seems to have a strange yen for both my wife and her aunt--two women, it should be noted, who have suddenly re-adopted their long-lost Southern accents after their gravy-heavy breakfasts.

"I'm actually married to both of them," I say, because I've decided to make the most of my stay in Yuma. I've decided that even though the food at Cracker Barrel is sitting in my gullet like a lead zeppelin (with lunch still to come), I'm going to at least enjoy myself in whatever twisted way I can and maybe create a few memories of my own, or, perhaps for the man with the dental issues. To misquote Sherman Alexie, this is what it will mean to say Yuma, Arizona, for both of us.

"No kidding?" the old man says.

"And they're related," I say. "Aunt and niece."