It started with a cat named Queso
20 years ago I bought a house in Puerto Penasco, Mexico – 4 hours southwest of Phoenix at the top of the Gulf of California. The house was named Casa Victoria. The man who built it for Victoria was named John Haskins. Haskins sold it 2 years later because Victoria did not like stairs. That seems like really poor planning on Haskins’ part. And, 20 years later Haskins’ curse has lingered. Casa Victoria has been a lovely excursion but a terrible investment. I am struggling to get 80% of my capital out. Phoenix has doubled in size, Rocky Point has doubled in size, and my cute casita has somehow sadly lost value as new condos have exploded around it like the chuparosa and globe mallow and yellow brittlebrush wildflowers in a Sonoran desert spring after a wet winter. Neither Victoria nor any potential buyer wants to climb Casa Victoria’s tiled stairs. *sigh*.
My investment acumen may be cursed, but, I bought the house for the promise of softness and water in the desert. That logic is unassailable. The Sonoran desert is an Iron Maiden. Everything pokes and stings and bruises. You can’t go outside to play without carefully disciplining every limb, every lean, every wave of your hand, every flick of your finger – do not touch. ¡No lo toca!!! In Arizona every feint brush up against everything will scratch, damage or wound you. It aches and itches for days as your body repels the intrusion and withstands the foreign bodies.
In Baja, there is a cactus called the cardon, which is a southern cousin to Arizona’s saguaro. But nastier. The cardon has a toxin on its spines. I’ve never been able to confirm this by science, but every biking friend I’ve met in Cabo swears its true. The cardon’s toxin can cause numbness, shortness of breath, sickness. I thought I was imagining an acupuncture needle straight into a nerve when i brushed a cardon with my arm in my own backyard while picking up dog poo. It triggered me instantly. It throbbed for two days. A friend told me he was laid up for a week and his knee was swollen for 3 months after he tapped into a cardon. I kicked a cardon on a mountain bike ride, and as I felt the searing slinking its way up my leg like crawling radiation, I reached down and ripped the spines out. Immediate relief followed.
A cardon spine lodged in my knuckle – not an uncommon splinter for a mountain biker – and my body formed a quarter-inch granuloma around it that slipped and slid across my finger for weeks. It was supremely motivated to keep relocating to a nastier, more pernicious home. I couldn’t squeeze it, dig it, slice it or pummel it out of from under my skin. I paid Mayo Clinic far too much money for a hand surgeon to scalpel it out of me. It was a ball of hardened puss that smelled so bad I nearly rolled off the operating table. Inside the foul nugget was the tiniest black point of a needle. The surgeon told me the cardon’s singular evolutionary goal was to kill me.
Sometimes, many times, I hate the desert. Regardless of the breathtaking sunsets, the Instagram moments, the bewitching visions that are real and have been for eons before AI – the desert is still your mortal enemy. It wants to murder you every day. Living in Phoenix is fundamentally dysfunctional. The only sane thing about Phoenix is that zombie viruses will have an extremely difficult time spreading. Our COVID spread was massively tempered because the Phoenix lifestyle is holistically blended to the outside on patios and pathways and palapas and few four-walled buildings. The zombies will desiccate in three to five days, especially if the outbreak is in summer. How can they chase you when their gooey eyeballs evaporate? Unfortunately, many Phoenicians will still die of dehydration while cordyceps destroys the rest of the world 28 days later and the water processing plants 500 miles upriver on the Colorado Plateau fail to pump water down to the Valley of the Sun.
In Phoenix, the heat melts you. It can feel in August like your cellular structure is collapsing day by day. No matter how much water you drink, your pee turns gold. Heatstroke and goldrush fever overtake you as you believe the desert made your pee turn to liquid gold, and how can we harvest such a glimmering brilliance? Your brain isn’t right. These transformations are only for candles or spice hunters in Dune. Good people are not meant to live here in Phoenix. If you open your oven on Thanksgiving, sit on the floor and take off the potholders, and lean into the furnace the raw blast of turkey smothers you in blankets of unremitting, uncaring suffocation and offgasses. It sucks the air from your lungs, your body creeps towards catching fire from the inside. Years ago in my 20’s, when I worked in a brewery, they taught us what NOT to do by having us stick our heads in a fermenter full of carbon dioxide. The response was immediate – my throat constricted into itself and I couldn’t think logically of escape. My brain clinched, C02 burned my eyes, my nostrils, it triggered an “I’m dying go to the light” response and I peacefully surrendered. The head brewer pulled me out by my belt.
I will never screw around with the prospect of breathable air again. I have limited empathy for people dying on Everest after paying $50,000 to be hauled up to the Death Zone at 25,000 feet above sea level. I have NO desire to learn to scuba. At least working at the brewery I got minimum wage and all the free beer I could drink.
Phoenix heat partners with cactus in its murderous intentions. It withers your willpower to fight back. Every trip to the mailbox, every walk through the yard to unclog a sprinkler head or empty the pool skimmer or take out the garbage bin. Every time you load the trunk or unload the groceries. Every time you say hello to your neighbor. Every walk from anywhere, to anywhere, for months on end, no matter how brief – you burn. People put on sunscreen to go to Target.
The mere visage of water is a narcotic to Arizona summers. When the process of getting in the pool itself is overwhelming and untenable – the burning on your shoulders, the frying feet, the moments of fast heat turning too quickly into terror j. The belief of water in Phoenix is enough to keep going on and on through another brutal August day, another Chernobyl day, another SPF 50 day that lasts from 4:30am to 8:30pm day after day after day.
I’ve lived in Phoenix for 30 years. I’ve heard Alaskans and Minnesotans go bat-shit crazy in February and execute their families over the smallest of insults — the paper towel roll being empty and soup being too lumpy. Chopping them up like Jack Nicholson in The Shining then eating soup and shouting “I’M SORRY FOR NOT RELOADING THE PAPER TOWELS!!!!“. I don’t approve, but, I understand. Phoenicians lose it completely by September. If we are not hiding out in matinees at movie theaters, we are starting fights in line at Chipotle or crying in the arms of total strangers at the powerfully air conditioned grocery store. I will shop for cottage cheese for hours on Labor Day just to revel in the dairy aisle.
In 2004, before even being a dad, I knew I wanted to give the beach to my daughters, where we could drive 4 hours anytime we wanted and be in the ocean. Water. It would be fundamental to their healthy social and emotional development as children living in Hell. Summer, Spring, Autumn and Winter — we had our beach. We had water. We could change our latitude away from cactus spines and heat and rock and asphalt. I took my girls to Rocky Point 100 times over 15 years.
And yet, Mexico is different. Its a beach, and there is sand, but its a different place. The rules and lack thereof, the stray dogs, the speed bumps and stop signs and traffic signals all at the same intersections, the fear of credit cards, the buggies on the dunes, the trash everywhere, the fresh birria rolls in the gas stations — its Mexico. People say “tengo hambre” and offer to skin your palm trees for $3. Workers haul cement up cinder block walls bucket by bucket. The wealth of the Americans, and the well-off Mexicans, sits side by side with mostly decent folks trying to get by in an evolving half-modern economy. Empathy and discomfort is its real gift to white Americans. There is so much more to crossing the border and stumbling through “hablo un poco espanol” at a corner asadero. It is not Phoenix. It is not Oceanside. Its Mexico and its unsimilar. Sometimes tourons post on Facebook about going out in the morning to a restaurant for desayuno, and their outrage at no syrup at the table for their pancakes. Mexico is not America, they eat tortillas not pancakes. Thank god the ugly Americans fade into the background if you stay off social media. I didn’t realize this change-of-attitude at the time we bought the house. I thought it was a cheaper, mellower version of San Diego. This was the best mistake I ever made, for only $60,000 in 2005.
Here is my best Mexico story. There will be many more in this book, and they are all really good. But this is my absolute best
In 2012 when the girls were 3 and 6, a cat appeared outside our door, making a nuisance of himself, like desperate cats do. Cats uniquely grasp the fine line between empowered avoidance and furious begs for charity.
Whether the kitten was scooped up or inched in to my arms willingly, I could not tell the difference. He was happy and eating cheese within moments. The girls named this tiny tabby “El Sombrero de Queso Pequeno Rivera.”
I confess that I provided the verbiage and, *ahem*, nudged the naming decision along towards consensus. I have since learned that this name is not grammatically proper Spanish, it should be pequena. It doesn’t change the genius of his name.
But, kitten names must be mere morsels, wisps of motion. Until they become magnificent adult cats with drooping tubby bellies, jowls, and emotionally reactive whipping tails. If his name starts muy grande it might negotiate down to Eduardo. Or Jesus. Or Arpaio. So many difficult choices. Like how to explain to 6-year-old Genevieve her role in our smuggling cartel to get him back across the border.
Me: You’re going to have your dvd player on, really loud, with ‘Bolt’ or ‘Tom & Jerry’.
G: What did you say about the bag?
Me: Don’t think about the bag. Think about your dvd, and laughing really loud. But not too loud.
G: He won’t like it in the bag
Me: Play it like Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad.
G: He won’t like it in the bag
They say a conspiracy of one is the only safe conspiracy, and anecdotally I completely agree. G is fatal to a conspiracy, but we had grand fun scheming about it for 3 whole days. That we pulled it off is a tragic indictment of the Customs Bureau and Border Patrol. If they can’t stop a kitten and kindergartner giggling babbling ‘there’s nothing in the bag, bro‘, we are destined for another fentanyl epidemic or a million anchor babies.
I should start smuggling bricks for the cartel.
When i reflect on stories like this, I think I am brilliant to fabricate these situations out of the pieces life pitter-patters in front me. I believe I am an artist and dreamer and my kids are blessed to have me. Sometimes I feel like I’m a pessimist, ungrateful, suspicious, too eager to join a battle and throw a punch. Sometimes I consider myself wary and prepared and justified, a responsible dad and defender with clear eyes about the threats to my family. Why can’t every day be like this day? Maybe I don’t deserve Mexico or this life. Maybe I’ve been too truculent, too selfish, too wrong, defended too hard that I have turned hard. The hard part of writing is the mandatory introspection to tell an authentic story. Ideally I draw on the memory of this kitten day every day, see myself as loving and grateful, filled with charity and simple warmth for a little life and my daughters and a wonderful country.
Mexico is different. That is its real gift to white Americans. There is so much more to crossing the border and stumbling through Spanish at an asadero.
Originally published: January 30, 2026
Last updated: July 23, 2026