Scott Stanley wants to show you photos of dead Mexicans. Some of the bodies photographed in American deserts are wasted and burned after lying for days as buzzard meat. Others, found sooner, are less unsettling. One is of a 17-year-old girl whose face, except for the doll’s-eye stare, belongs in…
Outside the Center for the New Age in Sedona, Oak Creek babbled like an inner child as rental SUVs on Highway 179 roared like angry parents. Above the din, professional healer Daniel Rain attempted to alleviate my chronic sciatic nerve pain via a technique billed as “didgeridoo chakra realignment,” which…
4.26.99 Cris Kirkwood 1029 W. 17th Street Tempe Cris– You know me, but you’ve smoked so much coke since we last talked I should probably reintroduce myself. I’m the guy who will write your obituary, unless you stop this mad jig to death’s fiddle. I imagine what’s going on inside…
I’ve got one for you: Two guys in wraparound shades with “Wetback Power” gang tattoos saunter past a Maricopa County sheriff’s volunteer posse member. Both are openly armed with pistols and combat shotguns. The weekend cop looks ’em over and says, “Have a nice Sunday, guys.” It was all part…
I’m watching a snuff film, and it’s hard-core. The snuffers–there’s a pack of them, male and female–are in uniforms. Scott Norberg, the man who will be killed on film, has blond hair, jeans, no shirt. He is slumped down, back against a wall. He looks confused. It begins. A fat…
It was one night in Arizona’s rave scene. One night of glow sticks, blow pops and pacifiers. Of whispered lies, sabotage and cops with shotguns. One night of cuddle puddles and the best dance music on the planet. Of stink bombs, broken windows and gambles gone bad. One night of…
As far as we know, the panhandlers downtown are, in fact, not armed with Mac-10s. We’ll give that up now. Last week, though, anyone who called New Times to ask if our April 1 cover story was a hoax received this standard, if indirect, response: “Real homeless people, real guns.”…
Manny Marco, unemployed vagabond, tenderly loaded the last of 30 9-millimeter bullets into the spring-action, extended clip for his new Mac-10–a semiautomatic assault weapon capable of throwing rounds as fast as Marco can blink. “That’s very good, Manny,” coaxed Arm the Homeless firearms instructor Pete Whippit. “Now, insert the clip…
Ronald Roe is a wife-swapper. The 31-year-old psychiatric case worker for a Valley hospital enjoys, on frequent occasion, watching his wife copulate with other men. And Ronald’s wife, a software engineer, fondly encourages him to have sex with other men’s wives, usually while she’s in the same room, having sex…
This mystery begins with the five known, credible witnesses to a car crash. The scene was north Phoenix. The time was 1:43 in the morning. Robert Nettles was on his back patio, facing Cactus Road, when he heard the chilling scream of tires on pavement. Nettles told police he looked…
If you want to get in the game at the Winter Music Conference–the electronic dance music industry and club culture’s annual mecca in Miami–then you have to be where the players are. Poolside. Specifically, poolside on the opulent deck outside the Fontainebleau Hotel, Winter Music’s social nexus and command center…
In the classic film It’s a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart’s character is given the opportunity to see what would have happened to his community if he had never been born. Without him, the quiet tree-lined downtown of family-oriented Bedford Falls becomes the garish, loud and decadent main street of Pottersville,…
The phone is no friend of Curt Kirkwood’s. Too often, the tidings it bears are foul. He calls them “incomings from Tempe.” They go like this: Your brother’s wife overdosed this morning; she’s dead. Your brother got busted again last night, and he told the cops he was you. Your…
Tempe street artist, avid cyclist and self-made celebrity Frankie Martinez, known to most as Elvis, died October 8 after one of his lungs collapsed. This came as little surprise to any of the thousands who recognized him or the few who actually knew him, because Elvis always looked pitifully sick,…
The City of Tempe is about to serve notice on the “crusties,” or homeless youths, who flock to Mill Avenue for the winter: “Watch your butts. Literally.” The Tempe City Council, in conjunction with the business district’s management company, Downtown Tempe Community Inc., is preparing to pass a municipal “sidewalk…
The referee takes half a fresh lime, pushes it between his fingers to bring out the juice, then runs the pulp along each blade to make them shine. They’re called Mexican short knives. One and a half inches of finely honed steel, curved like a scimitar and leather-strapped to the…
One hundred metal folding chairs sit in neat rows on the stark, tile floor of the Tucson union hall of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Seventy-nine are empty. The rest are occupied by a mix of hard-boiled blue-collar workers, aging hippies and a handful of young activists from the…
Basketball in Nogales, Sonora, is like football in west Texas, and Hector’s got game. Homeboy busts threes like a blackjack dealer. Sporting a new pair of Gary Payton signature Nikes–$140 in Tucson, “no counterfeit bullshit”–Hector went five for eight from downtown in the city league basketball championship in May. Downtown…
Shift change, San Ramon Industrial Park. Nogales, Sonora. Tuesday, 4:59 p.m. She wants out, the short, pretty girl in the short, pretty sundress. Out of this factory, out of this city, out of this grind her life has become. Right now, though, just out of this factory will do. Forty…
The Mexican-American border is a virtual cesspool and breeding ground for infectious disease. –Council on Scientific Affairs of the American Medical Association, 1990 Nature respects geographic boundaries, not political ones. Nogales Wash originates about 8.6 kilometers south of the Mexican-American border, fed by natural springs. The perennial wash travels north,…
Nogales, Sonora Virginia’s a bad girl, and she’s good at it. Eighteen years old, with a nightclub walk that purrs. Long, auburn hair. Tall and sleek, with cinnamon-sprinkled skin. She could be a model if she weren’t a factory worker. It’s Friday night. Party time. Virginia clocked out two hours…
Two months ago, celebrity wardrobe stylist Philip Block addressed an audience of clothing marketers, retailers, buyers and designers at Magic, the U.S. fashion industry’s annual summit in Las Vegas. “In the era of the too-perfect supermodel,” he said, “young consumers relate more and more to performers who look like them,…
