Somehow, the night just doesnt feel complete until the hot blonde in the "I ♥ Dick" tee shirt bends over, peels down the back of her jeans and asks the tuxedoed Richard Cheese, "Sign my ass?" It's 10 o'clock on a Friday night in Las Vegas -- actually, in nearby...
Playwright Oscar Wilde once quipped, "Work is the curse of the drinking class," and we're inclined to agree with the swishy scribe, especially when it comes to this year's St. Patrick's Day. Since the annual exercise in alcohol excess falls on a weekday, you'd better have a sick day up...
Art Casillas trolls East Van Buren Street for hookers four nights a week. Dressed in an untucked tee shirt and jeans, Casillas looks like he might be a Little League coach. Maybe that's why there's something initially unnerving about the ease with which he can rattle off a menu of...
A parade of pedestrians streams down Roosevelt Street on a warm First Friday evening in April, bringing life to an urban stretch that is desolate on most other nights of the month. Like colorful spring blossoms sprouting up from barren plots of desert, the dusty sidewalk and parking lot next...
In a converted stand-alone garage in the backyard of a midtown Phoenix home, an artist saunters in to his 20-year retrospective exhibition. The exterior of the garage-cum-gallery is painted eclectically in hundreds of exploding colors by the artist -- an eerily omniscient eyeball, a village of leaning buildings, three-dimensional arrows...
Ethan, Will and others who were there still talk about the scene that night. Two girls — a stripper and her friend — walked arm in arm through the living room of a villa at an East Valley resort hotel. Braless in matching bright halter tops, the girls wove their...
HELEN HESTENES, OWNER AND CURATOR of the Icehouse, can find raw material for creative inspiration in just about anything. Take breast cancer, for instance. Eager to explore the artistic aspects of the disease, Hestenes once invited the public to participate in an installation called "The Invisible Woman." An interactive exhibition,...
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...
Saint Travis, hear our prayer. Patron of all-American boys, role models and virginal heartthrobs, protector of sweet-swinging lefty hitters, first baggers, ambidextrous athletes, lead us in the basepaths of righteousness in His game's sake. Step to the plate and knock one into the cheap seats. Deliver us from the ignominies...
Harry F. Strong has these scraps of names, events, memories and deals, and as we sit in the semi-darkened living room, Mexican voices lap against the silence. Strong is in his late 60s, and the cancer eats his colon, liver and lungs and, most likely, other organs. By nature he...
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...
People wearing latex gloves sit on the floor of a west Phoenix living room, pulling artifacts from the life of Roger Somers Rudin out of large garbage bags and stacking them in leaning piles. Court documents. Photographs. Church records. Financial ledgers. Religious tracts. Articles of clothing. Nearly all of it...
Before going to bed at night, Richie Blandon usually took his school clothes to the kitchen sink. He washed the blue slacks and the white shirt as best he could. Richie never quite got the hang of planning out how long his one set of school clothes took to dry...
It's a balmy night in June 1995. Petty felon Thomas Glen Campbell slouches in the cab of a borrowed pickup truck north of Casa Grande. As he puffs on a cigarette, a helicopter drones low overhead. He gets spooked. He has no driver's license, there's a warrant out for his...
It's the final round at the Doral-Ryder Open, and Gary McCord is scatting. His solo begins as Peter Jacobsen, the hottest player on the PGA Tour, eyes a putt on the 12th green. "He's in that ever-present Zone that these guys get into once in a while," the CBS golf...
Rave I: Ghost in the Machine, Icehouse, November 4, 1995 The beat. The beat. The beat. I can feel it through the concrete and steel from 300 yards away, like the pulse of some adrenalized titan going wild within the walls of the warehouse before me. It's jackhammer fast--at least...
