I'm in Phoenix, Arizona - not for the Superbowl, like the 100,000 other people who flew in this weekend, but I've got my reasons - and I'm paging through the latest issue of The Arizona Republic. The paper's a lot like the community it serves: glossy, nuttily conservative, and oddly punch-drunk.
Friday, January 26, 1996, an article on page B2:
Culprits in Rock Barrage Elude Chandler Police Surveillance
Rocks and chunks of concrete larger than softballs have been raining on a Chandler neighborhood, pounding roofs and smashing into cars. Police have posted surveillance and have increased patrols, but the rain of rocks
continues. Neighborhood Block Watches have been able to do nothing more than collect the rocks - as many as 30 after an attack Tuesday night. Residents believe some device is being used to hurl the missiles.
But here's the coverage I'm looking for, on page D7:
Rampaging Robots Ready to Wreak Havoc Downtown
Some 30 tons of crashing, fire-spitting robotic machinery will perform at 11 PM Saturday at the Icehouse, 429 West Jackson Street, Phoenix. Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) of San Francisco will present its "Million Inconsiderate Experiments," with machine art tromping, stomping and shooting flames. The show, under the direction of artist Mark Pauline, has toured Europe and has been performed in Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle.
I'm pretty sure I can solve this mystery in Chandler, if the authorities are interested. Put out an APB for a scruffy male adolescent, a bright kid who sits at the family table sullenly radiating poltergeist vibrations and bending fork tines with his molars. He has a deep, secret interest in junkyards, whence he found those hinges, bolts, one-by-twelves, bungee cords, and powerful springs. Look for this kid, and while you're at it, look for his prankster friends.
In the meantime, SRL capo Mark Pauline, the 42-year-old adult upgrade of a deeply alienated teenage techie, stands in an abandoned Phoenix railway yard. I watch as Pauline checks a soldered connection, taps at a pressure gauge, steps back, confers with an associate in a set of coveralls even filthier and more tattered than his own, then presses a handheld switch.
A couple feet away, one of the few V-1 jet engines in private ownership comes to sudden life. FWOOOOOOM! A dragon tongue of misappropriated Nazi vengeance licks the desert sky. A pause, a few words of consultation, Mark couldn't be more blasé.
FWOOOM!!! BLADDABLODDABLADDABLODDA - KA-BLAM! Waves of heat kick up spinning torrents of yellow dust. Half-combusted fuel explodes deep within the iron throat of the jet, producing a fiery belch that is not merely loud but insanely loud, industrial-accident loud. The temperature in the freight yard, somewhere in the low 40s, soars at once to a toasty 90 degrees...
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