THIS GAVE SWEET just the respite from the smell of hairspray and local news that he was looking for, so he grabbed the bottle of "Macho Hombre" from Ditts and crammed himself back into his red Metropolitan. He needed some answers, and when it came to pharmaceutical fun, he knew the best place to find the 411.
Moments later he was cruising Toole Avenue, on the lookout for architecturally impossible haircuts and facial hardware. Turning past a giant mural of cows fighting superheroes, he found the barely converted warehouse studio of Joe Captain and Josephine Twinkie, performance painters and animal rights activists. They were throwing one of their once-a-month annual parties, to which only livestock and local artists were invited.
"Don't trash my mish, man!" shouted the crustiest skate punk in the Southwest as Sweet's car sprayed dust from one of Tucson's best dirt lots onto someone who was more Mohawk than man. The crusty fluffed his razor sharp hair, re-booted his board and skidded off, but not before shouting, "Death to the Amphi school board!"
Sweet spun around at the hint of such an obvious clue, but was stopped by a friendly greeting from the non-meat eating Joe and Josephine, who offered him broiled cabbage on a stick.
"What do you make of this?" tried Sweet, holding out the prescription bottle to the well-traveled duo.
"Mexican Viagra...the hard stuff," said Joe. "Too much of this and you'll be dead as the local theatre scene."
"Actually," said Sweet, "recent productions have garnered more than their share of critical aplomb, and Tucson's rapidly becoming a..."
"Yeah, we've heard it before," said the shiny pate of Mike Torquewrench, guru of underground arts and a well-connected scenester. "But maybe there'd be more in the way of aesthetic action if Jimbob Gemstone wasn't sucking the local arts scene dry."
"Are you saying you'd want to paint him out of the picture?"
"I'm saying that every good graffiti design somehow finds its way onto the label of one of his bottles before any of us can say 'copyright back.' "
"Suppose I told you Jimbob drank his last Evian this morning?"
"Evian's just naive spelled backwards...besides, I heard there was going to be a pygmy owl on the next bottle of over-priced tap water."
Sweet's eyes lit up. Torquewrench knew a little too much. And maybe a little too little.
Sweet looked at Torquewrench's multi-colored menswear. He wondered if Torquewrench knew he looked like he was wearing the spattered suit Gianni Versace was found dead in. "I heard you were having something of an exhibit on pygmy owls...photographs, they say, you took in the deserts of Sonora, Majorca and Malta."
"Maybe I was...maybe I wasn't. What's it worth to you, Sweet?"
After handing Torquewrench thirty bucks and a carne asada burrito, Sweet was on his way to the Wino Gallery, run by Willie Norman and Norma Wilson. The walls were festooned with Torquewrench's latest: photographic commentaries on commercialism and capitalism in the desert. The prints were dappled with amateurish crayon doodles and just enough blur to give them the veneer of art.
Along with the usual assortment of pictures of the San Xavier del Bac mission, the Pima County Courthouse's tiled dome, and cacti that looked like Republicans, there was an image that caught Sweet's smoke-stung eye. It was a shot of nondescript desert, except that, half-sunk in the ground, next to some more commonplace Native American archaeological rarities, was a blackened statuette of diminutive proportions. Sweet took out his Kodak Instamatic and recorded an image of the image.
Suddenly, striking with the furious force of a post-war action painter, gallery owner and Green Party gadabout Willie Norman brought a super-8 camera down on the back of Sweet's head, projecting him into a world of darkness. "Sorry, Sweet, no flash photography allowed."
Willie turned back to Toots Duckrump, who'd been in the gallery filming one of her weekly Duckrump Goes Downtown fluff pieces. "As you can see," he continued in his documentary voice, "the local arts scene is bursting with excitement!"
"Thanks, Willie! This is Becky Duckrump, reporting live from the cutting edge of Downtown Tucson!"
