Essay // Nights in Phoenix 

Once upon a time in Phoenix, I used to long for night to come down. It was like a mercy killing, really. I mean the way nightfall kills off the day there. I figured that’s why so many Phoenix sunsets look like bloodletting in slow motion.

When that sun would finally drop behind the city’s skyline, things just lit up. It didn’t matter to us that on summer nights, the heat still hummed like a migraine and the beer warmed too fast, just as long as that burning sun went down. Sometimes, the dry night breeze would be so hot I’d envision nighttime wildfires whipping up through desert arroyos out beyond Chandler toward the Superstitions. But it was beautiful, and desert things come alive in the dark.

I’d become a weird kind of tourist at night, curious and small and insignificant to the city and the desert surrounding it. I engaged all manner of people — from repo men, porn stars, and church founders to Santería priests, meth cooks, and taxicab gunmen — and profiled many in these very pages. We were mostly cooked and lean and hungry, damaged by the sun in some way, but grateful for the night. I’d romanticize the shit out of those evenings, and they’d often feel like a tripped-up mix of Denis Johnson’s desperate Phoenix in Angels and Alice Cooper’s quixotic one in “Alma Mater.”

[Excerpt from this 2014 New Times cover story]