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Dragoon Delirium Keith Allen Dennis Ever wipe your ass with a hot rock? I did once. Once. It must have been 140 degrees. Tried in vain to get all the sand off by hand. I had no spit left to help me. I squat in the middle of a hot dirt road on the West side of the Dragoon Mountains in Southeast Arizona, with a shimmering view of Tombstone, many miles away. My friend, Roadkill Bill, who got me into this mess, had graciously walked down around the bend. The sky was a blank canvas of stark blue against a 7,000-foot-high pile of wind-worn, orange megaliths. The merciless sun was all the heavens could hold. It was the middle of a bone-dry May — no shade, no sign of the monsoon clouds still to come, and hot as holy hell. Roadkill Bill is a filmmaker, engineer, drummer, and an allaround mad scientist. You can find some of his work online, awful movies like the Bisbee Cannibal Club, Bisbee Cuisine, and the one from which he got his name, A Roadkill Cautionary Tale. The cast of the latter were roadkill Muppets which Bill scraped off the pavement himself and stuck in a freezer until he had a full cast of rabbits, squirrels, and a coyote. No living animals were harmed in the making of this disturbing piece of asphalt camp. In addition to delightfully bad filmmaking, Roadkill Bill also makes what one might call animatronic sculpture. Like Daisy, forged from a found and mostly complete cow skeleton, which dispensed cheap wine through remote-controlled, five-liter Franzia “udders.” Or Guero, a remote-controlled skeleton that pedals a bicycle up and down the street on special occasions like Day of the Dead. He’s a weird cat. Bill drove an olive drab green Jeep CJ-4 from the mid-80s. “Bite Me” spelled out in chicken bones wired to the front grill. We had already taken a jeep run or three up into the Mule Mountains above Bisbee. “But we really gotta go up in the Dragoons, up to China Peak,” he said. “It’ll be fun,” he said. 32
