💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › posts › 1849 captured on 2024-05-26 at 14:38:18. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Denver. Twenty odd red brick smokestacks stand gaunt and furious beneath the overcast skies, not the sunny blues you see in the brochures, but the real gray winter chill that sets in around October and lingers impatiently, a veil of imminent death to those who remain exposed to the elements for too long. A calling card for nature’s hostility.
How I’ve missed it.
At the bus stop on Colfax and Lincoln, the tranq users shift in squealing anguish, blowing clouds of rotting breath into their patchy gloves. Soon enough, the night patrol will sweep by to cart them out only for the next batch to inevitably wander in around 2 in the morning. All lit by the brand-new LED schedules, which shift three times a minute to display an ad for the new MCA exhibit. Beside the fatigued masses, a trash can has been spilled open, laying bare its contents of expired transfers and discarded pizza boxes.
Denver, the city that time forgot, the looming anachronisms and the howl of the wind along the long concrete surfaces of the towers. Denver, you feel like saying every time you see it. How’s my old friend? Wanted to check up on you, make sure the cancer hadn’t taken you yet. Not yet, but it’s getting there? Aw, that’s too bad. Could be worse, of course...
The light snow drifts in on winds of hostile death, I turn the Camry’s heaters up to the limit and Sheila folds closer into her sweater. I can tell by the creases around her lips that she regrets this, would have liked to postpone the visit a few days more, but she’s glad to be back and I can’t fault her for that even if I can’t share in her sentimentality.
I don’t know what she sees in it, the rot that sprawls across the slabs of inert granite, the mounting threat on the 16th Street Mall with its gaudy billboards and rotating displays. We pass it on Market, I make note of the Daniels and Fisher Tower looking conspicuously like a sharp ivory jackknife. And the windows, all along Market- they have a way of looking down at you with a sentient and very palpable contempt.
You have a thirst for pain, that’s why you’re in Denver. Nobody feels anything but pain, shot to the system, quick stitch, patch on a burst water balloon. A system failing under the immense pressure of its own weight. You came here, you wanted to. You saw the gleaming lights as you flew in, felt angelic and beckoning then, siren’s call to Odysseus. Should have stayed tied to the mast, you fool... you poor, sweet summer child....
There are no immediate answers to complex questions.
Denver, the city that provokes an onslaught of infinite questions, more questions than I have time to deal with. The phantom zone. I’ve always felt on edge during the funerary procession up here, the flits of frost indiscriminately clinging to every windshield, bumper-to-bumper red lights on up to Larimer, the highway exits screaming to any wayward traveler that they should give up and leave immediately, that nothing of any value can be found here.
Sure enough, at the next light, to my left, coming in directly off the I-70 exchange, a sharp-looking man in his early twenties, hauling a cheap SUV, a precise glint of ambition about him. He assumes that he’ll start things over here, a clean slate, that his past will be wiped wholly from memory and all will be set right with the world. He taps his fingers and hums along to his stereo as he waits. He looks a lot like I did.
Perhaps it’s the open hostility that gets me, the raw and unrestrained emotion, the wailing of a million souls and the little thought bumping around about how I’ll never be able to tame it. It’s not a hospital, or a full medical complex, it’s a system well out of my hands or anyone’s, it’s a sprawling cluster of incompetents baked into themselves, a half-cooked pie. Unlike Pueblo, there are no simple veins to attack. Go for the jugular and you’ll hit the carotid, and the carotid will go heavy, heavier than most...
“Streets seem to be cleaned up now,” I point out. It’s true- the little urban garden on Park Avenue next to the rescue mission, which I distinctly remember was lined by homeless tents last year, coated in a swarm of tents, is now cordoned off with a sharp steel fence that makes using the sidewalk impossible. It rises fifteen feet high and would be impossible to break through for a skeletal transient.
Something’s wrong, as something always is here- the quiet is the prelude before the storm breaks, a fat world content too long on its own scraps, simple minds working in harmony towards simple, short-term ends. It’s a Roman holiday if ever there was such a thing.
In Five Points, the wreaths hang miserably.
Denver, old friend... you’ve got a nasty tumor there, eh? And I’m part of the tumor? I’m what’s responsible for your cells multiplying bountifully without end, black and gray, with a pungent odor? I’m the cancer? Well, fine by me. Fine and dandy. Let me chaw on your neck a little more. Bask in the flavor.
Her father, Lamar, is looking at me with curiosity. I’ve never liked the way he tends to see me, like an animal behind a pane of glass, either living or stuffed. Dinner is almost ready, and I’m sitting in the big armchair outside the kitchen, and Sheila’s little brother, Jake, who’s almost 20 now, is looking out through the shutters onto Welton, presumably at the flow of traffic.
“It’s changed so much,” he whispers to himself.
“That’s how they want it,” Lamar says. “No different here than anywhere else. Shut those blinds and come wash your hands.”
We all sit around the table- Sheila, Jake, me, Lamar, her mother, Dinah, whose background cooking in deep pork fat for food carts on Federal ensure that this will be a meal we’ll never forget. At the head of the table sits her maternal grandfather, Winston. He has some tupperware prepared so he can go feed his wife Valeria, who’s too ill to show.
Sheila, therefore, being the child of parents who are mixed already, her father being half-black and her mother being half-mexican, is technically half-white. You wouldn’t know it looking at her, and deep-down I have to wonder if I would have found her as alluring that day in Lions Lair if I’d known what a vibrant and complicated background she had. Not a day goes by in this household, it seems, when an argument doesn’t erupt.
Add to this that Winston is pushing 90 and comes from old money, the fortune of the greedy land barons who bought up acreage in Englewood when it was new. Lamar’s mother, meanwhile, who considered herself white, technically had a grandfather who was a chief lieutenant or something of the Arapaho, and participated in many early negotiations. You can see why every nerve is frayed and all the tension leaks out. Particularly towards me.
As much as I hate to admit it, their presence here is a testament to Denver’s peculiar unification ability. I thought I knew diversity, when I saw Jewish and Italian children playing side-by-side in the parking lots of the Bronx. I’ve realized since, that line I’d been fed since my youth- about New York being the great melting pot- was fiction. This is the great melting pot, twenty demographics who have nothing whatsoever in common and live highly off the rancid dirt of the high plains regardless, and make the best of every fleeting day they’ve got left before eviction comes knocking.
“How’s the new job going?” Lamar asks cordially.
“Huh? Oh, fine,” I respond. “Couldn’t be any better.” Can’t explain what’s been going on- that I haven’t been checking into the facility since the incident, that I’ve been wandering around downtown Pueblo aimlessly all week, that the checks keep arriving in the mail regardless. Maybe Nathan has taken over for me. Or maybe it closes for the holidays, and Nil sits motionless and dead for two weeks straight, nobody to keep him company at all...
“You have good business sense, Gerald,” rasps Winston, breaking me from my stupor. “I’ve always said that. In the sixties, I got hold of several parking lots on 16th. They cheated me from them, but they were good while they lasted. Have you considered anything like that? Passive, I mean?” He shovels a spoonful of green beans into his wrinkled craw. I avert my gaze.
“Come on,” says Lamar. “Clearly, he knows what he’s doing.”
“I, uh- I like to think that.” I wipe my mouth with the napkin. Backhanded insults, all around, little pointed knives passed underneath the linen, insincere remarks offered with no sincerity, and I’m at a loss because they all speak one language and I don’t have the dictionary.
“Excuse me,” I say, rising to my feet, holding my heart. I check my watch. It’s 8 P.M. and outside the snow is beginning to fall.
I walk down the flight of faded stairs, past the spot where the rug had faded to nothing, push the door open and stare up at the strange way the sky blares deep auburn above the lamps, light reflecting off every snowflake in a crystalline mesh, bouncing from neon billboard to sidewalk and back up toward train wire...
And sure enough, right on time, here comes the LightRail in the frigid ten-degree climate, wheels throttling in primordial ecstasy, electric power funneled from above, opening its doors wide to anyone who’ll step on, whisking you towards the looming skyscrapers beyond in less than five minutes.
Denver, old friend...