Stare

People stare at me in Denver. A lot.

Now, I know what you might be thinking. Yes, there are quite a few white people here in Denver, and yes, I am still black. And, yes, black people only make up about 9.9 percent of the population, which would make me something of an anomaly. So staring at me would seem to be par for the restricted golf course.

My extremely limited research tells me that roughly 72 percent of the population in Denver is white. Now that’s not enough to make it The Whitest Place In The United States (that title belongs to Beaver Cove, Maine, population 92, all of them white, according to the Bureau of Places Black People Never Even Heard Of). But, yes, Denver is pretty amazingly, unblinkingly white, when compared to a place like, oh, say, Chicago, where even a lot of the white people are starting to look (and talk) black.

So, yeah, being one of the few blacks here not being paid to wear a Broncos, Nuggets or Rockies jersey, I am something of a novelty, particularly in the neighborhood I’m living in, a sort of a cross between Chicago’s Lincoln Park and Wicker Park in any number of ways (conservativish yuppie-middle-agers mixed with indie music/wannabe-hip-hop twentysomething hipsters with fixed gear bikes and ironic moustaches). You might see a few blacks walking down Colfax Street (the main drag near the apartment) or occasionally stopping into one of the bars on the street, but as far as seeing them hanging out on a front porch in the neighborhood, leaving their home in the morning and heading for work, shoveling the snow in the walk in front or walking their dog in the park…on this street? Not so much. So, yeah, you might think I’d get a few looks.

You might THINK that’s the reason, but apparently it’s not the ONLY reason. Because the REI-wearing, snowboarding, lacrosse-playing microbrew drinkers are not the only ones who stare at me. See, even the black people here stare at me, all 9.9 percent of them. And so do the 32.4 percent Hispanic population, and the 12 Eastern Indians (not 12 percent, just 12. I counted them.) and the few Asians I’ve seen who I feel really bad about not being able to properly identify by nationality.

Everybody stares at me. I’ve had kids stare at me, teenagers, old people, dogs, geese, homeless guys, drunks, people driving by in pickup trucks, people sitting in Starbucks, people crossing the street against the light and risking death by not watching where they’re going, just so they can turn and stare at me.

I’ve been stared at in grocery stores, gas stations, restaurants, parks, bars, bookstores, shoe stores, furniture stores, sandwich shops, auto repair shops and a lesbian coffee shop.

Does this sound paranoid? Hell yeah, it does. I KNOW it does, but as an undocumented amateur psychiatrist, I take that self-awareness as being a good sign of sanity. If I were to never leave the apartment yet still insist that people were staring at me, then you might have a good argument that I was coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs, that plus the stacks and stacks of old newspapers I would probably be hoarding.

But I’m out there. I’m walking the streets and running in the park and shopping in the Targets and stopping at the gas stations and sitting in the coffee shops. I SEE people staring at me. And the strange thing is, they see me seeing them and they apparently don’t care.

If you’ve never stared at anyone, here’s how it’s supposed to work: 1. Note something unusual on the person you wish to stare at, otherwise known as “the staree”. 2. Make sure they aren’t looking at you. 3. Stare at the unusual particulars of the “staree”: that effed-up hairdo, those two-decades-too-late pants, the way they’re ripping that poor fried chicken to shreds while eating it on the bus. 4. Stare as long as possible until a) they look up and become conscious of their surroundings again, which includes you or b) oh, shit, here’s your stop and you gotta leave but, boy, wasn’t that weird? 5) Look away when they begin to notice you looking at them and 6) Try to remember the details so you can laugh about it with your friends. It’s not hard. It’s Classic Staring, the way The Good Lord intended.

But not, apparently here in Denver where, like so many other things I’ve seen here (coyote warning signs and legal U-turns at busy intersections), it’s done in a weird way. Here, people don’t give you the classic stare that ends when it’s supposed to, in a show of respect for personal space. No, stares here in Denver (at least the ones I get) are long, intense, unflinching, x-ray stares, stares that overstay their welcome, stares that make me run my hand over my face to wipe away any crumbs I might have overlooked or run my fingers discreetly over my fly or really question my purpose in life. Fucking world-class stares.

A typical Denver stare: I’m walking down the street and there’s a person approaching me from the opposite direction. From three blocks away, I can see them staring at me, not the fire truck that just clanged past or the guy that just literally fell out of a bar. It burns a hole in my head and they hold that gaze as we get closer and closer. I look away for a second, assuming we’ve reached the green zone of staring, that protective concentric circle where manners are resumed and we both avert our eyes as a courtesy. I turn away for a few seconds, look ahead again and, yup, they’re still staring as we’ve now come within feet of each other. And as we pass each other, their entire head turns as if it was perched on a lazy susan (I see this out of the corner of my eye) and they continue until it becomes impossible for them to look at me any longer without their transforming into a barn owl or Linda Blair in “The Exorcist”.

As I hate being stared (It summons up in me the same white-hot anger that I usually reserved for people who say “like” a lot), my first response to incidents like this is, of course, “WHAT???” As in, “What the fuck!?!”, as in “What the fuck is so interesting about me that you can’t tear your eyes away?” As I rule out the obvious (wipe my face of imaginary crumbs, fondle my fly to make sure everything is copasetic down there, check behind me for that gay pride parade that might have been visible over my left shoulder, etc.), I try to come up with possible non-obvious reasons for the prolonged looks: They expected me to spontaneously combust. I look like “that guy” (famous actor/musician/father who abandoned them when they were 10). They’re wondering where I got those cool-ass glasses. My t-shirt is speaking to them in a secret language only they can understand.

Who the fuck knows? It just happens. And happens. The guy standing at the bus stop who slowly turned his head and watched me walk past, all while shoving a hot dog in his mouth. The chubby guy at the gym who ignored rows of unoccupied treadmills and chose the one right next to me, then occasionally looked to his left to stare at me as he walked (I could see him out of the corner of my eye. What???). The other guy at the gym who sat on a bench in the locker room, situated so that he was facing the entrance to the shower area and stared at me as I walked out (I was wearing a towel), refusing to turn his head even as I got to the point in the journey to my locker where any normal person would KNOW that I could see them staring at me and maybe think, hey, this is a men’s locker room and I probably shouldn’t be doing this. (I know this may involve a whole different series of rationales, but for the purpose of this story, let’s just say he was staring rudely.). And then there was the rare double stare that occurred at the Zombie Coffee Shop* when I sensed someone to my left staring at me, looked over and affirmed that, indeed they were, then turned back to face forward and see someone else staring at me from the front.

Going against my journalistic instincts, I’ve pretty much given up trying to figure out why. Maybe they know I’m from Chicago and, unbeknownst to me, I reek of 40-plus years of Garrett’s caramel corn, hot dogs with celery salt and Italian beef with giardiniera, dipped. Maybe it’s the 1959 White Sox cap and they’re working really hard to understand why someone on Colorado Ave. is wearing THAT. Maybe it’s the only way they know how to look at things here, what with mountains and wide open spaces (Wanna know if a bear is coming down the trail towards you? You gotta stare.) Who knows? Fuck it. They’re staring. It’s their thing.

Forget “The Mile High City”. Denver is Staring Country.

*(Not its real name, but so named by me because many of the people there gaze for hours at their laptop screens not typing a single word, like the undead with Internet access.)