Broken windshields

by Ken Green
Even though most of Denver is as urban as any suburb of Chicago, they often try to pretend they’re still a rugged Western frontier town. Occasionally during the summer, you can drive 20 minutes out of town and see an actual rodeo with cowboy-hat-wearing guys ropin’ this and wrangling that and punchin’ doggies in the face or something, all while sipping on a microbrew made with coriander and just a hint of blackberry. Or drive to one of the mountain towns and you can watch as daredevils scale the sheer face of a mountain before scurrying back down to grab a chai soy latte from the Starbucks in the little town below.

But there is one area where Denver people display some genuine Wild West, cowboy macho Marlboro Man attitude that even I find impressive and scary at the same time.

Driving around with cracked windshields.

Cracked windshields are to Denver what parking tickets are to Chicago: they’re all over the place and most people ignore them. Stand on any street corner on any given day and within an hour you’ll probably see 25 cars go by with cracked windshields.

Therese are not just little chips or nicks or some small split in the corner that you can barely notice and won’t affect your ability to see while driving (an important factor I’m told).

No, I’m talking about big wide swaths of cracked glass, huge splits that bisect the windshield in to several areas, like a pie chart showing the popularity of each Beatle. Massive San Andreas Fault-lines. Big-ass trails of imperfection. Lightening bolts of negligence.

I’ve seen cars with windshield cracks that originate in the dead center of the windshield and radiate outward like the rays of the sun. Cracks that run the entire length of the windshield, from top left corner to bottom right corner like a graph showing the Democrats declining popularity ratings. I’ve seen cracks that occur in several separate sections of the same windshield, cracks that look like faces (one looked like a glass Jesus), cracks that have their own cracks.

I’ve driven past cars with windshield cracks that are so elaborate and multifaceted that it must be like driving while looking through a Coke bottle, with each crack offering its own distorted view of the world.

At first I thought I was imagining the sheer numbers of cars that had cracked windshields in this town, just as I first thought I was imagining the number of people who were staring at me for no particular reason. But the prevalence of cracked windshields turned out to be just as real a phenomenon as the rude, pointless staring.

My independent findings were supported by my research assistant, Kim, who I have now gotten hooked on the “Spot The Cracked Windshield” game. It’s like that “spot the (blank) car” game, except instead of VW Beetles or blue cards in general, you punch the other person in the arm when you spot a cracked windshield. Once I punched her in the arm five times just driving to the grocery store.

The cracked windshield fad isn’t restricted to old beaters, as one might think. Yes, there are plenty of 1970’s Monte Carlos or 1985 Ford Escorts tooling around with windshields that are as fractured as the stained glass windows at Westminster Cathedral. But you won’t have to look hard to spot a $40,000 Lexus with a cracked windshield, or a hulking pimped-out SUV with shining chrome and a windshield that looks like a fat man who split his pants. Pants made of glass, I guess, but still… The cracked windshield in Denver does not discriminate.

More amazing that the sheer numbers of cars with cracked windshields cruising around town is the fact that no one seems to give a shit that at any minute that windshield could give way and send shards of jagged glass raining into their weather-beaten faces as they head to the once-every-month beer festivals or while driving through the latest forest fire. They seem completely oblivious to the very real possibility that hitting one of the many potholes on the streets of Denver could result in windshield in front of them finally giving way and falling right into their genital region as they drive, embedding autoglass right into their face, chest and netheregions. It is this scenario that tells me I am not Western tough, as I find it hard to ignore the thought of several pounds of auto glass landing in my crotch region while I drive.

But no one appears to be in a hurry to get their windshields fixed, even with the very real threat of getting the top of your head sliced off like someone hacking into a thick roll of bologna. They drive around singing along with the radio, having loud conversations with their friends who are also in the car or yammering on their cell phones (another issue in itself), all while looking through a piece of cracked glass that distorts the view until it’s like looking through a kaleidoscope.

There are plenty of chances to get those cracks fixed. There are an unusual number of vans and trucks, usually parked near gas stations, with big signs that proclaim “Cracked Windshields Repaired” (further proof that I am not imagining or exaggerating this). I’m not sure how the process is done, but they sit there beside their truck, waiting to rescue someone from the possibility of having their face or genitalia shredded by auto glass. But I’ve never seen them working, never seen them repairing someone’s splintered front glass and possibly saving someone’s private parts from looking like it’s been run through a Cuisinart. Instead, cars just roll by, their owners squinting to see past the rainbow that has formed inside their car because the fractured windshield is now acting like a prism when hit by the sun’s rays.

While I’ve seen a lot of cracked windshields, I’ve yet to see how they actually develop. There are a few that you can tell came from rocks being kicked up by the car in front of them, probably as the were driving up to the mountains to find the perfect spot where they can mountain bike two feet from a bear. But others, the streaking lines that slice the windshields in two, three or five sections, have me mystified. If there was some sort of front-end damage, a bent fender, a smashed headlight, I could go all “CSI” and conclude that “Ah-ha, this car was in an accident and the cracked windshield is a result of that collision. Therefore, the murder must be…”. But most of the time there is no crushed bumper or dented hood to offer telltale evidence. Just a windshield that looks like a map of the surrounding interstate highways.

So far, I’ve managed to escape being a member of this club, but I’ve come close. I was driving to the airport once with the passenger side windows down. A semi passed me on the right side and as it roared by, it kicked up a small rock (OK, a pebble) that flew through the window and hit me in the center of my chest. Yes, for a split second I thought, “bullet”, but a quick check revealed that it hadn’t even broken the skin. But my next thoughts were how close it came to hitting the windshield and how close I came to being one of “those people” looking at a fractured world

My Heroes Have Always Been...Villains

(Note: This was written for the "10x10" show here in Denver, but has nothing to do with Denver, per se. Other than it was written in Denver...).

When I was a kid, I didn’t have any heroes, mainly because I thought the concept of heroes was stupid.

The idea that you, a kid, were supposed select some person on which you would model the entire rest of your life seems like it was asking a bit too much. We had different priorities to start with. Theirs was to promote good over evil. Ours was candy.

The heroes they pushed in our faces back then all had flaws as far as I could see. Take Superman, who was supposed to represent truth, justice and the American way, all that good bullshit. First off, he was a cartoon and/or a comic book character, a fact adults apparently ignored. I personally didn’t think it was right to ask someone to model their life on several different colors of ink squirted on paper, but whatever. I’m just the kid.

Even if I did accept that a two-dimensional image could be a hero, there were other factors. Superman could fly. I couldn’t. Superman could crash through walls. I found out I couldn’t. What’s the point of having a hero whose exploits you could never duplicate? A hero, I figured, was supposed to be someone whose life you could reasonably emulate. Maybe. But Superman? Sure, he was kind and protected the weak and all of that good shit, but he could also crush your head like a juicebox full of Sunny D. With that going for you, it’s not hard to be admired

They did occasionally point to real people as heroes, but I saw the flaws in these selections as well. Sports stars were basically freaks of nature and one-trick ponies: see ball, hit ball. Movie stars were fine until parents started finding out about their all-boy slumber parties and heroin for breakfast. Even Jesus was an inappropriate hero as far as I could see, because who the hell could live up to Jesus? Walking on water? We hated to take baths. Rising from the dead? I had trouble getting up on time for school.

I became bored with heroes and their one-note attitudes and their stoic demeanor. They never got pissed off, never said, “Fuck it, I’m sitting around in my underwear all day and watch bad sitcoms.” I needed heroes who were real. Which is why my heroes became villains.

Villains, I slowly discovered, had real emotions. They showed joy (at the demise of their enemies), anger (when their plans to melt the polar icecaps with a giant magnifying glass and flood the world failed), pride (in creating needlessly complicated ways to rob a bank). They had greed, lust, envy, spite, hate…all of the good ones.

The villains weren’t like heroes, muscular freaks with chests so chiseled that no one noticed they were walking around in their underwear. Villains were either freakishly thin and angular or morbidly obese. They had distorted features, bent noses, pudgy fingers, acne, hair growing out of theirs ears, possibly severe cases of flatulence, spoke with foreign accents and probably smelled like pickles.

In short, villains were like us.

As far as I was concerned, heroes could take a flying leap (and most of them could). I rooted for the guy with the bad attitude who had to create his own flying car and army of robots. Most villains weren’t born with special powers, they were just Regular Joes with a crazy dream of taking over the world and enslaving everyone. You had to admire that, even if you ended up being one of the ones enslaved.

I had no plans of growing up and creating a sonic ray that paralyzes anyone within a 15-block radius, but I admired villains for thinking of shit like that. They had style. I watched The Riddler on my TV screen, cavorting in a lime green unitard covered in question marks and I was transfixed. To Hell with Batman and his careful, measured speech. The Riddler was fucking nuts and I loved it. I rooted for Snidley Whiplash to teabag Dudley Do-Right, I wanted Auric Goldfinger to stick around and make goddamn sure James Bond ended up in two halves on the laser table.

I enjoyed them all, every cackling, plotting, scheming, ingenious one of them.

But one year I found my ultimate hero. My true hero. My villain hero. On Christmas Eve, no less, like a gift wrapped in dark, black paper.

We were at home killing time until Christmas Day. My mother worked on Christmas dinner in the usually overblown manner that meant hours of preparation and a 15-minute feeding frenzy, followed by the sound of pants unbuckling.

I was 14 and my sister, a couple of years older, was watching yet another of those old black and white movies on some channel higher than 12. I never understood the appeal. They were dry, crackling images that frequently jumped and had storylines as dry as plain white toast, usually involving some man and woman who basically talked in a room for what seemed like hours about whether they truly loved each or not. Sometimes they danced, but then went back to talking again. Like I said, I didn’t get it.

I was bored and unable to sleep so I sat and watched the movie with my sister, making sure to mock the movie whenever I could to bug the shit out of her. As near as I could tell, the movie was about some guy was helping everybody he came across and wasn’t too happy about it. Making sacrifices and getting screwed every time. Serves him right, I thought, as I watched this Bailey guy digging in his own pocket to help out some yokel who apparently wasn’t smart enough to get his shit together on his own. My sister seemed to love this movie, sitting quietly and staring at the screen, but I couldn’t stop thinking that this guy’s life was screwed.

But then “he” appeared on the screen. My soon-to-be hero. I didn’t pay much attention at first, still wondering what my sister saw in these grayscale movies. I was about to tell her, “you know, they’re making movies in color now”, you know, when a new character caught my attention, growling, grumbling with a voice that sounded like an old car with a bad muffler. He spoke in tough, no-nonsense terms, and despite his wheelchair, looked as if he would have no qualms about kicking someone in the balls, then toss a ten-spot at them as they writhed on the ground to pay for the damages. He glowered, he glared. He found pleasure in the pain of others. He had ambition and that ambition was to run the world, even if the “world” consisted of only this small little piece of it called Bedford Falls.

“Who’s that guy,” I asked my sister.

“Who?”

“That guy on the screen, who else, dumbass?” That was our cute pet name for each other when our mother wasn’t in the room. “What’s that guy’s name?”

She gave me a look like I had just asked her if our mother was really our mother. “That’s George Bailey. He owns the building and loan and…”

“Who, the guy in the wheelchair is George Bailey?,” I asked, seeking clarification.

“In the wheelchair? No, dummy, that’s Mr. Potter.”

Mr. Potter. Even his name sounded like it didn’t take shit from anyone. It was now etched in my mind.

“You’ve never seen this before?,” she asked. She seemed dumbfounded.

“It’s in black and white and it’s not King Kong, so no, I haven’t seen it before.” I hated black and white movies. They were old and so…black and white. But this Potter guy…black and white worked for him. Color would have dulled his power.

“What’s the name of this movie,” I asked, still staring at this balled fist of a man ripping that George Bailey a new one about being worth more dead than alive. Ha! I gotta use that one. “Hey! I said, what’s the name of the movie?”

Again, she looked at me as if I had asked her is she would like to join me in worshipping Satan.

She gave an exasperated sigh. “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

“Nah, not really,” I said.

I apparently misunderstood. “That’s the name of the movie, dumbass. I can’t believe you’ve never seen this before. It’s on television, like, a million times every Christmas.”

She was only exaggerating a little. Back before one network decided to corner the market on “It’s A Wonderful Life” viewers and bought the rights, every channel that could lay their hands on a copy aired it. It was like “It’s A Wonderful Life-A-Palooza” and you could literally watch the entire movie by flipping through channels. A character would say something on Channel 2, you could switch to Channel 5 and hear the other character’s response, flip to Channel 9 and hear the next response and by Channel 32 you were on to the next scene of the movie. It was an ADHD kid’s dream.

But yet the story in the movie remained the same. Frustratingly, maddeningly the same. For the two people who haven’t seen “It’s A Wonderful Life”: spoiler alert. The story concerns some mope named George Bailey who spends much of the movie basically letting himself get kicked in the ass by life and the entire town of Bedford Falls. Oh, they tried to make George appear to be an unsung hero who continually saved the day, but he was patsy, a sap, a pushover whom an entire town used as a doormat. His “reward” for his good deeds was being shown how life would be if he had never been born at all, which, in actuality, didn’t seem so bad because he could walk around town without a care in the world…no bills, no kids, no responsibilities. It was like God have given him a celestial do-over. Even the town seemed more alive now that George Bailey had never been born. Strip clubs, gambling … It was Vegas without the oppressive heat and Arkansas tourists.

But apparently George Bailey was too stupid to realize the luck that had just landed in his black and white lap. He silently fumed at his bad fortune, but eventually acquiesced. He raged at the stupidity of those around him but then told them everything would be ok. He saw the mistakes of others but then agreed to be the fall guy. He was no hero, he was a sucker in a grey flannel suit.

Ah, but Mr. Potter, now there was a true hero, a man with conviction and purpose. They may call him the villain, but he was determination and drive in a creaky wheel chair. He had but one mission and pursued it with a shark-like focus: to own Bedford Falls. In any other scenario, a man with a handicap such as Potter’s would be hailed as someone to be admired for fighting against adversity. But in insane world of Frank Capra’s, this poor man who had overcome adversity and a debilitating condition was “the bad guy”, the villain. Stephen Hawking makes up some vague theory about bending time that does no one any good and he gets a “yay”. Potter wants to show that handicapped people can be a driving force in the burlesque industry and he gets booed. Go figure.

But I saw the admirable qualities in Mr. Potter and he was my new hero. His every utterance was a reason for me to stop whatever I was doing and run to the television and listen to the Gospel According To Potter.

I cheered when Mr. Potter gave George Bailey a verbal smackdown by summing up Bailey’s pathetic life in one devastating monologue, after poor George had to come to Potter, hat in hand, asking for help (like I knew he would).

“Look at you,” Potter sneered. “You used to be so cocky. You were going to go out and conquer the world. You once called me "a warped, frustrated, old man!" What are you but a warped, frustrated young man? A miserable little clerk crawling in here on your hands and knees and begging for help. No securities, no stocks, no bonds. Nothin' but a miserable little $500 equity in a life insurance policy. Ha! You’re worth more dead than alive.

I shed a slight tear when Potter bared his soul in heart-breaking honesty.

"George, I'm an old man and most people hate me but I don't like them either so that makes it all even."

Yes, that was me too! Well, except for the old part, but, yes, I hate people too, Mr. Potter.

And then there was the ultimate Potterism, the sentiment that solidified him as my hero. There’s stupid ol’ George Bailey, running through the town after being duped by some angel into believing that his miserable life is somehow wonderful because he has friends, blah blah, blah, whatever. He’s galloping through the snow, heading home toward and possible imprisonment thanks to the stupid mistakes of others (yes, YOU, Uncle Billy) and he’s wishing season’s greetings to inanimate objects – the movie theater, the Emporium, the old Building and Loan…he’s clearly lost his effiin’ mind. He passes by Potter’s office window (Potter is working late on Christmas Eve, I might add, clearly showing his strong work ethic).

“Merry Christmas, Mr. Potter!” the obviously delirious George Bailey screams like a snow-covered madman.

Potter, my hero, confidently responds: “Happy New Year to you…IN JAIL!”

Oh, snap! Well played, Potter, well played. In your face, George Bailey!

For several years after, this was my standard response to holiday greetings, and as expected, it earned me several confused looks. But there were a few others like me, guys who hung around in bars and felt a similar kinship with Potter. “You once called me a warped, frustrated old man,” one of us would say, and the other would immediately respond with, “Well what are you but a warped, frustrated YOUNG man?” It was the password into Potterland.

I don’t catch the movie as often as I’d like these days, mostly due to its limited airings. And it’s not the same watching it on DVD, all high-teched and Blu-Rayed, though the idea of fast-forwarding past that Zuzu’s petals bullshit and getting to the Potter highlights.

But until then, I’ll try to catch it when the network gods decide to air it, leaving it on in the background while attending to other important business like complaining about buying Christmas gifts and figuring out the point of eggnog, until I hear the gravel road voice of Mr. Potter on the screen and I stop to watch a true hero in action.

Happy New Year to you, Mr. Potter…wherever you are.

The Art of Denver Begging

It’s hard work being a street person in Denver.

I know that may sound like a contradiction of sorts. The image of a street person, to a lot of people, is probably of some guy laying prone on a park bench whose to-do list includes scratching, shifting positions, sitting up, investigating the nearest trash can and loading more inane items on his shopping cart.

And while that may, indeed, be the MO of a lot of “bums” around the world, here in Denver, most of the street people work hard, harder than some of the hipsters and yuppies I see filling up the coffee shops from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., staring at their computers for hours on end and typing nothing while waiting for the hour when the coffee shops switch from selling java to microbrews (Chicago’s coffee shops could learn a thing or two from Denver on this).

No, most of the street people here work hard, putting in long hours under the blazing sun or pelting hail, trying to come up with creative and innovative ways to put some change in their pockets. In Denver, being a street person means having perseverance, being creative and being organized. If street people were a corporation, these guys (and women) would be the CEOs of BumCorp.

Being a street person in Denver is a lot different than being a street person in Chicago. In Chicago, we had bums. Oh, the newspapers and social organizations might call them street people because of editorial kindness and political correctness, but most of them were bums. Unorganized, marginally motivated, meandering bums. Sometimes relentlessly annoying, sometimes frightfully aggressive, but still bums.

(For the record, if I am ever living out on the streets, I would like to be referred to as a hobo. “Bum” suggests someone unmotivated and lazy. “Street person” is a little too clean-cut and vague – could be a homeless guy, could be some sort of performer. Hobo, to me, has an air of disheveled, poverty-stricken sophistication, a down-on-his luck guy with a streak of creativity despite his conditions. A hobo can probably tell a good story, recite poetry, perform a magic trick or win a trivia contest, all things I think I could do. Therefore, I would like to be a hobo, please. Or maybe a panhandler.)

In Chicago, the bums sort of wander the streets, stopping wherever they think they can get a quick handout, weaving their way down the sidewalk and approaching whomever they think is a soft touch for spare change (tourists, old ladies, me). Bums in Chicago don’t really have a game plan for success, which might be why there are so many of them (OK, the current economic and housing situation, drug and alcohol abuse might have something to do with it too). There are probably a handful of “bums” in Chicago who have some sort of blueprint for success: the kid who sits in front of Old Navy on State Street every afternoon and wails for people to help him out, the old guy in the suit I used to run across who always seemed to have lost his wallet and needed fare to get back to O’Hare to get his luggage, the guy on the subway who solicited fund for his imaginary charity, though I suppose he was more of a con artist than a bum. But for the most part, the street folk in Chicago were just winging it and are probably as successful as a baseball team that plays as if they made up their lineup five minutes before the game stars (I’m looking at you, Cubs).

But in Denver, unlike so many other aspects of life I’ve seen here, these guys have their act together, however disheveled and odiferous that act may be. There’s a formula to panhandling in Denver, a system that never seems to change no matter what weather. You can just step out onto the sidewalk, start shaking a dirty Starbucks venti cup and expect to succeed here. There are, apparently, rules to be followed. It’s as if an army of down-on-their-luck men and women had a meeting at the headquarters of the American Federation of Street Folks, Local 238, and set up a series of bylaws on how to be a street person in Denver, from appearance to approach. As far as I can tell, the regulations borne out of that first meeting went something like this:

1. All street people soliciting funds from the general public must pick a corner. There will be no aimless wandering of the streets permitted. Street people must select a corner somewhere in the city and remain there for the duration of their shift, regardless of how lucrative or non-lucrative the location may be. Locations may be at the off-ramp of an expressway, on a desolate stretch of road in the middle of a quiet neighborhood, or on a road that where there are few stoplights and the traffic generally travels at about 40 miles per hour. This location may either be manned every day by the same person, or shared by several people on a rotating basis. In the event of a major thoroughfare, both sides of the street may be manned by two different street people, provided there are at least four lanes of traffic between them.
2. All street people MUST have a sign. There are NO exceptions. The signs must be constructed from old cardboard and written in black marker ONLY. Signs must be held chest high, regardless of whether the street person is sitting or standing. While we restrict the subject matter of the signs to four categories, actual content of the signs is up to the discretion of the holder. Signs maybe religious in nature (“God Bless You”, “I will pray for you”, “Be an angel today”), patriotic (“Help out a vet”, “America the Beautiful”, or a simple, but unfocused “USA”), humorous (“Obama promised change, I NEED change”, “F.B.I – Flat Broke Indian”, or “I’m not gonna lie – I need the money for beer”) or, for those strapped for cash AND ideas, the straight approach, with a twist of humility (“Anything helps”, a premature “Thank you” or the basic “Spare change”). If you must use family references, keep it humble (“Wife and three kids need food”) and not too brutally honest (“Wife and three kids kicked me the fuck out because I drank up the rent money last week. Anything helps. God Bless You”)
3. Have a beard. The longer the better. Think House of David baseball team, not George Clooney after wrapping up shooting on “Ocean’s Fourteen”. When combined with slightly disheveled clothing and a sign, a long, unkempt beard says “hard times” and is more likely to evoke sympathy, as in, “Gosh, that guy needs a shave badly if he’s ever going to find gainful employment. I think I will give him some spare change.” Avoid a close-cropped beard or retro facial hair, which will only make people think you are a hipster and are panhandling “ironically”. While the research has not yet been completed, women are free to try this tactic as well.
4. Refrain from aggressiveness. Don’t badger people in cars on walking on the sidewalk. Let your sign do the talking. When the traffic comes to a stop at your corner, remain on the corner unless summoned by a hand extended from a car window bearing change. Offer a pleasant “good morning” if you like. Refrain from smiling unless your dental situation is in order. Leave that pushy, relentless, annoying panhandling to cities like New York City, L.A. and Chicago. We’re better than that. We’re Denver.
5. Army fatigues are optional.

I’ve only come across one person here who went against these rules, a tall, thin, relatively well-dressed man who used to stand in front of the 7-11 down the street from us and quietly ask for spare change. I mean really quietly, as in whispering. So quietly that if he had slowly faded away into a wisp of smoke right in front of our eyes I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.

The first time we came across him, we weren’t even sure what he was asking for and we leaned in closer to figure out what he was saying (He could have been saying “I’m old, rich and eccentric. Would you like a million dollars?” so it was worth pausing for a second). But when we figured out he was asking for change we politely say we didn’t have any (A lie, of course. Everyone has change in their pockets). But I like to think that he spoke so softly because he didn’t want anyone to know he was violating the Code of the West, Panhandling Division.

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.)

Good (Meh) Morning

As a (former) resident of a big city like Chicago, I’m supposed to be cold, unfriendly and aloof. And I am. But it’s not Chicago’s fault. I would have been that way had I grown up in Smackover, Arkansas (population 1,881), Willacoochee, Georgia (population 1,434) or Kaliforsky, Alaska (population 6,250) or any of the thousands of other cities that constitute Small Town America, where the values of friendliness, truth, honesty and racis…I mean, hard work reside. But because I spent my formative years surrounded by a couple million other people in a metropolis hiding under the butt end of a lake, my requests for people to kindly get the fuck out of my way is somehow misconstrued as generic big city rudeness. Nothing could be further from the truth. Now kindly get the fuck out of my way.

That’s not to say that big city folk like Chicagoans are open, overly friendly, embracing and will hand you a puppy the minute you step off the Greyhound bus with your cardboard suitcase. We CAN be nice, we just don’t trip over ourselves doing it. You need directions to the Field Museum, Sears Tower, Art Institute or Garfield Park Conservatory, we’ll take time out of our busy day to point you in the right direction. But if you’re expecting a Chicagoan to simply read the distress on your face as you stand on the corner of State and Madison clutching an indecipherable street map, or sense your confusion, take you by the hand and lead you through the maze of underground Red and Blue Line subway tunnels, fugeddaboudit. You gotta ASK for help from a Chicagoan. For various reasons (decorum, personal space, the fear of getting a shiv in the gut), we don’t step in and volunteer information to complete strangers unless they ask for help. Hell, you’ll get two or three Chicagoans stopping to help you if you ask and they’ll debate the best route to your destination, leaving you to walk away feeling better about the city, despite the gunshots you hear afterwards as the “debate” between the Good Samaritans devolves into a fatal argument.

I’ve heard tourists marvel at how nice Chicagoans were in comparison to their expectations, once they got over their fear of being stuffed in a trunk if they asked someone how to get to American Girl Place. Nope, we Chicagoans have no qualms about helping out a stranger in need on the street, mostly because we want you to find where you have to go and get the fuck out of our way.

So, like I said, we can be nice, we just don’t go out of our way to do it. Which means no saying “Good morning!” to complete strangers on the street just because our paths happen to cross, no “after you…no, after you” dance when it comes to getting on a subway car, no pitching in to help you with that big sofa that you’re struggling to bring into your apartment by yourself unless there’s a sawbuck involved. That rushing around you see us doing as you’re standing in front of the Disney Store blocking sidewalk traffic is us getting to where we have to go, doing stuff and generally going about our day without unnecessary chit-chat. If we give you a “what up?” head nod as we pass you on the street, consider yourself blessed.

Which brings me to my second day in Denver, a Wednesday morning when the sun was shining and despite the remnants of snow on the ground and it was warm enough for a person to walk around with their jacket unzipped and not have the wind sick a cold hand down their chest. Warm enough for a person to work outdoors, which explained the whining of the power drill I heard as I walked back and forth from the car to the apartment taking items from one into the other. On a trip back into the apartment, carrying my dirt-covered spare tire bike rack, I followed the sound upward and saw a guy drilling on a wooden post on the balcony of a second floor apartment. I wasn’t sure what he was doing, whether he was removing something, replacing something or installing something, but if you had to do outdoor work on a February morning, this would be the one, which I suspected he already knew.

On my last trip out of the apartment, carrying my gym bag and headed to my car to drive to Bally’s, I heard the drill still whining away, but this time accompanied by a woman’s voice. I couldn’t make out what she was saying but I assumed she was talking to the guy with the drill since the two sounds were coming from the same direction. I walked through the courtyard and toward the front gate when the voice suddenly got louder and seemed to now be aimed in my direction.

“Morning!”

I hesitated to turn around and look up because for all I know, that shout could be directed to someone else. It’s happened before, me thinking that I’m the recipient of a vocal greeting, a wave or a car horn honk, realizing I don’t know the person who appears to be signaling me and figuring out the real object of their attention-getting maneuvers is standing behind me or next to me, and I’m forced to figure out a way to exit from this situation gracefully, to pretend that I wasn’t really waving back, just wiggling my wrist because it was sore from writing, see, or that I was actually waving at someone behind THEM, so there.

“Morning!! MORNING!!!”

The voice was more forceful this time. Ok, she apparently wasn’t going to give up, so I gave a quick look around to see if there was anyone else in my proximity. There wasn’t. And I didn’t hear the drill guy stop or acknowledge her so I concluded that she wasn’t talking to him. So at the risk of looking like an idiot, I figured I had to respond. After all, I was new here and I didn’t want to immediately become known as the anti-social asshole in the building. That was my title back in Chicago anyway.

I looked up, saw the drill guy and next to him, through the bushes that partially blocked the view, I saw a woman in a robe leaning slightly over the balcony and looking in my direction. Although her hair was mostly black, her face made her look older than her black hair would suggest she was. Since I am lousy at guessing ages, I put her somewhere between 40 and 69.

“Good morning!” She yelled it again.

I’m not used to this, this random wish for a pleasant start to beginning of the day from a complete stranger. Hell, my own family didn’t greet each other like this in the A.M., our morning pleasantries going something like: “Hey, don’t eat all the Froot Loops. … Shut up, I wasn’t about to. …You did, you ate ‘em all, you pig. …Well, you should have got up earlier. …Ma!” Ah, good times…

But here was a complete stranger yelling “morning” at me, a wary, not-at-all-outgoing, technically-still-a-Chicagoan. And the tone with which she said it threw me off as well, employing the kind of urgency one usually reserves for drawing attention to falling boulders which are about to crush their hiking companions or alerting their paramours of the arrival of husband pulling up in the driveway. She was either really excited that it was morning or had a real desire to be heard over the sound of the drill. I’m not sure which.

This wasn’t the first time I’d encountered unexpected salutations from random citizens here in Denver. On earlier visits, Kim and I would jog in the nearby park (the one with little dollops of goose shit every three inches and signs warning of coyotes patrolling the area at night) and as we passed by people walking or running in the opposite direction, they’d greet us with “Good morning.” This disturbed me. For one, it required me to talk while running, and since I was not exactly marathon material and was still getting acclimated to the new altitude in the Mile High City, it was going to have to be one or the other. Second, I wasn’t sure if everybody did this. Was I now required to initiate the greeting process as well? If so, how often? Should I wait to see if they speak first and then return the greeting, or was that being standoffish and rude? Was this a practice reserved for grown-ups or did I have to say “good morning” to kids too? What about homeless guys? What if they’re wearing headphones (the joggers, not the homeless guys)? What if I’M wearing headphones? You can see how quickly this can spiral out of control and why I wish people would just shut up and run.

Not that everyone in Denver was super-cheerful. There were more than enough people who walked down the street tight-lipped and silent and I figured they were new in town like me, landing here from cities where doors were locked tight at night, where streets with one or more lights out were avoided and where Ratso Rizzo informed aggressive drivers that, hey, I’m walkin’ here! But there were still a substantial number of people who felt compelled to greet me even thought we hadn’t been formally introduced. From the hipster guy walking past me in front off the coffee shop to the Mexican woman hanging out with her drinking buddies on a bus stop bench (Ok, she did yell “Hey, Bill!” at me, but I’m still going to count that one.)

This was never a problem in Chicago where the vast majority of people say nothing to each other and that works out just fine. Not because we were rude or hate each other but because it was just more socially expedient that way. We wished each other a good morning by not interfering with each other’s morning to say it. That phrase, “The less said, the better” was tailor-made for Chicago. Unless I say otherwise, have a great fucking day, ok pal?

Balcony-yelling lady wasn’t giving up. She leaned over the railing like a guy trying to haul in a 75-pound striped marlin, staring right at me and waiting to reel in my response. I thought for a second about ignoring her to prove a point and teach her a valuable lesson: don’t expect everybody to be as happy to see the new day as you, oh woman of indeterminate age. But I caved under the tremendous pressure of social conventions. I thought about the consequences of ignoring her, the comments about me that would seep through the building like smoke, the awkward encounters in the laundry room. I looked up and her and offered a feeble, half-mumbled “morning.” Not a “GOOD morning”, mind you, just “morning”, as minimalist a greeting as I could offer. I do have my standards. You’ll take your goddamn one-word “morning” and like it.

I was forced to admit defeat, a loss in the battle to stay just as I was when I left Chicago. But the war is not over. I’ll have Denverites ignoring each other in the morning in no time.

It’s time to go jogging.

Go West, Not-So-Young Man

It's my second full day of living in Denver. I want to try and write about my first year here. I want to write something every day about what's already shaping up as culture shock after living 40+ years in Chicago. I probably won't be able to pull that off, but anyway... so it goes.


When the car refused to start just after we’d stopped for a moment to take a photo in front of the “Welcome To Colorful Colorado” sign, I debated whether it was an unusual coincidence or a foreboding tragedy.

I decided to compromise and call it an unusual tragedy.

A little more than 200 miles outside of Denver, the sun battling the cold weather for dominance, we stopped the Jeep on the side of a road leading to a camping site for a photo of me standing in proximity to a large wooden sign that read “Welcome To Colorful Colorado” painted in big white letters. The sign was set back from the road up a slight dirt incline that was dotted with dead grass. Kim, who was sitting in the car, motioned for me to get closer to the sign so that she could take a photo of me with her digital camera. I declined to move closer, joking that there might be snakes hiding somewhere around here. OK, I was half joking. Yes, it was about 30 degrees outside, the sun was beginning to set and the chance of a rattler who didn’t mind the cold weather slowly inching toward me to sink its poisonous fangs into my ankle were probably remote. But I’m from Chicago and after ghost voters, Loop floods and the “mysterious” destruction of small airports in the middle of the night, I take nothing for granted. I kept close to the car, gave a couple of glances at the ground around me and waited for the shutter to click.

Back to the car, get in the driver’s seat, seatbelt fastened, put the key in the ignition, turn and…nothing. Panic didn’t immediately set in, surprisingly. Here I was in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a gas station, a seedy motel and an abandoned diner just behind us, a whole lot of empty Colorado in front of us and a sign mocking my arrival. So far out of my comfort zone I might as well have renamed the Jeep Wrangler the Santa Maria. But I was keeping my cool. At least for a second. I tried the key again and heard no engine revving sounds and told myself, OK, you can panic a little now.

Kim was the first to notice that although the shifter was in park, the display on the dashboard said the car was in reverse. More confusion. A genuine “What the fuck?” moment, made even more dread-inducing by the fact that my knowledge of the mechanics of a car is only slightly less than my knowledge of the Keynesian School of economics and its relationship the Rational Expectations Theory, which is to say jack shit. But I employed whatever facts about automobiles I had picked up throughout my life and ran through them in a search for possible solutions. Was the battery dead? Was there enough air in the tires? Did we have enough gas? Were the ashtrays clean? Quick, check the rear cup holders.

Needless to say, none of these possible solutions solved the problem so I decided to rely on the twin brothers of prayer and magic. Kim joined me in staring at the dashboard; she, being the logical person she is, was no doubt looking for a possible cause. I, on the other hand, was attempting mental telepathy, hoping to psychologically bond with the engine to get it to see things my way and miraculously start, to convince it to maybe speak with the transmission, since they were so close and all, to get it to cooperate and magically fall back into place. I turned the key once more and the engine told me to go fuck myself.

I mentally went through our entire trip to that point, partially trying to determine if the problem was something that had happened earlier and partially amazed at all we had gotten through to get to where we were now, sitting in a stalled vehicle 200 miles outside of Denver in the middle of nowhere with a “Welcome To Colorful Colorado” sign laughing at us.

The slightly hurried departure from my Chicago apartment where I ended up leaving behind my practically new platform bed (value: about $200), a slightly used leather couch and about an eighth of a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. The long drive through Illinois, leaving everything I knew behind me. Driving through Iowa, not as flat as you might imagine. Driving through Nebraska, much flatter than you would imagine. Waking up to a snowstorm on Valentine’s Day in Lincoln and attempting to continue the journey; having to employ my defensive driving skills when we started skidding on black ice; being forced off the highway when state troopers closed I-80 because of apocalyptic weather conditions; holing up for a while in Shoemakers Truck Stop and Gasoline Station Museum before heading into downtown Lincoln and a Holiday Inn; monitoring weather and highway reports all morning and deciding to give it another day before trying to hit the road; waking in the morning to a blast of cold wind and setting out for I-80; passing abandoned cars and the remnants of cars; gripping the steering wheel like the bridle of a runaway horse for about 250 miles as the wind occasionally tried to push the Jeep into a Nebraska ditch; lunch at something called Carlos O’Kelly’s (no corned beef and guacamole on the menu, unfortunately…or fortunately); making the detour onto US 76 and stopping to gas up one last time in Julesburg, Colorado and then pausing to get a picture of me standing in front of that goddamned “Welcome To Colorful Colorado” sign…

As we sat there, surrounded by two-dimensional metal cutouts of buffalos and teepees, installed to add to a more Wild West atmosphere of the campgrounds I guess, I pondered our next move. I looked in the side view mirror and saw behind us the seedy motel, the perfect place to kill an unsuspecting traveler and leave the body to the pumas. The gas station we had just left didn’t appear to have a repair garage so fixing the car would obviously require at least one phone call and might call for an overnight stay considering the time. So if we took turns staying awake in shifts, we could probably spend the night at the Bates Motel and get the Jeep repaired in the morning. As for weapons, I had The Club in the car and my …

It was then that Kim volunteered to walk back to the gas station and call for a mechanic. I felt guilty that I hadn’t thought of that and even guiltier that I probably wasn’t about to suggest that, no, I should go. Hey, she’s the one that grew up on a farm; she was more used to being surrounded by wide-open spaces than I was. Wide-open spaces seemed more of a danger to me than the congestion of the city. In a city you could hide behind things, duck into stores to escape danger, etc. In wide-open spaces, there was nothing to do but run and hope you were faster than whatever was chasing you. Besides, someone has to protect the car and all my belongings from coyotes or wolverines or chupacabra or whatever the fuck was out there. That was the excuse I was going to tell myself every time the story of this incident came up. I watched her walk back down the road toward the gas station, probably with a little more confidence in this situation that I had. Ok, a lot more.

I sat there in the car and, other than the sound of the occasional truck or auto passing by the highway just in front of me, heard nothing. No car horns honking at drivers who were slow to react to the green light, no buses rumbling to a stop at the corner, no voices in the alley yelling for TJ to come down and open the door because they didn’t have a key, no police sirens signaling the end to yet another urban dispute. Just the wind rustling through dried grass and an empty western sky stretching out behind me. If a longhorn walked by at that moment I probably wouldn’t have been surprised.

It was then that it hit me: I was in The West, the one I had read about in books and had seen in old movies and the occasional cigarette ad. OK, no, this wasn’t THE WEST, with horses kicking up dust as they delivered shipments of sorghum, molasses and them fancy toilet waters from Back East, and clapboard towns where the barber also treated your pyrosis. But it was “west”, more west than I had been in before. I’d been to Tucson and El Paso before, but visiting Tucson and El Paso is not the same as actually living there, I figured. This was (personally) uncharted territory, more foreign to me than Peotone or Sturtevant, Wisconsin. I felt like a pioneer. A pioneer with an iPhone that currently had a limited signal, but a pioneer nonetheless.

A truck pulled up behind me and Kim got out accompanied by a mechanic who looked like, well, a mechanic. Dark blue work pants and jacket, both slightly stained with grease from repairing a ’53 Chevy Camero with a 5.3 hemi engine and an overhead cam shaft (OK, no, I don’t know if any of that is possible). Slightly overweight with a mechanic’s moustache. Yeah, you could look at him and tell that he would know what was wrong.

I explained the situation to him as best as I could, and to make it appear I wasn’t a complete idiot, I threw in some automotive terms like “key” and “turn” and “won’t start”. He looked at the car for a moment (was he using mental telepathy?), sat in the driver’s seat, fiddled with a few things inside, then got out and slid under the car. I was going to make some snide comment to Kim about how we were lucky that the Jeep had such a high ground clearance when the slightly overweight mechanic popped back out from under the car and issued his diagnosis.

“Yeah, your transmission linkage is missing,” he explained.

“Ah, the linkage,” I said knowingly. He wasn’t buying it.

“Yeah, the thing that connects the shifter to the transmission…It musta fell off or something. Strangest thing. It’s not broken or anything, it’s just not there. I’ve seen it on Fords before. First time I’ve seen it on a Jeep.”

Of course. The first time. Now. My car. In front of the “Welcome To Colorful Colorado” sign.

You could change the gear manually, he explained, but to do that you’d have to be under the car. And to even get the car started, you have to get underneath, flip a lever to park, start the car, and then flip it to drive. It was a procedure in which even I could see the danger. Our slightly overweight mechanic suddenly became super daredevil mechanic. He slid back underneath the car and instructed me to keep my foot on the brake, lest I start the car and immediately crush his ample midsection.

“You got your foot on the break?” came a muffled voice from underneath the car.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“You sure?”

“Yup, I’m sure.”

He yelled at Kim, “Does he have his foot on the brake?” Apparently he either didn’t trust me or had little confidence I knew what a brake pedal looked like.

I shifted my legs so that she could see my foot on the brake. “Yup, his foot’s on the brake.”

“OK, start the car.” I turned the key and the engine sprang to life. Daredevil mechanic guy slid out from underneath the car, wiped his hands on his pants and began to explain the situation. “Ok, because the linkage is missing, you can’t shift it into reverse, unless you get under the car again. Turn it off and let me show you.” I shut the car down, got out and slid under the car with daredevil mechanic guy.

“See this lever here?” he asked, pointing to…something.

“Yeah,” I lied. The entire area was a confusing canvas of imposing metal with just a hint of rust.

“OK, this position is park,” he said, flicking some lever with his finger, “this is neutral, this is reverse and this is drive.”

This began to sound important. I imagined a scenario where we’d have to go in reverse for some reason and I wouldn’t be able to do so and there we’d be, face to face with a mountain lion and unable to back away. “Show me that again,” I said, this time trying to pay attention.

Thirty-five dollars later, we were back on the road and headed further into the West, driving through an undulating landscape and past clusters of cows (wait…herds, right?) that stood around and chewed weeds nonchalantly and looked at me as if to say, “Are you sure you should be here?”

I ignored them. What did they know, they were just cows. We kept driving, determined not to go into reverse, staring into the setting sun and squinting my way into Denver.