It was snowing when I left Spearfish. I had just said my goodbyes to Lola and we were tearful. Feelings of guilt washed over me as I looked into her 92 year old eyes. I would be back in almost exactly 2 months so that made things a bit easier. Pulling out of the driveway it was hard to believe things would be hot and summery in just 60 days. Snow and sleet slapped at my windshield. Driving west toward Wyoming the precipitation picked up and the fields began getting whiter and whiter. By the time I got to Sundance, the look of winter prevailed (It was April 29.)
I turned south toward Newcastle and advanced toward my goal of Denver. I was at least six hours away. It had been years since I made this drive and it was incredible how the countryside had changed so little. To my left sat Inyan Kara Mountain blanketed in powder. One of General George Custer's men was buried on its summit. The general and an army of over 1,000 had passed through here in 1874 looking for gold so a settler's rush could open up the country for development. One of his prospectors found couple of big nuggets near present day Custer, South Dakota. Their discovery did the trick and the Indians lost big time.
A few miles from the coal mining ghost town of Cambria, I pulled over and took in a sweeping canyon below. It was biting cold and blustery. The door of the Buick was ajar and I could hear Wyoming Public Radio blasting Teri Gross as I photographed the Black Hills expanse that lay beneath. How fun to have been a hawk or eagle and just glide off over such rugged terrain. I shivered and jumped back in the car.
Newcastle was dry and on the brink of dusty. The 3 or 4 inches of snow had run out near the 4 Corners area west of Ice Box Canyon, about 20 miles before. The wind was raging across the Wyoming plains and barely a glimpse of spring had brushed this country. Green grass was sprouting in the barrow pits and that was about it. This stretch of highway was remarkably frozen in time. Just about everything looked like it did the first time I rode with my parents to Denver in 1965. It was great to see and made my drive feel timeless. At one point I stopped and took a picture of the infamous "Boner Ranch" sign. It is pronounced "Bonner" but the uninformed wouldn't know.
I passed through Lusk (also in amber) and glanced at the gas station who's owner had allowed my friend Debra and me to give him an IOU back in 1973. She and I had just been in Denver visiting my sister and her aunt. I was a junior in high school and she a college freshman. Believe it or not both sets of our parents agreed to let us take my mother's car (A 70 Cadillac Sedan DeVille) and spend the weekend! Talk about trusting. When we pulled into Lusk to fill up we realized we had spent all our money. The owner gave us his address and Debra's mother sent him a check the next day. I can't image that happening now.
It was time for lunch so I stopped at the cafe on the south side of town. I was the only one in the dining room and the waitress seemed just as stressed as if there had been 30 diners. A fundamentalist Christian cook with a shirt that read "Jesus is the Answer" came out of the kitchen and looked over a pretty high school girl's application. "What you thinkin' you want to do?" said the cook. "Probly waitress but aneh-thing will be fine...but I'd like to waitress."
The stressed waitress brought my food and I examined the tattoos on her upper arms displaying vines interspersed with rosebuds. As she placed my club sandwich in front of me she smiled and walked away quickly. She then started up where she had left off talking about her one day road trip from Lusk to Guernsey to Wheatland and Douglas and back. She had taken lots of photos. I could see this girl moving to Denver in a year or two and hanging out with some artsy crowd. By the time I left at least 10 people had suddenly appeared and the poor tattoo'd server was needing Xanax.
Driving through eastern Wyoming gives you plenty of time to think and let your mind wander. The cinemascope panoramas are meditative. The sky is immense and one feels pretty humbled. Mostly you see ranch exits and tumble weeds bouncing across the highway as you roar 80 miles between towns. It's a good place to have an audio version of an Oprah Book Club selection or memorize your lines for a Dostoyevsky play. There were many times when I was younger and drove this stretch completely tranced out. I would pull into some place like Lingle and not remember any of the last 40 miles. Today was different. I was acutely aware of the shards of light as they arbitrarily lit the tops of pine splattered mesas and terraced tables. The landscape had a bright whiteness to it backed by turbulent gun metal skies. Castle rock spires perched up to catch rays while their craggy slopes lay shadowless and gray.
As I passed through high plains farmlands between Torrington and Cheyenne the wind was approaching hurricane strength. My newly acquired Buick Century was getting pushed around a bit as the gusts bucked my gait. Wyoming is synonymous with wind. Rarely have I gotten out of my car anywhere in the state and not had my door almost ripped off its hinges. If your hat isn't pulled down it will end up in Laramie by sundown. The power of the air being pushed around in this part of the country could light up the state of Texas and possibly Mexico. Why Wyoming concentrates only on coal instead of wind is beyond me.
I made a quick stop in the state capital of Cheyenne and sped on towards Denver. It was late afternoon and the Rocky Mountains were a lush blue silhouette to my west. Driving south on I-25 I passed through extraordinary development in the Fort Collins area. What had been farm and ranch land was now inundated with cracker box housing and acres of shopping centers. Some of the new housing had yards that were literally feet from the freeway. The homes were practically an arm's length apart and the development was crushing. I became very melancholy when I saw the overbuilt ridiculousness in the Black Hills foothills but this was taken to a whole new level. America has lost millions of agricultural land in the last 50 years. The front range of Colorado has been slowly eaten alive in that process. Open fields along this corridor have become a rarity. It was almost shocking after driving through the vastness of Wyoming.
Around 6 or so I caught my first glimpse of the Denver skyline. It had noticeably grown since my last visit 8 years earlier. A spitting mix of rain and snow pelted my car as I angled onto the I-70 on-ramp. This part of the city (Commerce City) had not changed in decades. Refineries, cinder block warehouses and industrial abstract expressionism engulfed me as I flew east towards Aurora. The interstate was bumpy and cracked. I guess the stimulus money had not reached this stretch. I veered off onto Colorado Boulevard and passed old motels and rag tag convenience stores. Eventually I got into the Denver I remembered that lay east of downtown. Passing over Colfax I saw the old Jewish hospital and looked for 'The House of Pies' which had been converted into a Mexican chain restaurant. Neighborhood street signs started to look familiar. I pulled off Colorado and into the Hilltop neighborhood. Suddenly I was amidst large Tudor homes and handsome lawns with tall spruce. I passed a beautiful park with joggers and dog walkers. Roger's home came into view. He described it as a post-modern structure built in 1941 designed by the architect who put up the old Rocky Mountain News building in downtown Denver. It is a prominent sight that sits handsomely on a corner lot.
I parked in back and he buzzed me in. His extremely friendly Standard Poodle Billie jumped all over me with excitement. We sat in his modern kitchen and I told him of my Wyoming travels. Through the long bank of tall windows we watched the snow whip a bit outside. Later I was shown to my room. I entered it after ascending a Joan Crawford staircase of streamlined design. The place was beautiful and I felt like I was staying in Beverly Hills during the early days of WWII. It is one of the few homes I have ever been in with a true sunken living room. Elegant understatement appeals to me and had I my smoking jacket this would have been the room to wear it.
The next day Roger took me all over downtown and lower downtown to show me Denver's changes. Some of the makeover was truly astounding. The central core of Denver had transformed. Historic preservation complimented new architectural wonders. The city was finally "cool." I had often consterned about this city's potential when I lived here in the 70s and 80s. The potential was so potent in my head. Over a ten year period I watched most developers go the wrong way and tear down incredible 19th and early 20th century structures and in their place construct awful inferior glass nothings. I knew the railyard area could be transformed into an urban living space with mixed use. A lot of great stuff was lost and it ripped at my soul. It was not hard to leave in 1985 because I had finally had my fill. I thought the city would never get 'it" and would become increasingly mediocre and hollowed. Luckily I was wrong. Much of the city's great old edifices were sacrificed in the center of downtown but farther west in the warehouse district, the annihilation ended. Not only was it saved but revived with a vitality of life few would have envisioned. The best part is that it didn't stop there and continued across I-95 to the Highland area and beyond. Light rail stations were mixed in. Denver finally saw its unique qualities and saved a lot of itself at the 11th hour. The heart of the place can now compare itself to places like Portland, Oregon. It continues to evolve in this pattern. I would now return even though I am no longer a fan of the cold.
Late in the afternoon Roger and I met with Ann. She had been my sister's partner for years and Roger's travel agency had booked many of her world trips. Ann had been all over the globe from Mongolia to the Serengeti. She had recently returned from Nicaragua where she had gone with some people to teach English in small villages. Her dress implied that she could leave after our chat and go climb a mountain in Denali National Park.
That night Rog and I ate at a great Mexican restaurant called El Diablo. It sat across the street from the restored Mayan Theatre that I helped save back in the mid 80s. After eating we drove down Broadway until we located this funny gay bar that neither of us had been to for at least 20 years. It's called BJ's Carousel. We walked into a room packed with people cheering some of the worst drag queens ever recorded in modern human history. Onstage was a competition of some kind so we sat down to watch. The crowd was equally bizarre. It was a combination of a Fellini movie, the HBO show Carnival and Priscilla Queen of the desert meets Eraserhead. I have been to a lot of gay bars and drag shows in my day but this ranks in some very special category. Margaret Mead would have been very happy to take notes here. I had a camera on me but was fearful of taking it out. It just seemed like we had entered into some kind of sacred rite that should only be handed down by tongue, generation by generation.
Most of the drags were older and when I say old I mean prior to Hitler invading Poland. One of them looked like she had just had a hip replacement but it hadn't taken. She leaned at an odd angle with the shape of a motorcycle tire wrapped around her mid section. Maybe she had meant to have liposuction but opted out for whatever procedure she was offered. The pancake on her face was thick enough to spackle a remodeling project in your basement den. She was about 89, honey blonde and trying desperately to not be distracted by her sticking false eye lashes as she sang Cher's "Half Breed." A younger performer (about 60) jumped onstage singing Juice Newton's "Queen of Hearts." She weighed about 57 pounds and had some kind of protruding groin bone that figured quite prominently through a red spandex jumpsuit (that sported peek-a-boo holes.) Her eyes were too close together and it was hard to look at her because one of them shot off toward Pike's Peak. She was agile and ran all over the room. Roger and I had to busy ourselves and pretend we were texting when she danced into our quadrant. Her lip synching was exquisitely awful and she had no problem doing it right up in people's faces.
The MC duties were shared by the drags and overseen by a thin and tiny weathered leatherman who must have gotten his uniform at Baby Leather Gap. His ginger head of hair was sprayed tightly to his head and his nipple rings sparkled in the colored spots that periodically spilled over him. He was very adept at explaining the night's line up while walking in teeny black cowboy boots.
We finally agreed that the people sitting closest to us had either just performed in a local production of Cabaret and had not bothered to get out of costume or maybe this WAS their own hybrid version we had unknowingly walked into. No one resembled Liza so we gave up on that theory. After being alternately scared, delighted, stunned and confused we jumped up and walked briskly to the door. Patrons frowned at us as we passed because we obviously were not supportive of good talent. When we got into Roger's car it was apparent our body's chemistry levels had been altered and we might never be the same.
The next morning I had a bit of breakfast with Roger and Billie (still reeling from the drag show extravaganza) and then motored a short distance to my old friend Leslie's place. She and I had known each other since our freshman year in college. I was a bit wary given the poor thing had been going through some pretty rough domestic stuff the last few years. Hard times had fallen upon her and life as a talented writer had not gone well. Luckily her husband was at work so the visit wouldn't have an even weirder dynamic.
I could see a bit of what life had been dealing her when she answered the door. She burst into tears as her adorable Schnauzer-mix Woody jumped and barked at me. It had been a long time since Leslie had seen an old friend and feeling the warm hug of me just overwhelmed her. She made us coffee and showed me her extensive doll collection that she was selling off piecemeal. Some were Barbies that had never been taken out of their boxes from the 50s and early 60s. Next came a Limoge porcelain vase that she wanted me to inspect for its authenticity. A stamp on the bottom confirmed and she was thrilled as she had talked to a collector who was interested. There were other treasures like Royal Haeger, Roseville and McCoy vases that she had placed around the house. It was so sad that she was having to sell such beautiful pieces just to make ends meet.
We walked her garden and she compulsively pointed out every plant and flower that was sprouting or had been planted over the years. Conversations with Leslie are like walking a labyrinth of digressing pathways. You never know where you might end up but somehow you find your way home. We laughed when her old funny side came to life and became quite sober when she cursed her current unhappy marriage. It was sad to see such a gifted soul live with such uncertainty but sweet to have a few hours together because we rarely had the chance. She insisted on showing me some restored 1930s streamline homes in the neighborhood before I left. They were worth the photographs and I dropped her back at her place. I hoped her happiness would return one day as she and Woody stood in the doorway and waved goodbye. I punched in my Kansas destination site on my GPS and made my way east out of Denver. The day was sullen and dark. It had been hard to leave Leslie and I was now 2 hours behind schedule and my goal was to make Dodge City, Kansas that night. I slurped down a 5 hour energy drink mixed with Coke Zero and set my sights toward the brown Colorado plain. The Mile High City eventually evaporated behind me as I settled in for a very long day of incredibly austere scenery. Lonely strips of pavement with sagebrush dotted knolls would be my visuals for what seemed an eternity.
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