You set sail down the side channel of Bryant Street, the wide walk reminding you of the locks on the Chicago River that your rich aunt commandeered you through after a speedboat ride on Lake Michigan. She had already let you sail a model boat via a remote the first ever around a lagoon near her South Side apartment. Now you are the captain in your captain’s hat, setting forth for the South Seas; at least it’s the right direction. Just steps ashore after what seemed like a nautical mile, a young boy offers you the prize of a kitten in exchange for your hat. You took the kitkat as booty, but your sisters and mother refused the loot — they liked you in your cap with the black bill, the gold braid, the gold leaves. You lead them back to the pirate’s house, just a block away, to retrieve the captain’s hat. Your first venture in land locked Denver knocks the wind out of your sails. A farmer’s canal runs along the street you live on, but it gets a culvert in just a year. Bryant, the cross street between Alcott and Clay, named for American politicians you don’t know, won’t figure into your life again until you’re asked your drag name many years later — a combination of your first pet’s name and the street you grew up on. You’re Skippy Bryant, sailor nonpareil.
You follow a bunch of guys from the neighborhood to get a Royal Crown Cola at a little grocer on 33rd. They said the bottles were big, and the pop was sweeter than Coke. You had to cross two one-ways to get there — streets that let people drive faster to and from work; the kinds of streets that ignore little businesses. You didn’t know this pass through neighborhood. Big elms and maples line the walks, with the occasional fruit tree announcing a house entry. You like the extra big bottle, and even drink it on the spot so you could get the deposit for the bottle back, back when people recycled and salvaged. You like Duffy’s Orange better. Walking home, after you split off from the group, you realize you need to go to the bathroom, badly. You walk stiff legged in a kind of shuffle. You lift your legs for the two stone steps up the walk to your front porch, and you mess your pants. Should have side-stepped up the grass slope, but the porch steps were in the offing. You don’t like RC after that, and you avoid going past 35th, the one-way west, the one way where that kittennap took place. The little neighborhood stores disappear from these collector streets in the years to come. Your rich aunt visits and dresses you in a full Lone Ranger outfit. You wear it with pride, hiding behind the mask, under the wide-brimmed hat. The captain’s cap is retired to the closet.
You remember the first time your sisters brought you to Bob’s to get a haircut. Their boyfriends said you looked like a girl with your long locks. Your mother trusted you to walk on your own when you were six. Bob’s barbershop was across from Lubin’s drugstore where your mother picked up the Rocky Mountain News on Sunday after Mass — she had the Post delivered daily. They were both at 38th and Clay; now, out of the same buildings liquor and dope are dispensed. Miller’s supermarket was on the south side of busy 38th, the street that pulled North Siders from the tracks below the 23rd Street viaduct past Carbone’s deli and out to the open vistas of Wheat Ridge where drivers could speed without penalty. By this time you were sporting a white sailor cap, given you by one of your future brothers-in-law, looking to sail away you were.
The long bank of tall windows of Miller’s was filled with moths in summer months, and you thought that’s how it got its name, for the miller moths. You pass a wood framed storage shed with a peaked roof in the parking lot where people donate clothes to the poor. After one of your haircuts, you notice a broken hasp on the back door of the shed. You look in to discover paper bags and luggage full of pants, shirts, sweaters with holes. You crawl in, close the door behind you, and arrange the bags to create a cubby. You are reminded of the cardboard tunnels you made in the chinchilla cages in the basement after your mom sold the critters she expected to make a fortune on. Wide cracks between the wood panels and 2x4s create blinds of light that illuminate your fabric igloo. You peek out at the traffic on 38th through knotholes, like a Denver cop catching speeders racing up and down the street. You thank St. Vincent de Paul for your sacred space, your cave and lighthouse in the middle of the city.
West 38th Avenue is the main street you first recognize riding in the car, since your mother drives it to the store and church. One Christmas, you sit on Santa Claus’s lap in Gaetano’s at Tejon, a small business street. Your sisters drive to pick up a pizza at the Subway Tavern — thin crust cheesy with Italian sausage. Sometimes you stop with your mother at Carbone’s bakery to buy bread straight from the oven. They open a shop on Tejon across from the fire station; you get to pick up sausage cannolis when your mom gets paid. When you start at St. Catherine’s, you notice that all the Italian kids at school are living in new brick houses on Federal and north of 38th; some even live in big houses on 46th across from Rocky Mountain Lake Park. Denver’s streets are wide, attuned to car culture, the automobile is king. Federal was widened and took out the parkway and another ditch stream. You remember taking a white paint brush to your mother’s brown ’49 Chrysler in the old garage, wanting to make it yours. You dream of driving that car and it always turns just in time as though it was on tracks like the cars in Kiddieland at Elitch’s.
You follow the drift of people moving west, to the Federal movie theater (now a Mexican evangelical church) for Saturday matinees, and Republic Drug (now a tax service) for the bustle of the corner. Friends show you the toy aisle in the back of the store, and the rows of stuff on high shelves that make you feel like you’re in a maze. You still buy Big Hunks and Bazooka gum cartridges at Lubin’s on the way to the movies, because Mary Anne, the pretty pharmacist, knows your name. Walking home from school, you learn all the zigs and zags in the neighborhood between St. Catherine’s and Lubin’s. Modern, blonde brick houses with grassy lawns and rose bushes separated by chain link fences get built between the older homes like your own. You walk the alleys, too, and you see through the cracks of a new wooden fence a naked woman sitting by a pool. You don’t see any clothes, and you wish you could live in a ranch house instead of your two-storied farmhouse on a big corner.
In an empty lot off Clay Street behind the gas station at 38th, you toss weed bombs at friends in colossal fights like the ones you saw in Jason and the Argonauts at the Federal Theater. You cut through the lot to jump down a concrete wall by the loading dock for Miller’s. A friend finds some dirty magazines in the dumpster, but you won’t look at the pictures — you’re a boy being raised Catholic in a family of women. The winter when you are eight, all the guys and girls from the neighborhood show up at the lot to pelt the #13 busses with snowballs. Busses use the collector streets like Clay. You don’t take the bus since you walk home from school, and your mother drives you other places. One time she had to stop fast for another car, and your head cracked the front windshield.
The bus turns on 38th at Clay and travels the arterial west to Lakewood. The closest shopping center is Lakeside on 44th, next to the Amusement Park. Your mom shops at the new Safeway at 44th and Lowell, on the way to Lakeside. You find a gumball machine that is broken, and nickels spill out of the back of it when you jiggle it. One time, you say “hi” to a dummy dressed in women’s clothes in Monkey Wards, and realize a little later she was real. You feel stupid. There is a Grant’s dime store and a Woolworth’s and the Denver where your mom looks at expensive stuff. On the plaza by the Denver, you see a display of shoes, empty Keds and penny loafers, from six teenagers who died in a crash on I-70 right before it opened. You remember that a grade school friend Teresa moved because I-70 was being built where her house stood. You think it would be cool to drive on an open concrete roadway with no one else around. You wonder where this new highway goes. Your mom sticks to the avenues and streets, only takes the Valley Highway to get out of town, back to Chicago to visit.
You stay close to Federal but explore north on your bike, out past the city limits. You ride out Zuni on Sunday mornings to breakfast with your girl friend Carol and her parents. Her dad makes pancakes, and they take you for rides in their new Chevy. You notice how flabby your thighs look planted on the leather seats. Everything else on you is tall and skinny. In this same neighborhood, Glenn gets clotheslined by a wire fence on his bike as the gang rides frantically past 54th down to a lake that seems private because it’s surrounded by houses with little park space. Farther north past the standing cowboy statue on Federal, and east along a farmer’s ditch towards Pecos, willows and cottonwoods sucking up that irrigation water, your first dirt trail on the bike, you cavort on a summer day in the gravel pits and run down one of the sluice hills and barely escape it rolling after you into the water. Sometime that same summer, with friends egging you on, you throw rocks at new autos rolling into town on railroad flatcars. You think about how much damage you must have caused but never confess it because you can’t imagine how you would pay it back. After your first confession, you went back to Safeway and Miller’s to give the managers money for the candy bars that you stole. On your paper route, you finish at 38th and Federal on Sunday mornings, and buy your dog Ginger a Rockybilt burger, while you eat pancakes. Later in the morning, you see Carol for a second helping.
The unincorporated parts of Adams County pique your interest with their roads without walks, and industrial sidings. You like it where the country meets the city in a tangle of railroad lines, utility easements, and winding river channels and farmers’ canals. You get to know all the streets of the North Side on your paper route, and discover all the carriage lots inside many of the blocks. These were the first landscapes you pilfered with weed bomb fights and firecracker burns. When you become a golf caddy at the Denver Country Club, you bike the 20th Street viaduct across town to link up with Broadway and the rich neighborhoods east and south. On your bike, on the sidewalk, you can’t duplicate the repetitive whooshing sound of the bridge girders you first heard in your mother’s car. The people who live in mansions south of Capitol Hill have roads without walks but it’s because they don’t want people walking near their country estates. Oaks and evergreens grace their lawns. Once you start delivering telegrams for Western Union — death notices had to be personally handled — you learn where Circle and Westwood Drives are, since people in the Country Club neighborhood get more telegrams. You ride your Schwinn ten-speed in the highest gear all the time to build up your flabby thighs. On the Saturday that your mother is moving your household to Adams County near where Carol lives, your bike is stolen outside the Western Union office in the Ghost Building. You haven’t seen Carol in years, since she goes to Holy Family and you’re a Regis boy. You get a ride to your new place with your sister Norine and you focus on the whoosh of the viaduct girders as you cross the Platte Valley above the railroad yards. You aren’t talking because your boss could have chased the thief but she refused to leave her post; the teletype demanded her attention.
Once you start driving in high school, you realize how Speer Boulevard along Cherry Creek is the quickest way across town. On the long viaduct, you remember the Marlboro Man blowing smoke rings like he’s tossing a lasso, and you favor this entry into downtown because its curved panorama shows off more of Denver than the shorter street viaducts over the river and the valley. The latest incarnation of the Speer viaduct features faded pine green steel girded bridges and public art by Patti Ortiz. In your mother’s ’64 Beetle, you buzz between your girl friend’s house by Crown Hill, down 26th and 33rd to Zuni, and north to 56th Place where you live. She’s suburban and you’re unincorporated. You learn the back way to Regis, down the hill from 52nd and Federal to 54th and Lowell, through a forgotten neighborhood with no name. Your best friend in high school has his own Bug, light blue, and the two of you drive to Friday night football games and Shakey’s on Sheridan afterward for pizza and Cokes. One time on the Speer curve where it turns into Irving, you bang the curb in your mother’s car and the tire blows out. You can’t explain to your mother how it happened, but you know you were speeding. Your friend thinks you’re a crazy driver. You drive down Broadway beating every car, because you know the timing of every light, and the speed to maintain. Denver has engineered its traffic since Mayor Speer insisted on roadways in Cheesman Park. You grew up riding bicycles all over town, and you drive cars on the same roads. You avoid the highways; you stick to the surface streets, because you live in the city.
Classmates from high school drive the Valley Highway and I-70 and the high speed thoroughfares like University, Colorado, 6th Avenue, and Sheridan, but you drive the backroads, the inner city tracks, 15th Street below the viaduct, Broadway to Brighton, 32nd Avenue to Golden, or Stout to Stapleton, and Alameda to Green Mountain. Rather than take I-25 south to Castle Rock, you drive Santa Fe past the Country Palace and Hellsville. A friend from New York can’t believe the seamy routes you drive, like Wewatta to Denargo Market under the tracks and 45th back across the Valley Highway to the North Side. With a carful of people headed to a party in North Denver, you get stuck between trains on 15th Street; you turn up the radio and everyone dances outside the car until the freights have passed. These are the yards where Neal Cassady grew up, his father wino-ing on Larimer, probably a regular ghost at old-man Spinelli’s place. Driving up Boulder Canyon for a night of punk music at the Moose Lodge, “Rock Lobster” by the B-52s comes on the radio, and you stop the car so everyone can dance in their Halloween costumes beneath the canyon walls. During the gas crisis in the late ‘70s, you line up with friends to get fuel at the self-serve stations, and make a party out of the wait. You only like to drive for the fun of it.
You don’t drive much in college, as you attend school outside of Chicago, and freshmen aren’t allowed cars on campus. On vacation at home, you get in wrecks not your fault, not grasping that Denver drivers run the light after yellow turns to red. Something not taught in driver’s ed. You drive less and less. After college, you drive a taxi for three weeks before you get your first ticket for speeding on Colorado through Glendale. Martinis for dinner around 11 at a house bar on Grant in Capitol Hill become your routine. Dreading the long hauls from downtown hotels to the airport, you patiently read Melville while waiting on rides. You drive a woman client to a new Ramada near 56th and the Valley Highway, but you get there by driving through construction zones off north Washington; she doesn’t appreciate your freefall attitude. You get to hate driving, so you quit. You move back to Chicago where the routes of the El make up your street map.
After two years of mobilizing around the City of Big Shoulders, navigating snow and sleet and thawing spring dog shit on the walks and parking strips, scarcely seeing the sun you were so used to in Denver, you say goodbye to your college love and drive home on a December day of light snow, in a blue Dodge Power Wagon you’re driving across the country for someone moving. You drive the blue highways, not the interstates, to take in the Midwest fields of grain before the high plains of eastern Colorado underline the panorama of the Rockies. The plains are blowing you back to the prairie banks of the Front Range. Besides some clothes and records, your Schwinn Le Tour makes up the bulk of your belongings in the back of the pickup. It becomes your preferred mode of transport in your independent life in Denver. You walk or you bike.
Finding an apartment on Capitol Hill on Downing with a balcony porch means you can walk to your summer job at the Denver Botanic Gardens. You wolf down breakfasts of cereal and bacon and pancakes and eggs, and you don’t eat again until the sun sets on hot summer days. Walks through Cheesman early morning and late afternoon take you back to when you would meet up in the park with a messenger friend after your telegram routes. You were both fast and efficient and had time to kill after delivering your trip tickets on your bikes those last summers of high school. In the Spring, you take a job on the grounds of an apartment complex at Alameda and Monaco, and you ride your bike most days through Cheesman and the 7th Avenue Parkway to the Country Club neighborhood, past Circle Drive, and east out 3rd Avenue past Holly to the Crestmoor neighborhood. You know all the side streets from your years of delivering papers and telegrams and commuting through Denver on your bike.
Denver starts building a series of bike paths along Cherry Creek and the Platte River connecting the parkways between city parks. You ride these paths and research the history of roads and parks in Denver. At the Bug Theatre which you work to save as Denver’s first and only performance art venue, you write and act a sardonic piece about an urban planner gone berserk as he sees the parkways of North Denver abandoned to car traffic while those on the south and east sides in richer areas are preserved. Near the Platte downriver from My Brother’s Bar where Neal and Jack hung out, Dana Crawford restores the Pride of the Rockies Flour mill into lofts, and then matches the building with the Jack Kerouac Lofts. You write to Westword under a pseudonym advocating the bombing of bridges connecting the close suburbs to the inner city of Denver. You name the viaducts and thoroughfares that could be blocked to effectively seal off the city from cars: 23rd Street, Pecos and 33rd, 16th Street, Speer, Colfax, and 6th Avenue; and the bridges over Cherry Creek at Grant, Logan, Corona, and Downing. In another letter, you propose that a critical mass of bicyclists block commuter traffic on city streets during the morning and evening rush hours. You spit on cars as they pass you on the 1st Avenue bikeway alongside the Denver Country Club. You take back the city streets that you grew up on. You drive less and less.
But when your girl friend comes to town, you tour her friends around the railroad yards below the viaducts and over the freeways, putting Denver’s backstreets on display. She becomes your wife, and the Platte Valley gets built up with steel and glass highrises. New viaducts take the place of the old ones removed for the sake of progress — the planners could not envision a raised marketplace or a promenade; it could have been a precursor to the High Line in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. You find the new viaduct that rises from 19th Street to cross the 20th Street viaduct before descending to the dregs of Denargo Market and Brighton Boulevard to be the most useful crosstown express in reaching Ironton art openings, before the whole neighborhood explodes into the River North destination, RiNo destiny. What was a quick route now dallies past the Grand Hotel and Whole Foods and a new walkable neighborhood.
The major roads that you frequent as a pedestrian and bicyclist are Broadway and 1st Avenue, near the center of the numeric index of streets in Denver. Business owners and drivers on Broadway complain about the experimental bike path, but you know it’s part of a plan to connect I-70 at Brighton with I-25, an arterial for bicyclists, the Broad Way for spinners, cruisers, tricycles, GPS scooters and commuters. You remember when critics took RTD to task for the initial phase of light rail that connected Broadway Marketplace and Five Points. The lanes of mass transit and bicycles must begin somewhere. People drive to South Platte Park to ride their bike. You pedal there.
You walk your dog through the streets of Baker and West Washington Park, noting the cottage gardens growing in many front yards, in place of the hell strips once allotted to parking. The light rail lines make up your most recent map of streets, as you ride each one to its terminus, to bike home using the routes selected by Google and customized by your knowledge of the paths, trails, streets, and avenues. They all lead home for you, to the White Whale Room near Alameda and Cherokee. You anoint yourself the Ishmael of Denver. You know the whaleroads and bike them for adventure and trade. You know you can go home again — it’s no longer a matter of how, and you know the way, when you’re out in the street.