My single mother hired Zorro to care for me as an infant, while she worked to provide for her family of four children. Mother, the ever-independent Evelyne, moved to Denver to escape poverty and oppression, although she wouldn’t see it that way. She should have been defined by her family tree, but once she left Chicago in 1946 after the death of her first husband, Mother’s pioneering story took place across the mobile West where people abandon their roots to pursue opportunity; she gained a foothold in Las Vegas, New Mexico, before standing quick and tall like a Ponderosa Pine in Denver. Independent Evelyne left her in-laws behind. She wasn’t a native, nor were my sisters, but I am. Native means I am conscious of this place, this Denver, not indigenous per se, like the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe. The genius loci, the spirit of place, became my natural coefficient.
Too often, people don’t recognize the sacred aspect of their place of birth, regardless of their success or subjugation: how that origin point identifies them. Streamside cottonwoods like those along the High Line Canal qualify as native trees on the high plains. I was like a big Populus sucking what water was available. I would have dried up without the steady stream of my mother’s aspirations for me, born to a place that thrives on Rocky Mountain spring water.
Richard Wright and James Baldwin neither succinctly nor quietly explained their takes on “Native Son,” but the title was clearly used to proclaim the stature of African Americans in bondage, alas canvasing, stretching, framing American society. Slaves were stolen to build the Southern economy; after Reconstruction, blacks moved North for jobs only to find themselves confined to ghettos. American Indians were relocated by the likes of President Grant, a Civil War general, to reservations to make room for white settlers in the South. Plenty of tears were shed on these immigrant trails. Native populations were removed from their lands, and became slaves to the system.
Mother converted the parlor and study downstairs in the house into bedrooms, and turned the upstairs into an apartment to rent to soldiers returning from World War II. My deserting dad first called her landlady. He swore to cherish her and protect her, but he treated his Evelyne like an ignoble native. Before I was a year old, he left my mother; she sold half the land around our house to support her family. Love and tenderness, respect and land were stolen from her. He deserted his second family, and as I have found out, never served in the armed forces. Not a man for obligations to kin or country.
Albeit I’m a native Denverite, seldom am I recognized as such. Strangers don’t see me in the de rigueur uniform of cargo shorts, plaid shirt, and fleece vest, or roaming the hills till my heart’s content. When Dynasty was all the rage in the early 80s, and Denver vied with Houston as an oil boomtown, I gardened in lieu of drilling. After work hours I wore sharkskin suits and skinny ties in my mod revival, courting my wife-to-be who lived in Boulder. I owned my outsider status as an educated Jesuit boy bound for glory on the Shotgun Express out of Chicago. After the oil shale bust, Denver wore her cowtown heart on her Rockmount sleeve as she climbed the ladder of livable places, inducting the creative classes and tech startups. Through its Wild Chipmunk ride, the city often felt as much the handsome loner as I have, which I have refused to admit until now.
As for naïve, it is the French feminine form of “naïf.” As long as women have been ignored for their art or intellect, naïve has been associated with ineffectual practicality. I think naïveté is a genuine form of native intelligence. As a “Naïve Son,” I rank myself as a native who has approached life with a panoramic perspective. My life in Denver has granted me accommodation, assimilation, and a chance to succeed as a curious generalist, without an immovable identity.
This is auto-fiction, an autobiographical first and foremost novel, an episodic memoir ala Notes of a Native Son, but I call it Naïve Son: Coming of Age in the Metro West. The nativity of this fortunate son blocked the stage where I delivered the Post and telegrams on bicycle, drove spikes for the Colorado and Southern railroad, apprenticed as a taxidermist, gardened professionally and designed landscapes; where I saw and heard the cool bands, and pogoed my way through revolutions in rock, jazz, and world music; where I lectured at art school of literary movements and the rigors of writing. The stories can be docked like successive catches of city squirrels, from the high branches of academia down to the mud-soaked river bank roots of confessional poetry.
These are the notes of this “Naïve Son,” who cares to turn you on to the city’s mannerisms through a rendering of his own foibles and fortes. These memoirs let slip my life through jottings, epistles, sermons, and stories about songs, trips, relationships, sorrows suffered, loves supreme. Memories evoke emotions. I the protagonist exist as a scaffold of characters erected in analogous styles. Neither am I Pip nor Holden, neither Isabel Archer nor Janie Starks; I am a Denver native resurrecting his youth, retelling his past, representing his personas, and defining his present through his written memories of Denver beyond Kerouac and Cassady. Neither famous nor fatuous, here is a fellow who has worked his whole life and reflects on whether it made a difference. You decide whether I’m a custodian of culture. The soup is getting cold.