The Streets Of Denver

This is some rough passages from my new novel-The Streets of Denver-the life of an alienated outcast. Only I could know this that well…….

Waking up in urban America isn’t about the birds chirping, it’s about a 40 foot cherry picker and a diesel generator that fires up like a mechanized infantry division at seven A.M. It is at this time that our hero, J , wakes up and curses existence. The construction site across the street is in full swing with guys yelling and all manner of drill, hammer, and piston firing and reporting, bringing the sounds of metal on metal wafting into the sweltering hot garden level apartment. There is no air conditioner, the window is open and a window fan sits there whispering in the madness of a full on steel girder construction site that sits across the street. In a years time it will be a condo high rise, with businesses on street level. Right now its the bane of Johnny’s existence. It’s the rude alarm clock from hell, the loud awakening in a pit of boiling, bloody lava. J’s head rings from a hang over. How many Guinesses’ 10 12 14… a series of smoky beer. J usually sits by himself in the corner at the bar. He doesn’t notice the people around him. He feels their eyes burning into his flesh like a branding iron. He tries to remain aloof, detached, but sometimes he tries to join in. J lives in no man’s land. The area between the Allied and German trenches in world war one. He hangs out at the bar like a severed hand pinned onto a barbed wire fence.

The loneliness moves in like a solid band of cumulo nimbus clouds-giant and white. Clouds the perception and the moisture saturates the mind. All rationality disappears, the hole in the floor opens up and J dives in, splashing into a dirty pool of water, oozing with slime and fungus. The smell is brutal, overwhelms the senses. After the loneliness than the blues. Dark and stagnant like muddy water in an industrial backwash. J dives deep within the pool and as he begins swimming his mind races. Bloated images appear, over 50 one night stands, no woman, no cry, only the backwash of a day old Hamms can of beer. Nothing to show nothing to gain. As the morning sun shines J’s head tries to recollect last night. Another pathetic night, sitting alone, head swimming, looking out onto the Boulevard that stretches on forever. In Denver, Colorado the main strip east/west is Colfax which is actually the old covered wagon trail that headed towards Kansas. Now it’s the strip of urban decay, the strip of ugly humanity and is the home of the Streets of Denver, a little bar that sits atop Capitol Hill, British flag waving as if to say you can’t run the Redcoats entirely out of town. The Streets of Denver is an English pub although it has a dart board that was probably bought at Walmart. There are no Englishman in the English bar but there are Coloradans with British accents. There are also all manner of low lifes, degenerates, and yuppies. There are skaters, punkers, and scenesters. There are hookers and ho’s, it’s an urban bar in a little cowtown. An airport town, a town where they would eat the rich if they only knew how. Why J hangs out there, he’ll never know until one day he reaches enlightenment, at that point he’ll wish he never left the house at all, let alone enter this Cowboy English bar.

In J’s mind he equated the Colfax strip with big city living. Even though by big city standards it’s like Dodge City, Kansas. J always wanted to get out of Dodge but he couldn’t. He was pinned under the wagon wheels and like clock work once every other month or so the breakdown would start. The clouds would roll in black and ominous. Than his soul would be bombarded by golf ball sized hail stones and the monsoon would fire up and drench the land. J would dig a trench and wrap his shivering body up in garbage bags and quiver, moan, shake, sob, and cry. The walls of his apartment would come crashing in. He would throw things about and than begin to break down into the depths of the well. A false bottom would open up and he would plunge down, driven by the run off from the land drenched with the water elemental. The tears would than begin to flow. After that silence and icy despair. The conscious mind observes itself and sees that it is not quiet. It is racing around the track like little greyhounds. Racing around the track where there is no finish line. The rabbit never stops, the carrot dangles in front of the rabbit and around and round it goes. Until the morning hits and J wakes up with his head throbbing to the sounds of the construction site. All around him boredom lurks and takes away his focus. The last is never near. And so it began one summer morning……..