Just the 'Fax, man
Thirty miles of developments, drunks and dreams -- the ultimate road trip.
"There isn't anyone else to talk to," Sarah replies. "I'm the night manager. Now go."
"Fucking bitch."
The fat man goes, mouthing curses through the windows, carrying something in a knotted plastic bag that looks disturbingly like a kitten, though it's hard to tell for sure.
Sarah walks by, shrugs, tops off my coffee again, asks, "What're you gonna do?" and drifts away.
Two hours ago, I'd watched the clock roll over from 11:59 to midnight in the front section of the Denver Diner on Colfax at Speer -- heart of the city, an island of light. Midnight is still an honest hour, a time when being out requires no excuse, so there were couples, foursomes, night-owl businessmen with loose ties haunting the counter, pretty boys and beautiful girls floating down the aisles on clouds of coffee steam, and me, tucked in with some good company -- George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. The big blonde came in a little after one in the morning -- came in, found a table, sat with her low-rise jeans not rising high enough to hide the brilliant red elastic of her thong, and showed everyone her tits.
I still don't know why she did it. Or why she did it again a few minutes later. There were camera phones at the table, a titanium wink of flashes going off, a smattering of applause the first time, nothing the second.
I'm trying to explain the scene to Sarah and another insomniac book geek who'd noticed the Orwell in my hands and just started talking. I'm trying to get across the point that it wasn't so much the flesh that shocked me, but the absolute lack of attention the big blonde's breasts garnered in a busy diner, at 1 a.m., on an otherwise dreary Wednesday.
"Hardly anyone noticed," I tell them. "Or even looked up, until her friends started clapping." The second time, she could've set herself on fire and danced the hully-gully. No one would have blinked.
"People don't look up for much these days," the book geek says. "Most of them, I think, just look straight ahead."
Leaving the Denver Diner, heading east on Colfax to Tom's, I'd seen two men in an alley beside the Rocky Mountain Newsbuilding beating each other -- a rumble on Gene Amole Way. I was rushing, running the light in a knot of traffic, and saw them only briefly, carved out against the shadows by the sickly glare of an overhead light. They could have been dancing, I suppose. They could have been struggling into or out of some idle, side-alley embrace, except for the blood. When we see men fight in the movies, the reality we miss is how much they bleed and how quickly. I'd forgotten that until I saw these two waltzing on the blacktop and the spume of blood coming from one man's nose -- a mental snapshot, crisp, but caught only in passing when I should have been looking straight ahead.
The thing about people-watching, about cataloguing street life, is that you never get the whole picture, no matter how hard you look. You see half a table, the cover of a magazine or a book, a flash of tit, a glimpse of blood, nothing more. There's no connection, no anchor. Just a collection of moments, of little nonsense things. The future, and the present, look flexible when you're right in the middle of them -- just like the magazine says.
And a lot of life depends on which way you're looking when it happens. -- Jason Sheehan
5 a.m.: The Waffle House,
14107 East Colfax
At 5 a.m., the Waffle House is the end of the world. It has a dirty, purgatory vibe and a hospital smell like old age and powerful antiseptics. The bus shelter that crouches at the edge of the parking lot is the last on the line, and many of the RTD's buses sleep across the street in a bus corral. They begin coming up out of the dark around 5:15, stacking up at the short light opposite the El y Ella Beauty Shop, waiting to make the turn onto Colfax, headed west, toward whatever.
The Waffle House is where vampires come for breakfast. Steve, for example, who works for ZLB Plasma Services, on Colfax at Peoria. "Not blood," he says. "We don't do that. Plasma. Man your size, you could get twenty, maybe twenty-five dollars. More your first time, too."
Steve is up early today, but he isn't working. He has to take his father to the veterans' hospital for cataract surgery. "Gonna take all day," he says, shrugs, knocks the ash off his cigarette. "Nothing to do but sit and wait."
Steve's friendly for a bloodsucker. He starts talking about Alaska, land of the midnight sun. He was born there in the same year it became a state: 1959. Dangerous place for a vampire, I think, only half listening.
By 5:30 in the morning, the all-nighters have run out of conversation, have nothing left with which to bluff the clock. In this hour, where talk is currency, two men across from me are reduced to comparing the heights of different members of their families. In the corner, a woman is singing quietly to her silverware. She has a livid, crescent-moon scar on her forehead, nasty and old, that shines silver under the awful glare of the globe lights. A couple seats away from her, there's an older black man wrapped in a heavy black coat that doesn't look too far from new. He's sober, polite, peaceful. And from the service side of the counter -- from the waist up -- he must look like a perfectly normal man. But from behind, from where I'm sitting, I can see the rest of him. The ragged VOA thrift cammies, the postcard of Magic Mountain -- at Disneyland, not Colfax's Heritage Square -- poking out of his pocket, the green bath towels wrapped around his feet, secured with strips of masking tape.
Now Trending
-
Voice Places
Find everything you're looking for in your city
-
Happy Hour App
Find the best happy hour deals in your city
-
Daily Deals
Get today's exclusive deals at savings of anywhere from 50-90%
-
Best Of...
Check out the hottest list of places and things to do around your city
- Profile
- Newsletters
- Mobile
- Logout
