Just the 'Fax, man

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.

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.

Steve is talking about all the places he's lived. The buses keep coming, two to a green light, sometimes three. It's one of the waitresses' last nights. She's going to work at Sapp Brothers off I-70, but she's not leaving before she badmouths everyone she's had to work with here. Catharsis, they call that.

The man with the bath-towel shoes gets up to go. He moves with surprising delicacy, pays his bill with a crumpled dollar and change he counts three times before handing it over, then hoists a black garbage bag over his shoulder. It's stuffed with God-knows-what, except for everything he owns. He walks out the door like a lonely, broken Santa Claus.

The two men discussing their six-foot aunts and midget cousins run their family trees all the way to the roots, then go. They're replaced by a trucker -- a big fella, loud and boomy. He sits with Steve and me, hears I work for Westword and leans close.

"That paper is wild," he says, pronouncing it wahld. "But tell me, how much of it's bullshit?"

And I, rising to defend the honor of my publication, say no more than 80 percent on a good week. "We do better than the New York Times, anyhow."

"No, I mean the ads. All them ladies in the back? How much of that's real?"

He's serious as a heart attack. He has the look of a man who's been badly burned in some Filipino mail-order bride scam, and so is being very careful this time. Shopping around.

"That stuff?" I say. "That is all true. Hundred percent." And manage to say it straight-faced, too.

"Hoo-wee!" he bellows, laughing. "I like that! That's wahld."

And I laugh, too. So does Steve. The trucker is the kinda guy you can't help but laugh along with. We talk a while, the three of us, about blood, Alaska and the finer points of the escort business, and by 6 a.m., life starts to seep back in around the edges of the night. On the horizon, the sky is blue-black, the color of a smashed thumbnail. Sunrise is coming, and that signals the end of my time here at the end of the world.

I get up, pay my bill, leave a 150 percent tip -- payment for the memories. And by 6:45, I'm on the road, putting Colfax behind me and driving into the sun, into the start of a new day. -- Sheehan