In the beginning, the Big Bang created the heavens and the earth. The Big Bang, not God. Also, camels and lions were never immortal, and neither were humans, who actually used to be monkeys. Oh, and get this: The Earth is billions of years old, not six thousand, like the…
On the last day of August, in a vast, white wasteland, beneath a blazing, bone-bleaching sun, Jesus did combat with Satan, kung-fu style. The battle began by chance, at the 2002 Burning Man festival, when a twenty-something man costumed as Jesus crossed paths with a stranger in a Satan suit…
The dope man never saw it coming. Long-haired, pale-skinned and heavily tattooed, he sat in the champagne-colored leather back seat of his silver luxury sedan, watching his driver trot across the 2700 block of Downing Street to deliver a package to a crackhouse. Ten feet away, Mary calmly leveled her…
It’s been a week since I became a skinhead. Seven nights ago I did a few tequila shots, and then I did a few more, and then I said “Let’s do this” to a friend of a friend who’s in beauty school. She cut away the long hair I’ve had…
Leon, a 29-year-old pipefitter and self-proclaimed “Soldier of the Fourth Reich” from West Virginia, was wearing a T-shirt printed with the picture of a blue-eyed girl with blonde pigtails, dressed in a Hitler Youth uniform, smiling prettily while holding up a canister of Zyclon-B cyanide gas. “Got Jews?” the shirt…
On the flatbed trailer is a bed of nails, and on the bed of nails is a contortionist who is performing oral sex — on himself. “Damn, look at that,” says Martin, a 26-year-old DJ at a topless bar in Denver. “That boy’s flexible and stiff.” Martin goofs on his…
May 28 was a classic Memorial Day-weekend Saturday in the metro area. It was a day to spend time with the family in the park or take in a Rockies game at Coors Field. It certainly wasn’t a day to be inside a stuffy second-floor office in Aurora, waiting for…
The first annual Erickson Scott commemorative Italian scooter rally began the morning of June 2 with a festive Sunday brunch of powdered doughnuts, pizza, and Red Bull on the rocks, splash of vodka optional. The gathering point for the mass ride was Soulflower, a club-culture clothing and record boutique on…
Marcus didn’t feel at all like an aristocrat when he woke up next to his wife in their room at the Aristocrat Motel. He felt like a 27-year-old recently laid-off motor-home mechanic from Thornton. He felt like a guy with an eviction notice in the back pocket of his jeans…
Kim Clark is one of five American women on the first all-women climbing team to attempt Mount Everest. A former Keystone ski bum who is now a junior at the University of Colorado’s school of nursing, the 35-year-old Clark is the youngest woman on the expedition, which first arrived at…
It’s midnight in Denver, and Kid Rock the pimp is checking his traps. Cruising down East Colfax Avenue, he keeps one eye on the three pagers clipped to his alligator-skin belt and the other on the sidewalk traffic scrolling past the tinted windows of his metallic-gold Lincoln Continental. As always,…
Disco sucks” are fighting words to the finely honed ears of Charles Fields, widely known in the world of house music as DJ Feelgood. As a child growing up in Baltimore during the ’70s, Fields was often awakened early in the morning by his father blasting current club hits on…
The football season may have ended in January, but the Denver Broncos began running a new play on March 5. That’s when team lawyer David A. Bailey signed and mailed form letters threatening legal action to 100 of the football team’s richest fans. The recipients had all missed the February…
Six-foot-four, 300-pound “Big John” O’Brien cooks up “big ass” burgers. He drives a “big ass” bus. And that’s fitting, say his ex-employees, business partners and landlords, because O’Brien — a legally besieged Denver restaurateur and fugitive from justice — is truly a big ass. O’Brien, 49, first began making a…
Thirty-six and a half months per bullet. That’s what Joseph R. Morrison got when he was sentenced March 1 to five years and three months in federal prison for illegal possession of two .308-caliber rifle rounds. The details of his case are as follows: On June 21, 2001, Morrison contracted…
On February 14, Denver mayor Wellington Webb made Tom Strickland his valentine. At a press conference at Civic Center Park, Webb presented the former U.S. attorney turned Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate with a glittering endorsement. In praising his many efforts as Colorado’s chief federal prosecutor, the mayor paid special…
Last February, Officer Ronnie Williams of the Denver Police Department observed Black History Month by holding a press conference in City Park in front of a statue of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., at which he announced that he was forming a new organization to protect the rights of…
It was hour fifty of the Warp, the infamous 72-hour marathon rave and underground-theater festival that takes place every November in a medieval dungeon near the Tower of London. Headlining performance artist Ian Winn was about to take the stage, when a lad who had pupils the size of saucers…
It is a Monday night in LoDo, and a famous sky is melting. Over and over on a multimedia screen, the blue swirls and golden orbs of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” dissolve and re-form, accompanied by a fittingly kaleidoscopic live soundtrack. Shadowed before the dripping images, Denver jazz saxophonist Pete…
Inside Denver’s Office of the Medical Examiner, two coroner’s assistants unsealed a body bag containing the empty mortal shell of Eric Daniel Scott. A silver ball necklace lay around the body’s neck. They removed it, along with the matching nipple rings. Circling the steel autopsy table, Doctor Amy Martin began…
Dennis Forrester was reading the Bible inside his cell at the Denver City Jail the morning of October 23 when the lock on his cell door all of a sudden buzzed and popped open. “Basically, the lock malfunctioned,” a jail spokeswoman later reported. Forrester took it as a sign from…
Holiday-season installments in the ever-popular series of late-night television advertisements for Rocky’s Autos have featured the Shagman character, costumed as a pilgrim and chasing a turkey through rows of used cars with a blunderbuss musket in hand. Given the pending federal firearms charges against Rocky’s Autos co-owner John Rothrock, arming…
