Bill Good’s head is like a giant lightbulb. No matter where he is or what he’s doing, ideas flutter up to him like moths on a summer night. From time to time, he’ll pluck one of these notions out of thin air, examine it and say, “Hmmm.” “I just get…
Beelzebub arrived in a white pickup. He pulled to the curb in front of the Kelleys’ home in Cherry Creek, his truck facing oncoming traffic, and proceeded to leer at Vicki, who stood in jeans and a T-shirt cleaning her own truck. Vicki is blond, pretty. When men glance her…
Okay. So maybe Sean McGuire is a lawyer with too much time on his hands. Or maybe he’s really a man of convictions, fighting his own criminal conviction. But then again, maybe this is just a story about a man and his dog. “Come on, Roscoe,” McGuire says. “Now, stay…
Begin with the tattoo and Leonard’s big, bald head, because the tattoo that screams from atop Leonard’s big, bald head says it all. On Wednesday, September 1, Leonard Carlo had just returned from a trip to Alamosa when the manager of his Colorado Springs bar delivered the bad news: Two…
It’s consuming him, the murder of his daughter. He knows this, feels himself becoming overwhelmed, but he can’t stop. “I think about it before I go to bed. I think about it when I wake up in the middle of the night. I think about it when I get up…
It’s an inside joke, this thing about food, but in a way, it really did start with their guts. The Navy. Pearl Harbor. The USO. The billboard. Wal-Mart. For Dick and Doc Nash, poster boys from The Big One, it all came down to a full belly. “Hell, yeah,” says…
There is no simple way to explain what most people cannot understand. And after 135 years, there is no simple way to heal a wound that still bleeds. Yet on Thanksgiving weekend, Otto Braided Hair will try. If the good weather holds and plans proceed on schedule, he will spend…
Item: As the millennium approaches, a local exterminator shares an observation: “My phone has been ringing off the hook,” he says. “Yeah. Squirrels.” Confrontation (Part One): “Honey, come in here.” “What?” “There’s a squirrel.” “Where?” “On the fence. Just outside the kitchen window.” “Really? What’s it doing?” “Just standing there…
He told himself that Lenny was gone, that he would not be coming back, but Robert MacLaren couldn’t make himself believe. He talked to the police and he talked to the doctors, and he saw his little brother lying on the hospital table, ashen skin under a white sheet, all…
The houses are still there, sitting in the middle of the Auraria campus as though nothing had ever happened. They stand side by side, one short block of them, red brick and green trim, Victorian and cottage, reminders of a time — and a community — long gone. Josie Acosta…
It’s a big night on the boulevard. Federal Boulevard. Cruisers drive along with Mexican flags draped over their hoods, rap music thumping from their stereos and Mexican Independence Day smiles plastered on their faces. In their midst, a purple Impala rolls quietly along. “Check it out,” a passenger says. “That…
Previous Westword article
“The Heat Is On,”
October 22, 1998
These chile sellers have fire in their souls.
Kent Olson is driving through his neighborhood with a notepad in one hand and the steering wheel in the other, and it’s all he can do to keep on course as he surveys row after row of modest brick-and-frame homes. He checks the mirror, flicks his turn signal, slows at…
The train is late, again, so the stringy blonde and her friend, the one with the silver stud through her nose, slouch toward a couple of stools at the far end of the Railcar Diner. The friend asks for a banana and a dollar’s worth of change while the blonde…
Ben Kelley sits back on his front porch and looks out across the street at the row of new townhomes, the field of weeds, the boarded-up crack den, the ad for luxury duplexes, and fumbles for the words to describe his neighborhood. He adjusts his baseball cap, which he wears…
In northwest Denver, you wake up, rub the sleep from your eyes and straggle toward Common Grounds at 32nd Avenue and Lowell Boulevard. There you wave to a friend, breathe in the aroma of espresso and order a muffin or scone and a large coffee. You grab a table, scan…
Two guys, one with a walker and the other with a cane, sit at opposite ends of a long table at the boarding home. “Hey, there. How are you doing?” “Getting along. Getting along.” “Better than me.” “Oh, I don’t know about that.” The guy with the walker is William…
Ron Domenick, dealer of model trains and antique china, gulps the dregs of his morning coffee and slams a meaty fist on the counter. “You want to know what’s really going on?” he asks. “Come on, I’ll show you. No bullshit.” Domenick, a burly guy with a beard, ponytail and…
Russell Berry is here, leaning back in a rocker with his cup of coffee and can of chew, so it must be morning in Hillside. Time to get mail. Six days a week, as regular as the sunrise, Berry putters from his 400-acre cattle ranch two miles away to this…
It happened in a place where the land rises and falls like ocean swells, and what the earth didn’t claim, souvenir-hunters did, until all that remained were trail fragments, faded memories and the restless winds of the prairie. And in this way, a killing ground was lost. May 1999: Metal…
Mary MacLean is trying to explain what she does for a living and how she does it, but her friend Debi Lind keeps finishing her sentences. “When you learn a discipline, the discipline takes over the conscious mind,” Mary says. “Which leaves the unconscious mind free. And then it just…”…
On the day that fifteen people died at Columbine High School, Rebecca Oakes tried to block out the barrage of news reports, the sirens and the shocked expressions on the faces of her colleagues. She closed her office door, shuffled papers on her desk and attempted to concentrate. She couldn’t…
