At first he pissed me off. Then he worried me. Then he fascinated me. So imagine how I felt when I found out he was only nineteen! “We’re just calling to okay the purchase of the motherboard,” said the man on the phone. “We’re gonna charge your account the $600…

The smell of feedlot hung in the air as I drove up Route 85 from Brighton, and a sign reading “Welcome to Garden City” flashed by. Whatever sort of place Garden City was, I drove through it in less than a minute and right on into the heart of Greeley…

Glendale is a desert, and the man in battered denim is a wandering Jew, identifiable by the fringes hanging below his T-shirt. “I’ve spent a couple thousand hours studying Torah,” he confirms. “It keeps me focused on something other than this pain of mine. Don’t use my name.” His hair…

On Thanksgiving morning, the White Spot parking lot holds nine cars — two of them ancient Pinto station wagons — and one bright-yellow cafe racer of a motorcycle. A well-dressed man and woman, not old enough to be grandparents but much too dignified to ever go sledding, sit on the…

The two women were both in their mid-thirties, with three kids and one frost ‘n’ tip dye job between them. In no way did they look like potential naked people. “…so then I told her to quit driving so fast, and that’s when I pressed a big fat moon up…

All by himself, Rick Rosner is a few of my favorite things. In 1986, the story of his life thus far constituted my first Westword feature. He had just won second place in Omni magazine’s Smartest Man in America contest, which he aced by completing a long quiz of which…

Only the largest of cars will do. Thus, there were no road trips during the energy crisis of the ’70s. Before and after that, however, for better and worse, my father and I got to know each other during long drives in his 1971 Impala. No matter how rocky a…

Once upon a time, there was actual wheat growing on a ridge in Wheat Ridge. But not a lot of it. Instead, where today new strip malls sprout up almost daily, five- and ten-acre truck farms grew tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers and lettuce. And celery — the celery was particularly fine…

Writing about writing is precisely what gets writers in trouble, but I can’t resist. In fact, I can’t avoid it: There is no other way to explain how I embarked on a 200-mile drive around Denver, stumbled across both a snowboard angel and a crumpet, and discovered that a house,…

East High Farmer’s Market Under the orange and yellow tent, a man with an Australian accent looks at the drawing on the Big Mike’s Original Barbecue Sauce label, then looks at Mike. “Are you the Big Mike?” he finally asks. Mike McCrea looks down at his impressive belly. “Looks like…

For nearly ten years, since long before there was a ballpark in the ballpark neighborhood, Paul Zentgraf has been the Redemption Center’s unofficial apostle. A vigorously healthy 65, tanned but with no visible teeth, dressed in hiking boots and rodeo belt buckle, he is notable for saying “Greetings and salutations”…

The night Historic Denver visited Lakeside Amusement Park, Denver’s most historic amusement park, you could cut the nostalgia with a knife — or perhaps a pearl-handled dagger. Some fifty people had gathered in a pavilion almost unchanged since it was built in 1937, and none of them were there for…

When you’re sniffing around a perfumer’s house, your descriptions of smells had better be particular, so here: The backyard is lilacs before, as opposed to after, a quick afternoon rain in Colorado. The kitchen is cloves with a faint note of rosemary. The perfumer herself, Kerry Ott, does not smell…

I bring my wallet, telling myself that I will use a few old Post-its crammed inside for my notes. But the minute I pass through the massive wood-and-glass doors, my credit card begins to throb. I have come to the new REI flagship store, located in the husk of what…

Hal Bregman’s good manners know no bounds. Hence, any conversational topic — even hygienic concerns arising from our most personal daily function — may be tackled without fear of offense. Could it be that his vocabulary, which, with its specificity and lack of rude informality, inspires confidence? Or is it…

At 8 p.m. one Friday every month, it is Officer Dean Abeyta’s solemn duty to administer a form of juvenile justice that has been called everything from “groundbreaking” to “cruel and unusual.” Entering the single courtroom of the Fort Lupton municipal building, he sets up rows of chairs, drags a…

I’m sitting in the snow at the top of the half-pipe at Eldora, watching Chris Pappas ride down. The eighteen-year-old boys around me stop doing whatever they’re doing and stare down into the pipe. They all know who Chris is, and it’s commonly accepted that on some level, he has…

Once in a while, someone comes into Johnny’s Newsstand who is not a regular customer. Imagine! The Johnny of Johnny’s Newsstand is Johnny Kareski, and such occurrences fascinate him. Exhibit A: “Check this out,” he says, from behind the cash register where he keeps a guitar, sheet music, his first…

Intellectually, I know that the earth thaws from the outside in, but my gut feeling tells me it works the other way. Even when the visible part of the city is frozen into hard cubes, I like to imagine that something alive is running through its core, keeping things moving…

Next to theater, dancing, Maxine and a few glasses of sherry, Al Brooks’s favorite activity is talking. The first to admit when he has gone so far out on a tangent that he can’t remember how to get back, Al is nevertheless a seasoned and entertaining practitioner of the monologue…