The Lens: A Question of Geography

It is erroneous to say that there was not place better to live than in Denver. It's erroneous to say this because at the time of the story, there was NO other place to live than Denver. And if there were, why the fuck would you want to live there?

There was something in the dirt, the dust, the crusted over granite dusted road plowed snow or in the blue summer lightning storms that made it clear, and I mean clear, that this was Denver and outside of her borders there was nothing else. Nothing.

The traffic along Broadway once it left downtown heading south went into a second, or third reality that was every bit as real, as real as Englewood or Littleton might be. During afternoons, all three lanes were packed, RTD buses and cars and that was that. There were traffic lights on every block. After crossing over 6^th Ave, the bookstores/porn shops/gun shops began. Crossing over Alameda it was the antique shops. Post WWII was everywhere in post commercial despair. To the west, a distance away, the mighty mighty Rocky Mountains, but at the time of the story, they were just a backdrop. To the east, the entire world sloping forever down to the Mississippi, a place where you'd never see—unless your built a raft and escaped the homeless encampments along the South Platte river.

LSD was everywhere.

We'd just come home in some fashion or other from the military.

I was the first to come home. I rejoined old friends, old thoughts. I was angry, angsty, unaware of the fever in the air. Denver was abandoned. I was abandoned. Walking the streets from downtown up to East Colfax amid the HIV/AIDS victims, the junkies, the prostitutes, I felt a level of ease that would forever color my lens.

All the answers could be found in books, someone who told you about Hemingway or Vonnegut or Kerouac. All the answers were found in records. Someone you knew was into this that or the other, and some of these things did not come from LA or Chicago or New York. Occasionally someone came from Denver. Someone like the Warlock Pinchers.

There was something that I wanted. I know now that It wasn't something that I knew. All I knew was that I was safe and protected in Denver. Denver was the only place to be. Denver was a collective of people who did not exist but maintained houses from the north side to the south, the mountains to the Air Force base. Denver was a collection of graves and failed endeavors and the American Dream that tomorrow would be, would have to be, better that today.

I didn't know it at the time, not like I know it now, all I wanted was love. I wanted to be loved. And to be loved, then, was like the promise of a bad, a real bad sunburn. I was then, as I am now, terrified of the sun. And love? I was probably afraid of that too.

I wrote in my notebook. I wrote extensions of my vision, my views, Denver, Capitol Hill, Auraria Campus, Downtown, 16^th Street Mall. Later I would write in a journal, feverishly, the day's events. Later still, I would walked the abandoned streets with my camera and snap images that took me to a more and less worldly place than the place I was, Denver. Denver, Colorado.

And there was no place else on Earth. None. Ever. Denver. Just Denver.