I headed down The Hill and stopped behind a bus waiting for a red light at Lincoln Boulevard. “There’s a couple of routes to Golden,” I said. “We could take Sixth Avenue, or else head out Interstate 70 and take the 58th Avenue exit. Depends on how fast you want to get there.”
I always give the customers an option if I can. I want them out of my cab as quickly as possible because, as I said, I score a buck-fifty with every new fare. But Golden is fifteen miles from Denver so either route was fine with me. We were at a kind of fork in the road, although I-70 might have added a couple bucks to the meter, but believe it or not I was indifferent. Sergeant Bilko said it best: You’ll Never Get Rich. Speed was my main concern.
But Trowbridge didn’t answer right away. I gritted my teeth and waited. It was going to be one of “those” trips.
Then he said, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to take Forty-fourth Avenue out to Golden.”
My heart sank. That was the slowest route he could have picked. “Forty-fourth?” I said. “Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he said. “I grew up in Wheatridge and I’d like to take a look at … my old stomping grounds.”
My heart kept sinking but my Univac went into high gear. I had to calculate the fastest route along the slowest route in town. Broadway to 23rd to Fox to 38th, and then hopefully clear past Wadsworth Boulevard with no sightseeing side trips. I was already immersed in regret. Why couldn’t I have left it alone?
Why couldn’t I have have stayed away from Capitol Hill? Why did I have to … get involved in … the personal …
I couldn’t bring myself to finish the thought.
I had made a vow long ago to never again get involved in the personal lives of my fares, and yet here I was, like a moth to a flame, like a child to an orange—I had actually gone out of my way to pick up Trowbridge just because I felt sorry for him. What in the hell was wrong with me? I blamed my faulty Univac.
The light turned green. I made a right and worked my way over to the viaduct that would take us across the valley where I-25 and the Platte River runs. The traffic was flying on I-25. I could have been on I-70 within a minute and heading west toward Golden, but instead I found myself waiting for a red light at Fox Street near 38th Avenue. I had blown it. Why had I offered him an option?
One thing I have learned about customers during the past fourteen years is that they fear cab drivers. By this I mean that most of them live with the assumption that cabbies know what they are doing, that cabbies know the best routes to all points of drop-off in Denver, and to question our wisdom is to cross the line! The rest of the customers think we’re taking them on the scenic route. But all of them seem to forget that, because they are footing the bill, the driver is required by PUC regulations to do their bidding. If they want to stop off at a bank or a 7-11, that’s their option. We have to do what they want. As long as they maintain proper backseat decorum and adhere to the precepts of civilized behavior, we cabbies are pretty much their mobile slaves. You do get the occasional barbarian in your backseat, but when that happens, all the PUC regulations go right out the door, along with your customer.
After the light turned green I swung up to 38th Avenue and settled in for a long trip west. This required an attitude adjustment on my part. Speed was no longer in the loop. I focused my thoughts on the fact that this would be a moneymaking venture, which I rarely do. As you may have gathered, money has never been foremost in my mind when it comes to almost everything except publishing bestsellers. I know this may sound insane, but keeping my backseat vacant as long as possible is my primary goal as a cab driver. I read an average of two hundred paperbacks per year.
“The old beer warehouse,” Trowbridge said softly.
I glanced back, “What’s that, sir?”
He tapped on the side window and pointed. “I used to drink beer there when I was a young man.”
It was a bar he was referring to, not a storage depot. “The Beer Warehouse,” said a sign hanging over the doorway.
“That was back in the days when an eighteen-year-old could get legally drunk,” he said.
“Oh yeah,” I said, eager to get some kind of conversation going. As I have said, silence in a taxi can be unnerving, and I hadn’t yet succumbed to the ploy of turning on the Rocky radio to listen to the dispatcher yelling at newbies. I normally listen to the dispatcher as little as possible when I drive. But right then I wished I had stopped listening to him yesterday. “It’s ironic how nowadays you can go to a war when you’re eighteen, but you can’t do it drunk,” I said, thinking about my own army days. “When I was eighteen you could buy beer, sign contracts, vote, and get drafted, sometimes in the same week.”
He nodded. We rode for a few more blocks. “Elitch’s is gone,” Trowbridge said.
I glanced to my left as we passed the site of the old Elitch’s Amusement Park. All the rides had been dismantled and the park had moved to the Platte Valley. I often went to Elitch’s when I first came to Denver. One night I rode the roller coaster eight times in a row on purpose. That was the last time I ever did anything on purpose.
“A shame they had to tear it down,” he said. “I celebrated my eighth birthday in Kiddieland. All my old friends from the third grade were there. The whole gang.”
I glanced in my rear-view mirror. “The theater is still there.”
He nodded but didn’t say anything. I debated whether or not to tell him that many years ago I had seen Mickey Rooney coming out of the Elitch Theater. I decided not to tell him, but it took an effort. I’ve told practically everybody I’ve ever known that I once saw Mickey Rooney in person. Most people find it to be a real conversation killer.
“Turn right on Sheridan,” Trowbridge said.
He wasn’t afraid of cabbies. I made the turn, which took us to 44th Avenue. After that it would be a straight shot to Buffalo Bill’s grave, not counting the winding hairpin road up Lookout Mountain itself.
I swung left onto 44th and headed out.
“Lakeside Speedway,” he said as we drove past a vast lot behind a cyclone fence. “I used to attend stock-car races there when I was a teenager. They had a dirt track.”
I glanced at the site. The lot is part of the town of Lakeside, which is comprised solely of an amusement park about the same age as Elitch’s. Lakeside even has a mayor and a police department. It’s the kind of town I would have liked to live in when I was a kid. They don’t make towns with roller coasters anymore. I know a lot about Denver history. I once took a local history class at UCD when I was hiding out from the real world, compliments of the GI Bill.
“Lakeside Shopping Center,” he said a few blocks farther along. “I worked as a stock boy at Skaggs Drugstore when I was eighteen. My first job.” His voice was wistful. He was seeing his old stomping grounds. I glanced in the mirror and tried to judge his age. I didn’t like what I saw. The tinted mirror made him look young. I thought about asking where he went to high school and then surreptitiously asking what year he had graduated. But I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to find out that this old timer was younger than me.
We passed into the suburb of Wheat Ridge, a town that had boomed after World War II—a lot of white clapboard shotgun housing as well as one-story blonde brick ranch houses. But that’s the history of America itself. I didn’t live in suburbs when I was a kid though. Ancient urban residential, that was my Wichita. I could have grown up in the 1920s and wouldn’t have known the difference as far as the architecture was concerned. A couple of nuns at Blessed Virgin Catholic Grade School were born in 1890. It gives me the willies to think that I was educated by people who were alive twenty-five years after Lincoln was shot.
We finally passed Wadsworth Boulevard and entered the wilderness that separates Denver from Golden. I gathered from Trowbridge that the landscape hadn’t changed much since he was a boy.
“When I was twelve, my chums and I rode our bicycles out to Golden,” he said. “We made a day-trip of it. We pedaled our bikes up Lookout Mountain.”
I nearly lost control of the cab. “You what!”
“We rode our bikes up Lookout Mountain.”
“Why?” I said. I shouldn’t have said that. Why do kids do anything? To get away from their parents, of course.
“It was just something to do,” he said. “Did you have ten-speeds?” I said.
“Oh no, just old-fashioned bicycles.”
I started to feel faint. The road up Lookout Mountain is at least five miles on a steep grade. I tried to envision a boy making that climb on a bike without a complex system of high and low gears connected to the chain, and I couldn’t do it. My imagination could not envision such a madman stunt. I wanted to call Trowbridge a liar, but instead I felt pity for him, or at least the boy he had been. Didn’t they have television in those days? Of course they did, even if it was only three channels. I’d been there. Ergo, Trowbridge and his chums must have been truly desperate for entertainment. I whispered a silent prayer of thanks that I had grown up in Kansas. If you’ve ever seen a basketball court, you’ve seen Kansas.
Then we entered Golden. It’s a pretty town with a lot of trees. During the nineteenth century it was the territorial capital, until the capital was moved to Denver. That’s about all I can tell you about Golden. It’s jammed up against the base of Lookout Mountain. I made my way to an intersection that led to a two-lane asphalt road that started the winding climb up the hill, and I tried to imagine a group of little boys on old-fashioned bicycles pedaling up the steep road. It sickened me.
Within a few minutes we were high above the town. It’s a fast ride in a car. On a bike though …
“How did you do it?” I said.
“Do what?’ Trowbridge said.
“Ride a bike up this hill. It feels like a forty-five degree angle.”
“The grade is not quite that steep. But we did get off our bikes and walk them part of the way. It was very difficult.”
“I’ll bet,” I said. “How long did it take you to get to the top?”
“Oh, five or six hours.”
A kid could watch a lot of cartoons in five or six hours.
I looked at the rising asphalt ahead of me. Just traveling on foot up that road would be hard enough, but shoving the weight of a bicycle … my mind reeled, and ultimately rejected the entire scenario. I decided to stop thinking about it. Instead, I started wondering if my cab would make it up the hill without blowing the goddamn radiator.
We were halfway up the mountain when Trowbridge said, “Could you pull over here?”
There was a hairpin turn up ahead with a pull-off, the kind of scenic view you might see at the Grand Canyon. It had a low wall made of stone, which looked like a WPA project to me. I pulled off to the right and parked the cab.
“This was always a stopping point for us whenever we rode our bikes up here,” Trowbridge said. “We would drink soda pops and wait for the laggards.”
I turned around in the seat and looked at him. “You mean you rode up this mountain more than once?”
“Oh yes. Two or three times every summer.”
I turned away from him and stared at the eastern plains of Colorado. I could see clear across Kansas, all the way to the St. Louis Arch. Okay, I’m kidding about the arch. But that’s what it felt like. Two or three times a summer—was he serious? I felt like I was in the presence of Satan.
“Let’s climb out and take a look,” he said.
“Get thee behind me,” I almost said, except he already was.