If you’ve never been to Denver, let me tell you about the capitol building. It’s a big fancy gray granite affair with a dome on top covered with gold leaf. The dome sort of looks like the dome on top of the congressional building in Washington D.C. The building sits on top of a gently sloping hill that overlooks Lincoln Street and comprises the western edge of what is known as “Capitol Hill.” I don’t know who named Capitol Hill, but it may have been the same genius hat named the orange.
The hill is covered with a blanket of grass and bums. During the 1960s, the bums were known as hippies, but that nom de plume was just a flash in the pan. Panhandlers, street people, hippies, punks, beatniks, bummers, gold miners, buffalo hunters, Lewis and Clark, they’re all the same—people with no place to sleep at night who converge on what was doubtless envisioned as a garden of paradise back in the olden days when landscape artists had been hired to make Denver look important. There are a lot of Greek columns and water fountains in that part of town. The City and County Building is located a few hundred yards west, facing the capitol building. That’s where I have to go every year to renew my taxi-driving license. For some reason, a Denver taxi license is called a “Herdic” license. End of history lesson.
The hippies were standing near the eastbound bus stop at Colfax and Broadway. This didn’t surprise me. That particular stop is where the #15 bus loads before going up the hill and rolling straight east to Aurora. The 15 is kind of legendary in Denver. It takes nerves of steel to ride the 15. The 15 is a cross between the Mardi Gras, the bowery, and a John Waters film. I don’t know how the ride shapes up by the time you get to Aurora, since I’ve never ridden the 15 all the way to Aurora. It may very well be that no fare has ever made it all the way to Aurora, but I do know one thing: the bus passes the site of the old Fitzsimmons Army Hospital. That’s where President Eisenhower recovered from his heart attack in the 1950s, although I don’t think the 15 had anything to do with it.
I was relieved in a pointless sort of way. I really hadn’t believed those kids had been busted and sent to the clink. It’s just that sometimes my brain starts acting like a television and I get easily distracted by the show going on, when I should be watching the road. The sad part is, I watch the TV voluntarily. Whenever the script starts getting truly ludicrous, I sort of sit back to see how far my brain will take the premise. The more outrageous it gets, the less willing I am to switch the program over to what I call “The Maturity Channel,” which is similar to PBS.
The kids appeared to be panhandling. I felt bad for them. A bus stop is not the ideal place to panhandle, since the sort of people who take busses are not that far removed culturally from the sort of people who panhandle. From my point of view, the kids were engaged in an amateurish approach to mooching. I know a few things about mooching. I’ve been on both sides of that fence, and I have learned that form and style have as much to do with success as the amount of money a moochee has to “spare”—as in “Got any spare change?”
Professional mooches understand this of course. I myself never really rose to the level of “professional” because I did most of my mooching in college, usually at The Campus Lounge. When it came to cadging free beers, I thought of myself as an Olympic amateur—good, but not good enough to compete with John Elway.
I glanced at the kids as I rolled past. Two girls and a boy dressed like hippies. They stood out from the crowd. All the other people at the bus stop were just sort of “normal” poorly dressed.
I decided to circle the block. Even though I was no longer worried about the kids getting shipped off to the state prison at Cañon City—which is pronounced “Canyon City” for those of you who don’t speak tilde—I still felt a few ragged vestiges of desire to help them out. Okay. I’ll admit it. I wanted to make up for shrieking, “That’s impossible!” when they told me they had never heard of the Beatles.
I circled around the capitol building and pulled back onto Colfax, and saw the kids trudging up the hill. I drove past them and pulled into a no-parking zone and watched the kids in my rear-view mirror. One of the girls was holding what must have been spare change in her open palm, and the other kids were leaning over to look at it. The pathos was unbearable.
I waited until they were adjacent to my taxi, then I tapped my horn. They stopped and looked at me. I leaned across the seat and spoke to them through the shotgun window. “How’s it going?” I said. I thought about adding the word “dudes” at the end of the sentence, but I wasn’t certain about the proper etiquette for speaking to contemporary ragamuffins.
They squinted at me as if I was some sort of creep. Then the expression on one of the girl’s faces changed, which is to say, she smiled.
“It’s the Beatle man!” she said, and she leaned into the window.
“How are you guys making out?” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “We’re trying to get enough money together to take a bus out to Red Rocks.”
I was momentarily nonplused. Red Rocks is—among other things—way out of town in the foothills.
“Why Red Rocks?” I said.
“The concert,” she said.
“What concert?” I said.
Instead of replying, she reached into a purse made out of macramé and withdrew a long rectangle of paper. She handed it to me.
I quickly scanned it. It was an advertisement printed in a psychedelic font announcing a rock ’n’ roll retrospective at Red Rocks Amphitheater featuring a nostalgia band called Plastic Infinity. I was familiar with them. They were a ’60s cover group like Sha Na Na, whose gimmick was to be nostalgic for the 1950s. It made me wonder if the people of the 1740s were nostalgic for the 1720s.
I then realized that the sheet of paper was in fact a ticket for admittance to the concert. Price: twenty dollars.
I tried to withhold judgment on that, then I gave up. “The tickets ate up all your bread, huh?” I said. Right at that moment I couldn’t have cared less if she took offense at what was subtle sarcasm. She could have bought a couple of Beatle albums for that much money and heard the real thing instead of a cover group.
Plastic Infinity.
Give me a break.
“The tickets didn’t cost anything,” she said with a smile, as I handed the ticket back to her. “They were free.”
This statement somewhat ameliorated my admittedly irrelevant umbrage. But just as I am quick to take umbrage at things that are none of my business, so too do I admire anything that’s free.
“Groovy,” I said. “Where did you get them?”
“A guy was handing them out down by the bus stop,” she said. I nodded. Then frowned. Why would anybody hand out twenty-dollar admittance tickets at a bus stop? The answer came quickly: Plastic Infinity was giving away tickets because it couldn’t sell them. I almost started thinking about the world of publishing, but instead I said, “Is there a bus that goes out to Red Rocks?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess we’ll have to ask a bus driver.”
In a strange way I sort of enjoyed her reply. It was as if I was talking to an actual hippie, a person completely out of touch with The Establishment.
“What time does the concert start?” I said. “Six,” she replied.
This gave the kids barely an hour and a half to mooch bus fare, query a bus driver, find the right bus, and ride it to Red Rocks. In my estimation, it would take someone who was out of touch with The Establishment approximately forever to accomplish these things. Let’s cut to the chase.
I already had my fifty dollars minimum for the day, it was only four-thirty in the afternoon, the sun was still up, and I had nothing to do for the rest of my life. I knew the kids would never make it to Red Rocks in time for the concert. And I still felt guilty about yelling at them for not knowing who the Beatles were. Any of the above excuses was reason enough to give them a free ride to Red Rocks, but I liked the Beatle one best.
“Listen,” I said to the girl, “why don’t I run you out to Red Rocks for free? I’m finished working for the day but I have to keep my cab until seven o’clock. I can get you there early so you can find a good seat. It would take you a really long time to get there on the bus.”
“Oh wow, man,” she said.
If she wasn’t an actual hippie, she certainly had the patois nailed. She stood away from the window and spoke to her friends for a moment, then leaned back in and said, “Thanks a lot, man, we really appreciate this.”
She pulled open the rear door. She and the other girl climbed in and shut the door.
I looked at the boy, who was standing on the sidewalk waving at them.
“Isn’t he coming?” I said.
“No,” the girl said. “He doesn’t have a ticket to the concert.”
I frowned, then said, “What do you mean? I thought you said some guy was handing them out for free.”
“He was, but we got the last two tickets. Billy was just helping us to get some money for the bus. He isn’t going to the concert.”
I nodded, then reached up to drop my flag and turn on the meter. I stopped myself in time. It could have freaked out the hippies if I had turned on the meter. They might have thought I was a capitalist pig who had lied about the hidden cost of the free lunch. I smiled to myself. I hadn’t thought of the phrase “capitalist pig” in a long time. I felt like Gig Young again.
I pulled out onto Colfax and went through the complicated side street business of getting my vehicle aimed west. Eventually we were rolling along Colfax but I was thinking about cutting down to 6th Avenue. There are a number of ways to get to Red Rocks from central downtown. There are fast ways and slow ways and cheap ways and expensive ways. I always drive somewhere in between. That’s on normal days. But since I was giving a free ride to two hippies, this was not a normal day. I opted for fast.
Sixth Avenue turns into a highway beyond the city limits, so I decided to cut down to 6th and get this altruism over with as quickly as possible. Red Rocks is not really all that far from Denver. As I say, it’s in the foothills near a little town called Morrison. I went to high school with a kid named Morrison. I don’t know why I bring that up.
When I came to Kalamath Street I turned left and headed south toward 6th. Up to then I had been busy making cabbie calculations and not paying any attention to the girls in the backseat. Normally I don’t have to make calculations because normally I go to the same places over and over again, DIA, Cherry Creek, etc., but Red Rocks was unusual, and unusual situations force me to think. That might be true of everybody.
“Mind if we smoke?” one of the girls said.
I was just getting ready to swing west onto 6th Avenue, looking in the rear-view mirror, checking traffic, playing the road game, so I said, “I don’t mind,” which I did, but only because I hate to see young people light up cigarettes. I couldn’t care less if an adult wants to set his couch on fire and inhale the smoke, but not many kids own couches. I always have the urge to lecture young people about smoking, but I consciously try to avoid situations in which I pretend to be a grownup. That’s what started me smoking at the age of seventeen—I wanted to be a grownup. The army cured me of that desire. But it still took another ten years before I finally managed to become a kid again and quit smoking. I didn’t really quit smoking though—I gave up. Giving up is the solution to everything.
And then, just as I wheeled my taxi onto 6th Avenue, I realized that the girls in the backseat were not smoking tobacco.