It was Deborah who first brought up the idea of getting Denver a driver’s license, in the fall of 1998. She felt bad that her cancer—and how it consumed our time—was hampering Denver from being more a part of our lives. If he had a license, she reasoned, he could more freely join in the things we were doing, without being dependent on our hunting him down in the hood.
When we broached the subject with Denver, he responded in typical fashion: “Let me think about it,” he said.
A few weeks later, we talked it around over coffee at the mission. “I like the idea of bein able to drive, Mr. Ron,” he said. “But I got to tell you, I ain’t exactly clean.”
“Clean?”
“I got a record.”
It seemed Denver had done a little scouting down at the Department of Public Safety. When the clerk typed his name into the computer, up popped a list of problems: a disorderly charge in Louisiana, a few unpaid tickets related to his car-motel business, and—this was the deal-breaker—a citation for marijuana possession bestowed on him in Baton Rouge during some years he spent riding the rails. With the pot charge on his record, there could be no driver’s license.
Denver wanted to clear his name, so we agreed he had to travel to Baton Rouge and subject himself to the laws of Napoleon. It is an odd fact of American history that some laws in the Bayou State haven’t been rewritten since the little Corsican still owned the place.
It was December 1998, and we picked a sorry night for a road trip. A freezing rain had shut down highways all over Texas. But Denver wanted his past behind him, so I drove him down to the Greyhound station. He figured there might be a few drunks on the bus, but fewer than at the mission, which was always packed to the rafters during lousy weather.
Denver wagered that a couple of hundred dollars in the hand of the right Louisiana lawman might fix his legal problem. “That’s just the way it is down there,” he said. So I gave him $200 to pay the fine.
After a long, slippery trip on the Greyhound—“That dawg slid like a hog on ice!” Denver told me later—he rolled into Baton Rouge. The day was about like the night before, with the kind of icy wind that makes your toes ache and your nose run. Denver pushed through the doors at the police station, stamped the cold out of his feet, and tried to explain that he wanted to turn himself in for a ten-year-old marijuana charge.
The police just laughed at him.
He hunted down a payphone and called to tell me he wasn’t having any luck. “They think I’m crazy, Mr. Ron,” he said with a chuckle. “They think I’m just tryin’ to get arrested so I can have a warm place to sleep. I can’t find nobody to take my money under the table—or on the top!”
If I couldn’t help Denver get fined or arrested, I figured I’d have to use the good-ole-boy system. I called a fellow I knew, a young mover and shaker in Louisiana who’d grown up playing Hot Wheels with the governor’s son. Deborah had taught him in the first grade. I figured he would know someone who’d either arrest Denver or set him free. He did, and just like that, Denver’s record was clean. As Denver told me before he headed down to Baton Rouge in the first place: Things are different down there.
And so, the way was clear for Denver to get his driver’s license. That meant passing a written test—no big deal for someone who can read. But, unable to study the Department of Public Safety manual on his own, Denver opted instead for tutoring. A couple of fellows at the mission worked with him for weeks until he knew all the questions and most of the answers. When he declared himself ready, I took him down to the DPS.
After an oral exam, Denver emerged from the DPS office laughing, raising his hand for a big high five. Next came the driving test. He had driven a tractor and even a couple of cars, but had never parallel-parked. I drove my new car, a silver-green Infinity Q45, out to the big parking lot next to the Lakeworth High School football stadium and let him slide into the driver’s seat. Then, for a couple of hours, Denver practiced parallel parking between the phone booth and the concession stand before the Lakeworth marching band took over the parking lot and ran us off.
Finally, in September 1999, ten months after his trip to Louisiana to try to get arrested, Denver got his license. (The lady who gave Denver his road test said she really liked his Q45 and wondered aloud how much his monthly payments were.) He thanked me again and again, until I finally had to tell him to quit. He took nothing for granted and declared the license one of a great many blessings God had lately sent his way, Deborah and I among them.
In practical terms, Denver’s getting his license was a validation: Without one, so many things are out of reach—not only driving, but other things that make a person feel like a person, like just being able to prove who you are. Soon after he got his license, Denver used it to prove more than that.
Regan had finally found a job she was sure she’d love, as a cook for Young Life, a Christian youth camp. It was half the pay and twice the hours she worked at the gallery, but it was ministry work and it was in Colorado, set against the majestic Rockies, where a lot of twenty-five-year-olds feel called to suffer for the Lord.
Deborah felt strongly that Regan shouldn’t hover around home, waiting to see how the cancer would progress. We encouraged her to take the job. So she packed her bags and headed west to the Crooked Creek Ranch in Winter Park, Colorado. But at twenty-five, Regan had more than luggage, having had apartments in both New York and Dallas.
Jokingly, I said to Denver one day, “Now that you’ve got a driver’s license, would you like to drive Regan’s things to Colorado?”
When I mentioned the route wound through the capital city of Denver, his smile stretched wider than an eight-lane interstate. “I always wanted to see the city I was named after,” he said.
Now I’d opened my trap and couldn’t take it back. So over the next three days, we hammered out a plan. I pulled out a road atlas and traced the route to Winter Park with colored marking pens. But Denver couldn’t read the words in the atlas, so on plain paper, I drew a rough map with pictures of highway signs, and showed him what the one going to Colorado looked like. Denver was thoroughly convinced he could follow a map—and he convinced me as well.
So on a brilliant October day, we loaded my nearly new F-350 crew-cab pickup with everything Regan owned—TVs, stereos, clothes, furniture. We set a meeting time for him and Regan, 6:00 p.m. the following day at the Safeway grocery store in Winter Park. And after a final one-hour cram session, I sent him on his way, armed with $700 cash, a simple little hand-drawn map with checkpoints, phone numbers to call if he got in trouble, and a $30,000 truck with a free and clear title.
As he eased down the driveway, I ran alongside the truck, repeating, “Two-eighty-seven! Two-eighty-seven!” If he made the turn onto Highway 287, he’d be on his way to Colorado. If he missed it, he’d wind up in the hinterlands of Oklahoma where, I had tried to convince him, humans spoke an entirely different language.
I tried to convince myself I knew what I was doing, but the plain facts were that Denver was heading out on a two-thousand-mile round-trip, navigating interstates, back roads, and mountain passes—the highest in Colorado—using a driver’s license that had arrived in the mail only the week before. What was he thinking? Better yet, what was I thinking?
As he pulled away with the money, my truck, and everything Regan owned, Denver wiped his forehead with the towel that he usually carried, grinning a little semi-grin that I couldn’t quite decode.
The angel on my right shoulder whispered that it meant, “Thank you, Mr. Ron, for trustin me.”
The devil on my left cackled, “No, it means ‘Adiós, sucker!’”