. . . Was I [Have] Such Friends

OR

HighTimes in the ‘70s & ‘80s
A Baby Boomer’s Sketchy Recollections

It is March 21st 2020, and we are in the beginning stages of the Corona Virus pandemic. Any one of us could be dead within a matter of days. For some reason, I was thinking about old friends. I was born in 1956 and so am 64 years old. I have COPD/Emphysema from a diligent career of smoking tobacco cigarettes “in the closet” for the last 20 years and for 28 years “out in the open” prior to that. I am afraid that most of these recollections will involve smoking one thing or another, in one way or another–I do not mean the method of inhalation, but ‘one way or another’ means many of these stories will center around substance abuse. What can I say? It was the ‘70s and the times I am thinking of were long before any of us gave a second thought to the health effects of our actions. We were on earth primarily to have fun. Late Period Baby Boomers that we were, we had also not given a second thought to using our lives to make the world a better place, as I said, we were alive basically to see what we could score. Settling those scores came later in life.

(Why do so many of these stories involve drugs, well . . . it was the ‘70s after all, and because I think it’s funny what we used to do, or think we had to do, to make ourselves feel more alive. So if you hate tobacco, or marijuana, or psilocybin, or mescaline, or LSD, or hashish, or certain kinds of deodorant (to huff), or if you hate substance abuse–perhaps you know someone who has died recently of an accidental or intentional overdose–or if you have no time for people who loved to alter their state of mind at some point in their life, you probably should not waste your time by reading what follows. Thank you, and a sincere good day to you. Wash your hands for at least 20 . . .)

Peeter Verner Seebert Junior

So I was thinking about Peeter yesterday, when my wife had allowed me (allowed: because of her misgivings about me being away from home during the pandemic) to run some errands which I gladly did because then I could get a few smokes in without any family members seeing me, or without an elaborate song and dance performed by me so that I could steal a smoke behind one of several out buildings on our property. So I was standing by my car in a parking lot thinking about Peeter Verner Seebert Junior.

Peeter and I lived together in 1970 and maybe part of 1971. I guess every generation has their challenges. I’d say it was a pretty confusing time in the bigger world around us, although I’m not sure how aware we were of the bigoldbad world at this time. Wonderful old Walter Cronkite was in our lives many evenings and Eric Sevareid was waxing eloquent from rosy-fingered eventide to unrelenting dusky darkness now and again. But think of that, born in the mid-fifties, just as we were becoming aware of the wider world, there we were sandwiched between duck-and-cover drills and Woodstock . . . what the fuck is goin’ on here?

Peeter Verner Seebert Junior was a studious young lad. We both went to a private day school, the mission of which was to ready our restless minds for higher education, so we said, “Higher? I’m cool with that!”

So Peeter and I lived together in Denver in a house we shared with my mother. You should all know that Peetey was an extremely studious lad. In fact, I recall just now an episode from much later than the ‘70s when Peeter and I shared a house in the ‘90s, I came home one night and was walking up the stairs when, in my peripheral vision, I caught Peeter and a study partner, books opened on their laps, ink on their fingers, pencils behind their ears, making out and into each other’s lips and tongues so much that they did not hear me clomping up the stairs. I thought, both then and now, that only young teens made-out with that much vehemence. I believe, at this time, Peeter was engaged to be married to a different woman than his study partner, but as we used to say around “The Home for Unwed Fathers” “All’s fair in love and drinking”. (Oh no. I was going to limit this to the 1970s, if I get into the history and histrionics of the Hotel Pennsylvania also know as The Home for Unwed Fathers, we could be here for awhile.)

So Peeter and I lived together in a house we shared with my mother (yes, we’re back to the 70’s), and Peetey was a studious lad. Couldn’t hardly tear him away from his studies, except for a brief break each night when we would go “jogging”. Now this was way before spandex and Adidas and Nike and even before the mad ‘exercise your way to a better person’ craze. Each night we would tell my Mom that we were going “jogging” in our street clothes and the 5 pounds each hiking boots that were an essential part of the wardrobe of every cool Coloradan. Out the door, down the steps, down the driveway, turn left onto the sidewalk, jog to the end of the block, turn right and cross Franklin Street, jog to the alley, turn right again and begin to wind down from a half-hearted run to a snail’s pace, and stop behind the garage associated with the Clark’s house and light up an eagerly anticipated tobacco cigarette, shoot the shit for a while, and when our smokes were satisfactorily completed, walk back to the sidewalk, pick up the snail’s pace to a half-hearted run, cross Franklin Street, turn left at the sidewalk and turn right at the driveway and up the steps and in through the door feeling both chagrined and satisfied. I, of course, would pretend to return to my studies and Peeter would dive in deep although he might a have made time for a fantasy about making out with a young female colleague from his future Master of Business school who would be helping him with the statistical probability of his getting laid at least once a week.

Peeter’s epiphany came in his fifteenth year. I know this with some certainty because we were on bicycles and not driving a car. That would make it 1970. We used to ride our bikes out onto the golf course of the Denver Country Club, not as members, but as ne’er-do-wells. One could ride past the clubhouse, past the vast swimming pool, past the “pop-stand” and onto the golf course toward the latter stages of the front nine. Between the eighth hole fairway and the ninth hole green a steep gravel road pitched down toward Cherry Creek. There was a concrete pad 2 or 3 inches below the surface of the creek which provided a ford intended for golf carts going to and from the eighth hole tee, but it made for an easy crossing for bicycles too. So we’d ride on down the hill, ride through the creek, and then head up stream for a ways until we came to large grouping of bushes in the center of which was a fairly large open space filled with a greenish light from the sun filtering through small trees and large bushes. The perfect hideout. Now this proved to be a rather exclusive hideout, it being on the grounds of the DCC. Unlike most other hidden places, there was never a speck of trash, no sign of foreigners, no ghosts of illicit or perverted acts taking place there. So Peeter and I would sit there happy with the notion of being outlaws. I truly do not remember if we took beers there, or if, at fifteen, we ever possessed marijuana, we had certainly smoked it by then, but whether we had as yet ever purchased and possessed, I do not recall. So certainly we smoked tobacco cigarettes and maybe drank a warm beer and shot some outlaw shit and mused and daydreamed aloud or silently just being 15-year-olds in 1970 in Denver, Colorado, U.S.A. I remember when it happened, a spring day and there we were when Peeter fell suddenly and unusually quiet. A funny look washed over his face, and I became a little concerned, when Peeter said, “Shep, I know what we gotta do.” Now I always knew Seebert had a good heart, that, in fact, he had a magnanimous, generous, benevolent attitude toward the little person, the have-nots, had a desire to speak for those without a voice; he looked at me, somewhat pale, troubled, but with a gleam in his eye and said, “Shep, we’re going to liberate the Denver Country Club, throw the fat cats out into Speer Boulevard, we’re going to manumit the poor, we’ll occupy it and turn it into a homeless shelter!” Rarely had I heard a teenager speak with so much idealistic conviction, empathy and determination. I was on board! Right on, Brother Peete! Our civic minds were awakening. Max Yasgur’s farm was still recovering from Woodstock. Ashes of draft cards and American flags filled the air. Fat cats would run naked and screaming for whatever cover they could find. The revolution, although not televised, began here and now with two teenagers jumping up and down, arms and clenched fists raised inside a leafy hideout, hoping to god that no one could hear them. Oh, yeah, we must have been stoned.

So I became a printer and then later a chocolate maker and Peeter ended up selling mountain mansions to millionaires and billionaires in Vail and Beaver Creek, and last I heard the Denver Country Club still functioned as an exclusive club where the wealthy golfed and tennised and swam and ate and drank and held social gatherings where most everyone dressed impeccably and belonged to the upper echelons of Denver society: jews, blacks, browns, yellows need not apply, unless of course you were willing to be a token. In the ‘70s widows could be members if their deceased husbands had been members, but single women, eh, that was iffy, and definitely not 15-year-olds who held Karl Marx and Woody Guthrie in high esteem.

BOFP

BOFP, if you don’t know, is an acronym for Big Old Fuckin’ Perry. Mark at the age of 15 was bigger than life in many ways, about 6’6”, slender, size 13 shoes, or there about, kind of awkward as a baby giraffe, and yet he could move that large physique rather elegantly around the crease and goal on a lacrosse field. He later tried ice hockey, and the results were not the same. Mark possessed a confidence around girls the rest of us did not possess in our mid teens. I bring up his girlfriends only because this document is about friends, and one of his girlfriends back then became someone who I care about, all be it, from a distance in time and of geography.

Mark was an official and probably one of the founding members of  The South Street Gang. Please do not picture young toughs forged in the fires of inner city squalor. The South Steel Street Gang’s ‘hood was made up of large properties with acreage on a country road where people had horses for pets and tennis courts out back, and was away out south of Denver, where in the 1970s that was still rural.

The big Bofper played a significant role in my early development as an inabsentia member of the South Steele Street Gang. Although I grew up in the city, in the Cheesman Park neighborhood to be precise, and was therefore kind of a city slicker compared to the rural gang that haled from down south of Denver, Mark saw to it that I was accepted into the group. So he was really something like a sponsor to me, a protector, a big brother. Mark, perhaps because of his size, or maybe because he needed to water and till and fertilize and cultivate a garden intended to feed his rather large ego, and don’t forget that he did have some Texan blood in him, liked to do things in big ways. Actually, his going for grandeur in most everything might have been something he inherited from his father who had the demeanor of a conman with expensive taste. Mark liked to impress and while he may not have always had the funds to back it up, he most surely had somewhere in his wallet a card that would purchase the most expensive lunch in town, or the round of golf at the most elite club in town, or something, anything to make the two of you feel rich and privileged.

(As I write this morning at 6:29 a.m. on Thursday, March 26, 2020 I have to interject: I have the strangest line of a song, actually a hymn, rattling around in my head, and this is no shit: “We gather together to ask the lord’s blessing”. Well, social distancing, and my self-imposed quasi-quarantine do not allow for gathering together, and as far as asking the lord’s blessing, I do it all the time now as part of my A.A. program. My morning ritual involves saying the third step prayer and the seventh step prayer and the prayer of St Francis and a prayer I made up long ago for the lord’s blessing of my family and two Buddhist dedication/prayers and the five big remembrances and other spiritual reading, so we do not gather together but are leaning heavily on a god of my misunderstanding these day.)

Mark and Mike and Annie’s dad was, I think, mostly a confidence man and quite successful. He introduced me to sushi and the breakfast of REAL champions: fresh sliced peaches in a bath of port wine. He invited me to visit with him at the Broadmore outside of Colorado Springs, and he flew–in his own, or a borrowed, or shared plane–Mark and me to Aspen right after school let out for the summer of my junior year and Mark’s senior year. It happened that my brother and some of his friends from Yale Architecture School were in Aspen building a house for someone, and my brother had invited us to come up there as long as we were willing to work, which we did. As I remember it, they were only pouring foundations at that point, so we helped out with the concrete work, and then made sure we had time to do some camping. So off we went to Conundrum Hot Springs, about a nine mile hike up past the maroon bells and up to about 11,200 feet above sea level, and we arrived late in the afternoon. We dumped our gear at a likely looking camping spot and headed straight for the hot springs. Picture: snow still hiding out on north facing slopes and in the shady areas and small glaciers everywhere on the surrounding peaks, Conundrum Creek running high, timberline in the Colorado rockies, Conundrum Peak rising to 14,060 feet above sea level, and its neighbor Castle Peak topping out at 14,279 ft., and there tucked behind the curve of a moraine: stone lined natural hot springs. Far Out. There were a couple of older dudes lolling in the springs, each of them with hair down to the middle of his back. I don’t recall if Mark and I went in naked or in our underwear, maybe we knew it didn’t really matter. Oh, hot water after a rugged hike, surrounding peaks and an extraordinary view down and down and down into the valley. One of the long haired dudes picked up a pipe from the pile of clothes near him on the edge of the spring and loaded it with something, lit it and passed it to me. I took a huge breath of smoke, held it for a second and it blew up in my lungs so much I had to exhale and began coughing like that day’s hike might be my last. Mark took the pipe, inhaled, eyes widened, exhaled, coughed. The wizards who’d been in the pool when we arrived each smoked. I think for a time Mark and I tried to make conversation, but it quickly became apparent that spoken words were just an annoying noise. One of the long-hairs started a sing-song sort of chanting in some language, maybe whale, maybe mountain goat. Speechless. whoa

Mark and I needed to set up camp before dark and so rather unhappily we climbed out of the warm pool. My clothes did not make a whole lot of sense. I knew I needed to put them on, but sleeve holes and pants legs and button holes were something of a mystery. I finally managed to dress myself and stuck my feet into my hiking boots. Putting socks on damp feet and the Chinese trigonometry of tying laces was beyond me. So I wandered off toward our campsite, and before too long encountered an obstacle I was not at all prepared for. As I said, Conundrum Creek was running high. Before me was a churning, thunderous chasm of light blue and white water moving east and downhill at a frightening, tumultuous pace. There was a log bridge across the raging void that I did not recall setting foot on, and yet I could see the familiar sight of the packs Mark and I had carried up the long and arduous trail. I must have crossed the creek right here without even thinking about it on the way up to the hot springs, but this was an entirely different story. I couldn’t figure out why Mark hadn’t come up behind me with a storied plan, a confidence boosting quip like, one of his favorites in reference to the sad plight of house plants in houses we shared later on, “When the growin’ gets tough, the tough get growin’” I turned and looked to see where he was, and damned if he wasn’t still back by the hot springs having a knock-down-drag-out fight with a red sweater. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to put it on or take it off, but he had his head all the way through an arm sleeve which was all bunched up around his neck so he looked like a 6’6” tortoise standing on its back legs. After a while he extricated himself from his sweater and, vanquished, carrying sweater and socks and boots he gingerly came on down the path barefoot saying, “Ow,ow,ow,ow!” and when he got to the creek he looked at it, then he looked at me, then he looked back at the raging torrent and said, “Ah, shit.” It certainly wasn’t because we were drunk or even feeling drunk that the log over the water presented such a quandary (which, by the way, is the name of another 14,000 ft peak in Colorado, both Quandary and Conundrum were apparently named by disappointed, half-mad and very hungry miners.) We ended up sitting on the log in the way that ladies wearing dresses ride a horse and scooting ourselves inch by inch to safety. Having overcome the vicissitudes of the trail thus far, neither one of us wanted anything to do with pup tent erection. We had brought with us an elegant feast that remained in our packs. I believe we each ate a power bar, crawled into our sleeping bags, and I don’t know about Mark, but I seem to recall saying a silent little prayer about waking up less stoned. Not stone cold sober, just a little less stoned.

I need to interject here something about another good friend who won’t get her own section, not because she doesn’t deserve it, but because this is better. RoseMarie PerryStewartVoorhees was the mother of and to Mark and Mike and Annie and to many of us whom she entertained, consoled, reassured, encouraged and made laugh. Rosie was a highly intelligent and laughter-loving belle who, at least, seemed southern in her elegant demeanor. Despite the elegant aura she could laugh at herself. So many nights Mark and I would stumble into her abode at midnight looking for more beer, and Rosie would sit with us long into the morning talking and laughing and challenging us to think on our butts because thinking on our feet would have been dangerous duty at those hours. She seemed of a younger generation than my mother, prettier, cooler and she was there at one in the morning because she was genuinely interested, not about what we’d been up to, but about what we were doing and thinking and dreaming.

I hadn’t kept up with her later on in our lives, but I always wanted to, meant to. I would get news about her from Dayton mostly, “Oh, she’s still sharp as a tack” and the like. And then a couple of years ago I called Annie to see if I could arrange a time to visit Rosie, and found out she had died. I realized then that had she not died when she did, no, it would not be a good time to visit, because I had missed the opportunity 10 and 20 and 30 years ago. I don’t know what Rosie’s last years were like, but I do know that Annie ran herself into the ground caring for her mother for all of those years. Sweet mama, Rosie, lovely daughter, Annie.

Mark and I had many other adventures, ah yes we used to sneak on the golf course at the Denver Country Club so often the golf pros thought we were members. We’d start late after our work and start halfway down the 5th hole fairway and only get in 7 or 8 holes before the light failed or we flailed too often. Teeing off from the eighth hole tee and crossing the creek on the foot bridge I often looked down to the group of bushes where Peeter Verner Seebert Junior had had his revolutionary epiphany. “Were gonna liberate the place, throw the bums out!” Eh, maybe tomorrow.

The Turk

July 23, 2020 5:16 a.m.

The Turk was the “Turk” because he stopped shaving his upper lip in high school and the little mustache he sported there and thereafter made him look like a Turkish Dignitary. That may be stretching it a bit. He looked like . . . the court jester of the Ottoman Empire. That may be spreading it a bit too thin. (I am a lackadaisical historian, an unreliable witness, a delinquent chronicler, but I do know this) The Turk was the “Turk” and that was that. Few nicknames stick to a person like the “The Turk” stuck to the Turk, like liquid nails, like slime on a slug, like a bump on a log. Mike was the Turk, may he rest in laughter and cloud, ‘cause peace just aint funny or comfy enough.

First son of  Rose Marie and Henry Hank. Brother to Mark and Anne. Friend to most everybody. And a goat-head thorn in the tender feet of Pompous Authority. Like good trouble, Turk was a master of good mischief, often a tight-rope walk between fun and felony. Later on, in his too short life, the Turk was given a diagnosis which presented him with a choice of getting a lung transplant or letting it go. After some study, either cursory or rigorous, he chose to let it go. He bought a pick-up truck and an Airstream trailer and hit the road rolling. He went to Bermuda with Anne and, I imagine, visited the foyers of heaven, hell and purgatory with God. Turk laughed and made others laugh right up until the end. Beautiful Anne, as she did with her mother, stayed by his side through the toughest times. And when he decided he wanted to be buried near his mother, Anne arranged for his corpse to be flown from Houston to Denver in the middle of the pandemic.

I have found that the best way to be with those who have departed is to ask for their advice when faced with a quandary. Mike, I’ll be asking for your advice often. So go on now, my friend, and rest with wholesome laughter and evening cloud. 

Juan Baptiste Gallegos

Johnny is/was/is a latinx or latino character from Minturn, Colorado who would not identify as latino or latinx because all he would say on the matter would be, “Who really gives a fuck after all and all the rest is sentimental hyperbole anyway!” Johnny appeared on the scene because his Madre cleaned house for Peeter Werner Seebert Junior’s Madre. Johnny would tag along with his Mom and I imagine he and young Peete would scare up a good amount of trouble even as pre-teens. Now, the only form of super-ego that John ever answered to came in the form of an older brother named Geraldo who was definitely not latino or latinx, he was just a big-ass Mexican dude who’d been forced into playing the role of Padre at a very young age, and who did not like white kids from the city corrupting his hermanito. If Gerald only knew, god rest his soul. Odd now to think that I never heard a word about Juan’s Padre, nor ever thought to ask. Although H’ito, as he was affectionately referred to and sometimes not so affectionately referred to, did often seem to spontaneously burst onto the scene, whatever, wherever the scene happened to be. Maybe he just spontaneously burst into Rose and Geraldo’s family. A kid from Minturn, Colorado, what must have been a mining town in the old days where many families of Mexican origin congregated, this kid from Minturn who dug Kerouac and Burroughs and Stravinski and Socrates and Kierkegaard, and who could drink anyone under the table and go for days without sleeping while hitting it pretty hard and seem none the worse for wear. I would say with a certain amount of certainty that it was really H’ito who was the corrupting influence on Peeter and me. Drugs, irreligious and irreverent thoughts, come-what-fuckin’-may attitude, dangerous degree of substance abuse, if you were trying to keep up with him, all just theatrical properties when Johnny entered stage left. There was also something truly gentle and generous and empathetic about him at times. I remember a time when for me everything was starting to fall apart and I was reduced to silence and isolation even in the company of best friends, when a drunken Peeter, frustrated or frightened by my reticence said, “Say sumpthin Shepard, just say sumpthin, that or fuckin’ be somebody, will ya, get a fuckin’ life” and in my utter alienation, the only option left to me was to flee the bar where we were. I remember Johnny catching up with me in the street, hooking an arm with mine and looking at me with great sadness, knowing how depressed I was and knowing there was nothing he could do about it.

And yet, John was a little mercurial, hard to get a hold of sometimes even when he was standing next to you, sinister and gentle all at once. I remember driving his car to Telluride, where he was living, and because he did not have the patience to ride in a car for 8 hours, he flew while I drove down. Then arriving in Telluride, me expecting a rollicking good time as H’ito’s center of attention, he disappeared with other people. I went to his apartment, made myself a meal, slept. In the morning I found several people passed-out on the floor. I started to feel guilty about missing work and decided I would fly back to Denver, but I couldn’t find a pen that worked in the entire apartment for leaving him a note about where he would find his car. I drove myself to the airport in Telluride, parked his car, and flew back to Denver. He called me later that day or the next asking me where his car was, he sounded baffled and pissed, I said, “It’s probably in the in the airport parking lot where I left it.”

That might have been the last time I spoke with him. I hope to see him again before one of us dies. I hope I will see him as I hope he is. I hope I will feel and express love for him and he for me when I do see him. And I expect Johnny will be part there and part not there.

J

 “Mistah Kurtz–he dead”  Ahh, Jamie. J is the only one of our contemporaries who has died. That’s rather remarkable, really, that this conglomeration of people has, except for Jay, kept on tickin’ so far. I guess the Corona virus could change that rather dramatically. We could all skip that drama, please, if you will, and thank you in advance. I did not think about the line from Heart of Darkness at the time of J’s death. If it was tossed around by someone as a bit of gallows humor or mortuary humor, I missed it or did not get it. But J did indeed travel to the heart of darkness in the form of psychiatric pain. I didn’t know J in his earlier youth. He was a bit older than the rest of us, I think. I know from other members of the South Steel Street Gang that J was brilliant. He had a passel of brilliant sisters, actually only three, but their oddity and odd beauty made them seem like a passel. Apparently Jay was aware of everything going on, had an eager and curious and perceptive mind. He played electric guitar quite well and was wowed by early Garcia and Hendrix. At the age fourteen or fifteen he and a friend had his mother drive them to Boulder to see Jimi at Tulagi’s, a bar and music venue on “The Hill”, in Boulder–early enough in Hendrix’s career that he was playing in bars? Whoa! But when I knew Jamie later on, he was pained. I have been reading about shame lately. Healthy shame informs our moral compass; toxic shame may be the root of all psychopathologies. Jay had a “claim to fame” which he would bring up at every opportunity, something he had accomplished that anyone else would never ever divulge. Did he have no shame? Or was he devoid of healthy shame to the point his moral compass spun like a stopwatch, and all he knew was toxic shame? He mimicked his rather odd father constantly, something about a duck, “Quack quack”. I wonder if that wasn’t something to do with severely arrested individuation. He was in great pain most all the time, and we in a way, I at least, treated him like a leper sometimes. He was all “Paralysed force, gesture without motion”, that from the poem which begins with “Mistah Kurtz–he dead”, and he was hard to be around. He never got it together and I am not sure if he ever found any relief, and he died at sixty something. Our awareness of his pain maybe made it not so sad that he be dead. We all loved him; we just couldn’t take much of him.

Nedward Ho!

I almost forgot Ned, it has been such a long time since. Ned was a good one. Another part of the South Steel Street Gang I believe, although a transplant from Leadville. He was around Boulder some too during college days. Which reminds me of Rob Dando lugging his acoustic bass all around Miramonte, all the way down and around to the lake and back.

Ned and I and a couple of others were camped up above his place when a guy named Gary fell off of Ghost Rock. He was hurt pretty badly, unconscious when I ran down to Cosgriff’s house to call for help. I think Ned’s Mom was there trying to be something or to get somewhere she was not. I waited for the first responders and rode back up to ghost rock with them. They were laughing and joking around. Gary did not walk out of there that day, but he was alive.

Books and philosophy were something Ned shared with everybody, but not in an erudite way. He could talk about the Tibetan Book of the Dead with the captain of the Leadville High Cheerleaders. I remember a winter sleepover at a cabin above Leadville when it was so cold the only booze that didn’t freeze was the 151 rum.

Ned made a family before the rest of us had even thought about it. Then he became a doctor and gave that up for something more lucrative, and last I heard he was living largely near Cheesman park in Denver and going off on safari or expedition once a year or so.

Might see him again one of these days.

 July 30, 2020 11:36 p.m.

John informed me yesterday that Ned had died a year and some months ago. I like that notion that Ned could have explained the Tibetan Book of the Dead to the whole cheerleading squad of Leadville High School, and would have done so with neither speck nor specter of condescension. I like to think that Ned, of all my friends, would have immediately understood why I’d rather be a militant Marxist than a millionaire when I grow up, that if I weren’t such a flaming liberal hypocrite irredeemably spoiled by private property, I would have become a militant Marxist by now, and telling this to Ned, I believe he would have said, “I’ll join ya for awhile, Let’s check out what it looks like from there”. And I imagine, if the entire cheerleading squad of Leadville High had told Ned how terribly both the “hippies” and the “jocks” treated them and “something ought-ta be done about it”, Ned would have said, “That’s a trail I might like to take. May I join you?”.

I guess his heart blew up. Maybe over all the strain of trouble he endured–with a mind like his, I imagine there might have been some dark times–yet never mentioned to anyone. Rest in mountain air and fluttery books, Ned. See ya ‘round

Rendezvous

In thinking about old friends and acquaintances, one enters sketchy territory. I have never been to a high school or college reunion. I believe it is because I have not yet possessed the confidence to share and to be curious in the way that most people seem to be. Perhaps that is just a nice way of putting it. I seem to have suffered, for most of my life, from the bipolar opposites of self-loathing and grandiosity. On the one hand, I don’t feel that I have a compelling story to share, and on the other, I seem reluctant to stoop to the level of someone who would attend a reunion, huh? being mysteriously absent is so much more safe. I am without the wonderful, childlike curiosity and eagerness to share and listen and be heard that reunion participants must possess. I don’t think it is as simple a being ashamed of whom I have become. Although I remember talking with a drinking buddy, 30 years or so ago, “You remember that scene in the movie Papillon? where the character played by Steve McQueen is in solitary confinement again and he has a dream that he is sitting in front of a tribunal, all the judges are wearing elaborate robes, and the scene is set in a barren desert. The Chief Justice says, “You are not on trial for the murder of so-and-so, this is not about your frequent attempts to escape prison. You are on trial here for having lived a wasted life!” And Steve McQueen’s sweat-drenched face falls, his chin to his chest and he mutters, “Guilty, guilty . . . guilty.” And my drinking buddy and I would laugh and clink bottles and chew on how ironic it was that we were in a dive neighborhood bar drinking and clinking bottles when really we were brilliant, we just hadn’t put it all together yet. And I would go to the juke box and play I Threw it all away and the bartender would say, “Would you quit playing that damn song!”

Now, did I mention that it is March 24, 2020 and the world is currently in the throes of the Covid 19 pandemic? I have a telling joke all cued up, while others are talking about how hard social distancing is, and the inability to touch, shake hands, kiss on the cheek once or twice or three times, and to embrace proves to be excruciating. Well, it makes no difference to me, I’ve been practicing social distancing since I was eight-years-old. That might be funny in an odd way, but only I know that my isolation is one of my most debilitating bedevilments.

Something odd happens when one sees an old friend or acquaintance. One is either stunned with embarrassed consternation or overwhelmed with reassuring love. Let me give you two examples. I was sitting in an A.A. meeting not too long ago as it gradually dawned on me that I might have a prior history with one of the men in the room. I had not heard the man introduce himself or maybe I was late to the meeting and missed the formalized introductions, but the man’s first name was said in the meeting and I looked at him and thought, No! Wait. Could that be so and so. No. Kind of looks like him. But not really. Similar mannerisms. Nah. No way. Maybe. And then the meeting was over and my sponsor and I went out for dinner, and the same gent showed up at the restaurant and my sponsor asked if it would be okay with me if he invited the gent to eat with us. “Be fine.” Gent sits down and he and I exchange a few tentative, circumspect glances at each other when he asks, “Wait, what’s your last name?” “Shepard.” “Yours?” “So and so.” “No.” Damn good to see yas all around, and my sponsor asks, “You two know each other?” “Same high school.” Well, I’ll be . . . It was indeed so and so, not a close friend, younger than I, and our paths had crossed a time or two since high school, but not for 35 or 40 years. See, he looked like such a conservative, run-of-the-mill old chap that I could not overlap the images of person then and person now. The memory I have is of a young, tall, skinny, long-haired kid stumbling around on the other side of the high line canal while my girlfriend and I, with a gallon bottle of cran-apple juice, were finding our way to a secluded spot, when from across the canal, so and so says, “Got wine?” Why, now, could that have been a predictor of where his life would go? So-and-so had tried to make it as a stand-up comedian and I’d seen a few of his performances. Turned out he’d had a heart attack two years ago and was living a quiet, happy, sober life in the town we both called home. He, I figured had seen me at the meeting and thought, ‘Whoa that looks a lot like such-and-such, but I am certain that such-and-such would never allow himself to become a guy who looked homeless and fully ten years older than such-and-such should have been.’ Ah well. The self loathing I entertain when thinking about going to reunions also may have to do with the fact that I probably do look ten years older than my age of 64, and I tend to dress like a homeless person, and I have COPD/Emphysema from a long career of smoking tobacco, in fact just this morning I was thinking that my first cigarette in the morning should probably be taken on one knee because something about it doubles me over and I tend to stoop and walk bent over like a hunch-back or like someone who’s spent their life farming rice.

The flip side of the coin, that of seeing an old friend you haven’t seen for decades and they look so perfectly like you hoped they would, that not much had changed about their psyches, their view of life, their wardrobe, their wonder and curiosity and their immediate appreciation for you just as you are and feeling in the handshake or embrace all the invincibility of love and the goddamnbrotherinarmsslaponthebackcomradeship. Maybe it’s that reunions are supposed to be that way, but fall so friggin’ far short of that brother and sister shoulder to shoulder he she aint heavy eureka-moment that one only finds few times in life and therefore disappointing facsimiles, like reunions, should be avoided at all costs. Perhaps I expect too much. Perhaps my expectations have something to do with my fear and isolation. Oh, just a thought.

Son of the Man Who Thought He Owned Water

I really have no idea how William Eaton Phelps and I became acquainted. He had a passel of cousins who lived all over the country club neighborhood of Denver. Perhaps through a cousin or two, I dunno, but I was drawn to him because he was just plain different than the rest. He had a pet skunk and, at an early age, he was a hunter/gatherer from some other time period, and yet, he was a ton of fun to get in trouble with, and getting in trouble with him was half the fun, and we two became quite expert. Bill had a mini-bike, the kind of which you no longer see, a cross between a motorcycle and a bike that would fit a 6 year old. We spent countless hours late at night trying to score a six-pack of beer at the age of fourteen or fifteen. Bill, like me, is a recovering alcoholic, but he wouldn’t use that term and does not go to meetings. I guess his second stay in jail for drunk driving was so miserable that he just quit. His Dad, Big Bill, was, to me, a whole lot scarier than Gerald Gallegos. Mr. Phelps had an interesting life, came from a family with loads of money, but he was abandoned early on and out of the wreckage his childhood and young adulthood must have been he forged a steely personality and physique and outlook on life. He was not a wishy-washy liberal. He married a lovely woman who had loads of money and whose family had a lot of capital in the game of young Colorado. Bill has two sisters. The one nearest him in age was a girl most every boy fell in love with at least once, but suitor beware the wrath of Big Bill. And the oldest child was so brilliant that she was just plain different from the get-go and has remained true to her initial inclination that norms of any kind were not for her.

Big Bill bought a farm near Platteville, Colorado, up there around Greeley where the first farms in Colorado were plowed up, and he moved the family there when Bill was maybe in seventh grade. The hunter/gatherer in Bill Jr. then had hundreds of acres to hunt and gather in. That land was incredible, right on the big bend of the South Platte river, and there was a warm water slough that ran through the bottomlands and was home to all manner of fowl even in the dead of winter. Eagles too, come February. A favorite memory that happily does not involve drugs or alcohol ( see, there are some) was going up to the farm just after I got a puppy. The little fuzzy thing was maybe 9 weeks old and off we went traipsing through the cottonwoods, and we crossed the slough by splashing through and halfway across I remembered my puppy, I turned and looked at the bank we had just left, but he wasn’t there, and a moment later I looked down and there he was near my legs swimming across with a dry back, Oh! This is gonna be a good dog! (Shit! How could I forget? I gotta give Shmo a section ‘cause he was the best of the best of friends). Bill and I, in the company of others, did some cruel thing to animals that PETA would not be impressed by. I remember throwing rocks at a skunk, not Bill’s pet, and for the first time I saw a skunk stand upright on its front legs and let loose all the stink it had in one cloudy blast. Late drunken night by the river, I remember, this instigated not by Bill or me, but one of those cousins, lit fire crackers were being thrust down the throats of poor innocent toads. And I seem to remember a play put on and all the players were dead, skinned jack rabbits. There is a cruel streak in human beings, and if it is not directed at poor innocent animals, it is probably being directed at poor unsuspecting humans, tit for tat, you bet, I have seen giant toads shoving firecrackers down the throats of poor possibly innocent wives, husbands, sons, daughters, friends, acquaintances, strangers, and friends, and I have probably resembled a large, angry toad on occasion myself, god forgive me.

When the Phelps’ were still living in Denver, I made the mistake one evening of calling Bill on the telephone and opening the conversation with, “Did ya get the stuff?” and well of course Big Bill was listening in and so we had to have a little chat at the Phelps’ house and I remember sitting in their living room, Bill Bill and me, and young Bill was taking the wrath stoically and I was crying and sniveling and blubbering apologies. I am not proud of that. Another time, I went up to visit Bill on the farm, and there were some Denver kids living in a trailer and doing work around the farm. Bill and I and the boys went out somewhere, and Bill and Dodi, why the hell did he bring Dodi along?, were suspicious and ransacked the trailer and eventually found a tiny bag of marijuana somebody had stashed in his dirty laundry. Big Bill left a note: “you should have seen your mother cry. Shepard, so-and-so, and such-and-such at the house at 7:00 a.m. without fail.” We arrived at the house at 7:00 a.m.. Big Bill came out of the house, looked at us with disgust, and said, “Get in the back of the truck so I don’t have to look at ya.” It seemed a long ride to Denver in the back of a pick-up.

Bill and I saw each other rarely as young adults. Then he went off to Montana, got a wife, made a life, had a son, got divorced, built himself a house, drank too much and contacted me about 35 years after the last time we had seen each other. Both his parents had died and the kids were selling the farm, and he was in the area for a while. I drove to Platteville, nervous about the rendezvous. When Bill came out from behind a shed with a frolicking dog at his heels, it was one of those rare moments in life when everything seems exactly as it should be and there is love and friendship and legacy and laughter all in a simple embrace and recognition that you can pick up right where you left off  35 years after. He looked like I imagined, and dressed like I imagined, and I could tell he saw the world as I imagined him to, and he simply was like I imagined, maybe a little older. We had lunch in the old house, and then drove around the property and got stuck in the mud several times. We are planning a trip together as soon as the Covid19 stay at home rule is lifted. We’ll hit the road like old familiar friends.

Dordo da Boohdhah

I probably met Gordon when he was 4 months old, I being maybe a week old. Yes, we were cousins and we both lived on Franklin Street although he was in the country club neighborhood and I in the Cheesman Park neighborhood, so about three blocks apart. Weird thing is my maternal uncle, his father, actually purchased the house in which he had grown up. Not any ghosts in that house, huh? Or was it a way to make sure the skeletons didn’t escape? Either they, parents and maternal Grandmother thought we should be dressed like twins, or our Grandmother had a tough time buying gifts, so what she purchased for one she purchased for the other. Yes, unfortunately there are photos of Dordo da Buddha and me standing together at age four or so wearing identical lederhosen, identical cowboy outfits, I am looking at a photo now of Gordon and me posing outside of a tent in fishing gear, holding fishing rods like staffs, Gordon smiling, me not so much, maybe at ages 9 or 10. Gordon’s bangs cropped short showing his noticeably long forehead, me with blonde bangs covering mine. “That aint no accent dummy, that there is just the echo off yer forehead!” (I don’t know where that came from.) Having been forced to be identical in wardrobe and treatment by others, left us with a reassuring touchstone of commonality, but also a shuddering need to individuate. At younger ages we were alternately thick as thieves or we regarded each other as regrettable relatives. Through it all, and we are lucky enough to still have each other, there is a mutual admiration that is sometimes dumbfounding, because it seems so unfounded, and sometimes wonderfully reassuring just because of all that history now going back 64 years.

I can’t think of any specific adventures Gordon and I have shared, perhaps I should consult him. He’s just always been there for me, and as we grow old together, seems he’s even more for me wherever and whenever I might enjoy his company or require his assistance.

The Buddha thing is something I initiated here in this telling, but I believe he does awaken at four in the morning or so and meditates for an hour or more and then goes peacefully about his day. And he does have a wisdom and an ease all his own that he shares with everyone. I could go on with a list of all my admirations, but won’t. Buddhist, yes, he and his wife, of the gentlest and most authentic kind fer a coupl’a white guys. A remarkable relationship between he and his wife, another thing to admire, although sometimes it’s hard to tell which is which, which seems a little odd to me. They share an email address and discerning who is who from an email is a fruitless endeavor, she a little louder and with the traces of her many passions all spilled down her bib, and Dordo da Buddha a little more reasoned, thoughtful and serene.

Beast

Da Beast!. I never really liked that nickname for Chris and rarely used it except when referring to him to another who might not know him by any other name. I believe Chris was one of the original members of the South Steel Street Gang before he went off to school in the east, but just as importantly, he either wormed his way in, or orchestrated like a maestro, a collection of friends who made up the Vermont contingent which has played a significant role of friendship and adventure in many of our lives. Tweedy stayed in touch with Peeter through all of the years of his exile to the east, and when Peeter, Bofp and I bought a house in Denver he was around. Bofp never lived at the ‘Hotel Pennsylvania’ ‘The Home for Unwed Fathers’ ‘The Pennsylvania Street Rescue Mission’, but Peeter did from time to time, and as things go for a group of friends and acquaintances in their twenties, room mates, house mates, stragglers, floppers, regulars, the cast of characters who occupied those hallowed halls was fluid. Me, Peeter, Tweedy, Bub, Noon, Kim, forgotten tentants, Solon, Bolla Ocho, a turtle that starved do death because I did not know it needed to eat under water, and some hermit crabs all tookup residence at the Rescue Mission at one time or another. (More on that later).

So Tweedy moved in and I have him to thank for most all of the friends and/or residents who passed through the doors of the house, or came to visit and/or stay. They would not have come over were I there by myself, being asocial, but Tweedy liked a party or at least “felt a whole lot more like he did now than he did before” when people were around. So very often people were around.

Tweedy has a sharp mind and seemed to get my attempts at humor , or originality, sometimes before I did. In the Hotel Pennsylvania there was a room I liked to call the den of occasional brilliance where I tried to write drunken missives to some depraved god because depravity was about all I could come up with, but I thought that god was the one Kerouac and Burroughs and all the beatniks prayed to, so I, being drunk all the time back then, prayed and wrote and wasted paper and a large portion of my youth. The thing was, Beast got it, and approved and concurred that occasional brilliance did indeed ignite that room, but laughed and understood that I understood that 1% brilliance was, if not admirable, at least noteworthy.

Windsurfing and the beer and comraderie that came with it was a gift from Beast. He gave me Stavrogin’s confession and I gave him a beat old saxophone he tried to learn to play. He included me and took me along on his friendship ride. What a gift! Chris, in those years, was like a compass and a companion and a guide and a minder, who understood that there was a part of me that might break easily, and I might not have made it through those years without him. We never talked about things like this. We walked the dog and scratched the cat and said “Hey! What’s happenin’?” I remember him on the day he moved out of the rescue mission, starring out the back window and into the back yard, and he was full of some kind of emotion: glad, sad, who knows what all, and I misunderstanding or trying to dodge my own feelings said something stupid trying to wave away the emotion in the room like someone trying to clear smoke, in a high falsetto, trying to mock the unease away I said, “Beast, don’t go!” and then failed to notice when he left.

Cousin Noon

Noon and I are related somehow, like by a 5th cousin six times removed, but none the less, at some point he stopped being Shannon and became Cousin Noon, and I to him became Cousin Shep or Cousin Sheppie if consensus was I needed a ribbing. Noon’s gift to me was that no matter the situation, he was so easy to be around. There was never a worry about the conversation lapsing into an uncomfortable nothingness. Maybe he did all the talking. He didn’t, back then, or now from what I can tell by a long telephone call recently, just have a certain sense about humor, but humor surrounded him like the dust cloud Pigpen wore throughout the Peanuts comic strip. When you would call him up he answered the phone as though you had just shared a very good joke, and it went on from there. I remember him having a spat with one of his many girlfriends, and when she stormed out, he said, “Well, don’t go away mad!” She turned as though there might be an opening, that he might offer a word or gesture of contrition, and he said, “Just go away!”

Noon was an infrequent flopper at the Rescue Mission. One morning, most likely after a very late night of depraved drinking, he came crashing into my room, and said, with a frantic look on his face, “Shep! It’s later than you think!” and then he fled. I glanced at the clock and said, “Oh, shit.” I ran down the hallway and picked up the phone (in those days a phone was a stationary object wired to a wall) called work to beg forgiveness for being late, showered briefly, dressed quickly and sped off . When I pulled into the parking lot at work, oddly there were very few cars in the lot. “What the hell?” I walked into work and my boss raised an eyebrow at me, looked at his watch, and said “What have you been drinking?” After looking at the clock and realizing I was an hour early, I asked “Uh, do you need a bulleted list?”

But it was later than we thought, a good deal later if we were ever going to make anything useful of our lives out of the direction we were headed. So the phrase “It’s later than you think” acquired all kinds of meaning, could be used in almost any errant situation, which, by the way was the only kind of situation we were familiar with back then, and was scattered about in poet’s drawers, in those kitchen drawers in which nothing can be found for the clutter, on notices plastered to light poles, on bumper stickers . . . Along with the particles of humor that wafted around him wherever he went, Noon was a forgiving man: as though love, war, politics, taxes and death were just not worth losing a friend over.

Bub

Robert, affectionately referred to as Bub by me mostly, was one of the Vermont contingent which Beast had dragged back to Colorado with him. Robert was living in a “poke pad” in north Denver, but had to flee because too many women knew where he lived, so he took up residence in the Home for Unwed Fathers on South Pennsylvania Street. (This was about 40 years prior to the #MeToo Movement, okay?)

Bub, like Beast, kept me in friends all through the years he lived at the house. It is scary and sad to think how friendless I might have been without Robert cooking up, like the master saucier he thought he was, dinners, and golf tournaments, and wind surfing regattas, and picnics with Yogi and BooBoo in attendance, and elaborate immoveable feasts topped with Bub’s special sauce. There were times however when Robert could be, well, a little saucy and cranky. “Feed him! Will ya? And see if you can get Lynn to come over, pronto!”

There were a few reckless adventures, of course, like the night Bub and I closed down Reiver’s and having separate cars made the intelligent decision to race home, loser had to clean the house to the winner’s specifications. I won by like 5 minutes, but only because I drove the Vanagon straight through Washington Park, not on the pavement mind you, but on the grass, jumped the curb at Ohio St. and Franklin St and lickety-split hit the pavement again at Ohio and Downing. Had one of the two lakes been in my path, well, I would have gotten wet.

It was this kind of good, clean fun Robert inspired.

Kim & Lynn

Kim moved into the house I had just vacated on orders from Mary who’d found another young man who piqued her interest more than I did after Mary and my relationship grew too lazy to sustain. Kim and Lynn taught in the same Montessori school and out of brown stairs and pink towers and other commonalities they built a fond and lasting friendship. Then Kim introduced Lynn to Robert and then Robert was sporting a pink tower for Lynn ever after. I have always admired and appreciated the way women can make deep friendships out of the thin air between them and wander off to be, in an instant, BFFs. Men have to pal around for a good long time of arm wrestling and beer mug tipping and still never get to, in a lifetime, what women seem to find in a moment. So Kim moved into Mary’s house and I’m not sure who invited who to go out, but Kim and I became fast friends over a pizza at the Wazee Lounge and Supper Club because when I expressed remorse at not being as good a man as Mary’s new boyfriend, Kim laughed until she couldn’t breathe and then caught her breath and said, “The guy’s a jerk and you’re a . . . well, I don’t know what you are yet, but whatever it is, you’re a hell of a lot more than he will ever be.” Well, damn if that wasn’t exactly what I needed to hear, and Kim became, over a pizza at the Wazee, an exquisite female person. And she was/is even without, or in spite of my sad selfish ego, a really good person through and through. Kim and I cohabitated, cohibernated, almost coherniated and cohorted around together for years. “At any rate . . . “

Lynn was/is such a peaceful, calming (at least after Robert got his Montessori pink tower to stand down) steadfast compliment to Bub’s life, a quiet, easy support to him and spirit to the rest of us and quite the good sport. I have photos of Lynn patiently smiling while in the midst of four or five wet-suited guys guzzling beer and complaining about the lack of adequate wind against which to test their exemplary? skill and panache¿ at windsurfing, well . . . some of us were there for the beer mostly, but what a good spirit she is.

Mary & Jenny

Mary is someone I’ve known all my life, a shared family history and often a proximity. Jenny was one of Bofp’s ex-girlfriends, but a lifelong friend of Mary’s, and I feel close to her to this day although we hardly ever connect by word or physical presence. Toward the end of my school career when I was living on the first floor of a crooked old house, down the street from the Deaf and Blind School (not my alma mater) in Colorado Springs, I was paid and gifted an unusual visit from Mary and Jenny. I think I had not seen or heard from either one of them since the end of their high school careers, so about five years by my reckoning. I think I kept wondering, throughout the visit, if they had a mission or a motive, but no, as I waved to their departing car, it must have been just a friendly visit. After school my dog, Solon, and I moved to back to Denver and rented a house with Bofp. And after a few months our lease was up, and Mary and I both had dogs and both needed a place to live where we could have the dogs, so Mary house searched and I went along for the ride, and Mary and I became housemates. With Mary I learned everything, well every essential thing at age 23, about being a quasi-adult and shacking-up with an old family pal. So we kept house, although not to Mary’s specifications as it turned out, I think she worked at a bookstore and I worked for a tree-trimming company. We traveled some, found ourselves stunned by the trees in the redwood national forest preserve. We visited her sister in eastern Oregon and went to a very dilapidated hot springs pool, but had a soak, and in my explorations of the surrounding area fell up to my testicles into hot mud, and I envisioned a slow death being swallowed up and folded over in the mud. Mary saved me from the quicksand . . . again and again. Then as I said we got kinda lazy about whatever it was we had and she found a new man, and I moved into the basement of my sister’s house, where the only thing I remember is I didn’t brush my teeth for about 3 months. Why? I dunno. Then Bofp and Peeter and I bought the Pennsylvania Street House in1980, and I still own it. If we ever see our way out of the COVID 19 pandemic, it’ll be a good investment once again.

The extraordinary thing about my friendship with Mary is that at our ripe old age of 64 we remain, or have become over the years again, the best of friends. I haven’t seen her since I met she and Jenny for coffee one afternoon as they made their way to their, nah, that can’t be right, 40th high school reunion. Jenny was so kind. Mary is always so kind. Mary and I exchange 500 word emails a couple of times a year, and if our health holds, we’ll see each other again.

The Rest of the Crew

(Oh lord, who knows where this might go.)

Does anyone else remember Gordon May wrapped in an American flag back pedaling, stumbling, those big glassy eyes even bigger, a deer in the headlight of a fast approaching locomotive as it thundered out of tunnel 23?

Miramonte. A lot of people gathered and a lot of crazy things happened in Miramonte. My family is lucky enough to have a place in the foothills west of Denver. As a child I spent whole summers there, playing in the woods, digging in the dirt, spoiling for a fight (just sounded good) laying on my back looking at the clouds passing by pine trees so green against coloazul skies, or laying in a meadow gazing at the stars. The houses there are large multi-storied, multi-roomed 100 year old post and beam and all wooden structures and it is a great place for gatherings. The first one I recall was a happily drug induced all-nighter when the The Turk brought a snare drum and kept the beat. Now, you see, back then we did not do drugs to get “F’d up”, we did drugs simply to heighten the fun. ‘70s chemicals, booze and pot; ‘80s cocaine, booze and pot; simple. ‘70s saw me, H’ito, Peeter, Bofp. ‘80s saw me, Tweedy, Bub, Noon, Kim, Lynn, Kirk, Max & Peggy, Short & Molly or some combination there of. Sitting around the fire place. Late night hikes. Furiously competitive racquet sports and horse shoes, and downhill-only bike races, these guys could make a high stakes tournament out of breakfast.

All the same crowd frequented the house on Pennsylvania Street too. Kirk was a good one to have around if ya ever needed to jump start the battery in your brain, or your butt, like a kick in the butt. I suppose we have all made of our lives pretty much what we wanted, but Kirk ended up kite boarding for a living, and kiting checks to build a small resort in Mexico, which, I hear, he has sold, but lives next door. Not a bad idea, I guess.

I have to tell you an incredible story about friendship that involves Max & Peggy. My nephew, Cassim, was giving a talk at the Tattered Cover downtown to introduce and talk about his book.  There was a young man hovering around the podium up front, and I was somewhat upset that this guy was going to get in on the act, that Cassim had to share the stage with some twit. I saw a woman there who looked very familiar, in fact she looked just like Peggy Martin. There was some connection between the young man who was apparently going to steal away some of the lime-light from Cassim and the woman who looked like Peggy. As it turned out, Cassim had arranged for the young man named Will to share the stage with him to make Cassim’s talk more like an interview than a lecture. After the interview and the Q&A, I rose from my seat and my sister Dana went straight over to Peggy, talked for a moment, and then pointed me out in the small crowd. At the same time I heard someone behind me say, “Shep?” It was Max Martin. Before long, we got around to, “What are you doing here?” “Cassim is my nephew! What are you doing here?” “Will is my son!” So amid all the hugs and expressions of gladness about Max and Peggy and I seeing each other after a long, long time, there was the astonishing realization that Cassim and Will had been fast friends and like minds for years in Brooklyn before Will and his wife moved back to Denver. Multi-generational amigo magic! Beautiful!

Ian & Kate & the Chocolate People

Great name for a band right out of Haight-Ashbury, huh? But no, this is a more recent development in the art of friendship, not my artisanship, but all the employees and owners of Nuance Chocolate Company seem to me to be artists in, not only in the production of chocolate wonders, but also in the art of extending friendship. I am lucky enough to have been allowed to tip-toe shyly onto to the stage of this encore career, peek through the curtains to find a very warm and friendly and forgiving audience, to which I bow, but then it’s kinda hard to un-bow and stand up straight again because of the rusty hinge in my lower back.

Ian and Kate seem to have adopted me as a long lost uncle who has provided them with shelter and repast on occasion and returned the gesture with bushels and boatloads of kindness. Golly gee.

Then there is Toby and Alix who have kinda saved my life in a couple of ways, and Mark, the wrap artist, and Joshua, the philosopher king, and Anna the MVP of most anything she sets her mind to, and Coco, an exceedingly rarefied bird, Lexi who would not mind if I described her as a cuckoo bird, and Susan who I once described as having the ability to exude equanimity whether she was at a black tie event, a board room meeting or burning man convention, vivacious and sparkling Julie, the loquacious and bodacious Brian, Parker the savior, Cody the entertainer, Angela with a song in her head and nary a nasty word for anyone, and now the new crew ‘cause millenials are kinda here one day and gone the next, John, Kristen, Katie, Becca, Aaron, and Molly who is a trouble maker. The shop and factory are open and serving chocolate wonders curb-side and mail-order through this odd time of contagion.

Solon

This man’s best friend. Named for an old greek guy, don’t ask me why. His name disambiguated into Shmo, and then ambiguated into Shmolon Shmolonovitch Shmolenko. Part Great Pyrenees and part yellow mutt he stood thigh high and probably weighed 100 pounds. For a big dog he was around this mortal coil for 12 or 13 years. I never had the balls to castrate him, so he roamed. He too suffered under the sentence of  a house arrest quarantine one time, not because he was contagious, but because supposedly bit some guy who was not happy about him jumping the six foot fence in the guy’s backyard to woo the guy’s female dog and then jumped the fence again to trot on home. I was an irresponsible dog owner. Solon usually started jonesing about hitting the town just after dark each night. And I’d open the front door and tell him not to do anything I wouldn’t do. I’m not sure he ever listened to my admonishments. Tipping over trash cans wasn’t my favorite pass-time.

He was such a good dog. I never trained him really; he just hated it when I got mad at him, so he didn’t very often do anything to make me angry. And he was handsome and noble, regal even. He and I drove all through the southeastern united states. We were gone about six months just travelin’ and sleeping in the VW bus. Then I met a woman in Savannah and Solon and I moved in with her for a month or so. I had planned to meet a rich Southern Belle, but the one I met was poor and tragic and jobless and had a nasty temper. But Shmo and I had a grand time travelin’.

We pretty much traveled together for all of his 12 or 13 years. I didn’t put him down. He’d been struggling with congestive heart failure for a while. One morning in Miramonte he wasn’t around and wouldn’t come when I whistled or called. Finally he showed up on his last legs. I think he’d gone off somewhere to die, but didn’t quite achieve it that night, and when I called he felt obliged to come. We went back to Denver and spent a good part of the night in the back yard. I kept wetting his gums with water ‘cause he wouldn’t drink. Finally I went to bed. Next morning I saw him out the back window before I went out to him. I could tell he was dead, but he lay there in a posture that looked so comfortable, paws crossed head down body upright. Because of the congestion in his chest he hadn’t been able to lie down like that for months. He waited for me to go to bed, and then he just laid himself down.

 . . . Was I [Have] Such Friends

Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends

Until now, I misunderstood the gist of the Yeats’ poem from which I draw the title of this mnemonic excursion, that or there is some bastardized version out there about the measure of a man being the quantity of the friends he keeps right up until that long mysterious sleep. I always felt badly about that, that I didn’t measure up, because as I look around today I can go a week or a month or many months or years or decades not seeing hide nor hair of a true friend. There are those friends one works with, when anyone had work to go to, before the stay-at-home orders. And there are the friendly strangers one sees, or used to see every day in old town Fort Collins, before it became a ghost town with everyone staying home and lying low because of the pandemic. But as one ages, one has less commerce with close friends. And we know from menial commerce, large quantities mean less value.

Cocktail Parties? Neighborhood Watch Meetings? Ice Fishing with the Boys? Board Meeting? Foo baaa? (ah hell no sports at all these virulent days) I respectfully, oh who am I trying to fool, I irreverently choose to decline to see “friends” in those, or like situations, and the people there I doubt would be my friends.

And I aint lookin’ fer glory anyway. I am cold most all the time and skinny too, and mostly I seek warmth and these memories provide lots of warmth. And a little laughter for me. That’s where the drugs come in I think: laughter, that’s all.

There is such wealth even in the memory of old friends. And were I never to see this one or that one, they don’t depart anymore than the dead. Something reminds me of one or the the other and I am off remembering, retelling, conversing with them, memorializing them. I think of Solon and damn if we are not walking down the alleys of West Washington Park right then and there, walking down alleys because then I wouldn’t have to pick up his shit in a plastic bag.

I am the heir of my actions. My actions are the foundation on which I stand, as I go out from here. I know we’ve all heard variations of this hundreds of times and in a hundred different ways, but something about this time or the wording, or the way its phrased here as the fifth of the Buddhist great remembrances. It caught my attention like a burning bush. It struck me suddenly as so obvious. Not sure how this fits in.

Friends and memories of friends are like the damn loaves and fishes. If ya don’t remember, Jesus sent someone to find food for the multitude following him, but all they could scare up was a couple of lousy loaves and fishes. The miracle was that somehow it was enough.

. . . laughin’ back and forth at what the other has to say
reminiscin’ this and that & havin’ such a good time
oodlelolly oodlelolly
golly what a day

 < wherds