“There will be no justice here,” I muttered as the woman lifted the skirt of her long black dress and revealed the spot where the dog had bitten her. The pet’s owners sat silently at the table beside her, heads turned away as they scanned the patio of Skylark for something they could reasonably look at that wasn’t the woman.
The couple with the dog had to be tourists, I thought–both dressed like pro shop mannequins. Oakley sunglasses, collared shirts, and tanned show muscles. Frigidly attractive, forty-five-ish. Legal eagles at play. They looked extremely out of place there on the Skylark patio, packed that day with attendees of the DIY underground music festival, the now legendary Blucifer’s First Rodeo.
The air was rank with beer, sweat, and sunscreen. The temperature had risen to 101 degrees, breaking a record from 1963, but the heat only seemed to embolden the crowds. At every spot Anthony and I visited there was a mob of scenesters, bright-eyed with the promise of a virgin festival, untouched by the customary greed. Later that night, organizer Mike Young would take the stage of HQ and scream into the microphone, “Money will not save you from death! Money will not save this evil American empire from death!” to the roar of an audience who proceeded to mosh in a sauna of B.O. and black shirts for over an hour to the passionate rock of Horsebitch.
After the show, Anthony and I, joined by writer Lindsay Temple, fresh off her first crowdsurf, would watch as a man removed his shirt and wrung out a solid stream of sweat onto the Broadway sidewalk, while onlookers who hadn’t been part of the bacchanalia inside HQ gaped in wonder.
All of this to say that the festival probably wasn’t the best place for an ankle-high critter covered in hair and endowed with an elevated sense of hearing and smell. As Anthony and I chatted a few tables away, there was a sudden clatter of patio chairs while the angry little dog attacked the woman passing by.
The woman staggered and caught herself. Everyone turned and looked.
“Your dog just bit me!” she said, more shocked than angry.
One of the dog’s owners, the woman, hesitated for a moment and then softly patted the dog’s head while whispering a reprimand.
Then there was silence. The dogbitten woman lifted her dress, examining her wound but also showing the couple that she wasn’t kidding. It was a real bite.
I, along with everyone else on the patio, I imagine, undertook an examination of the two parties. The statuesque couple and their little dog vs. the larger woman in her plain black dress. “There will be no justice here,” I muttered.
Sure enough, the couple felt no need to address the woman. Beyond the brief acknowledgment of their dog’s misbehavior, their expression remained stony, and, again, they were looking away, trying to wait out the moment, allowing a strange tableau to settle on the patio as everyone gawked. The woman with the dogbite kept her injured leg held out, waiting for a better response. She waited, and waited.
I narrated the scene to Anthony as he sat with his back politely turned to the stalemate. My cynicism was at full froth.
Yes, this is what it is, isn’t it? I thought. They made an assessment. They know the woman isn’t one of them. She’s not real. She can’t touch them. They just spilled their drink on the waiter. That’s all. Yes, this is what it is. There will be no–
“Ya’ll can’t just sit there! What the hell is wrong with you? Are ya’ll seriously not gonna do anything?” a woman cried from the table next to the couple.
The couple started. They took one look at the table filled with young women next to them and went pale.
“What are you doing?! Be a gentleman and get the lady a damn ice pack or something!” the woman said, addressing the man, whose veiny neck grew veinier.
Soon, many others on the patio, including yours truly, joined in, chiding the couple. “Yeah! Not cool, not cool!”
At last, the man stood up with a look of begrudging surrender and, if I wasn’t mistaken, a slight sporting grin as he made his way inside to fetch some ice. Perhaps the grin was to mask his embarrassment, or perhaps it was a more sociopathic nod to the cosmic chess game he’d just lost (for the moment), a kind of touché.
Meanwhile, his counterpart finally began to address the aggrieved. I couldn’t hear what she said, as the audience on the patio was murmuring now, digesting this dramatic turn. I watched the woman with the dog nod and speak with the mechanical warmth of a realtor. Negotiations were underway, and, here and there, one of the women at the adjacent table would consult the dogbitten lady–her advocates!
You never know how much you’re projecting your feelings onto a scene like this, but I did feel a kind of catharsis had alighted there at Skylark. The tension had been released, and it was revolution! Justice after all. More than that, we’d all witnessed something righteous, a heroic smackdown. Well done, ladies! It was like the universe had put them there specifically–the perfect opposition to the dog couple, their kryptonite.
However, for the rest of the day (and week really), I did feel guilty that I’d only been a witness. I kept stewing on the moment, weighing the moral equation’s variables to see if they resulted in cowardice: my distance from the incident, the time elapsed, and my responsibility to intervene. Would I have eventually come through if enough time had passed? Or would the couple have gotten away with their callous response if the ladies hadn’t been there to speak up?
Eventually, a friend told me that it was better that a woman had intervened because a man’s intervention in such a scene would have been too confrontational. I liked that excuse and will quote it here to help save face. But it bothered me that one of life’s rare moments of truth had come and gone while I sat ensconced in my cynical musings.
After the dust settled, the bitten woman–a Denverse reader, it turned out–walked over and chatted with me and Anthony. The bite mark on her leg had grown swollen and purple. She told us how the couple never really apologized until pressured by the group of ladies. She’d gotten the woman’s phone number at the behest of her spontaneous advocates. But all she’d really wanted was a genuine acknowledgment from them, a mea culpa and so forth.
I can’t remember what she said here verbatim. But it was something like, “That poor dog. It’s no wonder it was angry. It’s so hot and crowded out here. I’d be irritated too.”
By then, the couple was gone.
Till Next Time,
Yours,
Paul M. French, Editor
—
[NOTE ON MAGAZINE THEFT INCIDENT: As many of you are aware, earlier this year someone made off with roughly 4,000 copies of our spring 2026 issue in one of the most bizarre cases of grand larceny imaginable. I wanted to provide an update on the case, since a lot of people have been asking.
The storage facility’s management responded and told me that there was no footage of the crime or of any suspicious activity related to the area, which is absurd since there’s no way to haul 4,000 magazines without being caught on camera at some point in the process, if you have any coverage at all. They also had the fob entry data of who’d entered the storage area, which you think would make this an infinitely solvable case. However, they wouldn’t share this or any of the footage they possessed with the detective assigned to the case.
When I talked to the detective about this, he said that if they didn’t want to share the footage or the fob data, there wasn’t much he could do, which is sort of baffling, since I thought the police had some, you know, authority when it comes to investigating crimes, especially when there’s over $5k worth of inventory gone. I pressed the facility about this, but they simply stressed again that there was no footage and that they wouldn’t be sharing anything with the police.
It became clear to me that I would have to make this a part-time job if I wanted to get any kind of justice—pestering the police and the storage facility. By that point, we were well into developing our summer issue. Articles needed assigning and editing, the flatplan needed organizing, artwork needed vetting, ads needed to be sold, etc. So I decided to give up and put my effort back into the magazine. Naturally, I still hold out hope that something will turn up and the culprits will be caught—if, for nothing else, to satisfy curiosity. But that’s where things stand as of right now. I don’t want to stew on the negative though, since so many things are going right for Denverse right now. Thank you for your readership and support! I’ll let you know if anything new comes up.].
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