Note on Recent Events + Oh To Be a Dirtbag Again
Addressing things + The allure and challenge of artsy life
EMERGENCY EDITOR’S NOTE:
As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think it’s my place to impose my worldview/politics on the magazine as a whole, just because I’m its owner/editor. It’s a dangerous game in media, and it’s how ideological content farms emerge. It’s also disrespectful to any contributors whose opinions may diverge from my own.
However, as a personal note, I have to say that I’ve been extremely angered and alarmed by what I’ve seen over the past few weeks, particularly the casual labeling of American citizens as “domestic terrorists” to justify a killing—and this from officials high up the chain.
A killing would be tragic enough, but most Americans understand that in mass law enforcement (whether they agree with the laws being enforced or not) there’s a chance a lone official can go rogue and act maliciously. But as I write this, our government’s responses have not repudiated the actions of the officer involved in the Pretti killing. There’s been no acknowledgment of wrongdoing from the top, despite substantial evidence. Instead, the deceased has been described as an enemy of the state by the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and the deputy White House chief of staff.
Add to this the talk of a “domestic terrorist” database being built to catalogue protestors and other malcontents. This clip of an ICE agent telling a woman that her facial data will be fed into the alleged database is particularly frightening, if it points to something true:
I worry about what’s coming. And again, I don’t intend to make a habit of commenting on national stories here. This is a local magazine, after all. And I shouldn’t create the expectation that we’ll respond to every national outrage or that I’ll use the magazine as my personal political soapbox. This is just all so wrong. It is tyrannical behavior, an abuse of power, plain and simple. It cannot stand.
Thank you for bearing with me.
Yours,
Paul
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Oh To Be a Dirtbag Again
The burnt brick from the Molotov cocktail should’ve been enough for me to realize that moving into J & R’s house was a bad idea. But J was a great salesman–high-energy for a man in his fifties–and if he hadn’t pointed out the charred corner near the doorway, I probably wouldn’t have noticed anyway.
So when he told me, quite casually, that his former boyfriend had tried to burn down his house by lobbing a makeshift incendiary at the backdoor, I chalked up the acknowledgment to a full transparency approach–which, in line with the incredibly clean house full of Harvard Classics volumes and imported wine, seemed very adult.
It also helped that I was looking to rent a room off of Craigslist for $400-$700/month cash. The last place I’d looked at was way south on Hampden–a room with a scabby yellow mattress on the floor that the owner just “forgot” was in there. There were bare wires poking from the wall, right above a patch of soiled brown carpet, and the whole place had a heavy, wet cigarette stink to it. That room was going for $650, and J was offering $700, so I decided to treat myself.
The goal was to live cheaply but tranquilly. It was 2021, and I’d just returned to Denver after working as a high school English teacher in Albuquerque. After the school’s administration broke me (that story here), I’d snagged a remote sales gig where I made more than double my full-year teacher’s salary in just six months, granting me the escape velocity I needed to leave my bleeding heart venture behind and recommit to Denver.
It was also at this juncture that I had a stretch of time where I didn’t have to work. I’d squirreled enough away to last six to eight months if I played my cards right, and my goal was to write the whole way through. For the first time in my life, all I was going to do was focus on the craft. All day, every day. Write until the money ran out. That was the plan. No compromises.
For years, I’d seen people driving expensive cars or taking vacations abroad, and all I could think about was how much time that money would buy me. I’d happily exchange a vacation for three months, a car for a year. If only I could break away from the paycheck-to-paycheck slog and just have a little time to live as a writer. A real writer. I could test myself, see what my limits were. It’s every would-be artist’s dream, I think, to live this way, and very few people get to experience it. And ever since that time there at J & R’s house on Harrison, I’ve never been able to achieve it again.
The meth was something I didn’t find out about until a couple weeks in. As suggested, J & R seemed like some pretty respectable dudes. J was a science teacher at East High School, and R was a retired electronics sales rep. The first couple of nights, they were these wizened, worldly, catty intellectuals. They were married, and talked about their time in France and Germany on wine tasting tours. They were helpful too, offered to help me move my stuff in. And when I stubbed my toe on some flagstone so bad it was gushing blood, J helped me wash it out in the sink and got some bandages for me. They didn’t mind that I was straight either, though I did get the sense a few times that J would’ve liked it better if I weren’t.
Everything seemed stable enough. My first week in the basement was bliss, really. I was doing it right too. Again, this was (and is to this day) the only time I’d ever experienced a life of artistic freedom. It’s a very tricky thing. You have to be relatively unencumbered. You have to live simply, but you can’t be too poor. You have to be in a situation where you can devote at least six to eight hours every day to your craft and only your craft, while still having the time and energy to study and read later. And, most importantly, before you get this opportunity, you have to have built up enough foundational skills so that you’re not just completely stabbing in the dark when you put pen to paper. You need to know how the work is done, or else you won’t know what to do with all that precious time.
One day, as I was taking my lunch break with some Sprouts sushi in the basement’s common area (complete with a pinball machine and wine cooler), J came down the stairs and asked if I wanted to join him over at Cerebral Brewing–sort of a get-to-know-who’s-living-in-my-house kind of thing, to which I of course agreed.
We walked over together, and J being a teacher and I a former one, swapped gripes about classroom culture, the system, yada yada. At that point, I told John that my friend back in Albuquerque, the head of the science department at my old school, had been in love with a woman who was a full-blown meth addict. You’d never know it either, but, yes. Very functional. A bright young Berkeley grad who’d somehow tumbled into New Mexico to work a modest job at a charter school. But outside of the classroom she was a mess. When they went to Santa Fe and stayed on the Plaza in a nice hotel, she’d tweaked out and trashed the room, leaving my buddy with a $1,200+ cleaning and repair bill. Still, he was ga-ga for this brilliant, troubled woman. Just something about her. I’ve experienced something similar myself.
“Yeah, you know R and I struggle with that too,” J said (and I do remember this part more or less verbatim).
“With what?”
“With meth.”
“What do you mean?”
“We do it on occasion. Just once or twice a week, really.”
“Oh…”
I hemmed and hawed, said something like “Oh, yeah, mmmm, well, it’s really common. A lot of people mmmmm struggle with that too.” But of course my head was all alarms. Barely two weeks into what was supposed to be this halcyon writing retreat, and I was finding out that the strangers I was living with were on meth. Just once or twice a week… Yeah, right.
I could’ve gone back on the housing hunt, but finding a new place would shave off more precious time and money. Besides, if writing is good for anything, it’s romanticizing squalor. I decided to soldier on.
And it was fine for a while. For six days a week, I’d write around 2,000 words a day, taking one day off to debauch myself at St. Paul’s or Lost Lake, where a guy in flannel once threatened me with a Bowie knife he’d snuck in, before announcing he was going to go “cut off Nancy Pelosi’s head” and then hopping the gate on the patio and sprinting off into the half-dark of Colfax. God, I was alive.
Focusing on nothing but writing all day, every day was incredible. I’d never been so productive nor so switched on. However, if you ever decide to embark on something like this, be warned. You’ll be more yourself than you’ve ever been–that is, if the self you idealize is your creative side, in touch with the flow state, etc. This part of me–typically repressed by the 9 to 5 routine–is funny and ebullient, but also neurotic and moody. High highs and low lows. One day, I’d feel like a genius, the next day I’d be an idiot wasting his life. It was like being a teenager again.
Still, the work was getting done at an incredible rate. I was also exercising daily, eating right. I didn’t have anything to smother my thinking, nothing to make me sag into the bad routines we all adopt when we’re working jobs that drain us.
Then the nightly screaming started, and the signs of real drug abuse appeared. J & R were fighting and, it turned out, in the middle of a divorce. They’d scream at each other for a while, throw things around the room upstairs. Then there’d be a solo, prolonged wail (I think it was J) and then, like clockwork, one of them would begin vacuuming the whole house at three in the morning. That was why the place was so clean!
Things got uglier. J was definitely the wild one, but R, I noticed, was mean. He would frequently tease J about having HIV, which is a strange thing for someone’s partner to do.
“Did you tell him what you have?” he sneered at J one morning in the kitchen, as J showed me pictures (unsolicited) of this young army guy he was trying to fly out to Denver, which was also mean, I guess (just not joking-about-a-potentially-life-threatening-illness mean). J didn’t respond until later that night, presumably, when the screaming started back up.
There was a lock on my door, and I was using it. One day, J told me that locking the door was a safety issue. I didn’t ask what he meant by that or how he knew I was locking my door, since I only locked it at night when I went to bed.
By that time, I was starting to give them the cold shoulder. I just wanted to focus on my work and push through the weirdness, the somewhat treacherous weirdness, that was beginning to percolate. The day before, R had come downstairs in his bathrobe while I was brushing my teeth.
“Do you hear that?” R asked, wide-eyed.
“Hear what?”
“Listen!”
There was nothing.
“I think J put microphones in the walls,” he said. “Have you noticed anything?”
“No,” I said, before adding, “I think that’s all in your head.”
There were plenty of other run-ins like this. Pure madness. I’m not going to lie though. This tension was probably good for the writing. It at least encouraged me to leave the house as early as I could. Still, I was aware that the situation was terminal–a point that would soon be made even clearer.
One morning, I heard J talking in the common area with a woman about square footage. Then, there was a knock on my door.
“Yeah?” I said, opening the door.
It was J, who informed me that there was a woman, a realtor, in the common area who wanted to see my room because, and by the way, they were putting the house on the market and I’d probably need to move out within the next two months.
I resisted at first, said the room wasn’t in a presentable state, but J said that she’d have to take a peek to confirm the square footage, and there didn’t seem to be any way I could stop that from happening without getting confrontational.
That was our dynamic for the next few weeks as I scrambled to find a new spot. I kept my distance and continued to write. I wasn’t nearly as productive though. I’d also drained enough of my savings for the nerves to creep back in and interfere with my artistic mindset. Soon, my special little writing sabbatical would be over, and I’d have to hunt for another job. Three pure months was really all I was able to get out of that endeavor. Eventually, I found another spot with a roommate in Cap Hill, where I spent most of my time emailing my resume and sweating out my last few shekels.
Despite all the chaos, I look back on those days fondly. It was brief, but I got what I wanted; I got to do the work. Living like that is a gift, and I don’t know if I’ll ever get to do it again. For one, these days I have too many responsibilities. There’d be no way to run the magazine for instance, which gobbles up cash like you wouldn’t believe, and pursue my own writing, at least not to that degree. Also, and I’m sorry to admit this, but I’ve gotten accustomed to my creature comforts. To put it plainly, I don’t think I have the courage to sacrifice what I would need to in order to make that life possible. I think of the writer Roberto Bolaño (one of the few I’m aware of who did it right) losing most of his teeth because he chose to live as an artist and forgo routine dental care. He was a better man than I am in that respect (duh). I just can’t bring myself to do it. I’m in my late thirties now, and the body just needs a bit more maintenance than it used to (the teeth, in particular!).
Retirement, of course, is a (very distant) possibility, but, by that point, it’s no guarantee how your brain is going to function, or if you’ll even be alive. So it may be the case that all I’ll ever have to look back on in my writing life–the pure writing life–will be those three months I spent in J & R’s basement. That’s okay though. Life is not about getting exactly what you want (duh). I’m sure Bolaño really wanted to keep his teeth, among other things, and I’m luckier than most to have time to write at all.
I hope they’re alright, J & R, wherever they may be. It really was a nice room. And even if it wasn’t, I’ve forgotten so many better ones.
Yours,
Paul M. French
Editor
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