I wrote this essay almost 20 years ago, back when I was a field organizer for GLAAD and spent a good chunk of 2005 in Colorado. I was in Denver this past week, telling a few of the same stories about having been born there, and realized I’d never actually published the piece. I’ve added a few footnotes from today’s perspective.
Whenever I’m in Colorado for work, I spend a lot of time talking up my local credentials and a lot of time leaving out the hard edges. I tell people: My parents met at the bar my dad owned in Boulder. I was born in Denver. My grandparents’ ashes are scattered at Maroon Bells. I grew up believing Colorado was the most beautiful place on Earth.
That’s all true, but like all good family stories, leaves out the actual truth, the layers and years of estrangement, the decades of unhappiness beneath the surface of a brutal 17-year marriage, the bitter admiration and pity often felt now.
In Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, a novella about growing up in Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains, the narrator’s father urges his son to stop writing “true stories,” to find refuge in fiction. “Only then will you understand what happened and why,” his father says in a moment of despair. “It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.” Maclean, in typically stubborn son-like fashion, instead wrote the true story, which became a great American classic of creative non-fiction.1
The line between reality and fantasy — if it exists at all — is slim, narrower still as we increasingly rely on technology that will be outdated and inaccessible before our memories even fade.2 But we still have those ancient stories to fall back on.
James Michener’s epic Colorado novel, Centennial, is a long, deeply researched book about thinly veiled real scandals and infamous actual people. Every winter growing up, in some kind of modern family tradition, we watched the 26-hour miniseries adaptation,3 but it was in rereading the novel that I learned the meaning of “epic.” Michener starts not with white settlement of the Front Range or the earlier native dwellers. He begins literally at the dawn of time, the Big Bang, the formation of the earth and collision of tectonic plates and slow chiseling of craggy mountain peaks by time and wind and rain.
Most of our stories are newer than that, the paint still geologically fresh. Last May [in 2005], a meeting arranged by a colleague brought me back to Boulder, back to my dad’s old bar and ground zero in my own creation myth.
My family legend goes something like this:
My father moved to Colorado to cowboy when he was 19 and stayed 20 years, building a series of successful businesses — the first off-campus housing where CU Boulder allowed women to live without an adult guardian, a record label that signed and laid down local bands playing country rock, and, chief among the entrepreneurial efforts, a bar and grill named Shannon’s with a crowd as varied as the folks who lived in Boulder in the ‘70s and a reputation that long outlived its actual operation.
Stephen King came in nearly every day, sitting in a booth in the back while he wrote The Stand longhand, even throwing in a nod to Shannon’s friendly live music booking policies in the novel. My dad promoted a bartender to become the city’s first female bar manager, bailed Native American activists out of jail, welcomed ex-con bikers on staff and cleared space for lesbian softball teams to have a beer after their Sunday afternoon games.
That’s where my parents met in ’73 or ’74, when my mom and her two sisters, all flirting with various seriousness with Buddhism and its spin-offs, got sick of waiting for a big-shot Shambhala lecturer to show up on time and went out for a drink. It was my aunt Andrea’s recommendation to try a place called Shannon’s around the corner. That night or maybe one after, my mom met and started dating one of the bartenders — a guy who was, so the story goes, a real love of my mom’s life. When they had trouble, my father counseled them to stay together. They did, for a while, and then they didn’t.
At some point not so long after, my mom decided she was old enough for an older, more serious guy. Born in 1941, my dad’s an undeniable generation ahead of my hippie chick mom, who was born in 1950, graduated high school in ’68, and left college for good when her campus was shut down after Kent State. But he wasn’t a square, exactly; the red-diaper son of two typical liberal, vaguely Communist Jews, he was in many ways exactly the kind of outsider my mom had always been attracted to.
And he was persistent in his pursuit of her. The family “joke” he used to tell was that she only agreed to marry him after a marathon discussion when he refused to allow her to go to sleep until she said yes. They got engaged on Mother’s Day and were married on Father’s Day way up in the mountains, where he had a big house. A month later she was pregnant with me. I was born in Denver at what was then called Rose Memorial Hospital and raised in the wilds above Rollinsville, where our nearest neighbor was miles down the road from the new place my parents bought from Stephen Stills.
My dad was at that time well-off and well-connected to Boulder’s business and political community. He threw parties that lasted for weeks when the barometer rose fast and the pass down to Boulder closed faster. My first real memory is from a party like that, lying still and quiet on a long couch with the kitchen at my back, faking sleep so I wouldn’t be sent to bed when all the fun was happening right there.
We left Colorado when I was four, when my mom was pregnant with my brother and a new sawmill investment had gone sour as the burgeoning environmental movement grew legislative legs. My parents went nearly overnight from wealthy to bankrupt, but the fact was their marriage had gone off the tracks long before the finances.
A decade later, after they belatedly divorced, my mother allowed me to read her journals from their honeymoon, where my father’s tendencies toward blinding, screaming fits of rage were already on full display. He threatened to use his political connections to win custody of me if she tried to leave.
He sold the bar not long after I was born. It was an impractical career with bad hours for a new dad, he said, holding whatever resentment that concession created towards me and my mom just slightly at bay. I remember hints of more serious complications — the “uncle” who lived down the mountain and was mysteriously killed in a plane crash, the trial my father stayed behind to testify at when my mom and I moved ahead to Vegas, the stories about days of trading liquor in Shannon’s vaults for a steady supply of harder substances.4 The best anti-drug lecture I ever heard was my mom saying she stopped doing coke the day she saw me, at age 3 or 4, pretending to snort something off the piano.
Hard lessons learned about the recreational pleasures of the 70s aside, Shannon’s never lost its luster in both my parents’ tales. It was a pre-PC melting pot, a rollicking must-play for up-and-coming musicians,5 a utopia of good times and good friends.
Some of these stories I grew up hearing over and over, some I unearthed from corroborating or contradictory sources (my maternal grandmother, after my parents’ divorce, admitting she never liked my dad and exactly why; my mother’s old letters and journals, loaned to me for a biography project I did in college). Much of it is likely self-aggrandizement or inflated in importance to impress my friends or theirs. I am as guilty here in that kind of tall-tale telling as anyone, but I’m not sure it matters that some of this is probably flat-out falsehood. For the first time in my professional life, I’m not even sure how much to fact-check. It’s the “true story.”
I have barely spoken to my father in years, but no matter how many times I move or prune my wardrobe, I haven’t been able to bring myself to throw out a tattered old Shannon’s shirt: a worn-out cotton red-and-white baseball raglan jersey with the bar logo of a drunk Leprechaun dancing a jig on a barrel of whiskey.6
So when I cross the Pearl Street Mall on my way to my meeting, an hour early, I park the car and wander back without giving the action much real thought. It is right there, all this lingering history, right there waiting to be rediscovered. I stand on the brick street in front of a courthouse and call my mother for more precise directions.
I walk up to 10th Street, past Tom’s Tavern. “You should go in there,” my mom says. “Someone’s bound to remember your father.” Nearby is Juanita’s, the Mexican place that hasn’t changed in decades. And there is a big, new brick building — West End Plaza — where at that moment a crew of workers is installing iron railings to ring a patio area for a new bar. The plate glass window hasn’t been installed yet, but the wooden stools and shelves full of candles and long, sleek bar stretch back from the street, full of urbanized elegance and the forward march of time.
I stand there, mouth open, my mom still talking in my ear. It doesn’t matter that there isn’t a hint of Shannon’s left — right after my dad sold it, the winter of ’78 or ’79, a wet, heavy spring snow made the roof fall in. I even saw a newspaper clipping documenting the collapse, carefully saved in my grandmother’s scrapbook. A proven “fact.” The bar was never refurbished to its former state, passing through different owners and iterations until, apparently, it was torn down and redone altogether.
It is still more real, here, in its ghostly reincarnation, than in any of those stories I’ve heard.
“Your dad wished me a happy Mother’s Day yesterday,” Mom says, bringing me back to the street, to Boulder, to my own adulthood. I am older already than my mother was when she had me.7
“He what?” They don’t talk, have only been in the same room in the last decade for graduations and, though my mother’s found a kind of forgiveness for him, they’re only capable of a small amount of polite conversation before someone needs a break.
“I called him to ask if he wanted to split the cost of your brother’s rehearsal dinner, and he said, ‘By the way, happy Mother’s Day.’”
My mom says the only time she was ever glad to hear his voice on the phone again was on September 11, when I called him after my long awful walk home to Brooklyn, trying him first only because I assumed he’d be easier to get a hold of during the middle of a day when my mom was teaching. He plowed through layers of receptionists and classroom aides to tell her I was still alive.
“You could call him, you know,” she says. “Tell him where you are.”
I have been promising some kind of reconciliation as an unspoken wedding present to my little brother, whose relationship with our dad is perhaps no less complicated, but more amicable, more patient. Different. We have different true stories to tell, and when my father and I let the time between our fights extend into a stubborn excommunication, my brother became the only living relative who still speaks to our father. He’s not willing to break that streak, and I don’t blame him.
All the same – “I’m not calling him,” I say.
“I’ll send him a picture,” I promise. “I have to say something to him before the wedding anyway.”
After I hang up, after another five minutes of slack-jawed staring in which I can’t begin to sort out what it all means and why I’m so overwhelmed, I see a man staring at me. He’s in his mid-30s, wearing a crisp dark green polo shirt. He has the self-righteous, nervous air of a man who’s watching his investment bear a bloody mess of a child.
“Is this your bar?” I hear myself ask, compelled out of self-indulgent contemplation by a strident curiosity. He nods, and I introduce myself, shake his hand. Shumar, or something close to that, has a cautiously nice smile and a strong grip.
The second thing I remember my father teaching me about the world — after how to avoid throwing a punch “like a girl, with your thumb inside your fist”8 — was how to shake hands in a way that would make people take me seriously. I was 4, maybe 5, and it is without question to me the most important legacy of my father’s networking, melting pot business-building career. My mom has moments of shyness, but my father’s presence is on the walls of every room I walk into and introduce myself around. I have made my own successful career in part on the strength of that handshake.
“My dad owned a bar that was here in the ’70s,” I say, and Shumar looks like he wants to call bullshit but is too much of a gentleman. “No, really, it was right here, this exact spot. It was called Shannon’s.”
He squints into the sunny late afternoon and grins broadly, believing me. “That’s crazy,” he says, and I have to laugh and agree.
“Anyway,” I say. “Good luck.” I pause, suddenly torn between those shy maternal instincts and gregarious paternalism. He holds out his hand again and I take it. I say, “It’s a good place for a bar.”
I take a few more pictures, feeling like a stalker, like I have no right at all to this square of public sidewalk. Then I pause for a long minute in front of Tom’s Tavern. I’m not sure I want to hear any other stories about my dad. It’s hard enough sorting out the ones I know like old roads leading home.
But it’s right there, and the conversation with Shumar has made me brave, given me the confidence of an easy anecdote that can be an icebreaker with my dad. I push through the doors to a greasy old diner. A bar is squeezed in one back counter and I bypass the hostess with a smile. The guy wiping the counter probably thinks I want a job.
“Is there anyone on today who’s been working here a long time?” I ask. “Like back to the ’70s?”
The bartender, a short-haired guy with smeared, shoddy glasses and a weird, twitchy mouth, gives me a mumbling answer I don’t understand. “Is there anyone?” I ask again.
“I said: me. I’ve been around.” I go through it again — who I am, who my dad was, the bar right down the block.
“Hell,” he says. “Shannon’s. ’Course I remember Shannon’s.” He pushes his glasses up his nose. “That was a real rowdy bar. I wasn’t old enough yet to be drinking there, but yeah, I remember your dad.”
Stan is Tom’s son, it turns out, and he’s sure Tom would have plenty of stories to tell me if he hadn’t already left for the day. I can always come back tomorrow, he offers, and though the offer is kind I’m suddenly glad I’m only around for a few hours.
“Tell your dad I stopped by?” He nods, shakes his head in that disbelieving way people get when they’re taken by surprise. Only after I go back outside do I realize we have something in common, that in another universe where my dad kept the bar, stopping his slow slide into angry nostalgia at the long-gone glory days, I might have grown up and gone to CU and paid for my books polishing glasses a hundred yards from here.
At this point I’m committed to the reenactment, and the bookshop on the other side of 10th Street has a sign that says “established 1973,” so I know I’m going in. The young women working the front desk say that Buster’s been around a while, and they page him with a vaguely threatening sounding message that “there’s a woman here who wants to talk to someone who worked here a long time ago.” Buster the bookworm has a short beard and a friendly face, and though he remembers Shannon’s it wasn’t his scene, he says. He points out the sticker in the window indicating the bookshop survived 25 years of gentrification and brainstorms with me a list of other local businesses he knows have been around as long.
Bart’s is a music store now crammed ear to ear with used CDs. I wonder if this is the store where my mom was standing in line in the rain to buy a Crosby, Stills & Nash album when my father came to tell her he’d bought Stills’ house. But it’s staffed entirely by people my age, so I browse but keep quiet. The jewelry store up at 9th is already closed for the day. My time is running out and I’m constantly jarred back into the 21st century by modern chains. There’s an American Apparel store, Lush soaps and cosmetics, a Wells Fargo branch.
I walk back across the mall, unpack my traveling slide show and get down to work. During my meeting — 20 local gay rights advocates crammed into the tiny living room of a house converted to a community center — I realize I can see the Shambhala Center, the building where my mom got bored waiting for enlightenment and went looking for a drink. I learn that Tom’s Diner is owned by Tom Eldridge, the most conservative member of Boulder’s City Council and an enemy of the group I’m there to work with.
I drive back to Denver and a clean, sterile hotel room with my thoughts trapped three decades in the past, a million stories in my head colliding like crashing waves in my wake. I sit up at the cramped desk until 3 a.m., trying to remember it all accurately, trying to get it all down before I forget, trying to find some essential truth and tell it unsparingly. A few hours later I’m up with the sun, the peaks of the Rockies casting cartoonish jagged shadows on the city.
Everywhere I go in Colorado are the mountains, the sleeping giants of my youth, staring down at me. My father’s bar is gone but not forgotten and I wonder, the question plagues me: If he was telling the truth about all that, about his bar being a legend, what else might be real, too?
My father is a lifelong con man, a teller of tall tales, a liar, and the truth of the matter is, so am I. I am a writer, after all.
I learned from him not only a good punch and a good shake but the sleight of hand you use to get what you want without paying, to dodge the phone call you shouldn’t have answered, to convince someone to give you something you haven’t earned. I have spent my lifetime trying to unlearn these skills, to lock them up in a place of my mind I don’t remember to go looking for, no matter how tight the times or dire the circumstances. I sometimes succeed.
I include in that box the idea that maybe my father was telling the truth when he said he loved me and I could do anything I wanted with my life. It was hard to hear or remember those lessons over the screaming, demeaning tirades. It’s even harder to acknowledge them now, when it’s too late to remember one part without the other, when I know that the truth is I’m happier without him in my life.
He is so rarely happy about anything. The world is out to get him, the man has done him wrong, the history books will bear no mention of the great ideas he had, and there’s always someone else to blame for all of that. I don’t have any real hope of a true renewal of our relationship, having finally learned from repeated efforts in the past that the sacrifice he requires from me in contrition for my bad daughter sins is far, far greater than I am willing to offer even out of pity and sympathy for his tragic figure.
He’s not interested in any of my truths, can’t reconcile them with his own. But maybe I’ll send him the photos anyway, I’ll ask after his health, I’ll tell him how every time I come to Colorado I understand why he and Mom settled down in Nevada in the foothills of the Sierras.9 The mountains there cast long, old shadows across the valleys where I grew up, just like here.
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, another high-mountain child, tried again and again to explain his lifelong affair with his homeland. He wrote: “Pardon me, if when I want to tell the story of my life, it’s the land I talk about.” This land is where I learned I don’t see any difference between true stories and the fictional characters we make up to exorcize them.
Michener says, “Only the rocks live forever,” and that much, I know, is true.10
I can only assume at the time I wrote it I thought this essay was too serious to also comment on Robert Redford’s 1992 film adaptation, starring Craig Scheffer and Brad Pitt (as the bad boy brother).
I wrote this in 2005.
Starring Richard Chamberlain and so many other people. Dramatic and slightly questionable promo can be seen here.
I assume this was basically a money laundering scheme, mob-related or not, which also makes for a much more interesting story.
If there was one question I’ve wanted to ask my dad for a while, it’s why I never heard about Elton John growing up — he recorded albums within spitting distance of where my folks lived during this time.
The Irish theme pre-dated my Jewish dad’s ownership of the brand.
She was 27 when I was born. I’m now older than she was when my parents divorced.
Strangely also something I thought about this weekend after seeing the excellent movie Bottoms. My dad would unrepentantly beat a 5-year-old at Monopoloy, but he never hit me — he taught me how to hit him so it hurt without hurting my own hand, and how to confidently knock him over if he was a catcher protecting home plate.
I do not, in all honestly, remember whether I did any of those things. If I have those photos, probably taken on an early smart phone, I don’t know where they are. We spoke occasionally in the years after this was written, and then even more rarely in the past decade. My wife has never met him. This year, the day after my birthday, he sent me a passive-aggressive email about how we must both have just decided to allow our relationship to drift away. I suppose that is his version of the story.
He is 82 years old now. He will not live forever. I’ve never written a fictional version of him and can’t imagine why I would.