J.R. ... The Boy of Summer

(Photo by Karalyn Dorn)

J.R. Trujillo.

We started out as reporters together in the mid-1980s at the student-run Monday, Wednesday and Friday paper, The Mirror, at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. Already shooting for the top, J.R. applied for and got the Editor-in-Chief position and hired me as his News Editor.

With black hair so sprayed and lacquered it shone like a ’65 Impala low rider, J.R. had an arrogance about him borne of burgeoning talent. His dark eyes flashed when he talked about The News, which he ate, drank and slept.

Behind those eyes an even deeper darkness lurked. From Grand Junction, he’d hint late at night in the newsroom about a mom who was in a nursing home there, and who wasn’t going to get better. I don’t ever remember him going home to visit her, or the working class family he had left behind and appeared to want to be shed of.

We had several things in common … News, Nicotine and Novas … His Chevy was yellow and mine blue, but they were of similar vintage, and J.R. was forever coming up behind me as I typed at my desk and borrowing two of my Camel unfiltered cigarettes. One which would go in his mouth and be set ablaze, and another which went behind his ear until he shifted it to his mouth and came sniffing around later for another.

We made a good team. He was a better reporter than I was and I was a better writer than he was and we learned from each other. A natural lady’s man to my nerdy shyness, he once called me and a reporter that I had been sleeping with, and who had broken up with me, into his office when it was getting in the way of the work. He told both of us together that we needed to work it out. Privately he told her that if it came down to firing her or me, he would fire her. Privately he told me to quit sleeping with the reporters unless I was going be enough of a print pimp to keep them in line.

A year ahead of me in school, it looked like J.R. was on his way to Bigger and Better when he applied for an internship with the San Jose Mercury News in California the summer between his junior and senior year. Competing with candidates from across the country to work at one of the more well-known and respected papers on the West Coast at the time he made it to the final rounds of interviews, but ultimately wasn’t selected.

It was stumble on his career path from which he would never recover his balance.

That fall, saying “presidents don’t take cabinet positions,” J.R. wouldn’t work at The Mirror. I continued writing and editing at the paper. He dropped out of school. He was talented enough as a reporter that he was getting stringer and freelance gigs with some of the local dailies, but when he started pushing for a staff position they told him he needed to get that degree first.

He had also begun to develop what was appearing line by line to be a growing addiction to cocaine. Liking coke and weed and booze plenty myself, I was happy to spiral down the shiny slide of substance abuse with him … to a point. I remember both of us being out of money, and looking for a high, and grinding up Vivarin caffeine pills and snorting them one night. Now in retrospect I’m not sure if that makes us more pathetic for our need for a high, or an indication of how naïve and nerdy our junior junkie ways were.

Since we weren’t going to school or working together, I saw less and less of J.R., but I still heard about him. A mutual friend who said he had found him nursing a drink and brooding one night at the bar, complaining bitterly about the shit-hole amenities of a press box at a local high school where he had managed to cage an assignment to cover a football game. I heard he had gotten a gig covering Weld County for one of the dailies, but that his car had broken down, and unable to fix it, he had simply let the State Patrol tow it away and now was being buried by impound fees.

I consciously distanced myself from him. I didn’t answer my phone when I heard him on the message machine, knowing all he wanted was to borrow money. I was in the final push to get my degree, and I saw him less and less and honestly thought about him even less than that.

One morning I was awakened by a call from my parents. They had seen a story in that morning’s paper about the former editor of The Mirror that had killed himself. The story didn’t name who it was, “pending notification of next of kin” and my dad said he couldn’t dial the phone fast enough, in fear that if he didn’t, it would ring.

J.R. had hung himself in his bedroom of the house he lived in with several other guys. They said he had watched some ESPN SportCenter with them, drank a few beers, then said he was going to bed. When he didn’t come out the next morning they finally went in to see what was up.

He was. Against the wall. With a belt around his neck. He was 22.

I remember at the time of his death not seeing it as a cautionary tale as much as a poetic prediction of where things may be headed. Where I may be headed. I saw way too much romanticism in him choosing to kill himself, too much torment.

In true shark smelling blood in the water journalistic tradition that would have made J.R. proud I managed to get a freelance assignment with the Denver Post’s Sunday magazine writing about his death. I turned in this 10,000 word story that was as much a manifesto about college journalism as about him. After I sent it to the editor J.R. came to me one night in a dream. He was impressed that I had scored a gig with The Post, even if it was over his dead body, and asked, "How long was it (the story)?" When I told him, he said, "Oh man, that's way too long."

He was right. The editor wrote back and said it was obvious that his death had deeply affected me, but “the story just wasn’t something they were looking to publish.”

As the years went by, I put J.R. away, pulling him out of my emotional baggage every now and then, but for the most part, life went on. That's why I was excited in 2005 to hear just before leaving for Lake Powell for a vacation with Lesli and the girls and her parents that a reunion was planned for late August of staffs of The Mirror from the mid-1980s when I worked there. Quickly it became evident that part of any revisit to this time would have to be a coming-to-terms with J.R., who for two decades had lain beneath his native Grand Junction soil. Grand Junction was always the overnight stop on the two-day drive to Powell.

I had been to J.R.'s grave in Grand Junction once before, almost 20 years ago shortly after he died while I was doing research for the story that never ran. Through all the years, it had stuck with me how the cemetery was off 'Unaweep' Avenue. What hadn't stuck with me was how to get there again. As soon as we hit Grand Junction on the return trip from Lake Powell, I started trying to find directions. Despite the fervent and somewhat hostile pronouncements by many Grand Junctionites that there was "no damn cemetery off Unaweep," I eventually discovered there was, and how to get there.

At dawn, on Father's Day, Lesli and I left the girls sleeping with grandma and grandpa at the motel and headed out to the Orchard Mesa Cemetery. I've always had good graveyard karma with Lesli. When we were younger, we spent an entire afternoon drinking beer with Billy the Vault Installer at Buddy Holly's grave in Lubbock, Texas. The years haven't diminished her enthusiasm for such adventures, nor her sense of humor. As we pulled into the Grand Junction cemetery - with gravestones and trees stretching to the horizon - she actually laughed when I said: "It was by a tree."

It was Lesli who first saw Ernie. It was her that approached him and told him our story. Ernie didn't work for the cemetery, we got the impression that maybe he was doing court-ordered public service but didn’t want to probe too deeply, but for whatever reason he was out cutting weeds around headstones with a weed-whacker at dawn on a Sunday for the city of Grand Junction. While officially he couldn't be of assistance, he was sympathetic to our quest.

"Could you come back Monday," he said?

"No, we're going to be heading back to Johnstown in the next couple of hours," I said.

Ernie would have none of that. He said he knew where they kept the grave registration cards in the cemetery office. He led us to the office, where drawer after drawer of 3 x 5 card holders lined one wall and maps of plots lined another. Lesli asked what J.R. stood for. I realized it was "junior" and that he had been touchy about his real first name. But time had smudged the memory enough that I couldn't read the handwriting in my mind.

So we began a melancholy trip down the card catalogue of Trujillos that lie in eternal rest at the cemetery. Old Trujillos. Baby Trujillos. Wilfred Trujillo.

"That's it," I said. "Wilfred."

We wrote down the plot number, Ernie figured out the area on one of the maps, and the three of us headed in that direction.

Ernie found it. I remember it being at the bottom of a small hill, but there it was, near the road, under a tree. Ernie, proud as any superhero, went back to his weed-whacking. Lesli hung back and I sat down on the grave.

Like a wave, the past 20 years, the good and the bad, all came over me. Lesli. Our marriage. Living in New Mexico. Moving to Johnstown. The girls. The paper. All these things washed over me as I realized that J.R. would never get to experience any of this. He was frozen in the amber of a time, sitting on my psychic shelf like a trinket bought at an interstate truck stop during a summer vacation that I pick up, and forget, at a whim.

I realized though, standing there, weeping at my friend's grave, that he's also likely been along for the ride all the way - as the spirit has moved him and me. I thought about whacking a chunk off his headstone to take to the reunion, but I was afraid Ernie might get in trouble.

Now, looking back at J.R.’s story three decades later, I’m not even sure he meant to kill himself. According to the coroner, he had tried first looping the belt from a plant hook, but it had pulled out of the ceiling. For years I pictured him so desolate, with plaster in that hair of his that he used to scream like a queen if you touched, then grimly looping the belt again to something more substantial, and the pain in his soul that kept him from putting his feet back down on this earth after he pulled them up.

It’s just as likely in my mind now that maybe he was just trying to cut off the oxygen to his brain and then releasing it at the moment before you pass out. I still feel sad, but now for the potential wasted chasing a cheap high, not the romance of the torment and tragedy of it all, that back then I think now in retrospect, I wore like a reflected badge of honor.

Either way: It's. Just. Damn. Sad.

A couple of years ago, just before I got clean, I decided to get a bracelet tattoo on my right wrist of “Day of the Dead” skulls, most of them tweaked in some manner to honor someone in my life who has died. One of them is of J.R. I told the tattoo artist I wanted something primitive and basic. Blacks and whites and simple lines. “I want it to look like I got it in prison,” I told him.

Now, when I hold my hand up while I’m writing, on the inside of my wrist, J.R., a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, his initials on his forehead and RIP on his chin, stare back at me from behind greaser shades. It’s a reminder of him, but also an admonition to me about the dangers of taking yourself too seriously, or looking in substances for an escape from the ghosts that haunt you.

The Backroom: Life among the ink-stained savages

There is a definite caste system to a newspaper.

You have advertising, all dollars and deals, and editorial, the news side, nerds with pens and pads and principles and the personalities of peacocks.

News is always screeching about how it must be kept pure of the filthy money of advertising, which in reality cashes its paychecks. I have known of papers where members of the advertising staff were actually forbidden by policy from entering the newsroom nerdom.

But if there is one thing news and advertising can agree upon, it’s they both feel superior to the men and women in the backroom: The printers, the people who prepare the papers for delivery, and those who actually either get it to the subscriber or newsstand.

News and advertising are populated for the most part by people with degrees. The backroom is manual labor, where a high school diploma, or even a command of English, is often not among the job requirements.

The college kids and the townies.

One of the first things I tell new reporters who come to work for me is to never look down their noses at the people in the backroom. In fact, I suggest, make friends with them.

“All your pretty words aren’t going to matter if that person delivering the paper doesn’t get up in the morning and get it to the subscribers and the newsstands,” I tell them. “If you treat the people in the backroom with respect, they will move heaven and earth for you. Treat them like you’re better than them, and they’ll stand there and watch the presses roll with a major fuck-up of yours on the front page and just smile.”

In reality I think my affection … or maybe more accurately connection … for and to the backroom … comes from my literal roots in the business.

I grew up working class. There were no respectable Republican cloth coats in my mom’s closet. My dad carried mail, and on Sundays, when he wasn’t carrying mail, he delivered the Sunday newspaper, The Star-Journal Chieftain, taking bundles to the convenience stores and other places where people picked up copies, and filling the numerous vending racks around the city.

Every Sunday morning at 3:30 a.m. a truck from the Star-Journal, usually drive by one of my dad’s old stock car racing buddies Scottie Oldedaker, would stop next to my dad’s pick-up parked on the street and toss papers into the back.

I’d awaken to the sound and lay in bed listening to the muted metallic echoing whump… whump… whump…  whump… as the bundles hit the bed of the truck, and then hear my dad’s smoker-hack cough and his footsteps walking around the house. Then I’d hear the front door close, his truck start, and then silence as I wondered where he was going and what he’d see in the middle of the night when I was leashed by childhood to my bed.

I’d fall back asleep, only to be awakened in the morning to him coming back home. My mom would make him a bologna and egg sandwich and I would sit on his lap in his Lazy-Boy and he’d read me the comics from the Sunday Journal-Chieftain, the ink still so fresh you could smell it as it left little pastel streaks on the paper towel when he wiped the egg grease from his hands.

Like the rumble of the presses starting to roll, that sound … newsprint bundles being tossed and stacked … still makes my heart beat a little faster even today.

As I got older, sometimes as a special treat during school vacations, I would get to go with my dad “on the route.” In the dark hours and early morning while most of the town slept I would see people and things that nobody in my class at Olga Hellbeck had a story to compare with come Monday morning at school.

Just before dawn, in downtown Pueblo, we’d stop at Reese’s Diner on Main. My dad would get a cup of coffee and I’d get a glass of milk and a chocolate glazed doughnut and we’d sit at the counter with the homeless people, hookers and last-call bar diehards sopping up the sloshing liquor in their stomachs with pancakes and sausage and hashbrowns.

Later, when I got older, and in trouble, my dad would make me go with him on the route. I know now in retrospect that the aim was not to get some slave labor, or even exact some punishment. For all I know, but now can imagine, he may very well have treasured those hours alone in the middle of the night once a week. I know now, and I think I even knew back then, that the idea was to get some time alone with me. Some time to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me.

Time when my dad would talk to me like he would never think to talk with me with other people around. Just the two of us alone in the cab of his pickup for hours, as the conversation rose and fell like the up- and downshifts of his manual transmission, with the golden opportunity to break off a subject that became too embarrassing because we needed to fill a rack or go into a store.

Secrets and stories, that’s what I learned on those mornings on the route with my dad. And all of it woven in and around a pickup full of newspapers. Even the reaction of the clerks in the convenience stores and the people, some literally waiting for the newspaper, fed on that feeling. As I walked in the door I knew something they didn’t, and because of me, they were going to find it out. And because of that they were if only momentarily all focused on my existence.

Newspapers made me special and worthy of notice.

And then, when I got my license, my dad turned the route over to me and my friend Mike.

Can you imagine a better job for two 16-year-olds than to be able to ride around town in the middle of the night, not only with the right, but the responsibility to do so, just to make sure the news was delivered? All that time I don’t think we ever got pulled over, or even talked to for that matter by a single cop. We were just a part of the night-scene pulp paper delivery woodwork.

At the time, in my mind because he was a pussy, but now, again in retrospect, perhaps from carbon monoxide poisoning from the old exhaust system on the truck and running the heater in a closed cab, Mike would invariably get nauseous during the route.

I would find myself at dawn in an empty grocery store parking lot, reading how my secret high school crush Connie Bond had done the day before in the gymnastics meet in the sports section of the Chieftain, while Mike, clad in his cotton jumpsuit during his Pete Townsend Woodstock phase, hunched and hurled next to the idling truck. I was such a sociopath that I wouldn’t even turn off the engine.

The pops that washed the vomit taste out of Mike’s mouth were bought from the jangling bag of quarters provided for the racks. The coffee and chocolate doughnuts and bags of chips were paid for by the Chieftain as part of our self-styled employee profit-sharing plan.

What I remember most about my days of delivering the Chieftain back then, however, is showing up at the newspaper at about 5 a.m. to get another truckload of papers to distribute on the east side of town.

We’d load up and then walk through the back shop where the papers were inserted and bundled for delivery. We’d go into the bathroom. Pressmen, who probably had a couple of job-printing runs for other papers and publications after printing the Chieftain, would just be showering and would be standing around in various states of ink-smeared sullenness and wet fatigue. Across the entire floor would be newspapers strewn, as if they used them like towels.

What always struck me was the calm after the storm environment of the now nearly empty newsroom that we would walk by along the hall headed back to the truck. The silence, broken by the monotonous low chatter of the police scanner, the vibe of the deadline push still shimmering off the metal desks and typewriters like a cooling heat. I still love the newsroom after deadline on Wednesday nights at The Breeze and do everything I can to assure that I am the last around, so I can sit and bask in the afterglow.

Later, at one of my first real newspaper jobs as a reporter, I was required to deliver the weekly edition myself. We would finish the paper’s layout at around noon on Wednesday afternoon and while we were at lunch it was printed and brought back to the offices, where we inserted the weekly ad flyers, and then, while the other reporters went back to work, I was expected to load my white 1969 Pontiac Bonneville with bundles of papers, which I took to the racks and businesses.

I remember at the time being mightily offended that myself, a professional, degree-carrying journalist, was expected to deliver the issue that I had just helped create. Embarrassed. What I realize now is that the other reporters, having just finished deadline, were now expected to go immediately back to work that afternoon on the next issue that sat somewhere in the murky mist a week-away under the watchful eye of the editor and owner, while I got to drive around town and listen to the radio, buying smokes from money in the racks.

I find it funny, that now, as the owner, one of my jobs still is making sure the weekly issue gets into the mail on Thursday mornings, and then I drive the route to the racks and vendors. Reality is, I haven’t found anyone that I trust enough to do it. You know those little tiny typeset things in the back of newspapers that are written in lawyer language? The entities and individuals who want those run pay the newspaper to print them. And to print them, your newspaper’s U.S. Postal Permit, our means of delivery to our subscribers, must be in good standing. And to be in good standing, you must have printed and successfully put in the mail by each Thursday an issue of the newspaper. If you don’t. If you miss a week. Then you have to print 52 issues before you can again run legals.

Maybe now you can see why I might be a bit edgy about entrusting the last, most important, link in the publishing chain to someone with only the investment of the 30 or 40 bucks I would pay them for a couple of hours work.

But no one can deliver the papers unless the drivers from the printing plant get them to us. They are the first human I interact with on Thursday mornings. I consciously make an effort to get to know them, and more importantly, that they get to know me. That they understand this is my paper, owned by my wife and me, not some corporation.

Those pictures on the wall above my desk … they are my daughters … their college education will be paid for by this paper. I tell them family stories. Share my week, ask about theirs, ask about their families. Give them a reason other than their paycheck to make sure that things go OK for Matt.

The driver is one of the last links in the chain to get the paper to our readers. I want to engender that sense of responsibility with them. That buy-in to what we’re trying to do each week, and have to do. You want that kind of loyalty when the roads are icy and it’d be easier to say you’ll come later. Or when the boss is being a dick and you’d just as soon take the whole load of newsprint to the recycling center and get some meth with what you can get for them, or dump them in the river, which for some odd reason has always been a fear of mine.

Wayne is the grumbling angel that wakes me from the ether each Thursday morning. A couple of drivers before him, I set up a deal where they would call my cell phone as they exited the interstate outside of town. This would give me about 15 minutes to wash my face, get dressed, grab a cup of coffee and more importantly … sleep as long as possible … before meeting them at the paper by 6 a.m.

Misty, the office cat back then, loved Wayne. As it happened, his own cat died just before he starting delivering the paper and the two bonded in his grief. I take it as a sign of his genuine good and trustworthiness that he dotes on and loves her so much. If I ever had to give Misty away, I would have given her to Wayne.

I trust Wayne to deliver the paper every week. I would certainly trust him with my cat.

Back when my daughters were little we had a cat… singular. We went away on vacation and when we came back the cat never showed up. Telling the girls the cat went to “live with the coyotes” in the farm field north of our house I took them to the pound to each a get a kitten. Misty was one of those kittens.

Over the years, dogs, three of them, the other kitten, now a cat, and another cat, were added to the mix. Misty was miserable. She’d spend her days hiding under the couch in the living room, then at night she’d try to sneak downstairs to the food and litter box.

Along the way, to show how she felt about the state of things, she’d piss on chairs, plants, shoes, you name it. I had been trying to talk Lesli into making her an office cat for months, but Lesli was worried she’d be lonely at nights and on the weekends when no one was in the office.

The night she pissed on Lesli’s head while she was asleep was the night Lesli decided we could maybe try Misty as an office cat.

She has blossomed. Former interns bring their parents to the newspaper as they’re passing through town not to meet Lesli and I, not even really to show them the paper, but to show them Misty.

Everyone loves Misty. But most of all, Wayne.

Every Wednesday night after deadline the last thing I say to Misty as I leave is, “Your boyfriend Wayne is coming in the morning.” While other days when I come into the office Misty takes her sweet time about coming out of the various nooks she sleeps in, ever Thursday morning, as she hears Wayne’s voice coming from the back of the building as he and I walk in, she comes and stands in front of the darkroom door from which he’ll enter.

Wayne played football on scholarship in college. “I was pretty good,” he says without any trace of ego, simply stating the facts, as he winces as he squats down to scratch Misty’s belly while I write the check for that week’s print bill.

Having noticed early in our relationship his limp, and having heard him allude to a knee injury that cut his career short, I had always assumed that he had hurt it on the gridiron field of glory. It wasn’t until about a year later that he told me he was riding on the back of a friend’s motorcycle, and his knees were angled out, and one caught the rear fender of a car that his friend rode too close to. And All Things Changed. He lost his scholarship and had to drop out of school.

Now, the road for him that started with dreams of the NFL has led him to the back parking lot behind our paper, where every Thursday morning we meet before dawn.

As I pull into the parking lot one morning I see Wayne sitting in the cab of his truck doing paperwork. As I park and get out of my Land Cruiser he clambers out with a wince as his leg hits the ground that has become almost as natural to him as breath or how to properly block on a sweep.

“It’s a new moon,” he says. “You have to close your eyes, spin around three times, and make a wish. It’s an old pagan ritual my mom used to teach me.”

So we both close our eyes, spin around three times, and make a wish.

Then Wayne tells me his idea.

“I’m going to need help with this,” he says. “Someone who can write. We should do a new version of War of the Worlds, but we make it terrorists this time. We need to write this, Matt. I don’t know how long I can keep pushing in that clutch.”

“If we tried to make that we’d end up in Guantanamo Bay,” I reply. “These are not the kinder and gentler times of our youth.”

I pull out my pack of Camels. “Hey Wayne,” I say, doing the traditional tap tap tap on the bottom of the pack against the palm of my hand. “What’s this sound? The mating call of the Great American White Trash Woodpecker. Heh heh.”

Wayne laughs.

If Wayne’s happy. I’m happy.

Wayne is just the next in a long line of drivers.

There was Deaf Jeff. It was a year before I learned to understand his slurred speech. Two before I remembered to look at him when I talked. But somehow we managed to develop a friendship that, even years after getting fired from the printing company for sexual harassment, he still drops by every now and then to say hi and show me the progress on the 1976 Pontiac CanAm muscle car he is restoring.

There was Scott With The Weird Eye; a real estate agent who had to take another job when the housing bubble burst. I talked a lot about the stock market with Scott on those Thursday mornings as we both saw the lives we thought we were going to be living disappear.

And there was one who went by “Buffalo”. A shaggy biker type, Buffalo obviously could smell the weed hanging in the air from me getting high just before he showed up at the office. He would stand around shuffling and pawing at the carpet after he helped me bring the papers in, with me impatiently waiting for him to leave so I could blaze another bowl before I went and did the route.

I became convinced that he was actually an undercover narc that was just posing as a delivery driver to bust me and never ever offered to get him high. 

And there are some who I don’t even remember their name. In one case I feel bad about that, because the guy literally risked his life to get the papers to me one week.

Back when we still had peel-off and paste-on mailing labels for subscribers’ addresses we had to get the labels to the printer on Wednesday night. Usually, a driver out on another delivery in the area would stop by and pick them up. The paper would be printed that night, the labels put on, and they’d be bundled for the various mail routes for delivery Thursday morning.

One Wednesday evening the driver who picked up the labels said our usual Thursday morning driver … let’s call him Lucky … might not be coming in the morning. They had just got word at the print plant that he had been in a car accident on his way to work.

But the next morning there he was, pulling up in the huge truck that carried the press runs of probably a half-dozen papers he’d stop at that morning.

It seemed Lucky was cruising along in his car on his way to work when some jerk in front of him slammed on his brakes and he plowed right into the back of them.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

“I had a bunch of CDs hit me in the back of the head that were lying on the back seat and I smacked my forehead on the windshield,” he said. “But I’m fine. I just got one of the guy’s from work come pick me up at the accident when they towed my car.”

I looked him closer in the growing light of the dawn. He had a huge hematoma on his forehead, all blue and green and purple.

“Dude,” I said, “You’ve probably got a head injury. You need to go to a doctor.”

“Nah,” Lucky said. “If I had they’d probably want to put me in the hospital or something and people die in hospitals. I ate a handful of Advil when I got to work. I’m fine.”

We unloaded the papers, and I got ready to go back inside the office.

“Hey, smoke a cigarette with me before I get back in the truck,” Lucky said. “Driving is weird. Especially when the headlights are coming at you.”

So I smoked a cigarette with him and sent him on his way. I felt a little bad about turning his loose on the roads … for his sake and for others … but I did have a paper to get out.

And then there was this Hobbit like hippie. All brushy black hair and Birkenstocks. One time, he and I unloaded literally a ton of newsprint for a total community distribution of a special issue – one of the weeks when everyone in both Johnstown and Milliken got a newspaper whether they wanted one or not – probably four times the number of papers we usually printed.

We unloaded them out of the truck, hauled them into the office, and then loaded half of the run into my Land Cruiser. We then took it to the Post Office. Unloaded it. Went back. Loaded the other half and took it to the post office. And unloaded it.

After dumb stuff like that, and two hernia surgeries, I decided it was time to start working smart not hard and convinced the bosses at the printing company to let the driver meet me at the Post Office, where we would just unload the whole mass once.

And the backroom people understand what they are doing. They understand what a newspaper means to someone. They get the basic tenets of the craft of journalism, that you need to spell the names correctly.

It was early in our ownership of the paper when the local high school cross country team won the state championship. On our front page that week was a team picture.

I was standing watching the presses roll at the daily newspaper in Greeley where we were printing at the time. It’s amazing that you can look at a story, or a laid out page for hours during production deadline, but as soon as the process occurs that mixes ink with newsprint, and a newspaper is created, you’ll see mistakes you missed all day.

We were almost through the entire press run when I idly picked up a paper off the conveyor belt of the presses and glanced at it to see how the color registration of the picture was.

The name of one of the kids on the team was misspelled in the cutline below the photo.

My heart froze. I tapped Mike, the head pressman on the shoulder.

“This kid’s name is misspelled!” I yelled at him above the roaring rumble of the press. “This paper is going to be a forever testament to the year he was on the state cross country team in high school. He’s going to get it out and show it to his grandchildren, and his fucking name is misspelled.”

Without flinching Mike reached up and hit the stop button on the press. It is literally the only time in my career I have seen them ‘stop the presses.’

We went into the production room. A page designer matched the font of our cutline and typeset it and printed it out. We took the corrected name back to the people who shot the negatives of the pages. With an x-Acto knife they cut out the misspelled name and “stripped” in the corrected version and re-shot the page negative, which Mike then took back to the presses, where they loaded the plate and re-ran the entire run of the paper.

I heard that the publisher wasn’t happy the next day when he came to work and wanted to know why an entire run of the Breeze was in the dumpster out back. But he never said a word to me. Mike acknowledged, the next week when we were doing the run, that he had gotten chewed out, yeah, but it was OK. Don’t bother sticking up for us, he said, they’re just dicks with ties and they wouldn’t even listen. He was just glad that that kid would have that memento of his winning season, he said. Tell the team congratulations for us.

Recently I was sharing a ride back from Denver with the current publisher of the paper, and I related the story, thinking he might get a kick out of it.

He didn’t talk about how important things like that are. He didn’t agree that people cut out what we do for a living and put it in their scrapbook, or like a widow who once told me that late at night, when she missed her husband, how she’d take out the yellowed copy of the paper where a reporter wrote a story about her Rueben and re-read it.

“They should have charged you for another press run,” was all he said.

The Gospel According to Leon Burford

Leon felt the muscles in his arms spasm after tearing down the Snake Girl tent in less than an hour. A job that usually took three other men two hours and a half-pack of cigarettes, he could do alone in 53 minutes.

People might think he was just a big dumb carny, but Leon knew he was smart about the things that mattered. Who cared if he could factor an integer, or whether he even knew what an integer was? What he did know was that if you laid the poles to the tent in the back of the rig before you put the scrim in … well, how are you going to put up the scrim if you don’t already have the poles up? Were you just going to lay it on the ground till you got the poles up? Daddy paid Doc Rivera $2,500 to paint that scrim: The Snake Girl rising 15 feet high in all her freakdom. Everything had to go in exactly opposite of how it would be reassembled in 12 hours at the next stop.

Leon’s theory of learning was simple: “Sit down. Shut up. Watch and listen.” That’s how he learned how to swallow swords. His Daddy wouldn’t teach him, but he taught his big brother Michael. Prince Michael. Leon learned by sitting there, keeping his mouth shut, watching and listening. Then, after Daddy and Michael went inside he’d practice until he got it right or got tired of spitting up blood.

He climbed up into the cab of the semi that pulled the Museum of Wonders after packing up the Snake Girl. While the Ride Boys were still sullenly tearing down, crawling the skeleton of the Zipper like tattooed tranquilized monkeys, he was already done and ready to start the jump to the next town.

How can I describe Leon? If I told you about his voice you wouldn’t be able to see his smile, lit in the strobe of traffic coming the opposite direction on an interstate late at night in the vast someone else’s somewhere nowhere of Texas at 2 in the morning. If I told you about his smile, you wouldn’t be able to hear his voice, yelling above the sound of the semi as he runs through the gears at 3 a.m. on an empty main street in a town where tomorrow everyone will wake up to their same-old lives and he’ll have moved on and be nothing but a laughing ghost.

That was Leon. A force of nature. There is water, wind, fire, and Leon.

Lesli and I had just moved back to Johnstown from Santa Fe. I was working as a reporter for The Breeze and writing freelance for an arts and entertainment magazine in Ft. Collins. I got the assignment to do a story about the Greeley Independence Stampede; a big rodeo and carnival in Greeley over the course of the week before July 4.

Since it was a music publication, I looked at the schedule of acts and saw "Up With People" were performing. That group of Cherry Cheeked Christians that were supposed to be a hip alternative for the kids to Heathen Heavy Metal.

So I made arrangements to cover their performance. I showed up and these kids just knew I was there to write some sort of smirking and mocking "I Partied with Up With People" piece. They smiled. They thanked me for doing a story on them. They answered my questions and ravaged me with politeness like a pack of wolves wearing turtlenecks and gingham dresses before sending me stumbling back out into the night.

In a daze like a moth that kept flying into a closed window trying to get out I made my way to the lights of the carnival midway and found The Museum of Wonders. The second the word "reporter" came out of my mouth people started getting hostile and nervous, but finally I talked my way into an interview with the guy that owned it ... Henry Valentine.

Henry was probably in his 70s and he took me on a tour of the museum, his "pickled punks" as he called them. All sorts of malformed animal fetuses in jars, along with dummies and pictures of famous freaks. All the time as we’re talking Henry’s voice, his grind, the carnival barker spiel that attracts people to the show, was playing over and over on the loudspeakers … Alive… Inside. We went outside and sat in lawn chairs in front of the museum on the midway with all the people walking by and he told me his story.

When Henry was 17, living in Ft. Collins, his girlfriend broke up with him and to salve his grief he went to the carnival that was in town. He left with it that night and never went back. With the exception of a couple weeks during World War II when he worked in an airplane factory in Texas, but got fired for wearing cowboy books, he had lived on the road with the carnival.

Henry’s first marriage was to Selena the Seal Girl. Likely a thalidomide baby, she had hands coming out of her shoulder like flippers. Henry speaks of her in the past tense and I start to draft a melancholy little story about how she died and how he’s still out on the road with her memory mixing with the smell of corn dogs and cotton candy. I asked him finally what happened to her.

“I divorced her,” he said. “She was a drunk. She’s living in Oklahoma somewhere.”

After that Henry met a woman who had been "camping" by the river with her kids. Every morning before she’d go to work she’d put them in life vests. He took her in, and her kids, and raised them as his own on the road.

The youngest, the baby, was Leon.

Henry worked with all the real freaks back when "the government would allow them to have some pride and work for a living rather than be warehoused in hospitals," he said. Grace the Mule-Faced Woman. Frank Lentini, the guy with three legs who used to tie a fishing line to his third one when he and Henry would go fishing during the day at some lake they'd find on the road.

So I go home that night and I tell Lesli. These people are fascinating. They are a culture all their own. Somebody should write about them. Not even breaking her gaze from her book she said, "Yeah, it's too bad you aren't like a reporter or something and could go on the road with them...."

I get in contact with Henry, which was hard enough since they had already moved on to the next town, but he agreed that if I'm standing outside the trucks when they leave the State Fair in Pueblo at the end of August I can ride with them to the next stop. The next "jump" to Abilene, Texas.

And, because I can talk freaks and old classic country music, and I’m taking an interest in his career as a showman as it winds down, Henry takes a liking to me and probably took Leon aside just before we left and said, "Try to make sure nobody cuts his throat, okay?"

And that's how I came to sleep in The Snake Girl tent trailer for the next 10 days, and meet my new friend and midway minder, Leon.

I'm sorry to disabuse you of your fantasy, but The Snake Girl isn't real.

She actually isn't just a single girl. She's one of two or three girls on the road with The Valentines, all of which who while working wear the same black wig that sits on Leon's kitchen table in his trailer like a dead Yorkie at night when you sit with him and the girls and smoke weed.

Usually, the girls sleep in the back of the Snake Girl trailer, on a riser at the front where Henry put a couch. An American Flag across the window serves as patriotic curtain to keep the people walking on the back of the midway from seeing you without your shirt on when you wake up in the morning. I think there might have also been a small table. It wasn't much, but it beat sleeping under one of the trucks that hauled The Zipper like some of the Ride Boys had to do.

There was a special place for THE Snake Girl who got to share Leon's trailer, his bed, and his no doubt prodigious sexual hunger. When I was on the road with them in Texas she was named Kayla.

Blond haired, buxom, with the beefy but sexy rocker chick look of a 17-year-old who had yet to have three kids and put on 25 pounds before she'd be smacking them around a Wal-Mart, Kayla had a nice hand-etched swastika tattoo on her shoulder.

The trick behind the Snake Girl is that it is the girl, sitting in an office chair, with a false box built around her so just her head sticks out. Around the head, on which she wears the ratty black nylon hair crown while on duty, is a rubber snake's body. There is a rope under the body around her throat:  move your head to the side, the snake's tail moves to the side. Move your head to the back, the snake's tail moves to the back.

Henry has one rule: you cannot fall asleep, which is sort of hard when you are sitting on a chair in a box with a huge rubber snake body around your neck and it's 115 degrees inside the tent in the middle of Abilene, Texas, in August. But what Henry says goes.

Leon is the ticket taker for the attraction and its bouncer. He sits out front of the tent in his ticket box and keeps an eye on the crowd; because you and I in polite society think it’s fun to taunt the Snake Girl and spit ice from our Coke on her down in the box.

I had breakfast on the midway, just Kayla and me, the morning after the first night she got spit on. Her eyes were flat like a shark's. She was never coming back to what you and I call society. After she ran out her string with the Valentine's, who knows why, who knows how, she left the carnival and when I asked Henry he said she "was working in a titty bar in Dallas."

I rode the first part of the trip to Abilene with Henry, but somewhere early that evening I asked Leon if I could ride with him. I think it was somewhere in Oklahoma, in the middle of the night, when Leon was telling me how he shot someone with a shotgun once, that I told him if he was thinking he might need to be killing me I could just get out right here.

“Nah, you seem okay,” he said. He explained to me that he used to road race motorcycles. As a privateer, with no factory backing, he and his buddies had taken a bike to Daytona for the annual Bike Week race. He not only finished, but ahead of many of the factory riders. A year or so ago, however, he had had a bad crash and sustained a head injury.

What would have likely killed a lesser man had simply mellowed him out, he said.

“Only two things make me mad anymore. People that mistreat their kids (Leon had a son back in Texas living with his mom) and people who steal from my daddy.” Every morning, Leon said, before anyone else was awake he would get up and prowl the midway for “ground scores” … the stuff that fell out of people’s pockets as they were jerked and tumbled like human dryer laundry on the rides. Sunglasses, lighters, combs, keys, pens and anything you could think of that people would have in their pockets. He was keeping it all in a box in his trailer for Little Henry, his son. Leon had an almost preternatural ability to spot the things you and I drop. At every gas station we stopped at he’d suddenly stoop low and pick up a piece of change from beneath the check-out counter.

We got into Abilene just before dawn. I climbed into back of the semi in the sleeper and didn’t wake up till early afternoon. Leon on the other hand was back up only a couple hours later to put up the Snake Girl. As I sat drinking coffee still trying to wake up he finished driving the last tent stakes, swinging a sledge hammer with one hand.

When I admired his strength he looked at me, almost hurt, as if I like everyone thought he was just a dumb muscle-bound mule. You only had to be strong for a moment, he explained, once you had the hammer in the air and in motion, it was a matter of focus.

It was a couple of hours before the carnival was to open when the sky filled with angry black clouds and down came a Biblical Rain that turned the fairground midway into a quagmire of mud .... When it stopped I ventured back out of the Snake Girl trailer and found Leon getting ready to open up.

"Do you think anybody will even come?" I asked, thinking how opening night would be a bust after all the costs of gas and food to make the jump from Colorado.

"Just watch," he said.

And they began to come. By 9 p.m. the midway was filled. People dragging strollers, the wheels long too caked and clogged with mud to roll, while with the other hand cursing parents pulled screaming and crying children who would slip and fall, only to be jerked back up with a pop of their shoulder. They all marched, like mud covered zombies, around and around the midway as the speakers on the Zipper blasted Guns and Roses and ZZ Top.

"I would never bring my child out in something like this," Leon said sitting in the ticket booth looking disgusted.

“Life’s a dare,” Leon said to me one afternoon while we were sitting in his trailer. “You either decide you’re gonna take it, or you back down. I’d much rather get my assed kick than back down from someone. No shame in getting beat if you at least tried. Can’t ain’t never got nothing done.

“When I was 16 Daddy let me do the bed of nails act,” he said. “The whole key is that the nails are close enough together that when you lay down on them the weight is displaced, so none of them stick through you. You take the pain all at once like that, you can survive it. Man, you take each and little hurt individually, they’re gonna go right through you eventually.

“I was doing the bed of nails and part of the show was Daddy called someone up to stand on my chest. He always picked the biggest guy he could find in the crowd. The idea was you have them get up slow. Well one night this fat fuck came up, and before daddy could stop him, he just jumps up on top of me real quick.”

Did it hurt? I asked?

“Of course it hurt,” Leon said, looking at me like I was retarded. “But I didn’t let on it hurt. I just held it in. Then after the show ended I had the guy who runs the Ferris wheel take me up to the top and stop it. I smoked a joint and I cried, then I came back down and went back to work.”

One day on the midway I let it slip to Leon that I was out here on a freelance gig. That nobody was paying me to do this. That my hope was I could write something someone would want to buy.

“Goddamn,” he said, with genuine admiration in his eyes for maybe the first time. “I thought you were just some reporter out here on assignment with an expense account. Good for you.”

In many ways, with his shaved head and perpetual good spirit Leon was a lot like a Buddhist teacher to me. After breakfast on a rainy morning in Greeley, decades and kids and a whole lifetime after that summer in Abilene and those 10 days of meditation in the Snake Girl trailer, I sat in the empty and quiet Mirror newsroom alone and watched Leon's funeral service on streaming video from the church in Texas. It was probably best summed up by one of the guys who spoke, who didn't even bother to take off his greaser shades when he went up to the podium.

"I have a million stories about Leon," he said, "and I can't tell one of them in here."

So here we go, one final story about Leon...

We were sitting on the midway in Abilene, a late afternoon, the promise of another night of neon and noise lying ahead of us. Sitting in front of the Snake Girl tent. Leon was telling me about how he bit a guy's finger off one night in a fight.

It sort of put a damper on the party they were at, he said, and his girlfriend was pissed because they had to leave ... As Leon was telling the story a woman, pushing a stroller with a small child in it, passed by. As she did the kid dropped their stuffed animal and the woman didn't notice and continued along her way.

In mid-sentence Leon leapt out of the Snake Girl ticket booth and sprinted across the midway. He picked up the soft toy and caught up with the woman and gave it back to the kid, bending down and handing it to them and smiling.

Coming back to the booth he just went right back to telling me about biting the guy's finger off at the party.

That was Leon. The kindest, funniest, most joyful soul I have likely ever met, who was the last person you ever wanted to be crossways with. The night he was stabbed in Abilene, only about a week after I left, two guys and a girl were trying to sneak into the back of the Snake Girl tent without paying. Only two things made Leon mad anymore: people being mean to kids and someone who tried to steal from his Daddy.

I have no doubt that Leon wasn't politically correct about telling the two guys and the girl that they needed to pay, but I know he gave them the chance to do it. The chance to avoid the fight. But they wanted to fight. They stabbed him through the heart. All he did was beat the hell out of all three of them and then go back to the Snake Girl booth and keep taking tickets till he stroked out.

Leon was never the same again. That fierce joy now trapped in a body that needed to be pumped full of drugs to keep it from seizing like a bike being run without oil. He had a hard time talking, his speech now slurred. That's the most painful thing I remember about being around Leon after the stabbing ... the sad, hurt look in his eyes when he would try to talk to kids on the midway and they would recoil in fear.

The thing that always came to mind was Frankenstein.

Well, that's over now. Leon is free again. Fierce and funny and free. And for that, I am eternally grateful and a little ashamed at the selfish grief that wishes he was still here. The Buddhists have a concept that we shouldn't grieve too deeply, because it holds the spirit back from moving on. I got the message from Texas that Leon had died in the nursing home, more than two decades after being stabbed through the heart, the same weekend Harper, my youngest, was graduating from high school. Oddly, the sadness of his passing made it easier to mourn the moving on of my little girl. It put it in perspective. To hold her back, for my own selfish reasons, was as bad as feeling bad that Leon was finally released.

As the service was ending they played the Carrie Underwood song "Temporary Home." It talks about moving on. How this is but a passing place. As the song was ending, a guy with sunglasses and a Mohawk like Leon had when I met him walked by the window of The Mirror. He was there for a moment, and then he was gone.

I feel privileged that I got to spend that time with Leon just before he was stabbed. The bike wreck had softened him just ever so slightly, but he was still in his midway monster glory. To remember him, and that time, I plan to get another bracelet tattoo, right above the one on my right wrist made up of Day of the Dead skulls tweaked for those in my life who have passed on but remain forever in my heart. In the center of my wrist I will get, as a clasp, a Ferris wheel. And around the edges of my wrist the words that every reporter should remember… A mantra of my business.

Sit down. Shut up. Watch and listen.

Runaways at The Rack

Like mute metal newsboys on the corner, newspaper racks are the slot machines of journalism. You put your money in and take your chances that there’s news you want to peruse.

Slot machines, and piggy banks. When you own a newspaper with racks you have little cash stashes all over town. Run short in the video store because the girls forgot to bring back the DVD for a week … Take some change out of the rack out front.

I pay for lots of things in quarters.

When we bought the paper, I put a big red Folgers coffee can in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet next to my desk. I would put that week’s haul of coins from the racks into the can; the idea to save money for my oldest daughter Riley’s college.

We soon realized it was going to cost a lot more than a fistful of quarters each week to put a kid through college, and started putting money into college fund investments, which the three-piece-suited Wall Street Peg Boys lost half of just about the time we were getting ready to put her through school.

So instead, over the years, the Folgers can has become my own personal company slush fund.

I’ve bought weed with it. For two summers, I sponsored a late model stock car driven by a local woman. One time, when Riley wanted to buy a camera, I told her she could have whatever was in the can to put toward it.

I once gave it to a kid just because I was in a good mood and he walked into the office with his mom, and I used it once to buy a new boom box for a teen-ager in Milliken who had his stolen that I did a story about.

When we first bought the paper, I called down to the Rocky Mountain News and asked about buying one of their used racks. After we got the paper out one Thursday I drove down to Denver to their warehouse.

A guy led me into a vast room where hundreds of Rocky racks sat in rows like blue Chinese terra cotta warriors.

“Look at the shit people do to these things,” he said, pointing to one that was riddled with bullet holes, sitting next to another that looked like it had been ripped open with a giant can opener. “If your town will let you, fucking bolt them to the sidewalk. You’ll still have people who drive pickups into them and shit to knock them over, but it’ll stop the ones who cut the chain around the street sign.”

The Rocky guy was adamant that I repaint the rack, apparently concerned that somehow people would confuse my small town weekly cow-rag for the then largest circulation daily newspaper in the state. I took it up to the local high school and gave it to the art class. I wanted artistic, I told them. They came back with a collage of images … for some reason a shark on one side, which was a bit weird for a landlocked paper in northern Colorado, but … and we took a picture of the students and the newly-painted rack and ran it in color on the front page.

Just recently, I tried to buy some more Rocky racks. In the intervening years the News has gone out of business, all its hardware swallowed up by The Denver Post, which won the newspaper war. I was always a Rocky man myself. The Breeze is a tabloid format, like the Rocky was, and I’ve never been fond of the inky-fingered origami mind-fuck that comes with reading broadsheet newspapers.

At first the guy at the Post told me that was fine. Later, he emailed and said that he had thought they still had some Rocky racks, but apparently they were all gone. Did I want some Post racks?

Who knows, maybe they shipped all the old Rocky racks to China and melted them down for Toyota fenders. Maybe my shit-talk about the Post over the years, and my obvious siding with the Rocky, hadn’t gone unnoticed by my daily Post brethren in Denver, but I honestly had to think about it for a moment. The vibe of it all. My papers in the Evil Empire’s racks…

Finally, I decided to buy the Post racks and just smudge them with pot smoke for a good cleansing after I got them painted … again by a new generation of teenage artists in the Roosevelt High School art program.

This time I said the only constraints were that somewhere on the rack, in whatever typeface they wanted, it needed to say “The Breeze.” I specifically wanted them to leave out the word “Johnstown” as part of our on-going campaign to convince Milliken, a town we cover just two miles to the east which does not have its own paper, that the Breeze is their paper too. Back when we used to put mailing labels on the paper, I used to have the crew put the Milliken address labels right across the word “Johnstown” in the nameplate on the front page.

I put that original rack out at Johnson’s Corner, a world-famous truck stop that sits several miles west of Johnstown along Interstate 25, a major north/south travel route across the country. About a year or so after we put it out there, the interior coin mechanism broke. You could now open the rack without putting money in. I was baffled how to fix it, and hesitated removing it lest I lose my position, so it became a de-facto test of the type of person people are: The kind who pulls the door before they put in the money, thinking they might get something for nothing, or the honest citizen consumer, who puts in their money and then takes out your newsprint wisdom.

My peeling paint barometer of human honesty. With a shark on the side.

Every week, I pull a handful of quarters out of the rack. And this past summer, I also pulled more than a weird share of runaways out of the parking lot in front of it.

The scene at the interstate truck stop at early morning is probably an every day scene. Truckers and other travelers pick up hitch-hikers somewhere in the state in the middle of the night, and if they’re heading north along the Front Range, it’s likely they may stop at Johnson’s Corner. Perfect place to leave or be shed of someone for the next part of their journey.

The all-night truck stop restaurant crew usually takes pity and lets them nurse a meal, and three or four cups of coffee, through the night, but when the sun comes up they start to run them off.

And that’s where I find them: standing in front of the rack when I show up on Thursday morning to put in papers.

It used to be, right after the economic crash, it was older guys. Construction workers, oil workers, laborer-types who couldn’t find something else when the lay-offs came so they hit the road. Gruff and grungy, grumbling like old dogs with arthritis, I’d usually give them a ride to the next interstate exit, and my next stop. As we’d talk in front of the rack, me trying to scope out whether they were going stick a knife in my liver and steal my truck, I’d unload the quarters from the vending box. As we’d shake hands when they got out, I’d hand them to them and wish them well.

One I didn’t give money or a ride to was The Zodiac Killer’s grandson.

Here’s what I posted on the paper’s Facebook page after I got back to the office that morning … I was so jangled.

We're not sure, but we think we met The Zodiac Killer, or his grandson, this morning when delivering papers to the rack at Johnson's Corner.

He was standing next to it. Late 40s or early 50s maybe … Hair slicked back with the toast he'd just eaten inside. Teeth browner than George Hamilton. 3-day growth. One-size-too-small leather jacket. Big Buddy Holly style glasses. He started the conversation by admiring us for not being part of the "consumer culture" for driving a 26-year-old LandCruiser. This led to a diatribe against Apple, all delivered with flat, emotionless affect, punctuated by these harsh, barking laughs … Heh, Heh, Heh … all the while staring off at the horizon. He was so creepy we actually worried he might jump in as we started to pull away, and tell us "to drive."

But this summer it was young people. Literally teenagers. Personally, I blame it on the fact that they are now teaching “Into the Wild” in English classes, setting another generation off on their own personal walk-about. If you haven’t read the book by Jon Krakhauer, it’s about a young man named Chris McCandless who decides after graduating from college to go to the Alaskan wilderness, where he eventually starves to death.

But in reality it goes far back beyond that, and even your grandfather’s beatnik, Jack Kerouac. In “Everett Ruess A Vagabond for Beauty,” (Ruess could have very well been McCandless’ grandfather. At age 21 he went along into the Utah desert with just his supplies and a burro and disappeared, never to be seen or found again), author W.L Rusho says, “Like Everett, we all yearn to cut ourselves off from the comforts and securities of a drab existence at some point in our lives. We too feel a need to enter our own small wilderness in that difficult search for a unique destiny…”

One morning there was three of them out in front of the rack, laying against the wall rummaging through their backpacks as they tried to scope out their next ride.

One of them, a small blond kid, said he was from Maine on his way to Los Angeles. The other pair, a girl with a guy who was obviously her boyfriend, initiated the conversation after I broke the ice by saying “hey” and looking at them as I started to load the rack.

We talked a bit. The couple was from Florida they said … One of the things I learned this summer was to just go with their story. Admire it for its creativity and not bug on the fact that more than likely, they are lying right to my face … The girl looked about 19. A tangled mass of black and bright blue hair hung in her eyes. The guy had dreadlocks down to the middle of his back. Momentarily I felt sorry for the blond kid, imagining what he must have to think of to try and distract his mind when the girl and guy are going at it late at night in the next stall of whatever rest stops they find to sleep in for the night.

“Can you give us a ride, mister?” the girl said.

For some reason I wasn’t into getting anymore involved in this Generation Y Peyton Place.

“I’m only going a couple of miles up the road,” I said. “The next exit isn’t the best place to pick up a ride that’s going to take you anywhere amount of distance. You’re probably better off hanging here and trying to catch a ride with someone else.”

Mr. Dreadlocks, obviously uneasy about not being the alpha male in this scenario anymore, quickly agreed.

“I just want the fuck out of here,” the girl whined.

“Really,” I said with the same smile I’d give one of my daughters, “I think you’re better off here.” I walked over and handed the girl the change from the rack. They thanked me and scurried back into the truck stop. I finished filling the rack with papers. As I was leaving, they came outside with a handful of food and drinks and started scanning the parking lot.

Then there was Tyler.

Despite the Wall Street Peg Boys, Lesli and I had been able to send Riley to college. In several weeks, she’d leave for Montana State in Bozeman to start her freshman year. Eighteen years old and straining at the reins to get out on her own, she had recently, and nicely, told me, “I really don’t care where I live, as long as it’s not with you guys.”

Tall, taller than me, with short blond hair under a baseball cap and eyes bluer than the skies my baby would soon range under alone, 10 hours away from my embrace, Tyler saw me walking toward the rack and shuffled off across the parking lot.

“Hey,” I barked. He turned around. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” he said with a shy grin.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Eighteen.”

I motioned him over to the rack.

“I’m going up the road about three miles,” I said. “At the next interchange you’ll have I-25 going north and south and Highway 34 going east and west pretty much through the state. You want a ride?”

Tyler tossed his backpack in the back of the LandCruiser with the papers and climbed in. He said he had been on the road for a bit. He had started out in his Toyota pickup, which he spoke of lovingly and like a gearhead, but it had blown up in Idaho and he’d just sort of kept going. He’d picked up a ride in the mountains of Colorado and they’d left him off here at the truck stop.

We pulled up to my next stop. He climbed out. I handed him the handful of change from my jacket pocket. I also pulled out a business card.

“See this side of the highway,” I said. “This is the town of Johnstown. See that side of the highway?” I said, motioning across the road. “That’s the city of Loveland. If you’re going to get in trouble, get in trouble on this side and give the cop my card and tell him to call me.”

“What’s on that side,” Tyler said.

“A huge mall,” I said.

“there would  be girls there?” he said with a grin.

“Lots and lots,” I said.

I told Lesli when I got back to the office about meeting Tyler. She smiled and suggested that when I give them the change I need to tell them that they needed to call home with part of it. They didn’t have to say where they were, if they didn’t want to, but they needed people to know they were alive. She also joked that Tyler was going to wind up in a field dead, with no ID, and just a business card with my name and a bunch of quarters in his pockets with my fingerprints on them. I said that well at least I would be able to tell them that he said his name was Tyler, And he said he lived in Montana.

Tyler and I shook hands. I told him to be careful. As I walked into the store with my papers I looked back at him. He had shouldered his pack and was already scrambling up the grass berm hill on the other side of the road. He had not looked back.