7.
IT’S SNOWING IN COLORADO SPRINGS WHEN PEGGY AND Elaine, two cowgirls on the rodeo circuit from Cheyenne, drop me off on Kiowa Avenue. My muscular, green-eyed companions have been enticing, even frustratingly attractive company. I’m afraid I have laid it on a bit thick, which I will do, especially with women in pointed boots and tight jeans, but it’s earned me curbside service and possible lodging at an unbeatable rate. Peggy and Elaine’s girlfriend, Gloria, or whatever her name is, has moved away to Gunnison suddenly. She ran off with a bull rider, apparently. Still two weeks left on the rent. Peggy and Elaine insisted I take the apartment since I’ve only got sixty-eight bucks and the weather will only get worse as I head east. I was vaguely hoping they might want to get a motel room together for a week or so (there’s one just up the street for eleven dollars a night), but they have to be in Pueblo by three and to be honest I’m probably not their type, the rodeo type, primitively dim with a ledge for a forehead and the ability to rassle an innocent animal to the dirt in 4.7 seconds, though I am obviously a recklessly charming world traveler and bon vivant.
It’s cold outside, the curtain of winter has crashed early upon Colorado, where I was born so long ago but of which I have no memory. Neither do I have a heavy jacket. Clapping my shoulders, I run up the dark stairs and find the key under the mat, where Peggy said it would be. It fits. I push inside to the smell of coal tar, horse urine, and burnt macaroons. Crude crayon horse drawings and posters of men in various rodeo poses are tacked up all over the dark yellow walls, against which sit ancient garagesale furniture packed in so tightly there’s barely room to walk. Through the tiny kitchen I find a bedroom, even a bed—but the bathroom seems not to exist until I discover it out the kitchen door and across the community hall. Even if I have to share a bathroom, I still can’t believe my luck. A free room! A bed! I run back down the stairs and give them the thumbs up. They smile at me from their idling, powder red Ford pickup.
“Do you want to come up for a beer or something?” I shout.
The flakes are floating down now big as butterflies. “Better get going before the roads get bad,” Peggy shouts.
“Well, thanks again!” I yell. God, why didn’t I ever learn how to rope a calf?
“Send us a postcard from Africa!”
I watch them pull away and disappear through a shivering curtain of giant, wobbling snowflakes.
Back up the musty stairwell I go. Eighty-five bucks a month and furnished. Even if the landlord decides he doesn’t want to keep me (and why wouldn’t he?), I’ll still have a place to camp for a night or two. I can’t believe I ended up in Colorado Springs. I know nothing about the place. Never been here, not consciously at least. I realize I’ve predicted the imminent demise of America, but it seems it will hold out for a few months at least, especially here toward the middle. When spring comes I’ll head out again. My plan will be a little firmer then and I’ll have worked up a stake.
I set my suitcase on the thin gray carpet, light a cigarette, and turn up the thermostat. The heat kicks on. I’m pleased. The refrigerator is empty except for a box of baking soda, a shriveled black onion, a cube of desiccated cream cheese, and a horsefly, heels up. I peek into the bedroom. No sheets or blankets, but the heat works, so I can sleep in extra clothes. Tomorrow I’ll visit the Goodwill and also pick up a few items at the grocery store. I hope Gloria or whatever her name is doesn’t change her mind or have a fight with the bull rider in their small trailer in Gunnison and decide to come back. Of course, maybe that would work out, especially if she crawls into bed with me and decides to stay. I close my eyes and smile.
I’m so tired I could fall asleep right here in this threadbare recliner, but I want to watch the snow flutter across the window for a while. It’s a wonderful sensation being warm and free in a new place, where no one but two green-eyed cowgirls can find me, and no tattlers prowling the hallways or silly psychology classes in the morning. I wonder about fate, and then I think of God and the Chumleys, who gave me a ride from Elko and bought me two hamburgers cooked just the way I like them, crisp, almost burnt, with cheese and raw onions and a cup of hot coffee. And then the truck driver, Merle, whose real name was Curly. Curly had just divorced and was depressed. We played cribbage all night and drank canned Olympia and he talked despondently about his ex-wife and being alone. I told him about Mountain and how the divorce had ruined his mother. Divorce ruins everyone. The only winners in divorce are the lawyers, and all they get for their trouble is money, and a dream about money is a dream about shit. He liked all that. The next morning he took me on in through the snow to Cheyenne. I wish I’d thought to get his address. Curly was a good man. I’d never been so scared in all my life for nothing. No, I’ve had a lucky trip, almost as if someone were watching over me.
8.
IN THE MORNING I FILE AT UNEMPLOYMENT, WHERE I’M sent five miles away to the magnificent five-star Broadmoor Hotel, nestled in the foothills against the snow capped mountains. I’ve never heard of this place. It’s gorgeous, with a golf course and a ski run and five restaurants. The personnel director glancing over my application asks me if I’d prefer to be a kitchen runner or work with the air-conditioning and heating team. I vote kitchen job because it sounds warmer, plus probably a meal. What are the odds of getting a job on your first try and then at a five-star hotel? And the next morning I’m running trays of food up and down the stairs, and I’m right about the free meal, schnitzel, peas and pearl onions, and new potatoes in parsley and cream.
From work that afternoon I hitchhike straight to the King Soopers on Uintah, then I stop at the liquor store. It’s dark by the time I get home, and I’m exhausted but I have a job, beer, beans and franks, a roof over my head. And I love this little apartment. When I open the screen door the creak of the hinge seems to announce: “Here he is.”
With my first paycheck I have a chat with Mr. Mondragon, my surprised landlord (he didn’t know Gloria had run off to Gunnison with a bull rider) and manage to keep my one-bedroom apartment, though I have to dish up another fifty for security. Mondragon is pleased I’m employed at the Broadmoor. “Classy joint,” he says. “They pay pretty good, huh?”
“Not that well, no.”
“How long you planning to stay?”
“Oh, I’ll be leaving in the spring,” I say.
“You don’t like Colorado Springs?”
“I like it fine,” I say. “But I’m a traveler.”
He gives a savvy nod.
In the meantime, the weather has improved. And Colorado Springs—an undiscovered dulcimer village tucked into those lavender-smudged Rocky Mountains that have inspired so many poets such as John Denver—is quite tolerable. The job is a dead end, suitable for high school dropouts and teenagers with drug problems, but after only two weeks of my running food up and down the stairs from the main kitchen, a Tavern cook leaves and Chef Bruneaux, the Tavern chef, asks me if I’d like to take the cook’s place. I’m elated. Plus there’s a quarter-an-hour raise. I’ve always wanted to know how to cook.
And I seem to have a flair. I like the butter and the heat, the burns and sharp knives, the lunacy of the onslaught of waiters and waitresses during the rush, the shouting and desperation, the heavy, starched uniform and the puffy French hat. Except for the hat, cooking, I imagine, must be like war. Since most of the food is prepared upstairs and we merely spoon it back out of a steam table, omelets are the hardest detail to master. I’m a lunch cook, yes, but we make dozens of omelets daily, caviar and sour cream, Monterey jack and mushroom, Denver, bacon, avocado, shallot and crab omelets. It takes me about a week flipping scorched and runny eggs everywhere but back into the pan before I get good. At the right temperature the whipped egg and milk mixture foams up the pan sides like cake batter. Ferran, the executive chef, a waddling old French autocrat, looms over us. Rumor has it that any cook who even vaguely browns an omelet and