My Day in Denver, Part II
Here it is folks, the eagerly anticipated, 3000-word monster conclusion to My Day in Denver. In case you forgot, I’ve just had a miserable experience in an Internet coffee shop and I was anxious to leave the neighborhood. I went out to my car to find my doors locked and my keys not in my pocket…
Now, Part II
The keys are in the car. No, wait, it can’t be true. Maybe I dropped them when I was sitting in the coffee shop? It was a long shot, but I could breathe a tremendous sigh of relief. I couldn’t see the keys in the car, they weren’t in the ignition, but I could have thrown them onto the passenger seat with my maps, cigarettes…
No I can’t think about that. I’ll look around in the coffee shop.
I walked in, the two kids screamed, “YOU’RE BACK!” I started looking around while the Asian clerk and her friend watched me like I was a lunatic.
“You didn’t happen to see my… keys in here, did you?” I asked hopefully. But I knew the truth. They were on the passenger seat, under my maps, cigarettes, cell phone, hip-hop tapes, and random garbage. I wanted to cry.
I walked back out, put my hands in my pockets, rooted around in one last ditch effort to recover the situation, and turned to go back into the coffee shop.
“Look,” I said, “I’m traveling cross-country. My keys are locked in my car. Could you please call the police and ask them to open my door?”
“The police?” The clerk seemed to detest the idea more than I did. “Maybe you can get it open with… a coat hanger!” She ran off to the back of the store, and came back with a straightened white coat hanger. I watched it with skepticism, I never stole a car, never learned to pick a car door, and was never good at trying to open one creatively.
“Thanks.” I turned to face my doom.
I went out and proceeded to shove a looped coat hanger in the cracks in my windows, going after doors, wherever I could stick a piece of wire into my car. I had a bit of early luck touching the lock, and wiggling it a little bit, but nothing that suggested it would have the strength to pull that little bastard up.
My car is a Toyota Corrolla and the door locks, while they are a push down system, are smooth plastic and impossible to get a loop around. I know the car is easy to break into with a slim jim, I’ve seen the police open a few car doors and mine was by far the easiest.
I felt like such an idiot. Here I was in this strange town shoving a thin piece of wire into my car door. I must have stuck out like a sore thumb with my New York plates and my car full of suitcases, boxes and a sleeping bag, things I was afraid I may never see again. And I wanted a cigarette so bad, all the smokes I’d collected through Indiana, Iowa, and all those other states that aren’t good for much but cheap cigarettes, they were all locked in the car. I dreamed of just one cigarette to cut this frustration.
At this point the friend of the Asian clerk came across the street to try and lend me a hand.
“Here, you have to do it like this,” he said, and bent the coat hanger a bit differently while shoving it through the cracks in the windows. He was a guy in probably his mid-thirties, dirty blonde hair, beard, glasses. He was having some of the same troubles I was, sliding right off the plastic. And he was smoking a cigarette. The smell cut to the core of my addiction.
Could I ask him for one? It seemed like a contradiction of good manners. Here was this guy, willing to spend his time shoving a piece of bent wire through my car windows, but I’m about to say to him, “No, no. Actually what I’d really like is one of those sweet, sweet Marlboro 100s.”
He pulled out the coat hanger. “Well, I don’t know if you’re gonna be able to do this,” he told me. “Maybe we will have to call the police.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I nodded enthusiastically. Get the boys in blue over here and end this nightmare. He dropped his cigarette butt on the ground and ran inside the coffee shop to make the call, while I continued to tug on the innards of my car with my home abortion device.
While I was waiting, still working on the car, a thin older woman walked by. She was probably in her fifties, with short blonde hair and no eyebrows except for the ones she visibly painted onto her face. She was dressed in the height of bizarre fashion, bright pinks and yellows, with her very pink lipstick smeared up beyond her lips like a strawberry milk mustache.
“Are you trying to break into that car?” she called over to me.
“Yes, but its mine,” I assured her.
“What, did you lock your keys in your car?”
“Uh huh.” Nothing got by this woman. She was standing next to me now, watching as I tugged back and forth with the wire, jiggling the locks, and pulling it back out of the car in frustration.
“Wow that’s a real bummer,” she said, and continued walking down the street.
The Asian clerk’s friend returned outside, half smiling.
“The police in this town don’t open doors anymore,” he said. “They say you have to call a locksmith.”
This was unbelievable. I’d done this twice before, and I’d seen other people with the same problem. Sometimes it took the cops a while, and sometimes they broke the locks, but my car was always very easy. My confusion must have been visible.
“It’s a liability thing,” he confirmed.
Damn it, they could break my locks all they wanted to, I just wanted to get into my car to my cell phone — come to think of it, I was probably missing calls — my music, my maps, my sweet sweet cigarettes — this guy was smoking again — and finding the Mile High Comics store — which I was becoming less and less interested in and instead focused on getting the hell out of Denver.
He pulled on his cigarette. “See what I’d do, I’d just smash in one of these windows.” My heart sank. I hadn’t heard a less appealing idea in years. “A locksmith’s gonna charge you a few hundred bucks to get out of this mess, and you prob’ly can’t afford that being on the road.”
I had to avoid that. I put my head down on the roof of my car in agony. “I guess I’m going to keep going at this with the coat hanger for a little while. I’m not really prepared to start breaking windows.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, and turned to walk away.
“Hey,” I called after him. “Do you think I could have one of those cigarettes? Mine are locked in the car.” Like I said before, it did seem kind of rude, but with the daunting process of getting into my car and the distinct possibility I would be breaking one of my windows looming over my head, I desperately needed a cigarette immediately.
He surprisingly seemed a little put out by the request. Either he hated giving cigarettes away as some people do, or he sensed it was rude of me to ask any more of him as he’d been trying to help me open my car for the last half-hour. Either way, he gave me a Marlboro 100, lit it, and was gone.
I smoked quickly, and was restored with more energy to prod my car with the coat hanger. Again, I could wiggle the lock, but I couldn’t get it open. The painted eyebrows lady came back at some point, and she decided she would go home for some heavy duty Velcro strips that I could attach to the lock and then pull up with the wire. Even when she said it the idea sounded crazy, but I wanted to be left alone so I told her that would be wonderful and she went on her way.
Eventually, I realized one cigarette wasn’t enough. I was lucky enough to have brought my wallet with me and I had a bit of cash in it. I decided to go to the liquor store across the street for cigarettes.
There was another Asian woman working there, another decidedly disinterested one. She was lounging on a worn out sofa behind the counter watching reality TV. At first I only saw GPC cigarettes, the second cheapest and most horrifying brand of tobacco there is.
“You only have GPC’s?” I asked her.
She got up. “Oh yes, GPC’s. They’re cheaper than regular cigarettes.”
“Ugh. Well, I guess…” I was about to order some, just because I needed the tobacco, when I noticed the racks of racks of premium cigarettes against the wall.
“Oh. I didn’t realize you had all these. I want a pack of Camels. Filters.”
Now she didn’t seem to understand. For some reason its always hard for clerks to accept that I want the full flavored Camels, and they always hand me the lights. Eventually, I bought the cigarettes and moved to walk out. A man with two bottles of Tanqueray stepped up to the counter when I realized that my lighter was locked in the car with everything else.
More frustration. I waited in line again to get a book of matches.
The cigarette was wonderful, and I got back to work on opening the car. I was starting to get really close, through a crack in the door that I left there slamming into a fire hydrant one rainy night, and an incomplete lock that had inexplicably broken one year. I actually had the coat hanger jammed underneath the lock, but just couldn’t wiggle the damn thing up.
Painted eyebrows lady came back at some point with the Velcro, but saw that I was extremely close to bringing the lock up without it. “Besides,” she pointed out in her omnipotent wisdom, “I’m not sure how you would have stuck the Velcro to those locks anyway.” She skittered off down the street into some door she kept going into. She seemed to just be walking back and forth between one particular shop and one particular side street.
At some point, I became aware of a couple guys on a nearby corner, it looked like they were standing outside of a bar, and I thought I heard them laughing at me. This was kind of enraging, I did not feel like getting laughed at, even if it was rather discrete. I was in no mood. But I ignored them.
Eventually, though, they came over to my car, and started looking around.
“I bet my wife’s Corolla key would break into this car.” The clerk’s friend from the Internet cafe had already tried this, and I told them so.
“Yeah, but this one’s worn so perfectly that it’ll get into anything.” They tried, and I didn’t blame them for trying. If they’d opened the door, I probably would have kissed them, and probably would have gotten my ass kicked for it. They key didn’t work, but they kept trying.
They were really funny, and it was great to talk to them for a few minutes. They seemed really down to Earth, and I’m sure if they had time to consider the problem they would have opened the lock far faster than I ever could have. It was clearly not the first car they tried to break into. But, as one of them worked on jamming the coat hanger through a crack in the door, the man revealed something that to me was completely insane.
His friend was urging him to leave. “Five more minutes,” he’d respond, and keep hacking at the lock, “and then New York’s on his own.” Eventually, he mentioned, “Oh we’re in a hurry to get to the hospital. My wife just had a baby.”
“WHAT!??” I exclaimed, “What on Earth are you doing here? You’ve got to get to the hospital!”
“Well, I think I can get in here,” he answered, and kept working on the lock. I was floored. I pleaded with him to leave the project, that I would be fine, and he needed to be with his baby. He continued working on the lock, despite the objections of his friend. “I just want to show New York here a little Denver hospitality,” he said.
Finally he did leave. As he shook my hand, he told me that a brick building up the street housed the local police department. According to the people in the Internet cafe, the police would not help me. But, given my situation, I decided I would stop by personally to beg them to open my car doors, to tell them I would accept any damages they inflicted on my car so long as the door would open. I threw the tools I’d been using onto the roof, grabbed my laptop bag and started hiking up the street.
There was a police station up the street. The thing he didn’t realize, was that it was an “Investigation Bureau” or something like that, and was barely ever manned. The police had failed me again. Still, the walk did me some good as it calmed me down a bit from the huge frustration of trying to open my locks. About two hours had passed at this point, but I was able to peacefully get back to trying to open the door.
It was shortly after that that I managed jam the coat hanger into the lock, and finally pulled the thing up. The car door swung open and I threw my fists into the air in ecstatic victory. “I am the champion of this car!” I screamed to an empty street, except for one haggard looking guy in torn fatigues with a long gray beard. He came over to me while I was rummaging around my possessions that I was so happy to finally have my hands on.
“If you had an older car that would have been easy,” he told me. “See that’s what I used to do, break into cars.”
“Where were you two hours ago?” I asked him jovially. “I could have used you.”
“I can’t break into these new Japanese cars,” he responded and wandered off down the street.
Painted eyebrows lady came back now, pleased that I’d finally opened my door. “You should go get a Heineken,” she told me. I put my back against my car in relieved bliss. “What are you going to do now?” She asked me.
I considered the question, I wasn’t sure. My original plan to stop by the Mile High Comics Megastore seemed shattered. I was tired of Denver, while the people there had been more than hospitable it reeked with the frustration of locking my keys in my car. “I guess I’m going to try to make it to Utah tonight.”
“Well, you’re welcome to come home with me for a few minutes for a drink,” she told me. “I live right around the corner.”
I shrugged. “Why not?” I said. I got what I wanted out of the car, closed the door and put a key into my wallet to avoid anything like this happening again. (A brilliant move, as I left my keys in my ignition again in Seattle but had the door open after less than five minutes of rummaging in my wallet.) So painted eyebrows lady and I headed back to her house.
It was a small, cozy place. There was a massage table in the main room, and she told me that she was a massage therapist. She apparently had rented a shop on the street but the city didn’t want a massage parlor there, so she had to run an antique shop instead.
“When I found this cute little house, I knew I had to move in. It’s so close to my business so I can just do both.” This was apparently why I saw her going back and forth. She had moved to this part of Colorado to be near her mother. I found out she was divorced, and had a son my age in Oklahoma. He was studying film and had fallen in love out there and was determined to stay in Oklahoma to be near his lady love. Painted eyebrows lady (whose name I don’t remember, so we’ll call her Katherine) actually gave me her card when she found out I was a writer, so perhaps her son could produce a screenplay I write someday.
Katherine offered me a glass of lemonade. She apologized for not having any beer, (she did say I needed a Heineken on the street) and said she didn’t drink. She did have a bottle of peppermint schnapps under the counter, but it looked wretched and I passed. She said she had a couple of friends coming over, one to give her some money, and another to bring her food. They showed up while we were discussing where I was going to go after Denver, two Latino men. The one with the food was big and burly, but very friendly. He brought Katherine a burrito and a soda, but nothing for himself.
“Who’s all this food for?” she said when she saw it.
“You, of course,” so matter of factly it presumed that any meal he brought into her house must solely be for her.
The other man was tall and thin, and didn’t come as far as the kitchen. Instead she left the burly man in the kitchen with me and sat at a table in the next room, presumably to talk about money.
The burly one and I discussed how I was going to get out of Colorado, and he told me that snow was expected in Denver, but didn’t know how much. When I told him I was going to try and leave the city and sleep in my car if conditions got too bad, he laughed.
“You’re going to sleep in your car out in the mountains?” he asked me.
I hadn’t really considered this. The landscape was a complete mystery, and most places up to this point had been completely barren of an elevation changes.
“If you’re going to make it to the desert in Utah, you’d better leave quickly. And consult your weatherman before you do it.” I agreed, and slurped down my lemonade. I got up to leave while Katherine was still talking to the thin Latino man. I headed out that way to the door, and Katherine got up to say good bye. She smiled warmly and said “God bless you” over and over.
And off I went on my way.