1 Bird Investigates: DENVER

Remember Meg’s doctoral dissertation, My Weekend in Omaha, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and is commonly assigned in college literature classes? Well, here’s my term paper in Freshman Composition, titled “I Went to Denver Recently to Visit My Friend Bobo.” It was four hours late, in 13 point font, and with suspiciously wide margins:

-     Bobo lives near an Ethiopian restaurant that sells food for $1.75 “per scoop.” Down the road, a Chinese restaurant has adopted the same business plan. IT IS GENIUS. I didn’t try this but I hope you can get food “to go” by just holding out your hand.

-    Speaking of, apparently Denver is full of Ethiopians, including the manager of the liquor store across the street from Bobo’s apartment. He has a little trio of flags, USA/Ethiopia/Colorado, on top of his TV, which is always playing spy movies. He sells Bobo exactly how much liquor he thinks Bobo needs, occasionally putting a bottle back with a gentle “No. You have enough already.”

-     A friend of Bobo asked me if I wanted any “edibles.” In my innocence I thought this meant snacks, and so I kept saying, “Oh, you know, just something basic like taquitos or whatever.” Apparently “edibles” actually means “food with pot in it which you can buy legally because of Colorado’s amusingly lax medical marijuana laws.” It took two full days to iron this confusion out, because Bobo’s friend was stoned and I am an idiot.

-     Hypothetically, what do you think happens if you give me some medical-grade marijuana? Hypothetically, what happens is that I eat an enormous quesadilla, talk for half an hour about what Green Day songs would be funny to commit suicide to, and then go to sleep for ten hours. (My conclusion was “pretty much any track from Nimrod depending on the circumstances.”)

-     I know, I know, I’m a child, but I never get tired of seeing animals mate, ever. Denver’s central park was absolutely full of Canada geese just going to town on one another and I got a good giggle out of that.

-     A drunk old Greek man who was bartending at the PS Lounge on Colfax took fifteen minutes to decide that my (real) driver’s license was fake:

DOGM: This doesn’t look like you.

Me: It was taken eight years and forty pounds ago.

DOGM: ….

DOGM: ….

DOGM: …It doesn’t look like you.

Me: It’s an old picture. Look, here’s a college ID and several debit cards.

DOGM: ….

DOGM: ….

DOGM: …. This picture has nothing to do with you.

Me: IT’S MY DRIVER’S LICENSE PICTURE. IT HAS EVERYTHING TO DO WITH ME. YOU ARE DRUNK.

You can imagine where it went from there.

-     I’m sorry I didn’t do a reader meetup while I was there. I’ll be honest: I’d j-j-j-just finished school and hadn’t seen Bobo in ForLikeEver, and I didn’t feel up to the delicate task of getting just drunk enough that I wasn’t cripplingly shy but not so drunk that I was intolerable. You deserve better. For example, I went through a phase earlier this year where every time I got drunk, I started telling the story of How Mayonnaise Got Invented. (See, during the Seven Years War, the Marechal de Mahon was leading the French forces at the Battle of Belle Isle, and his cook ran out of a lot of things so he had to make a sauce out of only oil and eggs, and so Mahonnaise sauce, which over the years…) Everyone talks about how graduate school opens doors; no one tells you it makes you aggressively, intolerably boring.

-     While in Denver, I met my parents’ best friends from their youth, which was pleasant, but awkward:

“How are your parents?”

“Divorced.”

“Oh. Well, is your mother okay?”

“Well, she just had a heart attack, but it was a little one.”

“Oh. Are you working?
“I just wrote a book making light of war crimes.”

“Oh.”

So, Denver! It’s beautiful and reasonably priced. I recommend the balls off of it.