Denver is a city constantly in the process of becoming itself, and the delight I encounter there is similar to what I feel when I watch my two-year-old son daily discover his personality. Without the overwhelming history and culture of Boston and New York, nor the stark, established identities of Washington, D.C. and Chicago, Denver rises out of the American West with all the brash promise of youth. My first experiences in Mile High City happened in my mid-20s, after college in New Jersey, when, itchy and love-numb, I followed a girl out to her home state of Colorado.
A Byronic almost-bard with a powerful lust for Romanticism, I was forever following a girl in hope of finding a home. I drove three days from the east coast in a van I inherited from my father, and when I first saw the shimmer of Denver against the sublime backdrop of the Rockies, I quite predictably thought of Lewis and Clark and Manifest Destiny — my American birthright — and then of all those intrepid wagoneers who went West in order to golden their lives. It occurred to me — belatedly, after 1,800 highway miles — that my life, too, was about to be altered by the West, by the highest city in America, 5,300ft above sea level and very close to the polish of God.
Accustomed to the cultural complexities and dramatic socio-economic divisions of Boston and New York, I was immediately struck by what felt to me like the smooth integration of Denver. On my first night in the city, I sat in a pizza joint on famed Colfax Avenue near Capitol Hill. For nearly two hours I looked on as the oddest, most easeful assortment of citizens filed in and out of that window-front restaurant: a cowboy and his cowgirl in their hats; Mexican workers with prison tattoos; two teenage boys wearing mascara, holding hands; a 30-something woman so pierced I thought she would soon start leaking; a tie-dyed hippy reeking of marijuana; a suited CEO on the phone to his wife in posh Cherry Creek (Denver's answer to Manhattan's Upper East Side); and a bearded, dressed-down professorial type with — I'll never forget this — the thin paperback copy of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son slipped into the back pocket of his khakis.
It was the beauty of everything that so walloped me, from the Rockies looming on the horizon, to the metallic thrust of the mini skyscrapers downtown, to almost every individual who passed me on hip 17th Street north of Capitol Hill. I was certain that somewhere between Denver and Boulder, just 30 minutes to the west, there was an organic farm — everything in the Denver area is organic — that grew gorgeous people and then released them into the mountainous glory of Colorado.
Denver and its satellite city/towns, Boulder and Fort Collins in particular, seem to have developed an immunity against the national scourge of obesity. The altitude inspires want of health and betterment; the holy views force one to feel that being a glutton and loaf is something of a sin. Ask any non-native Denverite why she moved to Mile High or its surrounding environs and she'll tell you: the weather. That endless azure sky and an absence of the wretched humidity that irks all Easterners. Seventy dry degrees in December is a blessing when you've been reared in the winter-hells and damp-heat summers of New Jersey and Boston.
Charles Homar, the narrator of Busy Monsters, spends some time in Denver and Boulder during his neurotic cross-country excursion to regain his lost fiancé. A New Englander, Charlie had never been to the Denver area before and quickly becomes entranced by its splendor. A kind of contentment finds him there.
He muses: 'The new air, the closer sun, mountains near enough to brush, graffiti and litter nowhere in sight: everyone was so young and beautiful and athletic, joggers and bikers, skateboarders and rock-climbers — I had never entered a place like this before and so it appeared to me like a kind of happy hallucination or the mirage of a parched traveller, a place to make a home if a person had a home to make.'
William Giraldi's debut novel, Busy Monsters, is published by W.W. Norton (£12.99). Readers of BA High Life can buy this book at 25% off the rrp. Visit wwnorton.co.uk, add Busy Monsters to your basket and type in the reference: WN183
