Dependent in Denver (From 6 Migrations; Relocations That Possibly Ruined My Life)

After living comfortably at my parents' home for a few years, I lost my head and moved to Denver to stay with my brother. I think I may have done so because I felt bad about mooching off my parents when I had so many brothers to help shoulder the burden. I also had some vague notion that to be a writer I should go out into the world and suffer a little. Not too much, just enough to stir up some good press, maybe.

My brother Michael (name changed) had just graduated from law school in New York, and gotten a job in Denver from some big firm that would eventually fire him for sleeping in his office during his lunch breaks, or maybe it was for telling people he could sneeze at will, I couldn't remember for certain. But at the time I moved in with him he seemed to be doing all right. He had ESPN and some folding chairs and lived in an apartment building for old folks in a predominently gay district near downtown.

The apartment building attracted mainly old folks because it had a supernatural tendency to stay a little too warm all year long, whatever the outside weather. My brother never even turned on the heat, and usually left the windows open, even when it snowed.

As a result of his massive lawyer-level salary, my brother could afford to keep well-stocked with Uncle Ben's beans and rice, which he would prepare for us every night after coming home from an exhausting day of sleeping and sneezing at will. He would spoon my share into the only bowl and eat his share from the pot with the serving spoon while watching baseball games and baseball highlites and baseball recaps and baseball highlite recap shows on ESPN.

Since I'd moved in with my brother to "get some writing done", maybe finish a novel or two, I would spend part of my afternoons typing gibberish with an old typewriter I'd borrowed from my girlfriend, and trying to avoid calls from a groupie I'd picked up from my brother's church group who would call me from her work incessantly all day long whenever she'd come across information about jobs, or magazines that accepted submissions from freelance writers, or apartments in the Denver area - it was all fairly annoying. I appreciated her efforts on my behalf, but I couldn't understand why she had to keep telling me about them.
"Spare me the details and don't call me until you have something concrete," I wanted to tell her. But I didn't, because frankly the novel just wasn't working out, and the phone calls were a bit of a relief from having to pretend to work on the novel and giving myself stomach pains because I hated it so. "Thanks, I'll have to check that out," is what I told her. Then she'd chatter on about it.

Then sometimes after an hour I'd get up and walk around the nearby park which was apparently a famous pickup place in Denver but which I didn't ever realize at the time except there were a lot of cars and people on bikes and I did see a naked man with a turban on his head, reading a book and taking a terrible risk of sunburn and possibly skin cancer in later life.

Eventually I got bored with the trying to write a novel charade and got some temp jobs which were not nearly as impressive to tell about as the failure to write a novel but which paid slightly more and got me out and about. My favorite temp job in Denver was at mailing business in their printer room because my job was to watch a gigantic printer print things and if there was a problem to go see Mr Gonzales and tell him. Mr Gonzales was a nice enough fellow who waxed his mustache and seemed embarassed to have to give me things to do. I went to lunch the first day and when I came back from lunch I couldn't remember how to find the printer room and so I wandered around the office looking and the office was all one floor of a building all around the elevator and it made a full circuit around the elevator with no dividing walls, and I kept going around and around and seeing the same people with every circuit there were more people looking up from their work to stare at me as I passed and with each circuit the mild curiosity of the stares turned to confusion, and the confusion to consternation, and annoyance, and hostility, and finally to uncontrollable laughter, and then I began to panic, and sweat uncontrollably, and I decided to get back on the elevator and go home and then I ran into Mr Gonzales who seemed somewhat embarassed but smiled a confused smile and I told him I was lost and he pointed to a room in the corner where the printer was.

My almost favorite job in Denver was through a friend of the groupie, helping models dress at a fashion show. It sounds like an absurdly fantastic job for a young man, and I can't quite remember why I turned it down. It might have been too early in the morning or something.

I eventually met the groupie's circle of friends and decided I didn't like them very much, and the groupie eventually got a job writing comedy for Bill Marr (name changed slightly). Jeff (name unchanged) got fired from the law firm and we drove back to Salt Lake together. He asked me if I finished the novel and I made some uncomfortable jokes and he asked me if I remembered how much I used to throw up on family trips when I was a kid, and I told him I did. Then he told me that the fellows who lived next door to us in the apartment building in Denver had been a gay couple who thought we had been a gay couple as well, and had been shocked to learn we were brothers.
"Are you sure they were gay?" I asked him. "They were always wearing baseball caps and talking about the Giants."
He told me that gay people often wore baseball caps and were sometimes San Francisco Giant fans. Then he asked me if I'd had any trouble from people when I walked in the park near the apartment. I told him about the naked man in the turban, and he made a pained look, and told me he was sorry I hadn't finished the novel.