Stoned again

This past weekend it struck me that I’ve probably spent more of my life with Martinezes than O’Gradys.

More waking hours, anyway. Not necessarily conscious, but in motion, for good or ill.

Lawrence Martinez, ex-cop, telling jokes to an ex-dope dealer he’d just met while taking five from his backyard grill in Alamosa, Colo. His wife, Lucy, making breakfast for the same ne’er-do-well and her eldest son, Jim, after their feeble attempt to follow in the oversized footprints of Hunter S. Thompson in Las Vegas.

The family came together again on Saturday as Lucy and Jim joined Lawrence at the Alamosa municipal cemetery.

Whenever I hear of a friend’s passing I always hope it’s a case of mistaken identity, or someone’s idea of a joke, and that we’ll see each other again.

But when I’m standing in front of a big stone with the name chiseled in … well, that’s one hell of a fact-check.

At graveside Larry Martinez spoke briefly of his father, mother, and brother. Sister BettyJo and her husband, Tom, were there, as were Larry’s wife, Sherry; their sons, Will and Stefan; daughter-in-law Kaitlyn and baby Delilah May; Jim’s son, Kelly; the resident wildman William, a.k.a. Guillermo; the fabulous Leonard R. Dogg; and a moderately sized coterie of other family members, friends, and hangers-on, among them Your Humble Narrator.

During a Friday-night barbecue at William’s and a late lunch Saturday at Nino’s Del Sol, old feats of dubious valor were revisited and new tales added to the family mythology. Some made me wish I was still a youngster sucker-punching his liver; others, not so much. Ditched in a small-town bar, stuck for a ride? The woman with four kids who says her place is a lot closer than yours? It makes for a good story later over margaritas, as long as the kids aren’t calling you daddy when the ex shows up unexpectedly.

I settled for writing a note to Jim that went into the earth with him, and placed a flower at graveside. And I bowed thrice to Lawrence, Lucy, and Jim, thankful to the universe for giving me two families — the one I was born into, and the other I stumbled into.

• • •

After lunch, pursued by an electrical storm, I drove to Colorado Springs to pay my respects to another friend, from another life.

I’m on a first-name basis with a lot of the ghosts in that haunted house of a town, enough of them to launch a chain of Overlook hotels.

There’s my dad, Col. Harold J. O’Grady, USAF (ret). And mom, Mary Jane (Dickey) O’Grady. My first dog, Jonathan, a.k.a. Jojo (William in Alamosa still remembers Jojo). Marguerite “Rusty” Mitchell, food editor at the Gazette, who dubbed the burg “a cemetery with lights.” My Zen bro Steve Milligan. My bike bros John “Usuk” O’Neill and Bill Baughman. “Doc” Lori Cohen, who put me back together every time I disassembled myself. Ike, a.k.a. Chairman Meow, the mini-kitty who fought off a coyote only to be felled by an enlarged heart.

And now Andy Bohlmann has joined the choir invisible.

Andy was a character in the second act of my little theatre of the absurd, in which I played a cycling journalist. A former technical director of the U.S. Cycling Federation who would later be dubbed “a problem promoter” by a top dog at that organization’s successor, USA Cycling, Andy was, simply put, a fool for bicycle racing.

He told me once: “Back, way back, in the late ’50’s through the mid-’70’s, I used my trusty Hallicrafters shortwave receiver to get Tour de France updates from the BBC in London on the hour. There was no other coverage anywhere here. I still have it within arm’s reach, though it’s long broken as tubes and parts are nearly impossible to find.”

Andy not only loved listening to bike racing, he loved watching it, on TV and in person, so much so that starting in 1991 he and his wife, Kathleen, began busting their butts promoting their Sand Creek Series of races in and around Colorado Springs, which despite the presence of USCF, USAC, and the rest of the Olympic “family” was woefully short of, y’know, like, actual bike racing, an’ shit.

The Bohlmann family — Andy, Kathy, and their sons, Matthew and Philip — picked up where that better-known, better-funded family left off.

Like another tireless Colorado race promoter, Boulder’s Chris Grealish, Andy could find a diamond of a course in the dung of unlikely places. The recurring nightmare “Hell on a Hillside,” for instance, which I remember as a vertical mountain-bike crit in Manitou Springs that was not at all tailored to my particular strengths, which were overshadowed by a multitude of weaknesses, primary among them a fear of death and/or dismemberment.

By turns goofy and grumpy this blue-collar bull in cycling’s china shop was forever tilting against the carbon-and-titanium windmills of the sport’s polo-shirt governance, and frequently found himself “in exile,” as he called it in a ceaseless torrent of emails to friends and foes. The Bohlmanns’ Sand Creek and Ascent Cycling races weren’t for the 1 percenters; they were for the rest of us.

Hell, they were there for you even if you didn’t know a chainring from a cassette. A 2013 race in Palmer Park sought donations to the Care and Share Food Bank for the firefighters battling the Black Forest blaze — at the time the state’s most destructive fire ever — and the residents affected by it.

As their sons grew and Kathleen fell ill in the mid-Nineties, Andy took on more responsibilities. There was college, and caregiving; he watched over his wife in their Colorado Springs home for nearly a quarter-century until she passed in 2013. He considered stepping away from cycling after that, but the boys encouraged him to carry on.

And so he did, until his own health took a wrong turn. I last caught his act at round four of the 2014 US Cup Pro Series in Pulpit Rock Park. In 2017, after we relocated to Albuquerque, he emailed to say he’d been out of the game for more than a year.

And then, on Aug. 1, son Matthew wrote to say his dad was gone altogether. A one-two punch — a stroke followed by the diagnosis of an inoperable cancer.

“He passed peacefully and comfortably at home with Philip and I with him,” he said. Good lads. They learned a lot from Kathleen and Andy, and not just about bicycle racing.

So there I was on Sunday, back at the old Bohlmann place on the east side of town, where my high-school pals and I used to act the fool in the boonies now buried under rooftops and retail.

Matthew and Philip had Jimmy Buffett on the stereo (“A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean”) and hoisted a pirate flag to a clangor of cowbells in a driving rain (Andy had taken a nautical turn at one point in his life, and it certainly felt as though we were at sea).

The mourners dined on Cuban sandwiches from a place he favored — call it a “Cuban Crime of Passion,” which of course I did — and shared memories face to face and over an Innertubes hookup for those who couldn’t attend in person. It was a fine sendoff for the old privateer.

Over the next couple of days, as sort of an homage, I visited a few of the courses Andy and I used for our respective events Back in the Day®: Palmer Park; Bear Creek Regional Park; Monument Valley Park

I brought a Steelman Eurocross and running shoes, but couldn’t get a whole lot of use out of either. The sky kept crying.