Killing time between breakfast and burial last Saturday I drove out State Avenue to River Road and parked at a little pullout across from the Cattails Golf Course, where a couple sat chatting as a kid fished.
Alamosa didn’t seem much changed from 1971, when I was a freshman at Adams State College, the only school in the state that would have me.
The school is called Adams State University now, but that seems a little grandiose. It’s still a small college in a small town, and the dorms — from the outside, anyway — seemed untouched, save by the ravages of time and undergraduates.
Coronado Hall, undated; shoplifted from the Adams State website.
Coronado Hall still has that generic Fifties-to-Seventies vibe. Could be anything from a budget apartment building in a Seventies sitcom to a residential treatment facility to a nursing home.
But the McCurry-Savage-Moffat-Houtchens L-block apartments would embarrass an East German, even before the Berlin Wall came down.
I took no pix of this academic detour down memory lane, not eager to be dubbed an elderly perv’, or worse, a narc.
“Do you have any children here, sir?”
“Uh, no, officer, not that I know of. If I did, they’d be in their 50s, and I could see their pictures any old time down at the post office.”
I don’t recall which of these hovels was my last known residence at Adams State — but Savage would seem appropriate, so I’ll take it. My roommates and I broke all the written rules and some of the unwritten ones, too, until I dropped out after two years and discovered the wonderful world of work. This sent me shrieking back to school in a year. Not to Alamosa, though. To Greeley, where I met all these Martinezes.
A half-century later, as I hauled bike and baggage into my motel, a man and a couple of women were discussing in low tones some loved one bound for a stretch in the federal pen. Could’ve been me in ’73. Stay in school, kids. And don’t deal drugs from your dorm room.
In other news, the Safeway has moved across the street. The Campus Cafe, Bank Shot, and Purple Pig are still around, but the Ace Inn is not. The Rialto, where I saw The Firesign Theatre’s “Martian Space Party” — double-billed with “Zachariah,” written by the Firesigns — is no longer a theater.
Tell me my man Jim isn’t gonna set this big ol’ cigar to smoking. …
And everyone still does their serious shopping in Pueblo or Santa Fe. In Alamosa, a Martinez cousin groused, “There’s nothing.”
Well, that’s not entirely true. There was a big gay-pride rally just down the alley from William’s house on Saturday. The youngsters dashed over to buy a rainbow flag and T-shirt to prank their elders.
Speaking of pranks, there’s a largish artillery piece not far from where Jim and Lucy were laid to rest. I can see Jim having some fun with that on Halloween, New Year’s Eve, maybe Super Bowl Sunday if the Broncos ever get there again.
I can hear Lucy telling him to knock it off, too. “Cállate, mijo, people are trying to sleep here.”
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.
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).
Stairway to heaven? The racers in the Mad Dog cyclocrosses at Monument Valley Park never called it that.
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.
A thunderclap yesterday afternoon startled Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who was curled up in her favorite sack, enjoying her eleventy-seventh nap of the day.
I did not tell her, as did Johnny Lundgren’s dad in Jim Harrison’s “Warlock,” “That’s God barking at you for being such a miserable little pissant.”
No, I reassured her that it wasn’t God, probably, or even the work of a (much) lesser (would-be) deity — say, Felonious Punk, commanding a few of his masked ICEholes to shock-and-awe us back to wherever we came from, or didn’t, whatever.
Even if fascism were to come a-calling at El Rancho Pendejo, Miss Mia should have nothing to fear. She’s a Russian blue, and since the Punk just blew a Russian, she should be A-OK with him and his goons. Cream for all my apparatchiks!
Now, me, I’m an Irish-American Red, so who knows where I’d wind up? Where would a Adderall-snorting asshat send a sober Mick scribbler with a bicycle fetish? A Boston pub to pull pints on St. Patrick’s Day? The International Space Station, to chronicle its “retirement,” slated for 2030? Couldn’t log much saddle time up there over the next five years, but I’d get to rip one helluva descent when NASA — if it’s still around — pulls the plug.
And Herself? Conscripted into the Punk’s platoon of librarians, I expect. Condemned to catalog the pestilential archives of fuck books, Truth Social screeds, and unpaid bills.
And she wouldn’t be allowed to shush any of his minions, who never ever give their festering gobs a nanosecond’s respite from telling the FreeDummies that Making America Great Again requires chop-shopping it into a Dollar Store knockoff of Pooty-poot’s Russia.
Troops to Ukraine? Hell no! But troops to DeeCee? That’s the real global trouble spot, amirite?
The best intel I can muster tells me that the enemy is bunkered up at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Careful with the arty and airstrikes, lads, and try to avoid damage to the facility if it’s feasible — it is a National Heritage Site, but may have been desecrated beyond resurrection.
I mean, have you seen what these terrorists have done to the Rose Garden?
“HQ says there’s a woke art exhibit at the Smithsonian. Cover me … I’m going in.”
“Tin soldiers and dipshits coming.”
Thus spake Charles P. Pierce about the governors of Ohio, South Carolina, and West Virginia sending National Guardspersons to “help police” the crime-ridden hellhole that is* Washington, D.C., which escalates the performative bullshit to DUMBCON 3.
Charlie further notes that Philip Bump, late of The Bezos Post, has assembled an interactive map “illustrating all the places in Ohio, West Virginia, and South Carolina that are actually more crime-ridden than Washington,” yet somehow muddle along with nothing heavier than the local coppers.
Parody throws its arthritic paws in the air and says, “Chieu hoi! I give.”
While we await reports from the Thunder in the Tundra, at which Vlad the Impaler will punk The Goldbug at one of our own Air Force bases, we’re enjoying a colorful sunrise behind the Sandias and some spirited aerial combat over the backyard hummingbird feeder.
It’s a good thing rufous hummingbirds don’t weigh 300 pounds. They’d rule us all.
Actually, now that I think about it, it just might be an improvement over what we have now.
Mad Blog Media 