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.
I should’ve taken a picture. It would’ve been one of the few times when someone pointed a lens in Jim’s direction and he didn’t immediately point to his johnson just as the shutter clicked.
Sample photo only. Jethro not included.
Because I was at a celebration of my old amigo’s life. And Jim was in a Chock full o’Nuts coffee can.
It was a nod to “The Big Lebowski,” of course. Also, there were “The Blues Brothers” — brother Larry and Jim’s son, Kelly — who wore dark sunglasses on Saturday as they spoke of their loss to a standing-room-only crowd at the Bull & Bush Brewery in Glendale, Colorado.
Hey, it could’ve been worse. Jim and the El Rancho Delux gang watched a ton of “Miami Vice” Back in the Day®, so it’s nothing short of miraculous that Larry and Kelly weren’t stylin’ like Sonny and Rico.
Me, I went for the “Outside Bought REI and Went to Whole Foods” look: Santa Fe School of Cooking cap, Timberland fleece vest, Patagucchi flannel shirt, Levi’s 505s, Darn Tough wool socks and low-rise Merrell hikers.
One of the many things Jim taught me was how to dress more like Possibility and less like Probable Cause. Another was how many times you can play your favorite Merle Haggard cassette in your own truck without Jim snatching it out of the deck and tossing it out the window at 85 mph somewhere in Utah. (The answer: One time too many.)
Anyway, it was good that I stepped up my fashion game a bit for the celebration of my old friend’s too-short life. Because this wasn’t just the old El Rancho crew, even though we were all in the Bull, shouting at each other over drinks as in daze of yore.
Former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb and his wife, Wilma, were in the house, as was the mayor’s former press secretary, Andrew Hudson, who got us started down memory lane with tales of working (and goofing) with Jim.
Hizzoner likewise delivered a fond remembrance of his longtime fixer, whom he called his “Luca Brasi,” as Jim’s cigar-puffing pals from the Smoking Cave lined up along one wall like an honor guard.
Kelly, Larry, and Andrew Hudson.
For me, the sentimental journey reached its peak when Kelly backstopped Larry as emotion took him off-script during his remarks. Whenever someone told Larry how fortunate Kelly was to have his support after his dad’s sudden passing, Larry replied that it was the other way around. His nephew is a remarkable, self-possessed young man, running smooth on a strong blend of dad and mom.
Mom — the love of Jim’s life, Teri Sinopoli — was in the crowd with her sisters. So were Jim’s sis, Betty Jo, and her husband, Tom; Larry’s wife, Sherry, and their sons, Stefan and Will; Stan the Man; Rudi Boogs and his wife, Tanysha; cousin Guillermo. Lots and lots of cousins, real and aspirational.
I was honored far beyond any merit of mine to be called a brother on Saturday, though anyone who didn’t know the backstory must’ve wondered how this blue-eyed, baldheaded old gabacho with a mug like a dried-up creek bed could’ve been any kind of kin to these beautiful people.
“Oh, one day we thought we smelled a dead raccoon in the attic and found him up there in a nest of old girlie magazines, mumbling something about where was his daddy the mailman. Didn’t seem right, so we brought him downstairs, gave him a little chile. Bad idea. Never feed a stray perro. He ain’t all there, and he’s too often here, like evil tidings from DeeCee.”
I wish Jim’s mom, Lucy, had been there to chide me for making myself scarce in recent years. But she has a lot of mileage on the odometer, even more than the rest of us, and wasn’t up to the journey. And anyway, I wasn’t really a franchise player.
Her son had a deep bench, and never more so than on Saturday at the Bull. Friends and family. Young and old. Colleagues and co-conspirators. Politicos and pendejos. Tales were told; photographs submitted as evidence; the legend rewritten and amplified.
Chris James “Jethro” Martinez always left the light on and the door open. What a blessing it was to have crossed his threshold, to be made welcome, to feel at home; to feel like family.
The patrón of El Rancho Delux, Jim “Jethro” Martinez, in his throne. The shirtless drunkard in the cowboy hat is Your Humble Narrator.
My old friend Jim Martinez went west last week.
We got the story from his brother, Larry. Jim had an episode at his cigar club: it escalated; he was hospitalized; it was bad. There was nothing to do but let him go.
He was 73.
Jim played a large role in my life. Hey, he was a large fella, nicknamed Jethro, the tallest in his immediate family — father Lawrence, mother Lucy, brother Larry, and sister Betty — and the joke was that the Martinezes must have had a very tall mailman Back in the Day®.
Jim lived large. too. While Larry and I and the rest of our gang were in college at the University of Northern Colorado in the early Seventies, Jim was working for a living.
He dressed well; fashionably, but not ostentatiously. Drove a Volvo. Your money was no good in his presence. And he loved a good party.
More than a few erupted at “El Rancho Delux,” Jim’s three-bedroom, one-bath, ranch-style rental on a rare handful of undeveloped acres in the Denver metro area. Hardly any neighbors to speak of, or to. A pub within walking distance. It doesn’t get any better than that.
The annual El Rancho Delux Welcome Back Summer luau in particular became legendary. Those free-for-alls recalled the parties in Jack Kerouac’s “The Dharma Bums.” I swiped Jim’s copy, which I cherish and am leafing through right now:
“Japhy kept wandering to all sections of the party with a big jug in his hand, his face beaming with happiness. For a while the party in the living room emptied out the bonfire clique and soon Psyche and Japhy were doing a mad dance, then Sean leaped up and whirled her around and she made as if to swoon and fell right in between Bud and me sitting on the floor drumming (Bud and I who never had girls of our own and ignored everything) and lay there a second sleeping on our laps. We puffed on our pipes and drummed on.”
The Martinez brothers, always a persuasive pair, moved into politics, working with the likes of Ed Graham, Monte Pascoe, Michael Dukakis, Ted Kennedy, and Denver Mayor Wellington Webb. I stumbled from one newspaper to the next until I realized that they were all the same newspaper, which is even truer now than it was then.
My wedding, circa 1990, Santa Fe: In the foreground, (L-R): Jethro, Intercoursey, Shady (yes, that would be me); background, Rudi Boogs, Mombo.
More than once when I went overboard it was Jim who threw me a line. El Rancho was like Motel 6; Jim always left the light on for you, sometimes for days at a stretch. If the spare bed was spoken for, there was a couch. The couch was taken? Plenty of room on the floor. No, your money’s no good here. You need some? How about clothes? Jesus, Shady, you look like hell. More chins than the Hong Kong phone book.
In 1983 Jim really went the extra mile — miles, actually, and plenty of them — after I broke an ankle as I was preparing to leave one newspaper in Oregon for another in Colorado.
I had a start date, an apartment to empty into the truck, and no way to drive a five-speed manual with one foot in a cast. It took several friends — hey, you know who you are; there’s only so much room on the Internet, y’know — to get me boxed up and shipped east, Jim among them. He caught a flight west and drove my truck, me, and my dogs back to the Ranch(o).
We hit Denver just in time for the party.
Jim was one of the many good Samaritans who put me up, and put up with me, after I burned through that gig in Pueblo and another in suburban Denver in five years.
He had his own problems by then, but found time to school me on the ROI of a creative hair stylist and a small quiver of pro duds, because looking like a werewolf with the mange was not helping the job search any more than my résumé, which had more holes than the Albert Hall.
I finally found another newspaper job, my last one, about a week before I ran out of unemployment insurance and Jim ran out of Christian charity.
Jim and brother Larry enjoying a smoke in 2009.
Then time passed, and things changed, as they sometimes do when you’re not paying attention. Our paths simply diverged. We traded abrazos at our respective weddings, reminisced with other members of the club in ones and twos, here and there, and enjoyed a few those-were-the-days chuckles during a reunion of a select few of the El Rancho mob at Larry’s place outside Denver in 2009.
That was the last time I saw Jim. I thought of him now and then, recounted the legend of Jethro — maybe embellishing just a bit here and there for literary effect — but I didn’t know that he had a son, or that his marriage had ended. For a so-called newsman I wasn’t exactly up on current events.
In Jim Harrison’s novel “Warlock” a character who lives in the real world says to another who doesn’t: “Don’t you know everyone’s life is shit? You’re smart enough to do something about your own. Don’t be such a drag-ass.”
He also said, “Every time I pass the cemetery on the way to work I get the feeling we don’t live forever.”
I’ve read that book a dozen times. Own two copies, one of them autographed. Paid for them and everything. You’d think I would’ve gotten the message by now.
The most recent images of Jim I’ve seen show a smiling, silver-haired gent in glistening casual athletic wear, hobnobbing with various powers-that-be. La Eme meets the Sopranos with a side of Corleone (Mikey always dressed better than Tony). On social media, former mayor Webb mourned his old friend and assistant as “family,” dubbing Jim his “Luca Brasi.”
Jim knew about family, blood kin and the other sort. His father passed far too early, in 1984, but his mother, now 92, is still with us. He visited her every day.
Larry says there will be a celebration of his brother’s life once this unusually cold Colorado winter takes its foot off the throttle, a posthumous and perhaps premature Welcome Back Summer gathering.
Not at El Rancho Delux, though. Our old outlaw hideout is long gone, entombed beneath a jumble of “apartment homes,” though the pub remains.
And now its proprietor, the host with the most, is lost to us as well.
I miss my brother Jim Martinez. Peace to him, his family, and his many, many friends. Leave the light on for us, homes. We’ll be along directly.
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