STEVIEB'S GHOST STORY

One of my first jobs during college was as a manager of a funky coffee house in an old Victorian on Colfax Avenue. The house was built on Denver’s grand boulevard in the late 1880s but, with the city changing and after the patriarch of the family shot the driver for knocking-up his daughter, the family soon moved out of the grand manor house. It changed hands only a couple of times, most of its life was a Denver’s premier Furrier at the corner of Colfax and Franklin Street.

That was a long time ago and by the time I was a manager of the gay coffee house the mansion had seen much better days. It took me around a month to understand that the huge fur storage vault door was swinging open not due to normal reasons. Or when I would turn off every light in the entire building, seeing the second floor bedrooms illuminated. Even after I removed the light bulbs. At two am I had friends join me one night to watch the windows flash on and off. Oooing and Awwwing like they were fireworks.

My last night closing I had my boyfriend at the time stay with me so I wouldn’t be alone. But soon I forgot about the “owner” of the house as my thoughts turned to my boyfriend’s carnal desires. This did not last long before I flew across the dining room.

I found a new job the next day.

After you get physically assaulted by someone you can’t see I could understand why you would get into the paranormal. I didn’t, just something to talk about. I saw it that I had it coming for being a bad guest.

On my birthday in 1998 I sat in my living room struggling to write. I was trying to get down into words that just six days earlier I had lost my best-friend, Randy Jorgensen. Taken away because of losing his hard fought battle with AIDS. How do you deliver a eulogy to a room full on his family, his relatives that don’t want to hear how he died? They didn’t want to hear how he loved men. They didn’t care about the love that we shared and definitely didn’t want anything to do with how and what took him from them.

I was writing for a hostile audience to say the least.

As I crumbled up draft after draft I kept getting annoyed at my dog because he wouldn’t stop whining. That’s when I finally looked up and realized that my house lights were going berserk. Blinking wildly, on and off blink, blink, blink. That’s when I got hit with the phrase, “Fuck them! Write about us!”

So I did.