Colorado Springs

I grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a town I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. Colorado Springs is the home of NORAD (North American Air Defense Command), which is located under a mountain outside of town where at the touch of a finger the missiles will fly towards whoever our current enemy is. It is also home to Peterson Field, an Air Force Base, and the Air Force Academy, where male cadets harass and rape the female cadets with impunity. As if that weren’t enough, in the early 1990s the town also became the headquarters of Focus on the Family, the reactionary Christian organization that lobbies against equal rights for everyone except themselves. James Dobson, the founder (who George Lakoff uses as his example of the “strict father figure of the family” that the Republican right has been so successful in promoting) is carried on thousands of radio stations and has published millions of books. Not surprisingly, Ted Haggard, another Colorado Springs-based evangelical minister, who was one of the loudest denigrators of equal rights for homosexuals, was not too long ago outed by a body builder in Denver who said the minister had paid him for sex.

My mother, who lived in Colorado Springs until her death in 1997, was a member of the Unitarian Church and used to threaten to shoot Will Perkins, a big-name car dealer who had been one of the organizers of the initiative to get an anti-gay amendment on the state ballot. She figured since she was already in her eighties, if they arrested her it was unlikely they’d execute her, and she was prepared to die in jail. She had joined PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Gays and Lesbians) after my younger sister revealed she was a lesbian, but being a Unitarian was probably enough impetus on its own. She was a Jew, actually, but came from an assimilated family, and my father, raised a Methodist, called himself an agnostic. So they joined the Unitarian Church when we were kids, and both my sisters and I became members of the youth group, LRY (Liberal Religious Youth) and learned all about sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll there. When some members of the Jewish Conservative temple in town decided to break away and form a Reform congregation, their kids came to the Unitarian Church for Sunday school until their building was finished. So there is that element in Colorado Springs as well, but the casual observer would never be aware of it.

Most people go there as tourists, to enjoy its spectacular setting at the foot of Pikes Peak, and visit all the sites: the cog railroad to the top of the Peak, Cave of the Winds, Seven Falls, Manitou Springs, etc. When I was in high school I was a lifeguard at one of the motels in Manitou, where tourists from Kansas and Texas all stayed. The motel was owned by a husband and wife, who were probably in their late fifties at the time, and unlike other motel owners in Manitou or anywhere else, considered it their responsibility to guard their guests while swimming. But you know how it is at motels. Families go off to sightsee during the day and come in for a dip in the late afternoon, and that’s about it. So I spent a lot of time sitting around an empty pool playing gin rummy with the owners’ son, who was about fourteen, and who cultivated a weirdness that manifest itself in black clothing and an encyclopedic knowledge of cult horror movies. I was also his designated partner for meals, at various restaurants around the neighborhood, as his parents never seemed to leave the motel. But I was compensated for being saddled with the weird kid by being allowed to have my friends come swim in the pool, getting all my girlfriends hired as maids, and essentially becoming a member of the family.

But Colorado Springs isn’t what it used to be, and the motel, actually made of Spanish-style adobe, with individual rooms and suites centered around a central plaza-like area where the original owner, the kid’s grandmother, had apparently hosted great barbecues and parties for guests who came every year to vacation at her establishment at the foot of Pikes Peak, was losing business to the more modern motels and hotels that were being built by the developers taking advantage of the booming economy. The coup de grace, however, was when the wife died of cancer and the husband didn’t have the heart to keep going. He sold the motel to investors from Texas, and the first thing they did was tell me they wouldn’t be keeping a lifeguard. They offered me a job as a maid instead. But a week into my new job I put a bedspread on sideways and they fired me.

I left Colorado Springs right after high school, although when I dropped out of college I ended up back home for a stint until I left for good for New Mexico. But I often go back to visit, of course. My mom was there, my older sister eventually came back, and my younger sister ended up living in Denver. Also, my best friend from high school, who I got hired as a maid at the motel, also came back and lived there for a long time. There are some good thrift stores, and the downtown, although rather deserted these days, is still beautiful, with its wide, tree-lined streets that run north into the neighborhood of old mansions that were once owned by those who made it rich on the gold and silver mines. Now the town sprawls to the east, subdivision after subdivision, dividing the land into tracts of ranch style or split-level houses where I guess all the evangelicals live. Or maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe they now live in the mansions with their new-found wealth along with their new-found religion.

But I still hate the town. On one visit Mark and I went back to my high school, Roy J. Wasson, where mediocrity ruled and the sensitive suffered. I had him take a picture of me standing on a wall in front of the school name giving it the finger. Silly, but somewhat cathartic.

Solution: You can’t go home again.