Later this month, I'm going to Black Hawk for the first time. I'm looking into different travel options, to get there from Denver. Thoughts on Ace Casino Bus? Have you taken it? Is it okay/decent?
We were faithful practitioners of an antique religion, the malevolent priesthood of a primitive and chemical mystery.
Denver Spring 2011 We were faithful practitioners of an antique religion, the malevolent priesthood of a primitive and chemical mystery. All but vanished for decades, a vein of revival made its way up from Mexico in the early 1990s. Upon conversion, we sold all we had to follow our goddess. In back alleys and hotel rooms all around Denver, we built altars with blackened spoons, the bottom halves of aluminum cans, gnawed and looped leather belts, orange-capped needles, lighters, and empty cigarette boxes, the worn relics of our sacrament and liturgy. We cooked magical potions and conjured blissful sleep with vapors the smell of vinegar and brown sugar, kneeling before her altar and letting blood from our arms. We would have sacrificed our first born if she asked. Heroin was life for us, and without her we were dead. Every heartbeat. Every thought. Every move. Every drop of gasoline in the car. Every cent we made. Every calorie we consumed. Every breath was devoted to the chase for more. In Denver, four Hondurans started selling heroin and cocaine at 5 in the morning. They came like clockwork, because they got off the first bus that brought them to Civic Center Park. Besides Chivo, it was the only other means we knew to get heroin in town, and it was the only place it was available at 5 a.m. Chivo started at 8, but sickness started early. The Hondurans sold dimes, or 10 dollars’ worth, in tightly wrapped balls made from cut squares of trash bag. Black was heroin. White was cocaine. They sold five for $40 as an incentive to buyers and allowed any combination. At Walmart on Wadsworth and Colfax, we woke up before 5, sick as usual. I gathered together the random CDs in the car and went to see if one of the Hondurans in the park would trade a dime of black for them. Roger was the one we knew best, but he laughed at my offer. He seemed annoyed. He would not look at me. We were out of luck, so we parked on Corona Street off Colfax right next to a 7-Eleven. In the car, we stretched and yawned. Our bodies ached, and the anxiety set in. We never knew where we would get it. We just had to have it. Watery snot and tears started, the sure signs of dope sickness. “What are we going to do, Bubby?” Danielle lay back in the passenger seat. “I don’t know, baby. I’m tired. We can call Chivo and ask for another front, or we can do something, but it’s too early to call Chivo. Let me chill for a minute. We’ll get it. Don’t worry. I don’t know how but we will.” She always said she liked me better when I was sick. Heroin made me extremely mean and difficult. When I was sick, I felt exposed and sensitive. Television commercials would bring tears to my eyes, and I was nice to her. “OK, Bubby. I’m sick as sh*t.” She held her stomach. “I know, baby. Me too.” I folded my arms and closed my eyes. My back and head ached. I pushed back into the driver’s seat. Not two minutes passed before we heard a knock on the window. A strange individual tried to talk to us through the closed window. Thick glasses, a shaved head, orange freckles on pale skin, a gaunt face. Maybe a man. Maybe a lesbian. I tried to tell the person to wait till we rolled the window down, but the person continued to talk. As the window lowered, I could hear he was a man. “I need a ride out of here! Right now! I’ve got money! I’ll pay you. I have to get out of Colorado!” He seemed genuinely desperate for our help. Through the window he flashed several bills, mostly ones and a five. It was good enough for me. “Get in!” Danielle had to open the door for him to crawl into the back, and we took off. “Where do you want to go?” I didn’t know where he went. There was nothing in the back seat but a pile of clothes. “I don’t know! Anywhere, out of Colorado!” His voice came from the clothes the pile of unfolded and dirty clothes under which he had buried himself. “Well, maybe you could give us a little more direction. Like, New Mexico? Nebraska? Utah? If you pay, we’ll take you anywhere you want.” I remembered the condition of my release from jail. My travels were not to exceed a 150-mile radius from Adams County, but money was on the line. “Utah. Sure. Let’s go there.” Traffic halted for miles on the interstate. It was from people headed to work in Denver, so we were stuck for a while. He talked about the people chasing him. They wanted to kill him, and the cops would send him to prison. He had spent the previous night jumping fences to escape. A day or two before that, he threw away several ounces in a hotel room of the Black Hawk Casino, because he thought he was being set up. Danielle and I knew what he needed. “Why don’t you let us get you some heroin? That’ll calm you down. We can get a hotel room and get some brown. Hey, what’s your name anyway? If we are going to be helping you escape and partners in crime, we should know each other’s’ names.” “I’m Earl.” “I’m Riley. This is Danielle.” He agreed that getting heroin was a good idea, so we pulled off at the next exit, and called Chivo. We found a Motel 6, and Danielle checked into the room for us. Earl snuck in while we waited for Chivo. We never had much money to score, so Chivo’s driver hurried to meet us at the gas station down the street. Out of the four $50 balloons, Earl gave us three to share, and he did so several more times, always giving us three and keeping one. It was like Christmas morning, and we were little kids. When Danielle and I got high, we bickered and said nasty things to one another, not as a matter of any real hurt or problems we had, but like an allergic reaction to the heroin. There were two or three days in a row of us sitting in a dark, cool hotel room watching HBO high on heroin and Danielle and I squabbling. Earl spent time on his computer and whined about our fussing and fighting. “You guys should love one another. You never know when you won’t have the other one with you again.” He whimpered. His life was hard, one of six boys, the youngest, and regularly raped by one of his brothers. His father hated him. In New York City, he found love with an old man named Tony, who taught him the trade of stealing fine art. They were busted together and sent to different prisons; Tony died of AIDS. I guessed. Danielle and I thought Earl turned tricks off the internet for the money he had, but we had no proof. On our third day together, he had us drop him off in the middle of nowhere between Boulder and Denver, because he did not want to hear us fight. His countenance was depressed, and he wouldn’t make eye contact. Danielle and I came back from trying to score all day at around 6:30, to find Earl outside of the room waiting for us. He got four balloons as usual, but this time he only gave us one and kept three. Then he gave us 20 bucks and sent us to Wendy’s to get some dinner. Earl lay on the floor sweaty and flaccid by the time we got back to the room. A few slaps to the face and yells of his name proved he had overdosed. Danielle shrieked and flapped her hands at her face in fear, while I ran to the bathroom and saturated a hand towel with water. When I wrung it out over his face and the water hit him he came to. “Hey, mother f*cker, we’re calling 911! You need to go to the hospital!” I didn’t take his attempt at suicide personally. It was his prerogative far as I saw it, but overdosing himself in the hotel room where we slept was unacceptable. “No! No! No! Don’t call the ambulance. I’m okay. I’m okay.” He begged us not to call. I listened to him, for some reason. Soon after all of it, I regretted not robbing him of all his money and sending him overdosed to the hospital. We would have been gone with his electronics and money before he got out of the hospital. We feared that he would asphyxiate, so we made him sit up against the corner of the room on his bed while we watched TV. The blankets were around him, and Danielle and I must have given cues that I was nodding out with our conversation. His eyes were closed, but he was awake. “See? Riley is nodding out,” said Earl. Why doesn’t he have to go to the hospital?” “Shut the f*ck up, Earl. Or we will call 911 to come get your overdosing a**.” It was 10:30. “It’s not fair. You are as high as I am.” “Shut the f*ck up, Earl!” He was snoring at 1:30 when I went to sleep. “The Hangover” played mute on the TV. Danielle woke me up at 10. “Riley. Riley. Wake up. I think he’s dead.” “No, he’s not dead.” I opened my eyes and looked at him. I was not so sure. “I’m pretty sure he’s dead, Bubby! He looks dead!” “No. He’s not dead. Let’s find a rinse before we check.” We found the bottom half of a coke can on a shelf below the TV. It had a spot of brown goo on the edge with a gray, shriveled cotton in the middle. It was all that was left of the three balloons he did the day before. I wondered how he managed to get that much tar into a syringe and inject it while we were at Wendy’s. I thought he must have skin-popped it. It would have been several injections of black sludge, and if he had hit a vein the first one would have put him out. We washed the bottom of the coke can with water and sucked it through his old cotton. It was not the clean thing to do, but we didn’t care. She peed on the toilet and kept telling me he was dead while I split the syringes of slightly colored water. I denied it one more time before I hit a vein in her arm and then my own. I walked out first and went over to his bed. I focused on his mouth and the strand of drool hanging from his chin. It was dried out and stuck there, the consistency of hair-sprayed spider web. When I put my hand on his shoulder to shake him awake, I screamed “Earl!” But he rolled over, cold and stiff. His legs never unfolded or changed position. The dried-out stalactite of drool stood upside down in the air, and his head hung off the bed. His eyes belonged on ice at the supermarket. They may as well have been a pair of yellow, lumpy grapes for all the life that they had in them. “He’s dead!” Danielle cried. I pulled him off the bed onto the floor. It only took a second for me to consider what money he might have on him and I reached into the pocket of his shorts to find a black leather wallet. There were $250 dollars, so I took the two big bills and left the $50. Danielle called 911 like we should have the night before. She said the operator said to give him mouth-to-mouth. One look at his dead mouth and the thought of the stale air trapped in his lungs settled in my mind that I was not giving him mouth-to- mouth. “I’m not giving him mouth-to-mouth!” “Come on, Riley! Just try! Is he cold?” “Not cold, but he’s not warm. If you want to give him mouth-to-mouth get over here and do it. Or they can come do it, but I AM NOT doing it!” She talked into the phone. “He’s not completely cold. Is that a good thing? Is there a chance he might live?” She asked in tears and then turned to me. “She says to put your mouth on his mouth and breathe.” “Hang up!” We gathered the syringes and cookers and balloons and threw them in the dumpster at the back of the parking lot. We stepped outside as the fire truck pulled up. They quickly gave up on trying to resuscitate Earl’s dead body. One squad car pulled up, then another, and one more. A cop put up the yellow tape around the room, and they separated Danielle and me, to question us. She spoke so I could hear her, to get our stories to match up. The black cop dressed in blues flirted with her. She flirted back and told him she was a stripper. As I wrote a statement on the hot hood of a running squad car in the sun, I wondered how many years I could get for it. Would these be my last minutes of freedom, scribbling and nervous on the hood of a cop car? An unmarked car pulled up with two detectives. They wore jackets, slacks and ties and had personality. They slicked their black hair back, true to their Hispanic heritage. One of them talked to me about the Hornets and mentioned the Nuggets. Sickly scents of pomade and cologne mixed with fear to turn my stomach. The detective’s partner walked around and talked to the policemen before he walked up to me. “Look. We got an overdose to go to right after this, two blocks away. Another dead body. We don’t have time for all of this. Where are the syringes and cookers? You don’t think he overdosed on air, do you? No. We don’t either. Now, we understand, you and your girlfriend got scared and hid all the stuff. But we need some evidence of his drug use. We need some syringes for evidence, and we’ll get you two on your way. I promise.” They took me to the dumpster where we tossed the stuff, and made me climb in, but I couldn’t find it. There were several empty 20-ounce bottles from another room with syringes in them. We never put our syringes in bottles like that, but the detective seemed satisfied. “OK. Grab a few and give them to me.” They took some pictures and got our written statements. Things wrapped up, and the coroner came. A hearse came to pick up the body. It was obvious that one of the two men working for the company with the hearse enjoyed his job, maybe too much. He wore a black three-piece suit and a felt top hat, with a gold chain to a watch in his breast pocket and a monocle. I didn’t know hearses picked up overdosed bodies out of hotel rooms, but that’s what I saw that day. When they finally took the yellow police tape down and released us from the scene, Danielle jumped into my arms and wrapped her legs around my waist. We shouted in glee and relief and made out in front of the last two cops on the scene. It was over, and we were free. I still had the $200. The first thing we did was call Chivo and met one of his guys at a gas station. When his driver showed up, I told him what happened. It didn’t matter to him. They wanted the money. At some point in the day, I spilled the last of our heroin out of a cooker onto my khaki pants. She was mad, so we went to Home Depot on Quebec. I tried to steal a bunch of copper wire to scrap for money, but on the way out of the door, Loss Prevention drove me to the ground so hard the scab on my knee had fabric from my pants in it and turned green. Denver County smelled better than Adams, and they let me out after three days for petit theft. A week later, the coroner called to ask what I knew about Earl. I told him what Earl told me; maybe it was true, maybe not, but it’s what he said. His tone of voice seemed bewildered over the phone. Sometime after that, on our way to Danielle’s first night at the Hustler Club, a strange figure riding a scooter on Colfax pulled up next to us. Danielle and I looked over at a lesbian in her mid-50s wearying a black leather cap and vest, thick glasses, orange freckles and pale face. Her hair was red and grey and buzzed off. Could it be Earl? It looked exactly like him. We laughed about when the 911 operator had instructed us to give him mouth-to-mouth. I never felt much about robbing the dead man, or the fact that the last words he heard before he died were me telling him to, “shut the f*ck up.” There was no time to feel bad about it, when spilled hits of heroin and three days in jail were so disappointing. The only thing I ever thought about it was that we should have robbed him when he was overdosed and called the paramedics. It would have been less trouble for us.
A guy named Carl overdosed and died in our hotel room.
Danielle PART 4 Dead Guy Carl
We were faithful practitioners of an antique religion, the malevolent priesthood of a primitive and chemical mystery that emerged from the soils of Asian jungles and worshipped by tribal factions of the middle east and orient through the 19th century. All but vanished for decades, a vein of revival made its way up from Mexico in the early 1990s. There existed sects in America still.
Upon conversion, we sold all we had to follow our goddess. In back alleys and hotel rooms all around Denver, we built altars with blackened spoons, the bottom halves of aluminum cans, looped belts of gnawed leather, orange capped needles, empty cigarette boxes and lighters. These were the worn relics of sacrament and ministration, our liturgical rite. We cooked magic potions and conjured blissful sleep and vapor the smell of vinegar and brown sugar. Daily devoting ourselves, tying off, kneeling before her altar and letting blood from our arms. We would have sacrificed our first born if she asked.
Heroin was life for us, and without her we were dead. Every heartbeat. Every thought. Every move. Every drop of gasoline in the car. Every cent we made. Every calorie we consumed. Every breath was devoted to the chase for more.
In Denver, four Hondurans started selling heroin and cocaine at five in the morning. They came like clockwork, because they got off the first bus that brought them to Civic Center Park. Besides Chivo, it was the only other place we knew to get heroin in town, and it was the only place it was available at five a.m. Chivo started at eight, but sickness started early. They sold dimes, or ten dollars’ worth, in tightly wrapped balls made from cut squares of trash bag. Black was heroine. White was cocaine. They sold five for 40 dollars as an incentive to buyers and allowed any combination. At Walmart on Wadsworth and Colfax, we woke up before five, sick as usual. I gathered together the random CDs in the car and went to see if one of the Hondurans in the park would trade a dime of black for them. Roger was the one we knew best, but he laughed at my offer. He seemed annoyed. He would not look at me. We were out of luck, so we parked on Corona Street off Colfax right next to a Seven Eleven. In the car, we stretched and yawned. Our bodies ached, and the anxiety set in. We never knew where we would get it. We just had to have it. Watery snot and tears started, the sure signs of dope sickness. “What are we going to do, bubby?” Danielle lay back in the passenger seat. “I don’t know, baby. I’m tired. We can call Chivo and ask for another front, or we can do something, but it’s too early to call Chivo. Let me chill for a minute. We’ll get it. Don’t worry. I don’t know how but we will.” She always said she liked me better when I was sick. Heroine made me extremely mean and difficult. When I was sick, I felt exposed and sensitive. Television commercials brought tears to my eyes, and I was nice to her. “OK, bubby. I’m sick as s***.” She held her stomach. “I know, baby. Me too.” I folded my arms and closed my eyes. My back and head ached. I pushed back into the driver’s seat. Not two minutes passed before we heard a knock on the window. A strange individual tried to talk to us through the closed window. Thick glasses, a shaved head, orange freckles on pale skin, a gaunt face. Maybe a man. Maybe a lesbian. I tried to tell the person to wait till we rolled the window down, but they continued to talk. As the window lowered, I could hear he was a man. “I need a ride out of here! Right now! I’ve got money! I’ll pay you. I have to get out of Colorado!” He seemed genuinely desperate for our help. Through the window he flashed several bills, mostly ones and a five. It was good enough for me. “Get in!” Danielle had to open her door to open the door for him to crawl into the back, and we took off. “Where do you want to go?” I didn’t know where he went. There was nothing in the back seat, but a pile of clothes. “I don’t know! Anywhere, out of Colorado!” His voice came from the clothes. He had buried himself in the pile of unfolded and dirty clothes. “Well, maybe you could give us a little more direction. Like, New Mexico? Nebraska? Utah? If you pay, we’ll take you anywhere you want.” I remembered the condition of my release from jail. My travels were not to exceed a 150-mile radius from Adams County, but money was on the line. “Utah. Sure. Let’s go there.” Traffic halted for miles on the interstate. It was from people headed to work in Denver, so we were stuck for a while. He talked about the people chasing him. They wanted to kill him, and the cops would send him to prison. He had spent the previous night jumping fences to escape. A day or two before that, he threw away several ounces in a hotel room of the Black Hawk Casino, because he thought he was being set up. Danielle and I knew what he needed. “Why don’t you let us get you some heroin? That’ll calm you down. We can get a hotel room and get some brown. Hey, what’s your name anyway? If we are going to be helping you escape and partners in crime, we should know each other’s names.” “I’m Carl.” “I’m Riley. This is Danielle.” He agreed that getting heroin was a good idea, so we pulled off at the next exit, and called Chivo. At 84th and Washington, we found a Motel 6, and she checked into the room, for us. He snuck in while we waited for Chivo. We never had much money to score, so Chivo’s driver hurried to meet us at the gas station down the street. Out of the four 50-dollar balloons, Carl gave us three to share, which he did several more times. He always gave us three and kept one. It was Christmas morning, and we were little kids. When Danielle and I got high, we bickered and said nasty things to one another, not as a matter of any real hurt or problems we had, but like an allergic reaction to the heroin. There were two or three days in a row of us sitting in a dark, cool Motel 6 room watching HBO high on heroin and Danielle and I squabbling. Carl spent time on his computer and whined about our fussing and fighting. “You guys should love one another. You never know when you won’t have the other one with you again.” He whimpered. His life was hard, one of six boys, the youngest, and regularly raped by one of his brothers. His father hated him. In New York City, he found love with an old man named Tony, who taught him the trade of stealing fine art, paintings and such. They were busted together and sent to different prisons where Tony died of AIDS, I guessed. Danielle and I thought Carl turned tricks off the Internet for the money he had, but we had no proof. On our third day together, he had us drop him off in the middle of nowhere between Boulder and Denver, because he did not want to hear us fight. His countenance was quiet and depressed, and he wouldn’t make eye contact. Danielle and I came back from trying to score all day at around 630 to find Carl outside of the room waiting for us. He got four balloons as usual, but this time he only gave us one and kept three. Then he gave us 20 bucks and sent us to Wendy’s to get some dinner. Carl lay on the floor sweaty and flaccid by the time we got back to the room. A few slaps to the face and yells of his name proved he had overdosed. Danielle shrieked and flapped her hands at her face in fear, while I ran to the bathroom and saturated a hand towel with water. When I rung it out over his face and the water hit him he came to. “Hey, mother f***er, we’re calling 911! You need to go to the hospital!” I didn’t take his attempt at suicide personally. It was his prerogative far as I saw it, but overdosing himself in the hotel room where we slept was unacceptable. “No! No! No! Don’t call the ambulance. I’m okay. I’m okay.” He begged us not to call. I listened to him, for some reason. Soon after all of it, I regretted not robbing him for all his money and sending him overdosed to the hospital. We would have been gone with his electronics and money before he got out of the hospital. We feared that he would asphyxiate, so we made him sit up against the corner of the room on his bed while we watched TV. The blankets were around him, and she and I must have given cues that I was nodding out with our conversation. His eyes were closed, but he was awake. “See? Riley is nodding out. Why doesn’t he have to go to the hospital?” “Shut the f*** up, Carl. Or we will call 911 to come get your overdosing a**.” It was 1030. “It’s not fair. You are as high as I am.” “Shut the f*** up, Carl!” He was snoring at 130 when I went to sleep. The Hangover played mute on the TV. Danielle woke me up at 10. “Riley. Riley. Wake up. I think he’s dead.” “No, he’s not dead.” I opened my eyes and looked at him. I was not so sure. “I’m pretty sure he’s dead, bubby! He looks dead!” “No. He’s not dead. Let’s find a rinse before we check.” We found the bottom half of a coke can on a shelf below the TV. It had a spot of brown goo on the edge with a gray, shriveled cotton in the middle. It was all that was left of the three balloons he did the day before. I wondered how he managed to get that much tar into a syringe and inject it while we were at Wendy’s. I thought he must have skin-popped it. It would have been several injections of black sludge, and if he had hit a vein the first one would have put him out. We washed the bottom of the coke can with water and sucked it through his old cotton. It was not the clean thing to do, but we didn’t care. She peed on the toilet and kept telling me he was dead while I split the syringes of slightly colored water. I denied it one more time before I hit a vein in her arm and then my own. I walked out first and went over to his bed. I focused on his mouth and the strand of drool hanging from his chin. It was dried out and stuck there, the consistency of hair sprayed spider web. When I put my hand on his shoulder to shake him awake, I said, “Carl!” But he rolled over, cold and stiff. His legs never unfolded or changed position. The dried-out stalactite of drool stood upside down in the air, and his head hung off the bed. His eyes belonged on ice at the super market. They may as well have been a pair of yellow, lumpy grapes for all the life that they had in them. “He’s dead!” Danielle cried. I pulled him off the bed onto the floor. It only took a second for me to consider what money he might have on him and reached into the pocket of his shorts to find a black leather wallet. There were 250 dollars, so I took the two big bills and left the 50. Danielle called 911 like we should have the night before. She said the operator said to give him mouth to mouth. One look at his dead mouth and the thought of the stale air trapped in his lungs settled it in my mind that I was not giving him mouth to mouth. “I’m not giving him mouth to mouth!” “Come on, Riley! Just try! Is he cold?” “Not cold, but he’s not warm. If you want to give him mouth to mouth get over here and do it. Or they can come do it, but I AM NOT doing it!” She talked into the phone. “He’s not completely cold. Is that a good thing? Is there a chance he might live?” She asked in tears and then turned to me. “She says to put your mouth on his mouth and breath.” “Hang up!” We gathered the syringes and cookers and balloons and threw the in the dumpster at the back of the parking lot. We stepped outside as the fire truck pulled up. They quickly gave up on trying to resuscitate Carl’s dead body. One squad car pulled up, then another, and one more. A cop put up the yellow tape around the room, and they separated Danielle and me, to question us. She spoke so I could hear her, to get our stories to match up. The black cop dressed in blues flirted with her. She flirted back and told him she was a stripper. As I wrote a statement on the hot hood of a running squad car in the sun, I wondered how many years I could get for it. Would these be my last minutes of freedom scribbling and nervous on the hood of a cop car? An unmarked car pulled up with two detectives. They wore jackets, slacks and ties and had personality. They slicked their black hair back true to their Hispanic heritage. One of them talked to me about the Hornets and mentioned the Nuggets. Sickly scents of pomade and cologne mixed with fear to turn my stomach. His partner walked around and talked to the policemen before he walked up to me. “Look. We got an overdose to go to right after this, two blocks away. Another dead body. We don’t have time for all of this. Where are the syringes and cookers? You don’t think he overdosed on air, do you? No. We don’t either. Now, we understand, you and your girlfriend got scared and hid all the stuff. But we need some evidence of his drug use. We need some syringes for evidence, and we’ll get you two on your way. I promise.” They took me to the dumpster where we tossed the stuff, and made me climb in, but I couldn’t find it. There were several empty 20 oz. bottles from another room with syringes in them. We never put our syringes in bottles like that, but the detective seemed satisfied. “OK. Grab a few and give them to me.” They took some pictures and got our written statements. Things wrapped up, and the coroner came. A hearse came to pick up the body. It was obvious that one of the two men working for the company with the hearse enjoyed his job, maybe too much. He had a black three-piece suit and a felt top hat on, with a gold chain to a watch in his breast pocket. He wore a monocle. I didn’t know hearses picked up overdosed bodies out of hotel rooms, but that’s what I saw that day. When they finally took the yellow police tape down and released us from the scene, she jumped into my arms and wrapped her legs around my waist. We shouted in glee and relief and made out in front of the last two cops on the scene. It was over, and we were free. I still had the 200 hundred dollars. The first thing we did was call Chivo and met one of his guys at a gas station. When his driver showed up, I told him what happened. It didn’t matter to him. They wanted the money. At some point in the day, I spilled the last of our heroin out of a cooker onto my khaki pants. She was mad, so we went to Home Depot on Quebec. I tried to steal a bunch of copper wire, but on the way out of the door, loss prevention drove me to the ground so hard the scab on my knee had fabric from my pants in it and turned it green. Denver County smelled better than Adams, and they let me out after three days for petit theft. A week later, the coroner called to ask what I knew about Carl. I told him what Carl told me, maybe it was true, maybe not, but it’s what he said. His tone of voice seemed bewildered over the phone. Sometime after that, on our way to Danielle’s first night at the Hustler Club, a strange figure riding a scooter on Colfax pulled up next to us. Danielle and I looked over at a 55-year-old lesbian in a black leather cap and vest, thick glasses, orang freckles and pale face. Her hair was red and grey and buzzed off. Could it be Carl? It looked exactly like him. We laughed about when the 911 operator had instructed us to give him mouth to mouth. I never felt much about robbing the dead man, or the fact that the last words he heard before he died were me telling him to, “shut the f*** up.” There was no time to feel bad about it, when spilled hits of heroin and three days in jail were so disappointing. The only thing I ever thought about it was that I should have robbed him when he was overdosed and called the paramedics. It would have been less trouble for us.
Danielle PART 4 Dead Guy Carl We were faithful practitioners of an antique religion. It originated in 19th century Asia, but a vein of revival made its way up from Mexico in the early nineteen nineties. Upon conversion, we sold all we had to follow our goddess. We lived for her, and in back alleys and hotel rooms all around Denver, we built altars to her with blackened spoons, the bottom halves of aluminum cans, needles, empty cigarette boxes and lighters. We practiced the ritual of cooking magical potions, conjuring up blissful sleep and vapor the smell of vinegar and brown sugar. We vomited and hiccupped as a rite of passage. Daily devotions involved tying ourselves off, kneeling before her altar and letting blood from our arms. We were ready to sacrifice our first born if she asked. Heroin was life for us, and without her we were dead. Every heartbeat. Every thought. Every move. Every drop of gasoline in the car. Every cent we made. Every calorie we consumed. Every breath was devoted to the chase for more. In Denver, four Hondurans started selling heroin and cocaine at five in the morning. They came like clockwork, because they got off the first bus that brought them to Civic Center Park. Besides Chivo, it was the only other place we knew to get heroin in town, and it was the only place it was available at five a.m. Chivo started at eight, but sickness started early. They sold dimes, or ten dollars’ worth, in tightly wrapped balls made from cut squares of trash bag. Black was heroine. White was cocaine. They sold five for 40 dollars as an incentive to buyers and allowed any combination. At Walmart on Wadsworth and Colfax, we woke up before five, sick as usual. I gathered together the random CDs in the car and decided to see if one of the Hondurans in the park would trade a dime of black for them. Roger was the one we knew best, but he laughed at my offer. He seemed annoyed. He would not even look at me. We were out of luck, so we parked on Corona Street just off Colfax right next to a Seven Eleven. In the car, we stretched and yawned. Our bodies ached, and the anxiety set in. We never knew where we would get it. We just had to have it. Watery snot and tears started, the sure signs of dope sickness. “What are we going to do, bubby?” Danielle lay back in the passenger seat. “I don’t know, baby. I’m tired. We can call Chivo and ask for another front, or we can do something, but it’s too early to call Chivo. Let me just chill for a minute. We’ll get it. Don’t worry. I don’t know how but we will.” She always said she liked me better when I was sick. Heroine made me extremely mean and difficult. When I was sick, I felt exposed and sensitive. Television commercials brought tears to my eyes, and I was nice to her. “OK, bubby. I’m sick as s***.” She held her stomach. “I know, baby. Me too.” I folded my arms and closed my eyes. My back and head ached. I pushed back into the driver’s seat. Not two minutes passed before we heard a knock on the window. A strange individual tried to talk to us through the closed window. Thick glasses, a shaved head, orange freckles on pale skin, a gaunt face. Maybe a man. Maybe a lesbian. I tried to tell the person to wait till we rolled the window down, but they continued to talk. As the window lowered, I could hear he was a man. “I need a ride out of here! Right now! I’ve got money! I’ll pay you. I just have to get out of Colorado!” He seemed genuinely desperate for our help. Through the window he flashed several bills, mostly ones and a five. It was good enough for me. “Get in!” Danielle had to open her door to open the door for him to crawl into the back, and we took off. “Where do you want to go?” I didn’t know where he went. There was nothing in the back seat, but a pile of clothes. “I don’t know! Anywhere, out of Colorado!” His voice came from the clothes. He had buried himself in the pile of unfolded and dirty clothes. “Well, maybe you could give us a little more direction. Like, New Mexico? Nebraska? Utah? If you pay, we’ll take you anywhere you want.” I remembered the condition of my release from jail. My travels were not to exceed a 150-mile radius from Adams County, but money was on the line. “Utah. Sure. Let’s go there.” Traffic halted for miles on the interstate. It was from people headed to work in Denver, so we were stuck for a while. He talked about the people chasing him. They wanted to kill him, and the cops would send him to prison. He had spent the previous night jumping fences to escape. A day or two before that, he threw away several ounces in a hotel room of the Black Hawk Casino, because he thought he was being set up. Danielle and I knew what he needed. “Why don’t you let us get you some heroin? That’ll calm you down. We can get a hotel room and get some brown. Hey, what’s your name anyway? If we are going to be helping you escape and partners in crime, we should know each other’s names.” “I’m Carl.” “I’m Riley. This is Danielle.” He agreed that getting heroin was a good idea, so we pulled off at the next exit, and called Chivo. At 84th and Washington, we found a Motel 6, and she checked into the room, for us. He snuck in while we waited for Chivo. We never had much money to score, so Chivo’s driver hurried to meet us at the gas station down the street. Out of the four 50-dollar balloons, Carl gave us three to share, which he did several more times. He always gave us three and kept one. It was Christmas morning, and we were little kids. When Danielle and I got high, we bickered and said nasty things to one another, not as a matter of any real hurt or problems we had, but like an allergic reaction to the heroin. There were two or three days in a row, just us sitting in a dark, cool Motel 6 room watching HBO high on heroin and us squabbling. Carl spent time on his computer and whined about our fussing and fighting. “You guys should love one another. You never know when you won’t have the other one with you again.” He whimpered. His life was hard, one of six boys, the youngest, and regularly raped by one of his brothers. His father hated him. In New York City, he found love with an old man named Tony, who taught him the trade of stealing fine art, paintings and such. They were busted together and sent to different prisons where Tony died of AIDS, I guessed. Danielle and I thought Carl turned tricks off the Internet for the money he had, but we had no proof. On our third day together, he had us drop him off in the middle of nowhere between Boulder and Denver, because he did not want to hear us fight. His countenance was quiet and depressed, and he wouldn’t make eye contact. Danielle and I came back from trying to score all day at around 630 to find Carl outside of the room waiting for us. He got four balloons as usual, but this time he only gave us one and kept three. Then he gave us 20 bucks and sent us to Wendy’s to get some dinner. Carl lay on the floor sweaty and flaccid by the time we got back to the room. A few slaps to the face and yells of his name proved he had overdosed. Danielle shrieked and flapped her hands at her face in fear, while I ran to the bathroom and saturated a hand towel with water. When I rung it out over his face and the water hit him he came to. “Hey, mother f***er, we’re calling 911! You need to go to the hospital!” I didn’t take his attempt at suicide personally. It was his prerogative far as I saw it, but overdosing himself in the hotel room where we slept was unacceptable. “No! No! No! Don’t call the ambulance. I’m okay. I’m okay.” He begged us not to call. I listened to him, for some reason. Soon after all of it, I regretted not robbing him for all his money and sending him overdosed to the hospital. We would have been gone with his electronics and money before he got out of the hospital. We feared that he would asphyxiate, so we made him sit up against the corner of the room on his bed while we watched TV. The blankets were around him, and she and I must have given cues that I was nodding out with our conversation. His eyes were closed, but he was awake. “See? Riley is nodding out. Why doesn’t he have to go to the hospital?” “Shut the f*** up, Carl. Or we will call 911 to come get your overdosing a**.” It was 1030. “It’s not fair. You are just as high as I am.” “Shut the f*** up, Carl!” He was snoring at 130 when I went to sleep. The Hangover played mute on the TV. Danielle woke me up at 10. “Riley. Riley. Wake up. I think he’s dead.” “No, he’s not dead.” I opened my eyes and looked at him. I was not so sure. “I’m pretty sure he’s dead, bubby! He looks dead!” “No. He’s not dead. Let’s find a rinse before we check.” We found the bottom half of a coke can on a shelf below the TV. It had a spot of brown goo on the edge with a gray, shriveled cotton in the middle. It was all that was left of the three balloons he did the day before. I wondered how he even managed to get that much tar into a syringe and inject it while we were at Wendy’s. I thought he must have skin-popped it. It would have been several injections of black sludge, and if he had hit a vein the first one would have put him out. We washed the bottom of the coke can with water and even sucked it through his old cotton. It was not the clean thing to do, but we didn’t care. She peed on the toilet and kept telling me he was dead while I split the syringes of slightly colored water. I denied it one more time before I hit a vein in her arm and then my own. I walked out first and went over to his bed. I focused on his mouth and the strand of drool hanging from his chin. It was dried out and stuck there, the consistency of hair sprayed spider web. When I put my hand on his shoulder to shake him awake, I said, “Carl!” But he just rolled over, cold and stiff. His legs never unfolded or changed position. The dried-out stalactite of drool stood upside down in the air, and his head hung off the bed. His eyes belonged on ice at the super market. They may as well have been a pair of yellow, lumpy grapes for all the life that they had in them. “He’s dead.” Danielle cried. I pulled him off the bed onto the floor. It only took a second for me to consider what money he might have on him and reached into the pocket of his shorts to find a black leather wallet. There were 250 dollars, so I took the two big bills and left the 50. Danielle called 911 like we should have the night before. She said the operator said to give him mouth to mouth. One look at his dead mouth and the thought of the stale air trapped in his lungs settled it in my mind that I was not giving him mouth to mouth. “I’m not giving him mouth to mouth!” “Come on, Riley! Just try! Is he cold?” “Not cold, but he’s not warm. If you want to give him mouth to mouth get over here and do it. Or they can come do it, but I AM NOT doing it!” She talked into the phone. “He’s not completely cold. Is that a good thing? Is there a chance he might live?” She asked in tears and then turned to me. “She says to just put your mouth on his mouth and breath.” “Hang up!” We gathered the syringes and cookers and balloons and threw the in the dumpster at the back of the parking lot. We stepped outside as the fire truck pulled up. They quickly gave up on trying to resuscitate Carl’s dead body. One squad car pulled up, then another, and one more. A cop put up the yellow tape around the room, and they separated Danielle and me, to question us. She spoke so I could hear her, to get our stories to match up. The black cop dressed in blues flirted with her. She flirted back and told him she was a stripper. As I wrote a statement on the hot hood of a running squad car in the sun, I wondered how many years I could get for it. Would these be my last minutes of freedom scribbling and nervous on the hood of a cop car? An unmarked car pulled up with two detectives. They wore jackets, slacks and ties and had personality. They slicked their black hair back true to their Hispanic heritage. One of them talked to me about the Hornets and mentioned the Nuggets. Sickly scents of pomade and cologne mixed with fear to turn my stomach. His partner walked around and talked to the policemen before he walked up to me. “Look. We got an overdose to go to right after this, two blocks away. Another dead body. We don’t have time for all of this. Where are the syringes and cookers? You don’t think he just overdosed on air, do you? No. We don’t either. Now, we understand, you and your girlfriend got scared and hid all the stuff. But we need some evidence of his drug use. We need some syringes for evidence, and we’ll get you two on your way. I promise.” They took me to the dumpster where we tossed the stuff, and made me climb in, but I couldn’t find it. There were several empty 20 oz. bottles from another room with syringes in them. We never put our syringes in bottles like that, but the detective seemed satisfied. “OK. Just grab a few and give them to me.” They took some pictures and got our written statements. Things wrapped up, and the coroner came. A hearse came to pick up the body. It was obvious that one of the two men working for the company with the hearse enjoyed his job, maybe too much. He had a black three-piece suit and a felt top hat on, with a gold chain to a watch in his breast pocket. He wore a monocle. I didn’t know hearses picked up overdosed bodies out of hotel rooms, but that’s what I saw that day. When they finally took the yellow police tape down and released us from the scene, she jumped into my arms and wrapped her legs around my waist. We shouted in glee and relief and made out in front of the last two cops on the scene. It was over, and we were free. I still had the 200 hundred dollars. The first thing we did was call Chivo and met one of his guys at a gas station. When his driver showed up, I told him what happened. It didn’t really matter to him, just the money did. At some point in the day, I spilled the last of our heroin out of a cooker onto my khaki pants. She was mad, so we went to Home Depot on Quebec. I tried to steal a bunch of copper wire, but on the way out of the door, loss prevention drove me to the ground so hard the scab on my knee had fabric from my pants in it and turned it green. Denver County smelled better than Adams, and they let me out after three days for petit theft. A week later, the coroner called to ask what I knew about Carl. I told him what Carl told me, maybe it was true, maybe not, but it’s what he said. His tone of voice seemed bewildered over the phone. Sometime after that, on our way to Danielle’s first night at the Hustler Club, a strange figure riding a scooter on Colfax pulled up next to us. Danielle and I looked over at a 55-year-old lesbian in a black leather cap and vest, thick glasses, orang freckles and pale face. Her hair was red and grey and buzzed off. Could it be Carl? It looked just like him. We laughed about when the 911 operator had instructed us to give him mouth to mouth. I never felt much about robbing the dead man, or the fact that the last words he heard before he died were me telling him to, “shut the f*** up.” There was no time to feel bad about it, when spilled hits of heroin and three days in jail were so disappointing. The only thing I ever thought about it was that I should have robbed him when he was overdosed and called the paramedics. It would have been less trouble for us.
Danielle PART 4 Dead Guy Carl We were faithful practitioners of an antique religion. It originated in 19th century Asia and had all but vanished. Except a vein of revival made its way up from Mexico in the early nineteen nineties. Upon conversion, we sold all we had to follow our goddess. We lived for her, and in back alleys and hotel rooms all around Denver, we built altars to her with blackened spoons, the bottom halves of aluminum cans, needles, empty cigarette boxes and lighters. We practiced the ritual of cooking magical potions, conjuring up blissful sleep and vapor the smell of vinegar and brown sugar. We vomited and hiccupped as a rite of passage. Daily devotions involved tying ourselves off, kneeling before her altar and letting blood from our arms. We were ready to sacrifice our first born if she asked. Heroin was life for us, and without her we were dead. Every heartbeat. Every thought. Every move. Every drop of gasoline in the car. Every cent we made. Every calorie we consumed. Every breath was devoted to the chase for more. In Denver, four Hondurans started selling heroin and cocaine at five in the morning. They came like clockwork, because they got off the first bus that brought them to Civic Center Park. Besides Chivo, it was the only other place we knew to get heroin in town, and it was the only place it was available at five a.m. Chivo started at eight, but sickness started early. They sold dimes, or ten dollars’ worth, in tightly wrapped balls made from cut squares of trash bag. Black was heroine. White was cocaine. They sold five for 40 dollars as an incentive to buyers and allowed any combination. At Walmart on Wadsworth and Colfax, we woke up before five, sick as usual. I gathered together the random CDs in the car and went to see if one of the Hondurans in the park would trade a dime of black for them. Roger was the one we knew best, but he laughed at my offer. He seemed annoyed. He would not look at me. We were out of luck, so we parked on Corona Street off Colfax right next to a Seven Eleven. In the car, we stretched and yawned. Our bodies ached, and the anxiety set in. We never knew where we would get it. We just had to have it. Watery snot and tears started, the sure signs of dope sickness. “What are we going to do, bubby?” Danielle lay back in the passenger seat. “I don’t know, baby. I’m tired. We can call Chivo and ask for another front, or we can do something, but it’s too early to call Chivo. Let me chill for a minute. We’ll get it. Don’t worry. I don’t know how but we will.” She always said she liked me better when I was sick. Heroine made me extremely mean and difficult. When I was sick, I felt exposed and sensitive. Television commercials brought tears to my eyes, and I was nice to her. “OK, bubby. I’m sick as s***.” She held her stomach. “I know, baby. Me too.” I folded my arms and closed my eyes. My back and head ached. I pushed back into the driver’s seat. Not two minutes passed before we heard a knock on the window. A strange individual tried to talk to us through the closed window. Thick glasses, a shaved head, orange freckles on pale skin, a gaunt face. Maybe a man. Maybe a lesbian. I tried to tell the person to wait till we rolled the window down, but they continued to talk. As the window lowered, I could hear he was a man. “I need a ride out of here! Right now! I’ve got money! I’ll pay you. I have to get out of Colorado!” He seemed genuinely desperate for our help. Through the window he flashed several bills, mostly ones and a five. It was good enough for me. “Get in!” Danielle had to open her door to open the door for him to crawl into the back, and we took off. “Where do you want to go?” I didn’t know where he went. There was nothing in the back seat, but a pile of clothes. “I don’t know! Anywhere, out of Colorado!” His voice came from the clothes. He had buried himself in the pile of unfolded and dirty clothes. “Well, maybe you could give us a little more direction. Like, New Mexico? Nebraska? Utah? If you pay, we’ll take you anywhere you want.” I remembered the condition of my release from jail. My travels were not to exceed a 150-mile radius from Adams County, but money was on the line. “Utah. Sure. Let’s go there.” Traffic halted for miles on the interstate. It was from people headed to work in Denver, so we were stuck for a while. He talked about the people chasing him. They wanted to kill him, and the cops would send him to prison. He had spent the previous night jumping fences to escape. A day or two before that, he threw away several ounces in a hotel room of the Black Hawk Casino, because he thought he was being set up. Danielle and I knew what he needed. “Why don’t you let us get you some heroin? That’ll calm you down. We can get a hotel room and get some brown. Hey, what’s your name anyway? If we are going to be helping you escape and partners in crime, we should know each other’s names.” “I’m Carl.” “I’m Riley. This is Danielle.” He agreed that getting heroin was a good idea, so we pulled off at the next exit, and called Chivo. At 84th and Washington, we found a Motel 6, and she checked into the room, for us. He snuck in while we waited for Chivo. We never had much money to score, so Chivo’s driver hurried to meet us at the gas station down the street. Out of the four 50-dollar balloons, Carl gave us three to share, which he did several more times. He always gave us three and kept one. It was Christmas morning, and we were little kids. When Danielle and I got high, we bickered and said nasty things to one another, not as a matter of any real hurt or problems we had, but like an allergic reaction to the heroin. There were two or three days in a row of us sitting in a dark, cool Motel 6 room watching HBO high on heroin and Danielle and I squabbling. Carl spent time on his computer and whined about our fussing and fighting. “You guys should love one another. You never know when you won’t have the other one with you again.” He whimpered. His life was hard, one of six boys, the youngest, and regularly raped by one of his brothers. His father hated him. In New York City, he found love with an old man named Tony, who taught him the trade of stealing fine art, paintings and such. They were busted together and sent to different prisons where Tony died of AIDS, I guessed. Danielle and I thought Carl turned tricks off the Internet for the money he had, but we had no proof. On our third day together, he had us drop him off in the middle of nowhere between Boulder and Denver, because he did not want to hear us fight. His countenance was quiet and depressed, and he wouldn’t make eye contact. Danielle and I came back from trying to score all day at around 630 to find Carl outside of the room waiting for us. He got four balloons as usual, but this time he only gave us one and kept three. Then he gave us 20 bucks and sent us to Wendy’s to get some dinner. Carl lay on the floor sweaty and flaccid by the time we got back to the room. A few slaps to the face and yells of his name proved he had overdosed. Danielle shrieked and flapped her hands at her face in fear, while I ran to the bathroom and saturated a hand towel with water. When I rung it out over his face and the water hit him he came to. “Hey, mother f***er, we’re calling 911! You need to go to the hospital!” I didn’t take his attempt at suicide personally. It was his prerogative far as I saw it, but overdosing himself in the hotel room where we slept was unacceptable. “No! No! No! Don’t call the ambulance. I’m okay. I’m okay.” He begged us not to call. I listened to him, for some reason. Soon after all of it, I regretted not robbing him for all his money and sending him overdosed to the hospital. We would have been gone with his electronics and money before he got out of the hospital. We feared that he would asphyxiate, so we made him sit up against the corner of the room on his bed while we watched TV. The blankets were around him, and she and I must have given cues that I was nodding out with our conversation. His eyes were closed, but he was awake. “See? Riley is nodding out. Why doesn’t he have to go to the hospital?” “Shut the f*** up, Carl. Or we will call 911 to come get your overdosing a**.” It was 1030. “It’s not fair. You are as high as I am.” “Shut the f*** up, Carl!” He was snoring at 130 when I went to sleep. The Hangover played mute on the TV. Danielle woke me up at 10. “Riley. Riley. Wake up. I think he’s dead.” “No, he’s not dead.” I opened my eyes and looked at him. I was not so sure. “I’m pretty sure he’s dead, bubby! He looks dead!” “No. He’s not dead. Let’s find a rinse before we check.” We found the bottom half of a coke can on a shelf below the TV. It had a spot of brown goo on the edge with a gray, shriveled cotton in the middle. It was all that was left of the three balloons he did the day before. I wondered how he managed to get that much tar into a syringe and inject it while we were at Wendy’s. I thought he must have skin-popped it. It would have been several injections of black sludge, and if he had hit a vein the first one would have put him out. We washed the bottom of the coke can with water and sucked it through his old cotton. It was not the clean thing to do, but we didn’t care. She peed on the toilet and kept telling me he was dead while I split the syringes of slightly colored water. I denied it one more time before I hit a vein in her arm and then my own. I walked out first and went over to his bed. I focused on his mouth and the strand of drool hanging from his chin. It was dried out and stuck there, the consistency of hair sprayed spider web. When I put my hand on his shoulder to shake him awake, I said, “Carl!” But he rolled over, cold and stiff. His legs never unfolded or changed position. The dried-out stalactite of drool stood upside down in the air, and his head hung off the bed. His eyes belonged on ice at the super market. They may as well have been a pair of yellow, lumpy grapes for all the life that they had in them. “He’s dead!” Danielle cried. I pulled him off the bed onto the floor. It only took a second for me to consider what money he might have on him and reached into the pocket of his shorts to find a black leather wallet. There were 250 dollars, so I took the two big bills and left the 50. Danielle called 911 like we should have the night before. She said the operator said to give him mouth to mouth. One look at his dead mouth and the thought of the stale air trapped in his lungs settled it in my mind that I was not giving him mouth to mouth. “I’m not giving him mouth to mouth!” “Come on, Riley! Just try! Is he cold?” “Not cold, but he’s not warm. If you want to give him mouth to mouth get over here and do it. Or they can come do it, but I AM NOT doing it!” She talked into the phone. “He’s not completely cold. Is that a good thing? Is there a chance he might live?” She asked in tears and then turned to me. “She says to put your mouth on his mouth and breath.” “Hang up!” We gathered the syringes and cookers and balloons and threw the in the dumpster at the back of the parking lot. We stepped outside as the fire truck pulled up. They quickly gave up on trying to resuscitate Carl’s dead body. One squad car pulled up, then another, and one more. A cop put up the yellow tape around the room, and they separated Danielle and me, to question us. She spoke so I could hear her, to get our stories to match up. The black cop dressed in blues flirted with her. She flirted back and told him she was a stripper. As I wrote a statement on the hot hood of a running squad car in the sun, I wondered how many years I could get for it. Would these be my last minutes of freedom scribbling and nervous on the hood of a cop car? An unmarked car pulled up with two detectives. They wore jackets, slacks and ties and had personality. They slicked their black hair back true to their Hispanic heritage. One of them talked to me about the Hornets and mentioned the Nuggets. Sickly scents of pomade and cologne mixed with fear to turn my stomach. His partner walked around and talked to the policemen before he walked up to me. “Look. We got an overdose to go to right after this, two blocks away. Another dead body. We don’t have time for all of this. Where are the syringes and cookers? You don’t think he overdosed on air, do you? No. We don’t either. Now, we understand, you and your girlfriend got scared and hid all the stuff. But we need some evidence of his drug use. We need some syringes for evidence, and we’ll get you two on your way. I promise.” They took me to the dumpster where we tossed the stuff, and made me climb in, but I couldn’t find it. There were several empty 20 oz. bottles from another room with syringes in them. We never put our syringes in bottles like that, but the detective seemed satisfied. “OK. Grab a few and give them to me.” They took some pictures and got our written statements. Things wrapped up, and the coroner came. A hearse came to pick up the body. It was obvious that one of the two men working for the company with the hearse enjoyed his job, maybe too much. He had a black three-piece suit and a felt top hat on, with a gold chain to a watch in his breast pocket. He wore a monocle. I didn’t know hearses picked up overdosed bodies out of hotel rooms, but that’s what I saw that day. When they finally took the yellow police tape down and released us from the scene, she jumped into my arms and wrapped her legs around my waist. We shouted in glee and relief and made out in front of the last two cops on the scene. It was over, and we were free. I still had the 200 hundred dollars. The first thing we did was call Chivo and met one of his guys at a gas station. When his driver showed up, I told him what happened. It didn’t matter to him. They wanted the money. At some point in the day, I spilled the last of our heroin out of a cooker onto my khaki pants. She was mad, so we went to Home Depot on Quebec. I tried to steal a bunch of copper wire, but on the way out of the door, loss prevention drove me to the ground so hard the scab on my knee had fabric from my pants in it and turned it green. Denver County smelled better than Adams, and they let me out after three days for petit theft. A week later, the coroner called to ask what I knew about Carl. I told him what Carl told me, maybe it was true, maybe not, but it’s what he said. His tone of voice seemed bewildered over the phone. Sometime after that, on our way to Danielle’s first night at the Hustler Club, a strange figure riding a scooter on Colfax pulled up next to us. Danielle and I looked over at a 55-year-old lesbian in a black leather cap and vest, thick glasses, orang freckles and pale face. Her hair was red and grey and buzzed off. Could it be Carl? It looked exactly like him. We laughed about when the 911 operator had instructed us to give him mouth to mouth. I never felt much about robbing the dead man, or the fact that the last words he heard before he died were me telling him to, “shut the f*** up.” There was no time to feel bad about it, when spilled hits of heroin and three days in jail were so disappointing. The only thing I ever thought about it was that I should have robbed him when he was overdosed and called the paramedics. It would have been less trouble for us.
Saratoga Casino Black Hawk will reimburse you $20 Promo Play for the ride! Simply present your same-day bus ticket at any Guest Services window after earning 150 base points on the day of your visit. Platinum members need only earn 100 base points, and our Diamond and Diamond Elite members always ride free, with no point requirement for bus fare reimbursement! Chartered Black Hawk Coach USA/ACE Express (Denver Metro) Ride with one of Colorado’s largest bus service providers, and you can depart for Black Hawk as early as 5:45 a.m. (Arvada), 6 a.m. (Wheatridge), 7 a.m. (Colfax and Chambers Rd.), with several other departure locations available. For more information, call (303) 421-2780, or visit their Experience the best action in Colorado at The Isle Casino Hotel® Black Hawk. The good times are waiting just an hour from Denver. Try your luck at any of our 900+ slot machines, 27 hot tables or try your bluffs at the 2nd floor live-action poker room. There are traveling restrictions on public transit in Black Hawk due to Covid-19. It may affect schedules and lines relevant to your trip to Ameristar Casino in Black Hawk. More details Which Bus lines stop near Ameristar Casino? These Bus lines stop near Ameristar Casino: Bus - ES, Bus - EV, Bus - EX. Some will rebate the bus fare with play. Report inappropriate content . 2. Re: Transportation to Black Hawk casino from downtown Denver . 1 year ago-:- Message from Tripadvisor staff -:-This topic has been closed to new posts due to inactivity. DENVER CASINO BUSES. Need an easy way to get from Denver to the casinos in Black Hawk and Central City? Ride with Ace Express! We are conveniently located in Arvada, with easy access from I-70 and I-76. View schedules below, then see our map for the exact pick up location. Since 1993, casino players and employees alike have trusted our shuttle bus service from Pueblo, Colorado Springs, and Woodland Park to the excitement in Cripple Creek, as well as casino shuttle bus service from Aurora and Lakewood to the casino action in Black Hawk and Central City. Black Hawk casinos have the following casino games: live blackjack, roulette, craps, and various forms of poker (including Texas Hold’em, Let it Ride, Omaha, 3 card and more). As for machine gaming, you’ll find all the latest video slots, classic slots, and a wide variety of video poker terminals to choose from. Casino Shuttle Bus Group Charters from Aurora, Colorado, East Denver and Parker, Colorado. Ramblin offers door to door group charter service to the casino(s) of your choice in Black Hawk and Central City, and also Cripple Creek! • Day trips, overnight trips and fundraising opportunities available • Casino Shuttle Bus Group Charters from Arvada, Westminster and Broomfield, Colorado. Ramblin offers door to door group charter service to the casino(s) of your choice in Black Hawk and Central City, and also Cripple Creek! • Day trips, overnight trips and fundraising opportunities available •
Black Hawk and Central City - CASINO MECCA - FULL VIDEO ...
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. REMASTERED IN HD!Music video by Soundgarden performing Black Hole Sun. (C) 1994 A&M Records#Soundgarden #BlackHoleSun #Remastered #Vevo Vlog channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/ChaddercheezeHD/featured?view_as=subscriberTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/ChadoyTwitter: https://www.twitter.com/iC... Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube. We found a hidden casino mecca in Colorado! All of the casinos are kinda grouped into this one small town where almost every building is a casino! You can ge... A Black Hawk helicopter landed at school, see what happened! American Remains · The Highwaymen · Willie Nelson · Johnny Cash · Waylon Jennings · Kris KristoffersonHighwayman 2℗ 1990 Sony Music EntertainmentReleased on:... Join Global Transportation on an adventure to Black Hawk, Colorado on a casino tour on one of our Luxury Motor Coach Buses. To book a charter bus tour or cha... As Black Hawk preserves the spirit of its past, it continues to prepare for the future with an exciting new vision for a development renaissance, destined to...
