The Esquire

In which Adam succumbs to a fitful spell of nostalgia

Where would you go if you had a time machine? Better yet, when?

Boilerplate answer is go back in time and kill Hitler; if not that then it’s usually go back in time and see the dinosaurs. Of course, you could always go back in time and kill a velociraptor, the Hitler of dinosaurs.

Two birds.

But for me the answer has always been Denver, Colorado, my hometown, in the 1950’s, maybe 1960’s.

This desire is entirely fed by my teenage obsession with the beatniks. When I first got wind of On the Road, from one of those great teachers who takes an interest in you beyond the curriculum, I was only intrigued because I knew it represented something vaguely alternative, a document of a lifestyle that ran opposite the status quo. There was a blurry photo of Jack Kerouac on the cover, smoking against a brick wall, and I thought, hell yeah; this seems cool.

Then I read the thing. And I learned that Jack Kerouac, indeed most of the beats, were all just chasing the shiny coin that was Neal Cassady.

Of the Denver Cassady’s.

Um, what?! This movement, this iconic counterculture moment that was so massive it leapfrogged itself and wound up mainstream, it all stemmed from a dude who walked the same Denverado streets I was walking?!

I dug deeper. I read his novel, The First Third, and while I was fascinated by the details of his feral childhood, I found myself devouring that book because it was telling me about a Denver that had all but disappeared, a Denver of yesteryear, a city of dusty alleys and vacant lots bursting with sunflowers, of redbrick poolhalls and brothels, the Queen City of the Plains, in all it’s heartbreaking, outpost fury.

That book read like a tattered roadmap; if you squinted you could just make out this vanishing city, from the house where Neal Cassady was born on Champa Street, to his unpaid tab at My Brother’s Bar. It was like I was staring at a fossil buried in the dirt, with just enough bones poking through to envision the whole skeleton.

I’ve always wanted to see that skeleton come to life.

Still, I know, the Denver of yesteryear would only hold my interest in comparison to the Denver of today, Denver as I know it. It would only prove noteworthy in the context of my personal experience. This is true for anyone, I suppose, or anywhere.

Your nostalgia is only of interest to someone as it relates to theirs.

I try to remember this every time a little piece of my childhood dies; it happens often. Denver is a boom town. Always has been. From gold, to oil, to weed, to real estate. The inclination here is strike while the iron is hot, screw the rest. The preservation instinct has never been strong. And as Denver grows, and treasure after treasure is scraped, and forgotten, I realize the Denver that I’m nostalgic for is just that: the Denver I’m nostalgic for. It will not matter to the next generation. And I’m trying to make my peace with that, because you can’t fight the wind.  

But if I write it down maybe they’ll wonder.

Maybe they’ll wonder about The Esquire. You know places like The Esquire. You have one in your city, or you did, once. I hope. The indie, art-house movie theater. The Film Forum, The Angelika. The place where you first learned that movies could be weird, and specific, and arty.

They closed the Esquire down this month. They’re converting it into condos, maybe some ground floor offices, and businesses. You know the story. Always that same mixed-use story. They’re not tearing it down, but, man, I’m going to miss it. The Esquire with the cool sign out front, that beckoned you as you ripped down Sixth Avenue, drew your eyes to the marquee to see what all was playing that week; besides Rocky Horror, of course, on Saturday, at midnight.

My mom started taking me there as a kid, when I began showing an interest in those kinds of movies, film, cinema. I remember sitting next to her watching Blood Simple and thinking what in the actual fuck? This is incredible! We saw Slingblade there. We waited too long, despite the critical buzz, and suddenly it was the last day of its run, and I had to study for the AP Euro the next day, and my mom said just bring your textbook, study in the car. So, I did. And we both marveled at that film, that performance, and on the way home I remember my mom, a woman from the wrong side of the Richmond, Virginia tracks, telling me how pitch perfect that depiction of the South was. The Esquire is where I learned how important that is on screen. A sense of place.

And I still got a 4 on the AP Euro.

I saw The Big Lebowski there high as a kite, back-to-back. I saw Rushmore there. When I started doing stand-up comedy, the Esquire was hosting screenings of comedy specials, with live stand-up before them, so I did a set in front of Sarah Silverman’s Jesus is Magic, and I crushed. And my wife was randomly in the audience. And it was the first time she ever laid eyes on this hunk of man meat. And now we have two sons. Named Jesus, and Magic.

Who will probably never care that the place where mom first saw dad closed down.

The Chez Artiste closed too, The Esquire’s sister indie theater further south, off Colorado Boulevard, by the old University Hills Mall. Shuttered three weeks after The Esquire. Like they couldn’t exist without the other. Then their parent company, Landmark, declared bankruptcy, and everyone is scared they’re going to close The Mayan, the art deco revival jewel of Denver’s three arthouse cinemas. That it will follow it’s siblings to the cinema grave.

Time will tell. But my city’s track record isn’t great.

They’re keeping The Esquire sign out front because hey look at this historic detail, potential condo-owner! But who I’m kidding? I’m just glad they’re keeping it. That counts as a win in Denver’s perpetual self-devouring.

They’re keeping the sign on El Chapultepec too. Thank God. Though the developer had to be shamed into it. That developer, of course, being Dick Monfort, the owner of the Colorado Rockies, the most inept man in all of sports. He’s from a family of Greeley, Colorado meat-packers—not making that up—who used their slaughterhouse fortune to buy the Rockies and set about ruining the sport of baseball. They don’t give a shit about the game, they’re just happy to pack a beautiful ballpark with idiots who like drinking in the sunshine—why buy a bullpen when you can build a party deck?—and so they open the gates every season and people clamber over each other to guzzle in the high altitude summer sunshine, regardless of the quality of the product on the field.

Welcome to Coors Field, a bar with a baseball team.

Monfort bought up a bunch of property surrounding the stadium too, built out a truly banal entertainment district called McGregor Square, where he siphons even more of your dollars with hot chicken and hard seltzer. And he keeps buying more land, including El Chapultepec, a legendary, old Denver jazz club in the heart of lower downtown. It was a shithole, but it was Denver’s shithole, and it had fallen into such disrepair Monfort claimed he had to tear it down to proceed. Fortunately, Historic Denver waded in, shamed him, and they’re preserving as much as they can now, including the amazing, neon signage out front, while detonating the interior, popping the top, and building out massive new condos, and office space. Standard mixed-use fuckery.

But they’re keeping that sign.

This is the Denver I’m living in now. A Denver where I celebrate them leaving old signs alone. A Denver where every day I see an article about another treasure going the way of the Dodo.

Benny Blanco’s is closing! Benny Blanco’s Slice of the Bronx, the hole-in-the-wall late night pizza spot, little more than a doorway that served slices until three a.m., in Capitol Hill, back where bygone punk club The Snakepit used to be, down the block from our killer record store, WaxTrax. Benny Blanco’s, where if you were just drunk enough, you could snag your greasy slice, wedge through the line of hammered people waiting to do the same, then lean up against a wall in the piss-smelling alley and feel like the city still had grit, and demons. Like Neal Cassady might sidle up next to you and bum a smoke.

I sound so old. I’m trying not to be too romantic. But then I learned Mutiny Now is moving. Not closing, mercifully, but moving. Away from their South Broadway anarchist bookstore outpost. Mutiny Now, a place where you could pick up some Jim Thompson, and have a bowl of sugar cereal at 1 a.m., home of crust punks and poetry slams and graphic novels and community refrigerators. A place that has let us host the High Plains Comedy Festival after-parties for almost a decade now, where we get to party till dawn in a bookstore that has now seen more fucked up comics than therapy. Mutiny, on South Broadway, is no more, in one month. Priced out of the hood. Unable to compete with conveyor belt sushi (thank god Hi-Dive and Sputnik are holding it down across the street).

If I’m this maudlin, imagine how the unsung heroes behind these institutions feel, the people who make Denver cool; they must be wrecked. I hope they see what I’m trying to see. That the nostalgia lives on inside us, even if the proof vanishes.

I remember during the pandemic, these dudes reached out to me. They were building an—all together now, “mixed use condo!”—on Tennyson Street, but then the pandemic struck, and shut down the whole effort. Temporarily anyway. Supply chain stuff. They’d pick it back up once the world got better. But in the meantime, they were just sitting on this empty lot, and people were starting to gather again, outdoors, so they decided to use their space. They put up a stage, and lights, and began throwing events. And they asked me if I wanted to do a comedy show.

I did.

Tickets sold out in hours. That’s rare for me. I’m not a big comic. I don’t live in New York or LA, and I hate being racist on podcasts. There’s only so far I can go. But people were hungry for comedy, for entertainment, for communing. Then, day-of, there was this huge snowstorm. Not quite a blizzard, but adjacent. And I asked the guys if they wanted to cancel. But they said let’s just do it and see who shows up. Who knew when we would be allowed to gather again. This was our window. Everything was uncertain, all the time. Like the ground beneath us was moving. They would trot out some portable heaters, and we would hope for the best. It was a time of making do. The show must go on.

Every single ticket holder showed up. Not one no-show. We even let in some walk-ups. They came in winter coats and hats, they bundled up in sleeping bags, and drank spiked cocoa from steaming thermoses. Everyone seemed so happy to be there too, to be out; they were delighted, caught up in the absurdity of the moment. It was like a Broncos tailgate. In the playoffs. We were all in this together. I did over an hour, didn’t want to get off the stage. People ate it up. I ate it up. We all needed it so bad. To this day, telling jokes to those diehards in a snowstorm during a global pandemic is one of my favorite shows I’ve ever done.

And that empty lot where I performed? Long gone. If you drive down Tennyson street now, you’ll just see one more mixed-used condo building, another bland offering in a beige sea of them. Maybe there’s a Barre Fitness on the ground level. Maybe they’ve put in a Shake Shack. The pandemic subsided, or our concern did, anyway. Construction resumed. Denver moved on, like Denver always will move on. Driving by, you would never know that the coolest moment happened there once, in a snowstorm, during a truly surreal moment in history.

But if you had a time machine, you could check it out. Travel across space, and time, take a left at Omaha, and see it. See how important that night was to me, and to the 150 or so people huddled in the cold. How it felt bigger than us, how it felt something like humanity. And even if that moment didn’t matter to you as much as it did to all of us, you would be able to feel how it would live on in our collective memory, forever, like the Denver that disappears beneath our feet every day.

And maybe that’s enough.

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September Shows!

Shows! I have some! Rarely do I make it down to Colorado Springs, but I’ll be showing my face in Denver’s politically mortifying neighbor an hour south for one show only! Because I love this venue that much.

September 13 - Colorado Springs - Lulu’s - Tix

Then it’s on to Comedy Christmas! Three days of pure magic, the festival that I started, and continue to helm, with the help of my dear friend Karen Wachtel, the High Plains Comedy Festival! There’s a smorgasbord of shows at the fest, but be on the lookout for the live Grawlix show, as well as a live GSTW podcast, and me doing a set in Spanish?! Dios mio!

September 19-21 - Denver - The High Plains Comedy Festival! - Tix

Only leaving state once this month, to our craggy neighbor up north, Wyoming! I haven’t performed in Wyoming in over a decade, and it will likely be another before I return (unless some rich folks want to fly me to Jackson Hole for a show, in which case, you got yourself a deal!), but in the meantime, onto Casper!, where they’ve restored a beautiful old theater, where I’ll be performing.

September 27 - Casper, WY - The Rialto - Tix

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News, and Bookkeeping, and what not

As you all know, I’m new to this Substack thing. I decided to do it to force myself to write more, and to get an email list going, so I could get more folks out to shows. I had no ambition beyond that. But then kindhearted subscribers kept throwing money at me; I didn’t even realize that “paid subscriptions” were a part of the deal before that. Some of you were quite generous, before I had set the prices (and had just left Substack’s default settings up there). All this to say, I’ve corrected the settings. If you want to read this for free, great, amazing! That’s how I envisioned it all along. If you’re one of those people who feel like supporting financially, I set the prices at $5 a month, $55 for the year, so it feels like you get some type of deal getting the annual subscription. If you already paid more than this, and feel screwed, see if you can readjust your subscription now that I’ve set it at a different price. If you can’t, reach out to me and I’ll make it right!

Other news! My comedy special, Wallpaper, which came out in January, 2024, just got picked up by Hulu! That’s right! It’s available, for streaming, on Hulu! So do me a favor, tell a friend about me. When they say, how can I check him out, say, “You can stream his special, “Wallpaper,” on Hulu!” As always, appreciate the help spreading the word.

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The Monthly Clip

From my special, Wallpaper, now streaming on Hulu!

God damn, great joke, Adam. Way to go.

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Before you go, follow on the socials!

That’s it for September. Thanks so much for reading! Hope to see you out on the road!