The 6'6" Drunk that tried to rape me and throw me off the bridge

It was late after a busy Friday restaurant night at the Riverside. Julie was in bed, and Darin, Rachel and I were in the bar closing things down, when in walks a very large man – I’d say at least 6’6” – with shoulder length wispy gray hair, wearing a ball cap, a filthy Arctic Cat jacket, and reeking of cigarettes and not particularly good hygiene. He wasn’t overly inebriated, but you could guess that we weren’t his first watering hole stop of the evening. He was friendly, a little loud, and said his name was Brian and this was the bar where 20 years earlier he had met his second wife. Darin looked at him with that serious mortician look that Darin uses and says “we’re closed”; not exactly what tall, friendly, loud, slightly intoxicated Brian wanted to hear. In fact, this information quickly transformed him into unfriendly, much taller and louder, and very threatening and intimidating Brian. I immediately became concerned for our safety, as none of us were physically able to deal with this individual, but it wasn’t yet to the point where we could justify calling 911. So my brilliant solution was to placate him; calm him down, give him a drink and befriend this big, furry, lovable Arctic Cat. This was, I was to soon learn, far from a brilliant solution. (The best solution would have been to never get in the bar business in a small town in the first place, but way too late for that.) Brian’s requests started off simply enough – Jack Daniels and Coke, with the normal Grand County request of “light on the ice, heavy on the Jack and a little Coke for color”. Like that isn’t a recipe for disaster!

Brian held court, getting louder and more physically fluid by the minute; his arms starting to flail wildly as he makes his inane points and observations – it’s not as if any of us wanted to engage him in conversation. He was after daughter Rachel, until he found out it was my daughter, and somehow summoned enough functional brain cells to think there might be a problem with his hitting on her, at which point he took up pursuit of young neighbor Cassie, who had come in for a late night visit. He then became overly fascinated with my lingering chest cold – I’d had a Grand County-sized dose of phlegm and mucous hanging around in my lungs for three weeks, making for that machine-gun staccato sound when I tried to clear my airways. Dr. Brian was quite certain that a shot of Southern Comfort would clear that stuff out of my bronchia once and for all, or perhaps numerous shots if one didn’t work. I don’t do shots – ever! But then I’m finding myself doing a lot of things in the hospitality business that I haven’t or wouldn’t do previously. To show me that it’s not as big a deal as I seem to make it out to be, Brian graciously offers to join me in this curative treatment – and he’s paying!!! After two shots of Southern Comfort – exactly two more than my normal limit – I decide that this sure-fire home remedy cure-all is in fact not what the doctor ordered. “The phlegm’s still here, but we’re out of Southern Comfort”, I tell Brian; he rears back and comes straight at my chest – the important part where the sternum, heart and lungs are – with a fist that looks, as it’s coming at me, like the fat end of a large veal shank, shouting “this’ll knock that shit outta-ya”. Thank God that Brian is an experienced enough drunk to be able to maintain a modicum of motor skills after consuming excessive amounts of spirits, and his flying osso bucco fist comes to a screeching halt just as it’s about to find pay dirt in the center of my congested chest. “That would’ve worked if I’d have actually hit you” Brian tells me; “yes” I think to myself, “phlegm probably does dissipate from the lungs as you lie dead in your coffin.”

We are now starting to edge towards that 911 call zone, as a drunk, intimidating Brian is bad, but a drunk, intimidating violent Brian is the absolute last thing I want to deal with. I’ll need someone with a uniform and a sidearm to get through to this mountain of a mountain man. A few shots later, Darin and I start to suggest to Brian that his night at the Jayhawk Bar might be coming to an end. In this regard, Brian is no different than any other drunk at closing time; they never take it as news they’re looking forward to receiving. Closing-time drunks get ugly, argumentative, profane, and quite frankly, not persuasive to the point where you would ever want to placate them by giving them more booze – the only thing they’re persuasive about is making the case for why God came up with closing time.

Naturally, Brian is pissed and more than a little argumentative when he finds that his fount of Jack Daniels shots has dried up – his lack of gentility only increases when Darin gives him his tab, which is just north of $100. (Health care ain’t cheap!) By this time Brian is drunk enough that he is losing his ability to think clearly, which means that he is more receptive to my calm nature and soothing voice – I’ve seen enough of my fair share of 1940 monster movies to know that a serene demeanor will tame the most savage of beasts. I tell Brian that I’ll walk him across the bridge and see that he gets safely to his camper. His camper??? What else does it tell you about Brian to know that he is camping out in January in Pioneer Park, on the banks of the frozen Colorado River, on a night when the temperature will easily hit minus -15F. It tells you that he’s tough, he’s probably a little crazy, and that he’s definitely stupid. That is a really dangerous combination of attributes to combine with $100 worth of alcohol, and here I am about to walk across the bridge with this dynamite keg. All of my sane and sober associates tried to get me not to do this – but my goal went way beyond concern for Brian; we had a hotel full of peacefully slumbering guests, not to mention a few rooms containing people that I loved and cared for, principally my wife and daughter.

I thought I’d gotten Brian calm enough where he’d go quietly, and this would be the end of the story; and it started out that way, as we quietly left the hotel and he reeled his way towards the river. I got him to look at the stars – brilliant beyond what most of you city dwellers have experienced, especially on this crystal clear, sub-zero winter night, 90 miles west of the nearest star-robbing metropolis. The details of the next few minutes are now, as they were that night, still blurry to me. It had nothing to do with the Southern Comfort, as I was pretty much stone cold sober; I think it was the total surrealism of the situation – me on a bridge in Colorado, 700 miles from what had been my home for 50+ years, late on a bitterly frigid night with a gargantuan, drunken human time-bomb, his starting to discuss life in prison and how he’d been raped by bigger, tougher guys than him. Yes, you read that correctly. Out of nowhere, (we’d been talking about the stars), he starts talking about his life in prison, and how he’d been raped, and how he’d killed a man in prison. I'm definitely not in Kansas anymore. Then he sits down on the bridge railing, and teeters back and forth a little bit; I’m thinking there’s a pretty good chance he’ll fall backwards and break his neck on the frozen river that slumbers 20 long feet below the surface of the bridge, bringing a tidy and painless end, (for me at least), to the night and the problem at hand. Nope, even really drunk, he maintains enough coordination to not make what would surely have been his final drunken sway. Again, out of nowhere, as I can’t remember any specific trigger words on my part, he erupts at me, swinging his big paw towards me in a roundhouse sweep, saying something like “ well, I’m gonna show you what it’s all about”, but he missed connections and fell flat on his face on the icy road. Finally, after a night of near hits and misses, that innate ability to manage his drunken motor control thing eighty-sixed itself. He fell flat, in slow motion, and I began running, in what certainly at the time to me felt like slow motion, as fast as shanks’ pony would carry me back to The Riverside.

When I told the assembled crowd, (which now included an awakened and very upset 'disbelieving-at-my-stupidity-what-was-I-thinking?' Julie) who’d been watching from the safety of the restaurant windows, what had happened, they immediately called 911. We were told it would be 45 minutes before anyone could get there – after all, it was Friday in Grand County, and a Friday in Grand County to those with DUI duty is busy like Christmas Eve to Santa Claus. Maybe busier. When they do arrive, I’m told that I’ll have to press charges of assault before they’ll go bother with our friend Brian. (Needless to say, he didn’t get up and run after me. To my knowledge, he still lay face down on the bridge road.)

Another funny, after the fact, side note to Brian’s swing, miss and face dive was one of my local friends, Tony, the only reliable plumber in Grand County, being dumbfounded that I didn’t take the opportunity to kick the living hell out of Brian as he lay face down and helpless in the middle of the road. I haven’t lived long enough in Grand County to have that be a cognitive natural reaction to a fallen drunk. Tony has.

I don’t want to press charges, mainly because I don’t want to prolong this incident any longer than necessary, as my post-meeting Brian goals for the evening were satisfied – Brian was out of the hotel, and I was still a virgin from male ex-con rape. The police took a statement, chastising me a little at having served an inebriated patron in the first place. Easy for them to make that call – they’re swaggering around town with Glocks on their hips! Let me stand behind the bar with an Uzi, and I’ll see to it that no one gets booze who I don’t want to get booze.

Even though I decided against pressing charges, the officers decided to mosey down to Pioneer Park and see just exactly what our friend was up to; he was, in fact, not any longer face down in the road, but back at his homey little Big Chief pop-up camper, just kickin' it in January in the middle of a frozen tundra. We all watched the officers’ progress from the safety of the River Room; it was too dark and too far away to see any details of what was transpiring beyond the lights of the parked police cruiser, which included the omnipresent police car spotlight on the subject vehicle. After about 20 minutes, the lights went off, and the police car drove by the hotel and away towards who knew where. We all went to bed in different states – me, glad that the event was over without me having to go for a late night swim, and pretty sure that Brian was in such a drunken slumber that I damn sure didn’t have to worry about him anymore that evening, and remotely confident that he probably would have no recollection of what he’d done and who he’d threatened the night before. Julie went to bed, for the second time that evening, very upset with me at the fact that I’d so stupidly put myself in harms way.

We later found out that Brian’s night didn’t end in a drunken slumber followed by a Grand County-sized hangover. No, our friend wasn’t only in the mood to tangle with this puny-assed bartender/hotel owner, he was after any swinging Dick who came his way, including two of Grand County’s finest. He had gotten more than a little belligerent with the two officers, and after an ID check with the local authorities, they found that our friend had several outstanding warrants from the Great State of Wyoming – outstanding assault charges and numerous parole violations. Brian was wanted, and not for unpaid tolls!

Needless to say, I learned a few new lessons that evening. One, when you’re closing down the bar, the first step is to LOCK THE DOOR!! Second, when you’re escorting someone from the bar, let them go out the door first, then quickly shut it behind them – don’t ever, ever take a walk with them. But back to sur-reality; we live in a public building with a bar that people feel they have the right to enter because it has an “Open” sign on the door – fair enough, it’s the life we chose. Most often it’s Seth and Sonya from Boulder who wants to see what lies behind the doors of this charming old façade. Once it was 6’6” Mr. Arctic Cat, January-camping Brian; drunk, horny and wanted in Wyoming on assault charges.