Our first encounter with authentic Boulder-ites

The town of Boulder, CO sits nestled in the foothills against the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. It is home to approximately 125,000 inhabitants, as well as the University of Colorado. Boulder is a beautiful city – it’s setting against the majestic Rockies, as well as its general design, layout and penchant for cleanliness, make for a wonderful educational and living environment. Perhaps because it is a college town, as well as a bastion of liberalism (as are most college towns - not that there’s anything wrong with that) it is also a petri dish for growing the odd, the arcane and the way, way, way “out-there” amongst the human species. Now, those of our good customers who have visited The Riverside and live in Boulder, I’m certainly not referring to any of you as belonging to this group; in fact, you are all normal to a fault. Sometimes I wish you’d shake it up a bit!
OK, I’ll be honest. There is maybe one of you who might’ve stepped outside the boundaries of normalcy just a bit during your Riverside visit.

It was late in August, and we were winding down our first summer season at The Riverside. It was a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon, and we were getting ready for dinner in the restaurant. The hotel had more than half of its rooms booked, so we were hoping that would translate to a busy evening in The River Room – we needed all we could get as we headed into the slower fall season. An attractive couple in their mid-40’s came into the lobby inquiring about a room for the night; upon showing them one of our full rooms with a river view, they gladly took the room, registered and paid in cash. All seemed normal.
The night’s dinner business was brisk, and it included our newly registered guests – they were from Boulder. I’ll call her Jane, but she had four names, which included a normal first name, then three surnames that covered the animal, vegetable and mineral spectrum. I’ll call him Jack, and he had but a first and last name, however, his last name was, I believe, a Native American derivative; he looked about as Native American as Andy Warhol, but he didn’t look like Andy Warhol. During dinner, Jane gathered up several of Julies knick-knacks – a plate her mother brought her from Italy, some colored votive candles and a small statue – and put them on their dinner table for adornment. Hmmmmm. Not that this was terribly unusual, but it made us take a little more notice of these people. After dinner, Jane took the knick-knacks and put them back on their original table, slightly re-arranged from how Julie had them, and then produced from her purse some rather unripe oranges, and added them to the mix – sort of a still life sans the canvas and frame. She beckoned some of the remaining dinner patrons to view her display. They all joined me in a quiet Hmmmmmmmm. (A note to future guests. Don’t ever, ever mess with any of Julie’s stuff. There are very few shit lists to be included on worse than the “You Messed with Julie’s Stuff” shit list. Wait a minute……I just remembered that the “You Minimized Julie’s Birthday” shit list is pretty bad too.)

After their meal and Jane’s attempt at performance art, she came into the kitchen while I was doing dishes. Just walked right into the kitchen – we don’t have a “welcome” sign on the kitchen door – and came up to me for a chat. When I say came up to me, I mean she took the art of being a “close talker” to a whole new level; a very uncomfortable level. She talked about all of the energy she was feeling in the building, and how blessed she felt that she and Jack had stumbled on to this marvelous place. She was very nice, very complementary and very well meaning – in spite of all this, she made me very nervous.
Monday morning started with the normal parade of departing weekend guests, followed by bed stripping and room cleaning. Not yet among the departing guests were our friends from Boulder, who had yet to surface. I was outside on the front walk, sweeping, yelling at Grandpa, whatever, when Boulder Jane greets me with a bright good morning smile, and asks, “Can you marry Jack and me?” I think I said something like, “Huh?” She and Jack decided last evening that they wanted to get married, today, and spend their honeymoon night in the John Lennon room. Jack pulled out $100, handed it to me and said “this should cover our room for tonight and our dinner last night”. It actually covered about 80% of the room and dinner, but Jack didn’t stay around to hear about that. I informed Miss Jane that I could not marry her, but as luck would have it, the Grand County courthouse was right up the street, and my guess was that would be a good place to start inquiring about marriage today, and probably divorce later in the week. Off the happy couple went, followed shortly by Julie and I leaving the Riverside for an always exciting trip into Granby and The City Market.
Back from the store an hour later, we pull up to The Riverside, and what greets us but Jack and Jane, sunning in front of the hotel. All of their belongings from their car were set out on the front walk, as if they were having some sort of yard sale; Jacks shirts hanging from our shutters, Jane’s skirts and tops draped over the open car doors and on our table and umbrella. Hmmmmmmmm.
Jane happily informs us that in fact they were to be married that afternoon at the courthouse, and were going to spend their honeymoon night in our hotel!! The next question was “Did I have enough liquor for Jane & Jacks honeymoon night?” Jane didn’t ask that question – I asked it of myself. The rest of the day involved the two of them behaving oddly throughout the hotel. Jane burned sage to get rid of evil spirits. Jack made sage tea for some of our other guests – luckily no one who drank it sued us. They both were sunning themselves – not naked, but close – on our back porch, coming in and out of the hotel in various states of undress. Jack had that natural BO that people who disdain chemicals and corporations have – the kind that’s real, as if it spews out of his pores from the core of his soul. He reminded me a little of the characters in Kerouac’s On The Road, a throwback to the beat hipster days where everything was cool – he seemed like he was sensing everything around him for the first time, in a feral sort of way. Hipster Jack told me that we were cool, unlike the hotel operators in Winter Park, who’d booted them out the night before. “They were so uptight”, he said; perhaps “uptight” is a Boulder-ism for “concerned about their other guests and their property”.
Jane was as nice as she could be, but she had no boundaries and absolutely no sense of propriety. I made sure I locked the bathroom door in our living quarters if I had business to do, because she would have tracked me down, barged in and had a conversation with me as I sat on the throne, if the mood so struck her. I always tell our guests to make themselves at home – and I mean that they do – but to take it to the literal context that Jane & Jack did has me thinking of saying to future guests, “make yourself at home, assuming your home isn’t currently the zoo.”

The restaurant wasn’t open that night, so we didn’t have to endure any more of Jane and Jack’s antics in the dining room. I don’t know where they ate – maybe down at the river where they caught fish with their hands and cooked them over a sage-stoked fire. During this respite from their loony presence, I welcomed a French family of four, two adults and two small children, who spoke not a word of English. The mother had a French/English dictionary, and pointed to English phrases – “we would like a room”, “we are very tired”, etc. We have only one room with two beds, and it adjoins the John Lennon room, but is separated by a door. “I’ll put you in ‘Phyllis’, our room with two full beds”, I tell them. They wanted a room with two beds – they we’re absolute about this; as absolute as someone can be who can’t verbalize but can only point at phrases in a book. Not even having to read further, you know what a cataclysmic boner this was, putting these poor, tired Frenchies in the room next to our sage smoking honeymooners. I can now picture the mother frantically paging through her French/English dictionary in the middle of the night, looking for the English equivalent of “When can I expect you to quit howling like a dog?”, or “Yes, we too wish God would help us!!”

I was up and out in the lobby very early the next morning, maybe 6:30 AM, and I saw a note on our check-in desk from our French guests that said, “We are eating breakfast, we will be back to pay”. Very shortly, they were in our lobby, looking as if not only they hadn’t slept, but they were up all night experiencing hell and anguish known only to the souls of the eternally damned; I’m certain that they experienced no less. The women pointed to a phrase in the book that said “our neighbors were noisy, we did not sleep” – I swear this phrase was in the book, as if this is something that foreigners commonly experience when traveling in the US. I apologized profusely, saying “sorry, sorry, sorry”, using my best French accent. I also didn’t charge them for their room. My biggest regret was that I didn’t speak French, as I would have loved to have heard their description of the carnal carnage that was occurring throughout the previous night in the adjacent room. I’m also grateful, and still a little surprised, that the family, including the two children, didn’t try to strangle me.

Jane and Jack finally checked out after a joint shower in one of our bathrooms. If you’ve seen the showers in our bathrooms, you’re now scratching your head in wonder as to how anyone could, or would want to, share a joint shower. You might also be wondering how I knew they took a joint shower? Trust me, everyone within three blocks of the hotel knew they took a joint shower.
I actually stood outside and watched them drive off, waving not so much a “goodbye” wave, but a “shoo-fly” wave, as I wanted to make damn sure that they were indeed gone from our hotel, our town and our lives. But they aren’t totally gone from our lives – their memory lives on in our psyche with every mention of Boulder or every whiff of someone else’s BO, and in reality through the permanent essential sage oil stain that they left on the pillow sham in the Lennon room. Seriously – Oxy-Clean, Spray n’Wash, hypnosis therapy and plenty of Dr. Bombay, we’ve tried it all; there’s nothing that will remove the memory, or the stain, of Hipster Jack & Boulder Jane.