Whiteout: Lost In Aspen

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Conover spent two years … hobnobbing his way into the heart of a city most outsiders think has no heart. He had loads of fun, almost lost his soul, and managed to escape the experience to write [this] fascinating book.

—The New York Times Book Review

Impudent and comic … There’s more than snow on Aspen’s hills in this saucy travel guide.

—People

A thoughtful, piercing look into the town we call Glamour Gulch … sure to be hailed as the first serious look at a town that has become an icon of wealth, fame, self-infatuation and hedonism.

—Rocky Mountain News

A funny, caustic view of life among the … lotus-eaters.

—Business Week

It’s not often that you read a travel book in which you worry that the author’s soul is in danger. The result is Conover’s funniest book yet, and one that has much to say about our country in the 1990s.

—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

A fine, entertaining ode to the new ski season … Aspen’s hypocrisy, ostentation and plain old weirdness are … hilariously documented. For the reader, it’s a ride worth taking.

—Dallas Morning News

Conover is one of our most original and intelligent journalists … Even as [he] takes on the Aspen icons who made the town into the circus it now undeniably is, he finds himself getting sucked in. It’s the easy life that hooks him, the skiing and the women, the mountain biking and the hard-edged, new-age affluence, the ‘specialized world offering much that the outside world did not.’

—L.A. Reader

WHITEOUT

Lost in Aspen

TED CONOVER

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Smashwords Edition

Copyright 1991, 1993 by Ted Conover

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1991.

Portions of this work appeared in different form in Smart magazine and Aspen Magazine.

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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Henry Holt & Company, Inc.: Nothing Gold Can Stay from The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1923, Copyright 1969 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Copyright 1951 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt & Company, Inc.

Christine Lavin: Excerpt from the lyrics to Nobody’s Fat in Aspen from the album Future Fossils (Philo/Rounder Records, One Camp Street, Cambridge, MA 02140). Copyright 1985 by Christine Lavin, Flip-a-Jig Tunes/Rounder Music ASCAP. Reprinted by permission.

MCA Music Publishing: Excerpt from A Pirate Looks at Forty, words and music by Jimmy Buffett. Copyright 1974, 1978 by Duchess Music Corporation. Rights administered by MCA Music Publishing, a division of MCA Inc., NY, NY 10019. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission.

Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.: Excerpts from Take It Easy by Jackson Browne and Glenn Frey. Copyright 1972 by Swallow Turn Music. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission.

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Cover design by Tatiana Villa.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.

Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

Table of Contents

I. They Call Me Mellow Yellow

II. In the Temple of the Silly Gods

III. His Rocky Mountain Highness

IV. Changing Times

V. Willing Seduction

VI. A Positive Difference on the Planet

VII. The Chances You Take

VIII. You Cannot Find a Finer Home

IX. Nothing Gold Can Stay

About the Author

Ted Conover was raised in Colorado and lives in New York City. Whiteout, Coyotes, and Newjack were named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. Newjack won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was a nominated finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. Further information about Ted Conover is available on his web site at www.tedconover.com.

Also by Ted Conover

The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World

Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing

Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants

Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes

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TO MY MOTHER, KATIE CONOVER

and

TO MY FATHER, JERRY CONOVER

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Nine days I drifted on the teeming sea

before dangerous high winds. Upon the tenth

we came to the coastline of the Lotos Eaters,

who live upon that flower. We landed there

to take on water. All ships’ companies

mustered alongside for the mid-day meal.

Then I sent out two picked men and a runner

to learn what race of men that land sustained.

They fell in, soon enough, with Lotos Eaters,

who showed no will to do us harm, only

offering the sweet Lotos to our friends—

but those who ate this honeyed plant, the Lotos,

never cared to report, nor to return:

they longed to stay forever, browsing on

that native bloom, forgetful of their homeland.

I drove them, all three wailing, to the ships,

tied them down under their rowing benches,

and called the rest: "All hands aboard;

come, clear the beach and no one taste

the Lotos, or you lose your hope of home."

—HOMER, THE ODYSSEY, BOOK NINE,

TRANSLATED BY ROBERT FITZGERALD

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There were not so many of these homeless people in your time. But now they are part of life here. Do they frighten me? On the whole, no ... It is the roaming gangs I fear, the sullen-mouthed boys, rapacious as sharks, on whom the first shade of the prison house is already beginning to close. Children scorning childhood, the time of wonder, the growing time of the soul.

And on the other side of the great divide their white cousins soul-stunted too, spinning themselves tighter and tighter into their sleepy cocoons. Swimming lessons, riding lessons, ballet lessons … children of paradise, blond, innocent, shining with angelic light, soft as putti. Their residence the limbo of the unborn, their innocence the innocence of bee grubs, plump and white, drenched in honey, absorbing sweetness through their soft skins. Slumbrous their souls, bliss-filled, abstracted.

—J.M. COETZEE, AGE OF IRON

Acknowledgments

This book had many midwives. Above all I wish to thank Margot Guralnick, Jay Leibold, and Lanette Smith for their time and care in helping me choose the words. David Rosenthal, my editor, was wise, profane, and indispensable, as usual. Mary Eshbaugh Hayes, Gib Gardner, Karen Chamberlain, Lauretta Bonfiglio, Elizabeth Kaplan, and Terry McDonell found or gave me work, for which I’m grateful. Other help in Aspen came from Paul Andersen, Paul Chesley, Tina Collen, Jill Uris, Leon Uris, Jody Guralnick and Michael Lipkin, Don Stuber, Tukey Koffend, Bo Persiko, Janie Bennett, Fritz Benedict, Hal Clifford, Robin Scarlett, Stacy Standley, Julie Peters, Nancy Pfister, and Bruce Berger and his sweet piano. I also greatly benefited from the ideas of Rick Larson, Seth Lloyd, Simon Boughton, Margo Conover, Mark Stevens, Jacquelyn Wonder, Melora Wolff, John Thorndike, and Rand Cooper. Raymond and Moana Beim, Elizabeth and David Beim, Estelle Guralnick, Brad and Ruth Segal, Judy Stein, and Rebecca Buechler aided me in other generous ways. Sterling Lord, my agent, has been behind me from the start.

Much of this book was written at The Writers Room in New York City; I and numerous others are grateful to the people who support it.

To protect their privacy, I have changed the names and a few particulars of the stories of others I got to know in Aspen. Theirs is still, in many ways, a small town. Neither they nor any of those listed above bear responsibility for the pages that follow; mistakes, in fact or judgment, are mine alone.

Chapter I

They Call Me Mellow Yellow

The snow fell. The wind blew. Gusts from over the frozen hedge carried the sounds of people having fun and the smell of a hot tub. Young men made jokes and young women laughed; all I could see over the hedge was steam rising through a spotlight. But I could imagine them, naked, surrounded by bubbles, perspiration on their foreheads, warm except for the wind on their faces and the beer in their hands.

I bent over the engine of the cab. The daytime driver, Herb, had parked away from a streetlight, so under the hood it was completely dark. Checking the oil before beginning my shift was a nightly ritual, but normally I could see and my hands weren’t frozen. The dipstick eluded me, and the engine still felt hot: Herb must have worked the full twelve hours.

The flashlight was missing, which meant that Richard, who leased us the Chevy Suburban, had borrowed it again. I tried to light a match, but the wind blew it out. Over the hedge, somebody popped open another beer can. The oil check was an operation you couldn’t perform with gloves on. Finally, I located the dipstick. I wiped it off with some newspaper, spent another five minutes relocating the hole, and then stuck it back in for the measurement. Next, opening the driver’s door with one hand to turn on the dome light, I leaned inside with the dipstick—down two quarts, as usual. There was a case of oil in the back deck.

I couldn’t find anything to protect my hand from the hot oil filler cap, so I sacrificed the end of my parka sleeve. I got a grip on the cap, unscrewed it, and—shit—dropped it. Somewhere into the engine. I tipped in the first quart of oil and started feeling gingerly around the distributor cap, the spark-plug cables, down by the alternator. Nothing. I looked under the cab, onto the packed snow of the parking space. Not there. I would have to reach back further, which effectively sacrificed the front of my parka to the accumulated grime of the front grille.

I didn’t know what these parts of the engine were, but I knew my numbing hands might not be able to register if they were hot, and this worried me. I moved them around lightly and tentatively, blind. In the meantime, I could hear splashing and the slapping of bare feet on wet concrete—the action was picking up poolside. More beer cans were popped open, though the smell of oil on my hands made it harder to imagine drinking one. Here, Sally, catch! From the corner of my eye I saw a Frisbee thrown from a balcony and heard it skitter across the deck. Moments later, a voice from the balcony seemed to be calling to me.

Hey, bro’! Can you toss us the Frisbee?

I straightened my back and looked around. The Frisbee had traveled over the hedge, maybe carried by the wind, and landed not far away. I considered the Frisbee. In weather as cold as this, I happened to know, a tap from above can shatter a Frisbee. The Frisbee looked wet, and it was probably warm, from having been in the tub, but in a couple of moments it would be very cold.

Stalling, I cupped my hands and blew in them to warm them up, trying not to touch my face because they were dirty.

Dude! The Fris’!

With my half-frozen claws, I got a clumsy grip on the disk. I thought about it for a moment and then sent it flying back over the hedge, motor oil around the edge.

Thanks, blood. Young white people, on vacation. You were their driver. You worked for them, and were best off to remember it.

I gave up on the oil filler cap and stuffed a wad of newspaper tightly into the opening. With more newspaper and my pants leg,

I wiped my oily hands, then started up the car and turned on the heat. It was 6:30 P.M., time to go to work, and I was a mess. I turned on the cab radio and was reassured to hear the voice of my favorite dispatcher, the link between me and the others of my trade.

K-ninety-one, signing on, I said, grasping the microphone with some difficulty.

Hello, stranger, said Susan. Why not shoot the Port?

Ten-four. Another night in Aspen.

*

From the beginning, I had some ill intent. Not a grudge, really, because there was nothing personal between me and Aspen, but a bad feeling, let’s call it, about the town and what it represented. To be skeptical about Aspen, it seemed to me, was to take a position against hype and elitism. It was to endorse traditional values of my state, like neighborliness and a dislike of pretension, and to eschew trendiness, in-crowds, and the influence of cities like New York and Los Angeles.

I grew up skiing at a publicly owned area, an hour and a half from Denver, called Winter Park. My ski club, with hundreds of kids in it, was called the Eskimos, and the Eskimo train left Denver every Saturday morning during the season for Winter Park and returned at night. The train was hot and crowded and noisy, but we learned how to ski. Aspen was for people with their own ski houses, for people from out of state, for people of means.

Downhill skiing, at the time, was still a fairly new sport. Whether in Aspen or Winter Park, it was about the outdoors, about exercise, about speed and discipline and fun. Those were days of Arlberg straps, wooden skis, and lace-up boots. As years went by, though, skiing changed. Those who promoted skiing—the resorts, the developers, the equipment manufacturers—came up with a couple of different ideas to attach to skiing. One had to do with life-style and status: A certain kind of person skied, we learned—a leisured, upscale person. And another was eternal youth. A full-page advertisement placed in a magazine by the newly constituted Colorado Tourism Board pictured a guy riding on a double chair lift with his husky. Your request for a return to childhood, read the headline, has been granted.

It may be hard to imagine this seductive advertisement irritating anybody, but I grew up in Colorado. Colorado, at some point during my teenage years, came to recognize that in skiing and ski promotion lay riches; and Colorado, a state barely a hundred years old that until recently had been concerned with mining, farming, ranching, and some summer sightseeing, decided it was going to be about fun. Colorado became tourist-hungry.

In the sixties, seventies, and eighties, Aspen and I, both young, developed and grew older. Aspen during these years became a sort of paradigm for Rocky Mountain tourism: a small mountain town that built on its mining roots, kept its soul, promoted the arts, and attracted skiers from around the world. People in other parts of Colorado, including many of my parents’ friends, were worshipful of Aspen: its tastefulness, its reputation. It seemed to be that rarest of things, a cosmopolitan small town. Having a stake in Aspen said something about you that was good.

But Aspen was hyped, and hype distorts. Whereas I grew up and learned about a larger world during those years, Aspen, it seemed to me, never did. Though open to the outside, Aspen remained childlike, concerned with itself, spoiled with lots of money and attention. A core of caring Aspenites banded together in the seventies and tried to gain some control over what was happening to their home, but the ethos of Aspen—what Aspen promoted—was anti-responsibility. The town was, in essence, a resort; it was about pleasure and escape. In Aspen, Peter Pans could find a Never-Never Land.

If Aspen was the paradigm, I thought, was this where we all were heading? By the early 1980s, the perennial trickle of movie stars swelled into a flood, and the town was drawing the very, very wealthy. In 1983, as I returned from several months of freight-hopping around the West and sat down to write a book about life among railroad hoboes, I read in The Denver Post that in Aspen, a town of six thousand full-time residents, more million-dollar homes had been sold in the past year than in Denver, a city of 1.8 million. In 1986, when I returned from a year of work and travel among illegal immigrants from Mexico, I noticed that Aspen had gained equal billing with Denver on USA Today's national weather map. Over Christmas a year or two later, sixty to sixty-five private jets were crowding Sardy Field, Aspen’s tiny airport. People I met on trips out of state, or out of the country, would say things like, You’re from Colorado? Oh, we ski in Aspen! as if Aspen had anything to do with life in the rest of the state.

At the same time, I was curious. Aspen was like a pretty, rich girl with a reputation for being bad. Though unsuitable for the long term, you might want to go out with a girl like that. In 1988, I was struggling with a first novel in Denver and looking for distractions. When I heard that my friend Alex had bought the Mellow Yellow Taxi Company, an Aspen institution, I thought perhaps I’d found one. Now, there was a way I could see myself in Aspen, I thought— as a working stiff, a witness to the seamy underside. Nighttime cab driving would be even better (i.e., worse), and nighttime cab driving during high season would be better yet. As a friend of mine who had lived there liked to say, Winter is when the toilet bowl of Aspen overflows and fertilizes the town for the next year. He was referring to all the money that businesses took in, but it seemed to me the metaphor had a broader meaning.

I kept my apartment in Denver, in case things didn’t work out. But the thought of Aspen had me hooked. Maybe I could write about it; but if not, I would still have had some fun. I went to Aspen on a blind date, to see how far I could get. I went to sample an exotic and unknown flavor. The possibility that such an adventure could cost me scarcely entered my mind.

Shoot the Port meant go to Sardy Field, where cabbies spent much of their day (or night). The airport was Aspen’s front door, the ceremonial entry to the town. For years the main gateway was Highway 82, the two-lane road from downvalley. But Killer 82, so named because of the narrow, treacherous curves that claimed several lives a year, now functioned mainly as a service entrance. Skyrocketing housing prices in Aspen had turned most workers into commuters, forcing them to live downvalley, in towns like Basalt and Carbondale. The long lines of workers’ cars and pickup trucks clogged the uphill lane of 82 at dawn, the downhill lane at dusk, while overhead passed the commuter planes and private jets carrying tourists, absentee owners, and locals of the employer class.

In fact, the two entryways came uncomfortably close to touching at the runway’s western end. There, incoming planes, having just passed, by the reckoning of most passengers, rather too near to a mountain on one side of the narrow upper valley, buzzed Highway 82 seconds before touching down. If you happened to be in a car at the wrong time and hadn’t seen it coming, the shadow and the roar would make your heart race. At night, you could usually see the lights of the plane from a distance, from down the valley, eerily slow until the instant they flashed overhead and revealed the fuselage. It was like a visitation of the future on the past, this strafing of the highway by pricey small planes—and in the high season it happened, on the average, every five minutes.

Awaiting me curbside at the front of the taxi queue were two women and perhaps twelve pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage. Staying a long time? I asked with a smile. The bags, fifty cents additional each, were fine with me.

Just a week, one of them replied in a soft French accent. I opened the door for them.

Ingratiating yourself with customers is easier in a resort town, because there is a mutual understanding that they know little and you know a lot. As the first local they encounter, you can become a sort of one-man welcoming committee. They would tell you the name of their condo, and you would say, Where are y’all from? Los Angeles, they replied. They were blond, lovely, foreign. You are French?

Yes, we work for Chanel. It is all right that we wear our furs here?

All right?

Yes—zere is no law?

I laughed and then they laughed. "No, you don’t have to check your furs at the airport. The referendum failed, and it was only over whether furs should be sold here, anyway. Some people don’t like them, but there is no law."

Oh good. You know the Paradise club? I couldn’t tell which one was asking, because neither was really in the rearview mirror, but it didn’t matter.

Sure, the High Altitude Paradise. Do you want to go there? Oh yes, she said emphatically. Our friends told us all about it. I pictured them at the Paradise, your basic downstairs dance club except for the fact it was in Aspen. They would, I felt, be a sensation at the Paradise. What else, where else should we go?

I told them their other choices and about some of the restaurants.

They wanted to know everything about Aspen, from snow conditions (three inches yesterday) to which areas we were passing (Buttermilk Mountain is on the right—it’s for beginners and intermediates—and up behind it is Aspen Highlands, a bit tougher. Aspen Mountain rises directly above town, where we're headed—locals call it Ajax, after an old mine up there) to what elevation we were at (8000 feet).

Oh, and every alcoholic drink you have up here counts for about one and a half drinks at sea level—they’re about 50 percent stronger at this altitude, which is about the only way you’re going to save any money staying in Aspen.

It was the Aspen primer, which I repeated maybe a dozen times a day. To the left and back, uphill a ways, is Starwood—that’s where John Denver lives, where Claudine Longet—French, right?—shot her lover, Spider Sabich, the ski racer in ’76. We were driving up the Roaring Fork Valley, at the top of which Aspen is perched. Highway 82 continued on through town, snaking its way up to the 12,095-ft. summit of Independence Pass. But the pass was so treacherous—with the road barely twelve feet wide in spots, and huge drop-offs that made it subject to avalanches—that it was closed from November to May or so, turning Aspen into a cul-de-sac and adding to the sense of Shangri-la.

Driving up 82, you wound through a couple of small canyons, passed across large meadows, spanned chasms with Maroon and Castle Creeks far beneath and, at the city’s limit, passed Aspen’s most pretentious little sign: The town’s sister cities, it announced, were Chamonix, France; Davos, Switzerland; and Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. Immediately, then, you found yourself, with a sudden zigzag of the road, on Main Street, Aspen, Colorado. It was beautiful at night, and my passengers aahed.

Before us lay a wide concourse, gently sloping down, snow-packed white and glittering with old-fashioned gas-style streetlights, which someone thought it wouldn’t be too hokey to wrap in white lights and pine boughs. The miners who founded Aspen had great hopes, I noted; Aspen had a main street fit for a metropolis. It was the longest street in town and by far the widest, a sort of Park Avenue of the Rockies. Main Street, in fact, had been laid out to line up exactly with majestic 12,953-foot Mt. Sopris, the peak at the end of the Elk Range that could be seen the length of the valley.

When it wasn’t too polluted, that is. Yes, even Aspen had air pollution, among the worst of any city in Colorado. At night it became invisible, but in daylight you could see it from up on the mountain, looking down from the slopes. It was polluted in the old days, too, with all the silver smelters and coal-fired steam trains. But modern Aspen had pollution of a unique and appropriate sort. Some of it was car exhaust, but a bigger part was smoke from condominium fireplaces, dust kicked up by the gravel used on icy roads and, most pungent, restaurant grill emissions. On one block it was the smell of steaks, the next one, mesquite or Chinese. This was a town where the dirty air could make you hungry.

We saw a police car, and I told the women about the passenger I had from Michigan who lost twenty dollars on a bet to his friend that the police car they’d passed couldn't have been a Saab. He was wrong. The department had seven of them, Saab 9000’s, about $30,000 each. He had neglected to realize that on entering Aspen, he was really entering a sort of fourth dimension. Yes, those city buses were free, and the racks on the side were for skis; in the summer, they put bike racks on the front. The British Aerospace 142 jet they had arrived on looked just like a Boeing 767 shrunk down to about one fifth of the size. It was a parade of toyland vehicles.

Finally, I pointed out to my passengers other landmarks: the historic Hotel Jerome, at Main Street and Mill, Aspen’s main intersection and site of its first traffic light, in 1973; the post office— important, like the airport, as a link to the outside world and similarly equipped with solar-energy panels; the headlights of Sno-Cats grooming the runs way up Aspen Mountain, which met the town at the gondola building and Little Nell Hotel. That was the main stuff, and certainly enough of an introduction for the moment. Other things, they would soon learn for themselves. How icy-cold the water came out of the taps, for example—mountain-stream cold. How fast the sun could burn at this altitude, with everything white. How men and women would not be afraid to look at each other on the street here: so often, I had found, women in Aspen would hold your gaze, instead of breaking it. How they would love it here and want to belong.

It felt good to offer information, to feel like a friend of two such pretty women. I drove them first to a real estate office, where they picked up their condo keys from a guy who knew two or three phrases of flirtatious French and offered to show them around later, and then on to the condo. They were crestfallen to see it was not a very nice building. It was on a busy corner, and they were on the top floor, without an elevator. I offered to help carry the bags up, which was beyond the call of duty. Oh no! cried Nicole when she opened the door. The room was minuscule, a studio. They had gotten it from a travel agent. The beds were the fold-out type and would just about fill the available space when extended. They had been misled, but had paid in advance. I said not to worry, they’d be spending all their spare time at the Paradise club anyway. They gave me a small tip.

I called in 10-7 and decided to cruise downtown to the cab stand. It was disappointing, back in the cab. Eager newcomers could elevate a local like me, make him feel important because of all he knew. But now, even if I were to meet them in the Paradise, offer to buy them drinks, they would know I was just a cab driver. And they did not overdraw their accounts in L.A. to come to Aspen and meet a cab driver. Working in Aspen encouraged you to be unrealistic, by dangling beautiful treats in front of your face, like carrots in front of horses. And somehow, in Aspen, you were dumb enough that the carrot would make you go.

To be an Aspen cabbie is to be, in one sense, an official voyeur. No one else sitting in his car at the end of one of Aspen’s cobbled pedestrian malls, lights out, night after night, would be above suspicion. But as a cabbie, it’s your business to be parked where the people are, waiting for a fare, and if you’ve got nothing better to do than sit back and stare through the windshield, nobody’s going to fault you for it. An occasional flick of the wiper button kept the windshield free of evening snow, and the warm wind of the defroster kept everything clear and cozy.

It wasn’t simply people-watching—it was more like spectating at a parade, Aspen at night. During season it was mainly the tourists walking by, and many had come to be somebody else for a while. Here, the part of the stockbroker that really wanted to be a ski instructor came out; here, the lawyer could shed the corporate straight-lacing and try another role. It showed in their clothes: outrageously bright colored, outrageously revealing, or outrageously expensive, clothes that would be hard to wear anywhere else. Recreation comes from the Latin recreare—to re-create (oneself). From the taxi, you got to see people as they thought they ought to be.

The Beach was a nickname that carried over from the summer season, when a gurgling fountain, shorts, and tanning oil made the taxi stand into something like a lifeguard post. Winter or summer, from there you could see them all: the rich and famous, the rich and obscure, the young and the restless, the domestic and the foreign, the blond and the bleached blond. As a taxi driver, the Beach was a good place to find yourself midevening as the people you had taken to dinner beginning around 6 P.M. reemerged in search of a ride home.

The watching got better later—at around ten or ten-thirty, by which time the more sedate couples were headed home to heal the wounds of the day’s skiing and the restless were preparing to drink and dance. As the clubs geared up, sidewalks and pedestrian malls came alive. Moderate cover charges made switching back and forth between clubs popular, and all the best ones were within about three blocks of each other: the Paragon, the Paradise, Andre’s, Club Andiamo, the Tippler, the Caribou Club.

On the Beach, to a driver, there were two worlds: the outside world, of people on the mall, and the inside world—the world through your cab radio. The radio was where your mind was: You got to hear who else was on duty, where they were going, what the roads were like there. It bound drivers together, in a loose way: our names became numbers (K-91, K-10, K-24—up to fifteen of us or so on a busy night), and other familiar words turned into code, which only the drivers, never the passengers, could understand.

As a driver, you always listened to the radio, no matter where you were. And time at the Beach, between fares, was always best if Susan was the dispatcher.

A San Francisco debutante and daughter of a diplomat, Susan had come to Aspen in the sixties, when doing so was still an act of rebellion. She purchased a Checker cab, painted it a blue metal-flake, and became the first female driver in town. Now a good-looking forty-five or so, she was the grande dame of Mellow Yellow cab drivers, a sexy sort of mother-figure with a raspy smoker’s voice and quick wit. A fixture at places like the Midland Bar in Basalt, a working-class bistro where she collected cover charges and improved the general atmosphere, she was, as dispatcher, sympathetic, efficient, and knowledgeable, anything but all business. She was the first person in Aspen I liked.

I need some vitamin C and a new psyche, she announced to all the drivers. Somebody radioed in to tell her of a magazine called New Psyche. Then maybe there’s hope, she said.

An hour or two later, she came on the air again, laughing. I’m sorry—it’s Letterman, she explained. He’s got the guy from the zoo on again. Big birds. A small TV kept the dispatchers amused between calls. There was a brief silence as one of the drivers radioed in a thought. "Yeah, the mating call of the turkey, we