6 JUNE 22-28, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | great on stage,” Passerelli says, “and he has a really fantastic voice.” But the foundation of Floorwax’s fame was laughter. Rick Goins, also known as G- Man, the sports expert who served as a sup- porting cast member on Lewis and Floorwax for many years, puts it simply: “Wax was the funniest guy in radio for almost 25 years. And that’s not even debatable, in my opinion.” Then, almost a decade ago, Floorwax suddenly vanished from his namesake show. And he never returned. What happened? The question remains a Google favorite in Denver to this day, in part because Floorwax didn’t talk publicly about the mental health challenges he faced for years — and when he fi nally spoke to Westword in July 2018 to preview a sit-down with Peter Boyles on KNUS radio, he shied away from specifi cs. He said only that he’d been battling clinical depression but had experienced some relief thanks to treatment involving ketamine, an anesthetic that was known to recreational us- ers as Special K and became controversial locally owing to its role in the death of Elijah McClain after a horrific in- teraction with Aurora police offi cers in August 2019. Only now, nearly fi ve years later, is Floorwax ready to tell the whole story — or at least as much of it as he can recall; he admits that his memory, which was never first-rate, has declined signifi cantly. Dr. Sara Markey, a psychiatrist and medical director for Progres- sive Psychiatry, a Denver-based practice that Floorwax credits with saving his life, thinks the deterioration may stem from negative effects related to electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, one of many failed treatments prior to his becoming her patient. When asked what he thinks of this theory, however, Floorwax maintains that he never underwent ECT. Fortunately, Floorwax’s sense of humor is intact. It’s always been based on his quick wit — the ability to come up with something riot- ous on the spur of the moment. “Morning drive is the best place to do improv,” he contends. “Really, that’s all it is: improv. It’s what I do.” And now he’s doing it again. He’s currently workshopping a podcast in which he teams with G-Man and Steve “Mudfl ap” McGrew, another veteran of standup comedy who had a highly successful stint on the morning show for country radio giant KYGO from 2001 to 2009; he also manned the early shift on C&W rival The Wolf for a couple of years. Should a radio executive hear the re- sults and decide to plug the program into an outlet’s lineup, McGrew, for one, would defi nitely be game. “This is not to toot our own horns,” he says, “but Wax and I together are two monsters of Denver radio. Wax had the number-one rock show and we had the number-one country show. So putting the two funniest people on both shows together is kind of a no-brainer.” Such a gig would certainly help Floorwax from a fi nancial perspective. According to Fox, the riches earned by his client and pal are pretty much gone. “He never saved a dime of it,” he says. “He spent his income on fancy tables and chairs and lamps and heavy-duty clothing and guns and rifl es, and now he has zero income. Zero, zip, nothing, nada for fi ve years.” Floorwax is currently subsisting on So- cial Security disability payments. “I had to sell the house that I had in Bear Creek and everything else because of all the medical expenses,” he explains. “You have to start over. That’s just the way it is.” Still, he’s upbeat about recent develop- ments. He thinks the podcast is coming along well, and after two months at the Holiday Inn, he’s moving into an apartment in Capitol Hill that Fox set up for him. His current state of mind is also improved, a sharp contrast to the agony he suffered for years — pain so vivid and relentless that he had to withstand the temptation to take his own life not just once or twice, but over and over again. “I fi nally feel good,” Floorwax stresses. “It took a long time, but I fi nally feel good.” When arranging the interview with Westword, Floorwax begged off meeting at the apart- ment, which he described as “kind of a mess,” in favor of gabbing at an area park. But this idea apparently slipped his mind, and since he doesn’t drive these days, he suggests chatting on the Holiday Inn bench — not exactly the most intimate location given its proximity to a parking lot and the steady stream of tourists going in and out of the hotel. So instead we head to Clement Park, near Columbine High School, and fi nd a picnic table overlooking a lake. Once settled, Floorwax pulls out a cigar roughly the size of a baby’s arm and asks if it would be okay for him to light up. “These are called Robustos,” he says as the sweet smoke curls around him, providing the perfect atmosphere for reminiscence. His tale begins 61 years ago, when he was born in “fabulous Fargo, North Dakota” and christened Michael Steinke Jr. His father, Mike Sr., was “a biker,” he notes, and his mother, Harriet Olson, was “a brilliant jazz singer. But she never quit drinking. She was done in her early thirties, just from drinking. Too many vodka tonics. But that helped save me when I was a drunk. I saw what hap- pened to her.” He hasn’t imbibed or done drugs for decades. By the time his mother passed away, when he was in his early teens, he was living with his dad. “It wasn’t pretty around that house, so one day, the old man just came and got me,” he says. The family he joined in rural Minnesota, where Mike Sr. had moved, included three step-siblings — Chris, Robert and Carrie — and the change was positive. But in the years that followed, he developed an itch to hit the road, and at eighteen, he teamed up with some buddies and caught “the fi rst car out of town.” He wound up in Denver not because of any grand plan, but because “that’s where they were going.” Before long, he landed a job in the kitchen at the Wellington Broker, a fi ne-dining res- taurant in Glendale. He was listening to the radio at work one day when he heard about a new talent night at a club overseen by the late George McKelvey, the progenitor of Denver’s comedy scene, “where anybody could go on and do standup,” he says. “I was like, ‘You’ve got to be shitting me.’ It blew me away, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to do that.’” An aficionado of George Carlin and Cheech & Chong, he knew he was funny. “I was the class clown — plus a clown in gen- eral, since I was getting high in those days,” he says. “I’ve done everything there is to do except for needles, because my dad said, ‘You’re not going to do that, understand?’ And he was smart to say that, because I would have done it, for sure.” He’d never done standup, either, before taking part in the new talent night. “I talked about drugs and I talked about liquor and I talked about women. The big three,” he says. “And afterward, I just had a feeling that this is what I wanted to do.” For his second swing at new talent night, “I was Michael Floorwax,” he says. “I don’t know why. When they introduced me by my real name the fi rst time, it didn’t seem right. I wanted to have something different, and that was the fi rst thing that came to my mind.” Did he ever wish he’d given the new moniker more consideration? The question prompts a Floorwax guffaw. “I’ve had regrets that I didn’t think harder,” he replies, “but not about that.” The rise of Michael Floorwax was rapid. With McKelvey’s blessing, he quickly graduated from new talent night to scheduled stints at local nightspots to regional tours. At fi rst he was the opening act, but by the time he was in his early twenties, he was headlin- ing — and to promote his appearances, he started guesting on radio shows. “There’d be a morning show in every town, and every time, they’d have a host who ran the show and knew what the fuck he was doing,” he says. “Like in Cincinnati, on this station called WEBN, there was a guy named Eddie Fingers, and when I went in there, we just started going boom, boom, boom! I could tell it was different with this dude. I was cracking off a few beauties and we were crushing it, having a great time.” Among those impressed was Randy Mi- chaels, the power behind Jacor Communi- cations and a crucial fi gure in the growth of national radio conglomerates; Jacor eventu- ally merged with Clear Channel, the precursor to iHeartMedia, the largest owner of stations in the United States. Michaels asked Floorwax to meet and quickly launched him into a new career. “He was like, ‘Pick a city, and you can do whatever you want,’ which I thought was pretty cool,” Floorwax recalls. “So I said, ‘I’m staying in Denver. I like it there.’” At the Fox, a Jacor property, Floorwax was teamed with a few co-hosts, but the one who stuck was Lewis. “I thought they were the perfect radio team,” says Schaffer, who’s now best known as a sports agent; his clients have included Pro Football Hall of Fame members Barry Sanders and Jerome Bettis. “Rick was the consummate radio professional. Great timing, great set-up guy, and he also had a tremendous sense of humor, which was unusual for that role. And Wax, he was the funniest guy in Denver: clever, witty, topical and very generous — overly generous.” Goins agrees, noting that Floorwax was the type of person who’d give a valet fi fty bucks when he would have been happy with fi ve. Within months of its 1990 debut, Lewis and Floorwax was the hottest show on Den- ver radio, and its stars’ proclivity for push- ing the envelope got them branded “shock jocks,” a term associated with Stern. “Everybody tried to analogize Ricky and Michael with Howard, but that wasn’t the case,” Schaffer insists. “Denver wasn’t a community that The Last Laugh continued from page 5 continued on page 8 EVAN SEMÓN While Michael Floorwax left their successful show almost a decade ago, Rick Lewis is still on the air. “I finally feel good. It took a long time, but I finally feel good.” RICK LEWIS TWITTER
