8 JUNE 22-28, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | gravitated toward shock jocks. Denver fans wanted to hear what was going on in their city. Very parochial, not a shock type of town. Did they do some outlandish stuff? Yeah, in terms of satirical bits to poke fun at celebrities and local people. But they were just doing what Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel do every night now. They were so far ahead of their time.” Still, their Denver-centric material im- posed limitations. “We had a number of opportunities to syndicate, but syndication would have changed the nature and direction of the show, because it would have had to be more nationally topical, and the strength of the show was local,” Schaffer explains. “If the Avs were on a run, they were behind it. If there was a mayoral race, they were talking about it. They were always so local, and that’s why people loved them. If you went national, you would have had to talk about what was happening in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and you would have lost the Denver audience — and they never did that. They always stayed true to their Colorado roots.” If the pond was smaller, Floorwax was undeniably one of the biggest fi shes in it. But then his world went to hell. Mental health concerns weren’t entirely foreign to Floorwax. They’d fl are up on oc- casion, then recede. But in early 2014, he ex- perienced what he characterizes as a “combo platter” of clinical depression and clinical anxiety, and he was quickly overwhelmed. “It was less than two weeks, and I couldn’t even...I couldn’t handle myself,” he remembers. “I mean, I was so fucking uncomfortable. There was so much discomfort that you didn’t want to do anything other than hang in there and survive. It wasn’t like you were going crazy. You just physically had so much discomfort that you’d trade the pain for anything.” The crisis brought not just his career, but his life, to an abrupt halt. “You couldn’t leave the house, you couldn’t go for a walk or whatever — not the way it was in the be- ginning,” he says. “You just had to sit down somewhere.” Suddenly, planting himself in front of a microphone and making amusing observa- tions for hours at a time became an impos- sibility. He didn’t suffer anything as dramatic as an on-the-air breakdown, though. Instead, he says, “one day I just didn’t go in.” Early on at the Fox, hints about Floor- wax’s disappearance were offered in lieu of explanations. Lewis, who’s still the morning host on the station and also handles color commentary for Denver Broncos games on KOA, told listeners he couldn’t address the situation because of HIPAA — a reference to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, whose wide- ranging rules include provisions restricting companies from revealing information about an employee’s medical history. Greg Foster, then the vice president/ programming for the Denver branch of iHeartMedia, shared even fewer details in response to an inquiry from Westword at the time. Foster’s email stated simply: “Floorwax is currently taking a personal leave of absence. For privacy reasons, we will not comment further.” Rumors fi lled this vacuum, with the most prevalent claiming that Floorwax was back on booze and narcotics. But in a statement Lewis read on the Fox that October, Floor- wax refuted this presumption. “I did not fall off the wagon,” he wrote. “I have been clean and sober now for thirty years and very proud of that. I did not quit my job, and iHeartMedia did not fi re me. “As you know, if you have listened to the show at all for the past 24 years, I have struggled with certain medical issues,” he continued. “I’ve openly talked about it on the radio and have made many jokes at my own expense about the issues that have plagued me for many years. I know many of you have reached out to me over the years and have said that you struggle from similar conditions.” He added: “Some of you may know that with these types of conditions, doctors will experiment with many different drugs to see what will work. Some work for a while, some don’t work at all and others can actually make things worse. This past year has been the biggest battle of my life as I continue to seek relief.” That goal remained beyond Floorwax’s reach for years. “I did not give up and all of this bullshit,” he insists. “I was fi ghting, fi ghting, fi ghting.” But as he went from doctor to doctor without success, he concedes that his frustra- tion would sometimes get the best of him. “That’s the part of not being myself totally and being sick that I have regret for,” he says. “I got pretty angry at some people. I admit that. I’m a fast reactor to anything, and it’s the same thing with that feeling inside you — anxiety or whatever. It kind of jumps out sometimes, and I’ve tried to work on that to make sure that I’m still polite.” Nonetheless, the way Floorwax’s fury over his plight manifested itself frightened many people in his orbit, especially given his fondness for fi rearms. But the only person who was ever really in danger was Floorwax himself, he says — which is why he fi nally removed weapons from the equation. “I had people come and take the pistols,” he reveals. “I said, ‘Get them out of here.’ I didn’t think I was going to do anything with them, but you know what? It hits you so hard. Sometimes in the middle of the night, it hits you so fuck- ing hard that you’ve had enough of this shit. You’ve just had enough.” But he made it through. “You have to be tough to survive what happened to me,” he says. And with a little help from ketamine. Beyond verifying that she’s treated Floorwax since 2017, Markey doesn’t divulge any facts about his diagnosis or condition. But she’s happy to share general information on ket- amine, which she considers widely misun- derstood. “One time, I met with this group of trauma-informed therapists — people of color who do yoga with gang members,” she says. “And I felt like a Karen when I talked with them, because when I said, ‘Ketamine can really help traumatized people,’ all they could think about is Elijah McClain.” While Markey understands this reaction, she sees an enormous distinction between clinical applications of the substance and what happened to McClain, who was ac- costed by Aurora cops and administered an extremely high dose of ketamine by para- medics without his knowledge or consent — actions that were subsequently addressed by the court system and the Colorado Legisla- ture. In July 2021, Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed a law banning police offi cers from telling paramedics or other medical professionals to use ketamine on individu- als; that November, McClain’s family settled a wrongful-death lawsuit for $15 million. In contrast, Markey uses much more modest amounts of ketamine only in care- fully controlled circumstances, with patients fully informed about what’s going on and closely monitored to make sure that no problems occur. “The fact that we can give it in an outpatient offi ce setting shows it’s quite safe,” she says. “We’ve never had to call 911 or get out the crash cart. Never.” Moreover, she adds, ketamine has been indispensable for “treating intractable cases: treatment-resistant depression, treatment- resistant PTSD, OCD and anxiety, and some treatment-resistant pain conditions.” The term “treatment-resistant” is key. “People don’t just walk in off the street and get ketamine,” Markey emphasizes. Rather, the drug is prescribed when more typical prescription options fall short. “Ketamine can be a godsend for people who have mostly neu- ropathic pain that other treatments haven’t helped. It works primarily on the NMDA receptor in the brain, which affects glutamate, rather than on serotonins and dopamine, like standard anti-depressants,” she points out. Some patients are given ketamine in tab- let form. But it’s administered to Floorwax intravenously, and when it hits his system, he says, “You get a sweet buzz — which is the irony of it. I haven’t taken drugs for a long, long time, but when they gave me this ketamine, I was like, ‘If this doesn’t work, okay, but I feel good when I’m in here.’” The Last Laugh continued from page 6 Steve “Mudfl ap” McGrew and Michael Floorwax are currently workshopping a podcast. “If you’re with me, it’s eventually going to end up in dick jokes.” EVAN SEMÓN
