With the sounds of combustion engines clogging the ears of a few dozen people standing alongside West Colfax Avenue beneath Federal Boulevard, Jonathon Stalls begins to preach. “I want you to just feel it, I want you to just smell it,” Stalls says. “It’s important that we’re in this tension. To just get in the car to drive by, it doesn’t serve the whole. It doesn’t service healing. It doesn’t service injustice. It doesn’t serve what we’re doing to the planet. It doesn’t serve to only bypass what’s actually going on. So I just invite that tension with love and some fi re, because we need to love each other radi- cally — and part of that is going into the tension.” Stalls delivers these words on one of the fi rst tour events for his new book, WALK: Slow Down, Wake Up, and Connect at 1-3 Miles per Hour, just published by North Atlantic Books. An advocate since 2010 for the power of walk- ing and the dignity of people who don’t use cars to get around, he organized this event, which started outside the Corky Gonzales Library, to illustrate the thesis of his book through a powerful tool: walking. Now forty, Jonathon Stalls wasn’t always a walker. He was born in 1982 in Tampa Bay. His father, Dave Stalls, was a defensive tackle with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers who also played with the Cowboys and Raiders as well as the Denver Gold USFL team. Jonathon spent his earliest years bouncing around between Florida, California and Colorado. “My father always stayed in Denver,” he says. “Denver was always a home base.” But his parents split up when he was six, and Jonathon ended up living primarily with his mother and stepfather, who worked in the cell phone industry. The family moved around the country, from Wisconsin to Ten- nessee and West Virginia. “I moved every two years as a kid. Ideas of ground and home were hard for me; I didn’t have a lot of stability growing up,” says Jonathon. “I was shuttled around, mostly in the suburbs, in a car with my face smashed against the window.” While in middle school, he started to no- tice that when his male friends began talking about their feelings for girls, Jonathon him- self was feeling a similar attraction toward boys. But by the time he got to high school, he’d “started mastering the art of putting on all of the masks,” he says. “For me to get through the day, I had to…I had to pretend. I had to fi t in in all these dif- ferent ways.” When he was sixteen, Jonathon moved to Denver to be with his father, who’d founded a drop-in center for teens at 2109 Stout Street called the Spot. It “was basically a place for any young person kind of in the urban core — gang members, homeless teens, anybody who was moving through those streets,” he recalls. His younger sister, Tracy, was there, too, and the two spent continued on page 6 5 westword.com | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | WESTWORD SEPTEMBER 22-28, 2022 EVAN SEMÓN
