KEEP UP ON DENVER ARTS AND CULTURE AT WESTWORD.COM/ARTS CULTURE Paging Through History ERIKA T. WURTH’S WHITE HORSE CAPTURES A DENVER THAT IS GOING, GOING, GONE. BY TEAGUE BOHLEN There’s a moment in Erika T. Wurth’s new novel, White Horse, that encapsulates just how important Denver is to its narrative. Especially the Denver that Generation X knew, the one that’s nearly gone now, with only a few hold- outs to remind us of the place that used to be. This particular moment takes place at Lakeside Amusement Park, a spot where time has frozen, where the past is still visually pres- ent. It, too, is vanishing by degrees, but Wurth captures Lakeside in all its declining beauty with a scene between the novel’s main charac- ter and her sister, who are sharing a cigarette in the shadows of the Wild Chipmunk. The main character thinks to herself that they could never get away with sneaking a smoke at Elitch’s. But at Lakeside? Part of its allure is also its danger: No one is really paying attention. That sense — that things happen in a shad- owy world that enjoys no real oversight, for good or for ill, and that people have to live with the consequences of those shadowy things in their choices and their lives, and even in their deaths — is at the core of White Horse. White Horse isn’t a Native American take on Denver; it’s a Denver novel that roams the detritus of the Mile High City with a focus that happens to be through an Indigenous lens. Its namesake saloon, the White Horse, was either a bar or a lounge, depending on what sign you encountered. The building is still there, on Alameda just east of Sheridan, but Excerpt From White Horse, by Erika Wurth I am thirteen years old when I tell my best friend to get the fuck out of my house. I’d gleefully popped my cherry earlier that year in the basement of a house on an old mattress, wine-sick but ready to get this part of my life over with. I remember there had been a toy truck underneath me as he came. I fl ung it into the darkness, listening to a child crying somewhere in the distance, sounding lost. Jaime and I were drunk on the whisky and cokes conned from men we’d chatted up in a bar in Denver. We’d hitched one 16 it closed soon after the pandemic hit, as other bars have — quietly, and without much in the way of an announcement — and is now for sale. One of Denver’s oldest drinking institutions, the White Horse opened in 1926 — smack in the middle of Prohibition, no less — and kept busy slinging drinks for nearly a century. “The White Horse was important to me not only because it was known as an Indian bar, but because it was old Denver,” Wurth says. “The book is, in a lot of ways, an homage to old Denver as it dies, the Denver that I knew.” Wurth grew up in Idaho Springs. “I was a tremendously nerdy kid,” she recalls. “I ate lunch sitting under the display case at school, to get away from the bullies. I read a ton of dragon books and ghost books. Someone once gave me a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and I read it and wondered where the dragons were. It just wasn’t interesting to me at all.” She did her undergrad at Fort Lewis Col- lege, got a scholarship to the University of Toledo for her master’s in English, and then returned to Colorado to get her Ph.D. in cre- ative writing and literature at the University of Colorado Boulder. “And they steamroll the love for things like that out of you,” she says. “If it’s a ghost, it has to be a metaphor. Sci- ence fi ction is for children, and fantasy is for babies. Horror is for weirdos. Stephen King isn’t literary. I remember arguing the other side in my classes for a long time, but in the end, I think they won. At least until now.” After earning her Ph.D., Wurth taught, splitting her time between Colorado and a simultaneous gig at Western Illinois Univer- sity. And through all that, she wrote, making a name for herself with portrayals of a gritty sort of reality. Her 2017 collection of short stories, Buckskin Cocaine, did well on the indie circuit, as did 2019’s You Who Enter Here and 2021’s Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend. But this is the fi rst of her works of fi c- tion to be offered the big-publisher push, marketed as a literary horror story, and it’s paid off: White Horse, which was just re- leased November 1, continued on page 18 Saturday night, ready for adventures of the kind that could not be had in a small town that sat at the bottom of a mountain, the trees swaying above our trailers, our dingy houses, our wild, furious hearts. We had told the men at the bar that we were in our 20s and they had laughed and said they’d love to buy us drinks, love to take us home. I’d been drawn to the taller one because he’d been wearing a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. I thought that band had gone a little soft, but they were Jaime’s favorite band, and I still liked what this minor metal-head, and his friend, who laughed like a donkey, seemed to be offering. What they were offering: experience. Erika Wurth standing in front of her book’s namesake, the now-closed White Horse. Even at that age, I’d learned that I liked to work my way in slow, though I was never what you would call subtle. I knew what I wanted, and they had it. A little cash, enough for drinks. Packs of cigarettes poking out of their tight, slightly dirty jeans. The hint of an adventure that held just a little bit of danger. If I was honest with myself, it was espe- cially the last thing. This was the time that I learned to test myself, test my limits, fi nd out what I could do and come back from, what I could do and survive. I had decided that we would go home with them, when one of them asked me what it was like to live in Idaho Springs. There was something about his tone. Mocking. Superior. Cruel even. Up until then we’d been having a great time. Bonding over metal. Arguing, my long, brown hand slamming playfully down on the arm of the man who’d been supplying us with cigarettes all night. I’d been wondering what his thighs looked like under those tight jeans. What it would be like to get on top of them. What do you mean by that? I asked, my eyes going fl at as a cat’s. He blinked rapidly. He was dark-eyed, tall, long-haired. I remember thinking when we fi rst let them approach us that he was the kind of man I would’ve wanted as a boyfriend, if I was the kind of person who would ever want that. Even then, I continued on page 18 NOVEMBER 3-9, 2022 WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | LETTERS | CONTENTS | westword.com EVAN SEMÓN
