I wake up to a text from 12:33 a.m. that says, “After hours dub step show? Hahaha,” because Cam Omlid didn’t want to sleep last night. Or any night, for that matter. In first grade, he'd be up until 4 a.m. reading, by James Michener, before moving on to Stephen King, whose work I can’t recommend as a sleep aid for elementary school kids. Then in high school, he started smoking pot to help him quiet his mind. Now, he never wants to leave his bar.
“I had friends who went to Fountain Valley School, the school that Bob Weir attended,” Omlid explains. “A lot of my friends got introduced to that Grateful Dead kind of world and that style of music, and it bled through to me. People were giving me tapes of DMB" — he pauses to explain that it stands for Dave Matthews Band, as if we weren’t the same age, the last generation of high-schoolers immersed in the monoculture of media.
Kitty-corner from the Zumba and self-defense studio Urban Survival Fitness, the facade of Mr. A’s proclaims it"Denver’s Friendliest Lounge” in a way that makes"Denver’s friendliest" appear ironic. I assure you, it is not. We’re the only two at the bar, but there are eight guys in the back playing an emphatic game of dominoes. The force with which tiles are played reminds me of the sound a cue ball makes when it hits a concrete floor.
This bar is an escape for Omlid, a place to “get away from people I know,” he says, because everyone knows him. Later, he’ll take me to the Lion’s Lair, the Squire, Pete’s Kitchen and Bar Bar. At each, he gets stopped unexpectedly more times than an ice cream truck on 4/20. Behind the bar, he finds escapism and performance all in one. “I’m here to keep everybody happy and laughing.
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