Normally, Richard would be up there too, on auxiliary percussion, but he took the night off to tell me the story of how he came to Fort Lyon and got clean. Richard is 54 years old and had been sober for seven months, one of his longer stretches — discounting the six-year stint he did in prison. “But that was forced sobriety,” he said. He was making a choice now.
He was trying to tell me about losing his daughter but his voice kept getting drowned out by the amplified hair metal, so we exited the theater and stepped into the icy Colorado air. Somewhere beyond the women’s dorms, we heard coyotes chattering in the dark. Richard (who asked that I not use his last name, as did several others in this story) walked with a stiff splay-footed gait on account of his toes having been amputated last winter, frostbitten casualties of a drunken blackout in the snow.
I thought about the financial burdens that Richard had brought to bear on Colorado’s social infrastructure over the last decade. He had spent six years in state prison, had been in and out of jail many times for minor offenses, had taken several ambulance rides, had spent months in the hospital, had undergone intricate surgeries, and had sent a child into the foster care system.
But now Richard was with hundreds of other people like him: chronically homeless, addicted to drugs and alcohol, and taking part in a last-ditch attempt to reboot their lives. They had come from all corners of Colorado, of their own volition, to get clean at an abandoned Army fort in the middle of nowhere.
Somewhere on campus, a 12-step meeting had just wrapped up, and there were knots of people talking, enwreathed in clouds of smoke and frozen breath. Guitar licks filtered into the night through donated amplifiers. The band had moved on to Bob Seger deep cuts. This was Fort Lyon — something like a Betty Ford Center for the homeless — a radical experiment to rehabilitate some of society’s most vulnerable members.