Idiot Boys: A Memoir Chronicles Growing Up In Park Hill

‘Stupidity is Part of the Human Condition’

Introduction By Cara DeGette; Excerpts from the book by Bradley Butterfield

Way back in the 1970s and early 80s, the omnipresent helicopter parent had not yet been invented. In today’s world it’s a hard thing to envision, but the stark naked truth is that, back then, many teenagers growing up in Denver drank beer, got high, or both, in excess – behind the wheel even. Yes, including the honor roll students.

Park Hill native Bradley Butterfield’s recently self-published memoir, Idiot Boys, is at times raunchy, at times brutal, at times droll, and generally puerile. His reminisces of his experiences coming of age are sometimes heartrending. Like Butterfield’s story of the kid who wore his heavy, clunky ski boots to school, thinking it would be a cool thing to do. And he insisted they were comfortable. And wore them the whole day. Would any grown-up even let that happen at Park Hill Elementary anymore?

Here’s another near-forgotten oddity: that Denver-esque catchphrase of the 1970s, “Ways out, Man.” Ask any kid who grew up in the day, and they will know exactly how to say it, and the variations of what it meant.

Butterfield is now a respectable professor of English and a family man. Living in Wisconsin, he decided to turn his amusing coming of age stories into a book at the urging of his wife, Kim.

“Stupidity is part of the human condition, but the aggressive idiocy of boys, especially teenage boys, is something everybody has a story about, and those stories can be really funny,” Butterfield writes. “In my opinion, the best comedy comes from reality, not from slapstick or irony or satire or cheap gags, but from absurd situations we all recognize as human-all-too-human. I didn’t want my book to be an escape from reality but a confrontation with reality, so its humor is often edgy, sometimes downright uncomfortable.

“There were a lot of racial and class-based tensions in Park Hill in the seventies and early eighties, so that’s in the book, but I became really nostalgic for Park Hill while writing it. It’d been a long time since I’d left, and meditating on all these memories brought everything back to life for me: the hangouts, the business landmarks, the slang, my schools, all the parks that start with C.

“Park Hill sort of developed into one of the book’s main characters, with its own haphazard coming-of-age.”

The memoir, released last month, is available on Amazon. Some names in the book have been changed, to protect the guilty. Butterfield is hoping to make a Denver booksigning event happen in early 2016. In the meantime, here are a few excerpts from the memoir. For many Park Hillians, they offer a stark remem- brance of life back in the ‘hood – 70s style.

Exhibit #3: The Red Man

Those red bellbottom pants. They were 100% real Nylon, with stiffly creased flares and 3-inch cuffs. I’d fallen to the floor in supplication in front of my mother the moment I saw them at Woolworth’s: “These are the first pants that I’ve ever seen, that I really, really, really like, in my entire life, Mom, so . . . please!”

I put them on as soon as I got home and ran outdoors to show them off. My brothers were playing with some other kids from the neighborhood in a giant leaf pile in a yard a couple houses down. When I saw that leaf pile, I knew immediately that the thing to do was to run and take them all by surprise by jumping straight into the middle of it in my new red pants. I ran, I jumped, and then I just stood there in the middle of the leaf pile, legs spread wide, arms up, letting everyone get a gander. When I glanced down at my legs to confirm my glory, it seemed for a moment as if I were standing in two large red paper pirate hats. Nobody spoke for several seconds. I realized I hadn’t planned what to do next.

Then: “What’s with the pants?” one of the neighbor kids asked. My face warmed and suddenly I didn’t feel like being the center of attention.

“Nothing,” I said, trudging my way deliberately out of the pile. “I’ve had these.”

Despite their awkward debut, I wore my red pants every day for about a month, convinced of their secret power, until another kid at school pointed out, “You wear the same pants every day.” I’d never thought of it that way. I was mortified. As if they’d betrayed me, I never took them off their hanger again.

Apparently, however, I wasn’t finished with red clothing obsessions. I got the idea from a suntan lotion advertisement in Ski magazine (the term “sunscreen” was not yet in vogue). My new friend, John Puffer, was equally impressed by this particular ad, which featured a very serious, very tan-faced guy with a Band-Aid on his nose walking down off the mountain with his skis slung over his shoulder. He had on a pair of rugged but bright red leather ski gloves that nearly crippled me with desire. They spoke to me of Security and Prestige, and from then on my mental self-image, the way I pictured myself, was as a guy wearing red leather ski gloves, whatever the occasion. With such gloves, I would be invincible.

Poor Puffer fell in love with the Band-Aid, which in a similar ad on a later page was missing in action, revealing white skin offset by the perfect suntan. Puffer wore a tan Band-Aid to school on his pale Nordic nose, and suffered accordingly:

“Hey, what’d you do to your nose, man?”

“Huh, oh, nothing, I just sometimes wear this . . . Band-Aid.”

“Just for looks?”

“Uh . . .”

Exhibit #7: White Boy

When I was in the second grade I joined a football team called the Pirates and for awhile I was the only white kid on the team. We practiced at Skyland Park, about a mile north of our house on Montview. My mother wanted me to play on a more integrated team rather than on the mostly white Falcons who practiced a mile south of us. Before joining the Pirates, I would run around our front yard with a football pretending I was Floyd Little, the Bronco’s famous running back. I always chose the front yard in case there were talent scouts driving by (a typical idiot boy fantasy). I actually believed that I would be the star running back on the Pirates and would score lots of touchdowns, but as it turned out, there were more qualified candidates. In the three years I played for the Pirates, we won almost every game we played. The guys on our team wouldn’t even wait to be on offense to score. They’d just grab the ball right out of a guy’s hands and start knocking people down until they reached the end zone. My teammates played football like they were playing for their lives.

Exhibit #4: Billy Jack

Probably the most influential movie of my life was Billy Jack, a B-movie cult classic I managed to see six times in the theater when it played in 1971, a difficult feat for a nine-year-old back then. Billy Jack was a half-breed, karate-fighting, Vietnam vet who turned his back on the war and the white man’s world. He lived alone in a cliff dwelling on an Indian reservation, serving as guardian angel to all the reservation’s animals and its experimental hippie college. What I loved most about him though was his look. He wore a black T-shirt, jeans, a jean jacket and one of those round, black, Navajo cowboy hats with a color-beaded hatband. Oh, that, hat.

In the first scene, Bossman Possner and his boys are about to slaughter wild mustangs on Indian territory. Billy Jack’s aura precedes him. The men all stop short of firing their guns and turn around—cue the cryptic flute music—to see him ride out of the brush, rocking slowly in his saddle, reins in one hand, a Winchester rifle in the other, until his horse comes to a stop right in front of them. When he cocked that rifle, real slow, with one hand and a crank of the wrist, I was devastated, changed for life. I would later go to an experimental hippie college myself and become, in my own mind at least, a protector of the weak (i.e., a liberal), minus the karate chops. Billy Jack was the liberal superhero of the early seventies. He stood for peace and brotherhood with a swift kick in the face.

In my mind at the time … what made someone heroic was that they were cool and took their beating with style. I would gladly take a beating, I thought, never having heard of being careful what you wish for. If only I had a cool name like Billy Jack. Hmmm, Bradley Butterfield . . . Billy Jack . . . Bradley Butterfield . . . Billy Jack . . . Bradley—JAMES—Butterfield! My middle name! Bradley James! BJ!!!!! I am short for him! I am Mini-Billy Jack! I am BJ!

After telling everyone my new name, I set to work on my wardrobe. I already owned everything but the hat, but I believed deep down that it was really the hat that made him Billy Jack. And how does a little kid like me manage to find a hat like that? It was hopeless. But then, thankfully, my family took a trip down to Santa Fe where I found Billy Jack’s exact hat at some kind of street fair. It was the only one of its kind and it fit me perfectly. I nearly wept with gratitude.

When we got home I immediately set out on my bike sporting the full regalia. My gold Stingray was my steed. It had those streamers coming out of the handle grips—approximating, in my mind, a horse’s forelock and mane. I’d even acquired a toy Winchester rifle, which I learned to cock with one hand, just like Billy Jack. Whenever I’d ride past someone in their yard, I’d coast by looking straight ahead, without smiling, letting them get a good look at the hat. Then I’d cock my rifle and ride off down the block singing the Billy Jack theme song, “One Tin Soldier.”

Numbers reflect “exhibits” that are cited in the book