There Was No Ned

The first thing you need to know about Todd’s trip to Colorado is that he packed nothing.

Not lightly. Nothing.

He got on a plane in Boston with his wallet, the clothes he was wearing, and no apparent awareness that Colorado had winter. When he walked off the plane in Denver, he was wearing jeans, boat shoes without socks, and probably a button-down shirt, because that was pretty much Todd’s uniform.

It was snowing.

The second thing you need to know is that, within a few hours, Todd would be sitting in the pool room of the Pioneer Inn in Nederland, high on mushrooms, while a stranger he’d met at the airport told him that he was actually my roommate Brent.

Todd had spent the entire drive into the mountains telling that stranger how much fun they were going to have fucking with Brent when Brent got home.

This happened in January 1994. I was twenty-eight and living on Caribou Ranch outside Nederland, Colorado.

I’d moved there with a woman named Margo. Her mother had managed the recording studio at Caribou Ranch and knew the owners, which was how we got the house. Margo eventually moved back down to Boulder, but somehow I stayed. Once I was living on Caribou Ranch, there was no fucking way I was leaving voluntarily.

The owners rented a few houses scattered around the property, mostly because they didn’t want them sitting empty. The rent was ridiculously cheap, and people who got one tended to stay forever. We had access to the back half of the ranch and regularly wandered into places where we probably weren’t supposed to be, including the abandoned Bluebird mining town.

After Margo left, Brent and Reggie moved in.

I’d met Brent on my first day in Boulder. He helped me move, we went out that night, and we’d been friends ever since. He was a CU Boulder art student with the exact combination of creativity, commitment, and poor judgment required for the story that follows.

Reggie was older than us, a Black poet living on Caribou Ranch in the mid-1990s. He was unusual even for Boulder, which was filled with people working very hard to be unusual.

Todd lived in Boston. I knew him from our fraternity at Purdue, and we’d stayed connected. He ran a company called Continental Trade that bought laptops and other computer equipment in bulk and resold it to businesses. This was the mid-1990s, when a surprising number of companies made money moving large piles of questionable computers from one company to another. Todd was good at it.

He was doing well for a young guy. He was also deeply insecure and drank far beyond his ability to control what happened next.

A lot of us probably drank enough to qualify as alcoholics in those years. I had nights and weekends that don’t make me look especially good. But I could usually pull myself back. Maybe I didn’t control myself very well, but I still felt like I controlled the drinking.

The drinking controlled Todd.

Some amount of luck may be all that kept me from ending up in the same place.

Todd went on genuine lost weekends. He’d lose pieces of time, wreck relationships, and wake up having no idea what he’d said or done. He also called me constantly, usually drunk and usually at about two in the morning Colorado time.

Sometimes he wanted to brag about his company or how much money he was making. Sometimes he was out with strangers and would put me on the phone.

“Billy, tell this guy who I am.”

I knew what he wanted. I was supposed to explain that Todd owned a company, made all this money, and was a powerful guy who should be taken seriously. I never knew how to do it. I’d repeat some weak version of whatever he’d just said—yes, Todd owned a company; yes, he was doing well—and then stop talking.

He kept calling me for this purpose even though I never gave him what he wanted. Maybe he didn’t have anybody else who would take the call.

When he called Colorado, he wanted to talk to everyone. He’d ask for Brent and Reggie, brag to them, and tell them how crazy things were in Boston. The call might be entertaining for five minutes. Then we’d start passing the phone around because none of us could take much more.

Todd wasn’t a terrible person. He was a drunk, insecure young guy who desperately wanted people to be impressed by him. He had enough money to make his worst impulses possible and enough confidence while drinking to mistake those impulses for charisma.

Naturally, I fucked with him.

A few years earlier, when I was still living in Boulder, I’d bought a new computer. It was probably a 486, which at the time seemed like technology from the future. I didn’t have internet access yet, but it had a modem and could send faxes.

I used some primitive Microsoft drawing program to make pictures that looked like they’d been drawn by an angry child: crude crosses, broken hearts, and threatening messages.

TODD, YOU HAVE A BLACK HEART.

I’M GOING TO GET YOU.

Then I faxed them to his office.

Todd began trying to determine which child was threatening him and whether he’d slept with the kid’s mother. Every time another fax arrived, he called me.

“Billy, I just got another one.”

He’d describe it and ask what I thought was happening. I’d help him investigate a mystery I’d created while sitting at my computer in Boulder.

I don’t remember ever telling him it was me.

So this wasn’t the first time. It was just the first time in person.

He’d been threatening for months to come to Colorado.

“I’m coming out there. We’re gonna go fucking crazy.”

We never knew whether he meant it. Todd could announce plans at two in the morning with the certainty of a man addressing Congress, then remember none of them the next day.

One Saturday morning, Brent, Reggie, and I were sitting around the breakfast table, drinking coffee and getting high. I don’t know the official name for that particular hippie weekend ritual, but it was one of ours.

Todd called while he was still drunk from the night before and announced that he was coming to Colorado. We didn’t believe him. Then he called after buying a ticket, again from the airport, and once more when he was about to board. With every call, the trip became slightly more real until we looked at one another and realized that the idiot was actually getting on the plane.

Eventually he gave us the flight information and an arrival time. Now we had to go get him.

Snow was coming down, and we knew we couldn’t let the opportunity pass without doing something.

Brent had the use of a friend’s Toyota 4Runner while she was away. It was new and nice enough to impress Todd. Brent and I took it to the airport while Reggie stayed at the ranch.

We invented the rest on the drive to Denver.

I would meet Todd as myself. Brent would become a stranger wandering around the airport who desperately needed a ride. He’d approach us, tell us a sob story, and keep asking until I finally agreed to help.

We kept as much of it true as possible so we wouldn’t fuck it up. Brent really was from Wisconsin, so the stranger had just returned from Wisconsin. His girlfriend was supposed to pick him up, but she hadn’t shown.

Todd knew my roommate’s name was Brent, but he’d never met him. He knew Brent as a character from my life, not as a face.

The stranger’s name would be Ned.

We got it from Nederland.

At the airport, Brent separated from me and waited until I found Todd. Then he approached us and started asking for a ride. I kept saying no. His girlfriend had blown him off, he had no way home, and he only needed to get back to Boulder.

Todd immediately decided he was a loser. His own girlfriend wouldn’t even come get him at the airport. Todd started making fun of him, talking the way he talked to anyone he thought was beneath him.

Finally, I gave in.

“All right, kid. We’ll give you a ride.”

Todd loved calling him “kid.” It put Ned beneath us immediately.

We were only supposed to take him to Boulder. Todd decided he needed to come all the way to Nederland.

“Hey, Ned, you want to come party with us?”

Ned wasn’t sure.

“You think you can hang?”

“Well, I don’t know. You guys seem like really big partiers.”

Todd loved it. He’d look at me and make faces behind Ned’s back, except Ned could see him making the faces. Todd believed he was fucking with this poor kid while Brent helped him do it.

By the time we reached the parking garage, Todd owned the situation. We hadn’t invited Ned anymore.

Todd had.

Then Ned saw the 4Runner.

“Wow. That’s your truck?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You want to drive it?”

Todd couldn’t believe I was handing the keys to someone we’d supposedly just met. Ned acted like it was the greatest moment of his life. Of course, Brent had driven the same truck to the airport a few minutes earlier.

We climbed in, and Ned drove us toward Boulder.

Another friend of Brent’s, Logan, was supposed to meet us outside a North Boulder liquor store and join the prank. This was before cell phones. Logan wasn’t there, and we had no way to reach him, so we kept circling the same few blocks.

Todd didn’t notice at first. After about the fourth lap, he looked out the window.

“Didn’t we already see that?”

We distracted him and made another circle.

Finally, we gave up on Logan, bought alcohol, and headed toward Boulder Canyon.

Todd had barely sobered up from Boston before beginning the next round. He kept promising Ned that we were about to show him a weekend beyond anything he’d ever experienced.

Ned’s girlfriend story gave us the opening to bring Margo into it.

Margo had been more than an old girlfriend. At one point, she’d been the woman I thought was everything. When our relationship ended, I went into an extended depression and generally lost my mind. By January 1994, I was mostly over it, but everyone knew that Margo still had some voltage.

The exact route into the story is fuzzy now, but Ned’s tale about being abandoned at the airport reminded Todd of something Margo had done to me.

“Billy, didn’t Margo do that to you?”

Brent took the opening. Ned mentioned that his roommate had been seeing a woman named Margo, and Todd began asking questions. What did she look like? Where did she live? What did she do?

Brent gave him enough details for Todd to conclude that it was the same Margo.

Now Todd believed the random loser we’d picked up at the airport had a roommate who’d been secretly fucking the woman whose departure had nearly destroyed me.

To Todd, this wasn’t evidence that the story was false.

It was proof that his trip was cosmically important.

He’d been called to Colorado for this.

Ned explained that his roommate saw Margo on Wednesdays. She’d claim she was going bowling, come over for a couple of hours, then go back to her boyfriend.

Todd started cross-examining me.

“Billy, wasn’t Wednesday the night she used to go out?”

Whatever day he named, I said yes.

Soon I was helping Brent make it worse.

“Oh, next you’re going to tell me she was over there on Mondays too.”

Ned thought for a second.

“Yeah. Mondays too.”

Every time I invented some new humiliation for myself, Brent confirmed it. It became a complete secret history of my relationship. Apparently Margo had spent nearly every day of the week with Ned’s roommate.

Then Ned suggested that his roommate and Margo had once invited him to join them.

Todd thought this was the funniest thing that had ever happened. He’d call me an asshole, then turn back to Ned for more details.

I was supposed to be humiliated, but every new addition made it harder not to laugh. Brent and I were improvising an increasingly elaborate story about my own betrayal while Todd sat between us, delighted that the universe had arranged this discovery for him.

We must have made mistakes. We must have used the wrong name or contradicted ourselves. But no matter how absurd we made it, the story kept working.

When we reached Caribou Ranch, Reggie was waiting.

He knew Todd from the phone calls, although I don’t think they’d ever met. Within minutes, Todd was loudly telling him the entire story about Ned’s roommate fucking Margo.

Todd believed he was sharing this discreetly while Ned was in the next room.

Todd was never discreet while drinking. He was yelling.

Meanwhile, Ned went into Brent’s bedroom and started changing clothes. Todd followed him.

“Billy, this dude is trying on Brent’s clothes.”

“That’s okay. I told him he could.”

Todd couldn’t believe it. I’d given this stranger a ride, let him drive the truck, brought him all the way to Nederland, and now I was letting him go through my absent roommate’s closet.

Todd saw another opportunity. When Brent got home, they were going to fuck with him.

That became his mission. He and Ned planned how they’d surprise Brent, how Todd would introduce himself, and how shocked Brent would be to discover that the famous Todd from Boston had appeared without warning.

Ned encouraged him.

Todd never asked how Ned knew which room belonged to Brent, where Brent kept his clothes, or where anything else in the house was located.

Then we made mushroom tea.

Brent was our resident psilocybin-tea expert, so Ned walked into the kitchen, found the right pots, located the mushrooms, and started making it. Todd watched a stranger navigate our kitchen like he’d lived there for years and still didn’t put anything together.

We drank the tea and went into Nederland. The problem was that nearly everyone in town knew Brent. The moment somebody greeted him by name, the whole thing would collapse.

By then, we were ready to end it anyway. Fooling Todd had been exhilarating at first, but he believed everything so completely that it stopped being challenging. We could connect Ned’s roommate to Margo, let Ned wear Brent’s clothes, and have him make mushrooms in Brent’s kitchen. Todd only became more convinced that reality had arranged itself for his entertainment.

We also wanted to stop acting and start partying.

In the pool room at the Pioneer Inn, we called Todd over.

“Hey, Todd. We’ve got something we need to tell you.”

Brent stood in front of him.

“I’m Brent.”

Todd laughed.

“That’s funny. Where’s Brent? Let’s go fuck with him.”

“No, Todd. I’m Brent.”

Todd looked at me.

“This is Brent,” I said. “There is no Ned.”

He still thought we were extending the joke. Then he began looking at Brent differently. You could see his mind taking apart the previous four hours and trying to rebuild them.

The airport.

The girlfriend who never arrived.

The 4Runner.

Margo.

The clothes.

The kitchen.

The mushroom tea.

Every conversation about what he and Ned were going to do to Brent when Brent finally came home.

The man standing in front of him had been Brent the entire time.

Todd was already drunk and tripping on mushrooms. We’d just removed one of the load-bearing walls from his reality.

He stood there with a blank expression while his whole brain seemed to rewire itself.

Eventually he laughed, and we explained the story to our friends at the bar. He knew he’d been beaten. The prank was too complete to argue with.

Later, we went back to the ranch with people from town. Nederland had a wide variety of residents but a much smaller pool who were always drinking or doing drugs. Since we were also always drinking or doing drugs, we knew nearly all of them.

We probably brought ten people home.

One was a Native American woman, probably from the Southwest. For reasons available only inside Todd’s head, he decided she was an Eskimo.

He kept pulling me aside.

“Billy, there’s an Eskimo here.”

“Todd, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“The Eskimo.”

Eventually, Todd retreated into a bedroom and lay down. He was freezing, so we piled comforters over him and kept adding more. At some point, he was under a mountain of blankets and still cold.

The Eskimo, as Todd had fixed her in his tripping mind, kept trying to get into bed with him. Todd was completely gone and in no condition to consent to anything. We’d pull her out of the room, go back to the party, then check again and find her trying to crawl under the covers beside him. We had to keep removing her.

We’d forget about him for a while, then remember that we had a mentally demolished man from Boston buried in a bedroom. Somebody would check that he was breathing, that the woman hadn’t gotten back under the covers, and that he hadn’t wandered outside into the snow wearing boat shoes.

Every so often, Todd emerged from the blanket pile and found me.

“Billy. There’s an Eskimo here.”

Then he disappeared again.

The next morning, he was wrecked.

We had breakfast at the Boulderado, where Brent worked and could get us a discount. Even with the discount, it wasn’t cheap.

Todd was in the familiar morning-after stage when a person who has spent years drinking suddenly announces that he’s finished forever. No more lost weekends. No more calls he couldn’t remember. No more getting onto airplanes and arriving in snowstorms wearing boat shoes.

The storm was still bad, and for some combination of reasons involving the truck, the roads, and our unwillingness to make another airport run, we put him in a taxi to Denver.

The drunk calls slowed down after that. For a while, Todd cleaned himself up. Eventually, much of it came back.

That wasn’t the end of Todd.

In the spring of 1995, I traded him a Jeep for a 1967 Harley Sportster. I still don’t know whether he was returning the favor for Ned or whether it was an honest mistake, but a Hells Angel came to Colorado with the motorcycle, got me set up, and drove my Jeep back to Boston.

By the spring of 1996, I was making my own way toward Boston. That eventually led to A Message for Louis, another Todd story entirely.

Todd was a never-ending supply of stories.

But things were never quite the same after Colorado.

There was no Ned.

It scared Todd sober.

For a little while.