The homeless men, some 50 of them, gathered at 9 in the morning Thursday, picked up rakes, shovels and brooms and set out walking from the mission to comb the streets of Lower Downtown.
There could have been women involved. I did not see one. They have been doing this for 11 years now, picking up trash in the Ballpark neighborhood just ahead of each Rockies home opener at Coors Field. They let me tag along.
The men are participants in the Denver Rescue Mission’s various New Life rehabilitation programs. They would be cleaning the very same streets many used to call home.
Each one has a story. Julian Romero, 37, dragging a rake and carrying a black bag filled with trash, shared his freely.
Downtown Denver, it should be noted, is not nearly as filthy as one might think. One crew did find a pair of panties, and the one I was with uncovered a checkbook. They ripped it to pieces.
Romero was finishing his first week at the Crossing, the mission’s big transition house on Smith Road, where he has been assigned duty on the kitchen and maintenance crews. Classes to achieve his general education certificate start next week.
He had worked construction, mostly hanging drywall, for 17 years, a job his father, a 20-plus-year “lifer” at the company, had arranged for him.
And then in May of last year, everything fell apart.
“I got fired,” he confesses. His life was out of control. Six months before that, Romero had gotten out of a Denver jail after serving 244 days for roughing up the mother of his 3-year-old.
Out of work, he turned to booze and drugs. It was easy going back, he says, to his “old ways — getting into trouble, selling drugs and falling into a serious round of negative thinking.”
He had to pay the rent, buy food, he said. He would work temporary jobs, but after child support, he netted maybe $12 a day. He finally lost his apartment.
“Then I fell into some really crazy thinking,” said Romero, a bald, slender man with a ready smile. “I was ready to rob somebody, break into a house. It does go through your mind.”
Instead, he wandered the streets, sleeping in parks and on friends’ sofas. And then one day, he walked into the Denver Rescue Mission. He’d heard about its rehabilitation program. He asked to get in.
He spent 51 days in a pre-transition program at the Lawrence Street shelter, working odd jobs and trying to convince the staff he was serious. He stopped drinking and drugging, and spent other hours in counseling.
His plan now is to spend a year at the Crossing, working the different phases of the program, which include enrolling in college courses. He wants to become a computer technician.
He has discovered God again, he says. He wants a life again. A real life.
He speaks softly but urgently of putting his family back together, to rejoin his daughter’s life.
The crews filled countless trash bags and tossed each of them into the back of one of the mission’s trucks by 11:30 a.m.
They then walked to Coors Field, where a Rockies executive offered them thanks and began distributing various bits of Rockies gear and vouchers for tickets to a future home game.
And then crew members gathered at a nearby restaurant to eat lunch together.
I wish Julian Romero good luck and ask him to call me when he graduates from the program. He smiles.
“I want to — no, I have to — do this for my little girl,” he says. “I know that she is waiting for me.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
