The last thing I wanted was more driving, even twenty minutes to and from the amphitheater at Red Rocks. I swallowed four Ibuprofen with a beer at the hotel bar while I waited for my Uber to arrive. 

“You ever been to Film on the Rocks?” I asked the bartender, a guy my age, 40s and muscular, sleeves of his black polo waging a loser war against his tattooed biceps. His shaved head had a tattoo of a rooster crowing on one side. 

“My partner has. I haven’t. Moved here in the fall from Reno. There’s always shit going on. Nonstop train running through this town. Can’t keep up with it. But the tips are good. You want another?”

My glass was a quarter full. The Uber was ten minutes out. I did the math while wondering if his friends called him Rooster and that’s why he got the tattoo, or if they only started calling him Rooster after he got the tattoo, or if Rooster came from his days working on a farm on the outskirts of Reno, or if he just really liked eating fried chicken and friends whittled his love of chicken down to Rooster, or he was so arrogant that his friends called him a dick, and Dick, and a cock, and finally a rooster, because calling someone an adult male hen became a mouthful the moment you tried, and people like plays on words, and so Rooster he became. 

“Yo.”

Rooster snapped his fingers. My head twitched. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll do another. Thanks.” 

“Hmm,” he said, grabbing a fresh mug from a cooler and filling it with beer. “Long day?”

I finished my quarter of a beer and swapped the empty mug out for the freshly foamed beer. “You know when Frodo and Sam are hiding from the Fighting Uruk-Hai in Two Towers? Tired and frightened with no choice but to continue their journey to get the ring to Mordor?” 

“I do.” 

“Well, I haven’t even gotten to that point yet and I’m already exhausted. My mind is overflowing.” I took three gulps of beer and felt a line of lightning crack through my temple. The Uber was four minutes out. “Where’d the idea for a rooster tattoo come from?” 

“I like chickens.” 

It was my turn to say Hmm. “It looks great, but I wasn’t sure if there was some wild story there.” 

“My aunt owned a farm that I helped her with after my uncle passed. This was Illinois, before we moved to Reno. Gnarly accident for my uncle, caught in the grain system in the silo, like getting sucked into quicksand. She needed help. I was twelve and already sneaking cigarettes from my Mom. Sneaking like she didn’t count every last one from her packs. She sent me to the farm for the summer. My aunt paid me in cash and lessons like, ‘Experience what you’ve learned’ and ‘Settling is for suckers’. And now here I am, working at a bar in Denver making good money and meeting more than a few folks with minds overflowing, for one reason or another. Cheers.” 

I lifted my mug to him. “Cheers.” 

The restaurant portion of the bar filled with dinner patrons. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. A banana in the morning? Was there oatmeal at some point? My stomach grumbled at the sudden awareness. I filled it with the rest of the beer and left the necessary bills, adding extra for the rooster story. 

“Thanks, man.” 

He took the mug and bills. “Enjoy the show.”

Huey Lewis’s “Power of Love” came on the restaurant speakers. Meredith used to say you were in the right place at the right time when song lyrics lined up with what you were saying or thinking. I walked outside and got into my Uber, making pleasantries with the driver, a woman in a shawl with wrists full of beaded bracelets. We chatted about Denver and Red Rocks. I kept thinking about “Power of Love” in Back to the Future, and how maybe the person who played the song was going to the movie and played it for that reason, or maybe Huey Lewis was a popular artist in the ‘80s, and the ‘80s were back in a big way, and an ‘80s station playing at the same time I was heading to watch one of the most popular ‘80s movies wasn’t that far-fetched, and maybe didn’t signal some cosmic alignment forming. 

I went with cosmic alignment theory anyway, happy I was on the right path, and pleased with my progress over perfection in my quest to find Dad’s secrets while the woman driving me said, “You know, I thought I had mono for an entire year once, but it turns out I was just bored,” and I couldn’t nod harder at her statement, both the movie reference and how terrifyingly close she was to describing the last year of my life.