Denver Beer Run
Heterodox Academy Conference was Fun
I was in Denver for the Heterodox Academy conference. True to form, Jesse Singal ordered way too much pizza for everyone. Meanwhile, we were completely out of alcohol. Raj and I took it upon ourselves to make a beer run at the 7-11 right across the street, where we slammed head first into Colorado’s regulatory regime. At 12:23 AM on a Monday morning, the 7-11 was closed to foot traffic. The woman standing outside told us they could still fulfill online orders through the app, except for cigarettes (didn’t care), phone chargers (didn’t ca—wait what? Chargers? Why??), and of course…alcohol. She wasn’t amused when I said “I thought this was America.” We went back to the hotel lobby defeated, and I stayed up late into the night talking to Tracing Woodgrains and [REDACTED] while stone-cold sober and surrounded by a wall of cold, uneaten pizza.
The next evening, we thought we were better prepared.
Raj was again my compatriot on this new, better educated, better planned, beer run. Having learned our lesson the night before, Raj and hit the 7-11 with plenty of time to spare before midnight. We showed up but yet again, the 7-11 was closed to foot traffic. The clerk for the night was sitting outside on the curb, and she looked up from her phone to tell me they were closed because of staffing issues. She went back to looking at her phone.
We saw there was another 7-11 within walking distance. But here’s the thing, having now been burnt twice by this international conglomerate, I was not going to assume the next location would have no problems. Raj and I made a plan, with several contingencies.
I was not about to walk all that, so I got on a bicycle share, and Raj got an electric scooter. We were now primed and ready for almost anything.
The second stop was promising—they were actually open. Worried about somehow losing our electronic rides, I waited outside with both our steeds while Raj scouted the interior. He came out soon after and immediately declared “This is all they had!” with a pack of Bud Light in one hand and a pack of Budweiser in the other (the two genders of beer). My indie cred was in jeopardy, but we at least had some beer, and we were close enough to try another location, so why not? I put the 36 cans of American-made goodness in the front basket of my bicycle (which made it incredibly front-heavy and quite unwieldy to ride) and we pedaled/scooted onward to the next stop.
The third stop was also promising—not only was it open but it looked much larger than either of the two previous locations. I again waited outside with our twin steeds while Raj went inside. Or, he tried to. In front of this 7-11, there was a cadre of people just hanging out, including a guy with a guitar backpack confidently standing in front of the doors. He stopped Raj and told him the place was closed.
Raj walked back, disappointed, but I pointed out the obvious. “That’s just a dude with a guitar, why are you even listening to him?” You could see the dawning realization in Raj’s face. He walked back to Gitaroo Man and asked him to step aside. Gitaroo Man was resolute and insisted that the place was closed (“deadass”) but offered to let Raj inside if the store clerk said it was OK. Raj walked up to the window, knocked, and then wildly gesticulated to the clerk pantomiming some sort of box shape presumably intended to convey the universal symbol for “beer”. The clerk nodded, and Gitaroo Man was magnanimous enough to open the gates for Raj. After a few minutes, Raj comes out with two packs of a much more respectable selection. Our mission was a triumph. Except…
Raj only had a scooter, and the front basket on my bicycle was already full and creaking from the weight of two packs of beer. How were we going to transport everything back to the Grand Hyatt lobby? Raj’s idea was as simple as it was bold: he would grasp both the pack of beer and the scooter handle with each hand.
We rode the four blocks back to the hotel lobby. I made it a few feet away from the doors when I paused to check on Raj. In stopping, I failed to adequately account for how heavy the front basket was, so the entire bicycle toppled over, and the Budweiser pack ruptured and spilled its cans all over the street gutter. I saw Raj in his glorious double-fisted scooter emerge from around the corner, when right on cue one of the straps broke and sent several cans tumbling on the asphalt. As we’re picking everything back up, I get a text from Singal that was the equivalent of a loud sigh:
“Status report?”
Raj and I finally walked into the lobby with our arms full of both shitty and non-shitty beer, still laughing from how convoluted this beer run turned out to be. We warn everyone that almost all the cans will explode upon opening. Some people tapped the top, others tried spinning the can. None worked.
My apologies to the Pritzker family for all the exploding beer we spilled on your lobby carpet that night. But yeah, Heterodox Academy conference was fun.