'Drug' says it all.

East Colfax here in East Denver/Saudi Aurora, is an infamous stretch of neighborhood known for its prostitutes, and by-the-hour motels. Westword has an interesting article this week on how gentrification is making even more people homeless.

The area wasn't that bad when I was a kid. I used to live a few blocks north between Colfax, and then Stapleton Airport.

But eventually, in '86 due to my bro getting in to trouble in school, my mom decided to sell the house and move. Problem was, she closed on our old place before the deal went through on the new place.

Then after that deal fell through, we actually hotel-surfed like the people in the story. We even stayed at the Sands hotel for a few weeks, but it wasn't as bad as it sounds like it got.

So, that was my summer/fall of '86.

Who knew ten years later, through a series of events, I would be homeless again, and sofa surfing.

You know, when I get down on things going on in my life these days, I need to remember how good I actually got it.

'Amy Limon was born near Trinidad in 1941, the fourth child of an eventual eleven born to her Apache family. She was ten when her two older brothers were drafted to fight in Korea and her older sister married off at fifteen, bumping Amy up to the woman of the house, caretaker for her younger siblings and alcoholic parents. Amy was epileptic, but that didn't slow her down. In addition to taking care of the household, she started washing dishes at bars and restaurants after school and on the weekends.

She was still in high school when her drunk father made a move on her, showing her his penis. Her mother refused to believe her, but her sisters confirmed that he'd tried the same thing on them -- only they'd been too scared to speak up. Amy wasn't scared, though. She's not afraid of anyone, she says, so she reported her father to the authorities, and he bounced between a state mental facility in Pueblo and prison. While he was locked up, Amy married a man who was in the Air Force.

When her father was released, in 1959, Amy followed her husband to Denver, where he was stationed at Lowry. Afraid they'd be lost without her, Amy's mother and her seven younger siblings all piled into the car and moved to Denver, too.

Amy and her husband had four children -- one a daughter who lived only three months. By 1973, they had fallen out of love and divorced. Amy moved to an apartment with the children. She found work in a halfway house, taking care of people on their way out of mental institutions. She didn't love the work; taking care of people was all she'd ever done, and she was getting sick of it. But at work she found love: another Air Force man of Mexican-American descent who'd served four years in Vietnam and was one of the facility's residents.

Julian Limon had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was bipolar, but he was always friendly with Amy. When he was released from the halfway house, he married her and moved into her apartment in Westminster, where they lived happily until Julian went off his meds one day in 1986 and was sent back to the institution. No longer able to afford the apartment on her own, Amy went to a women's shelter in Denver. A few weeks later she moved into Halcyon House, a subsidized apartment on Arapahoe Street, where she was still living alone when she had a stroke ten years ago. The stroke put Amy in a wheelchair. But by then her husband's condition had improved enough that his doctors allowed him a conditional leave so that he could live with her and take care of her. Her son helped, too, but five years ago he was killed in a gang shooting, an innocent bystander.

By last October, Amy's husband "started acting his bullshit again," and she knew he was off his meds. She woke one morning unable to find her wheelchair. She called for her husband but got no reply. He'd taken her chair cruising and left Amy stuck in bed. So she started sleeping in her chair. Then Julian had another episode, beating on the walls and making a mess of the place. Halcyon House managers told Amy that if she wanted to stay there, her husband could never come back. "But what if God makes my husband well again?" she asked.'