The Compound

I lived down the street from The Compound for about five years and yet the only times I ever stepped inside were years before I even thought about moving to the city. At that time, I was still living in Colorado Springs. I was working at a faux Italian restaurant that would never gain the prominence of Olive Garden, though it desperately wanted to and it was there that I met Fabian, who was a few years older than me and therefore knew much more about Denver nightlife than I did at only twenty-one. About once or twice a week, Fabian and I would go up to Denver–always in my car, a small circumstance I never thought much of until a few months into these excursions.

We had a pretty standard routine. First, we would go to this bar called, I think, JB’s, where we would partake in their incredibly generous happy hour deals, and then we would head to The Compound, where Fabian would dump me at the end of the bar or at a table somewhere dark and then run off to do whatever it was he was doing. I’ve always been a lightweight when it comes to alcohol, so at this point in the evening, I was typically fairly bad off, which was compounded by the fact that, unbeknownst to me, I was clinically depressed and, beknownest to me, I was dating a man who was barely interested in me. In truth, I spent most of my time at The Compound crying and staring at my terrible flip phone, while trying to get it together enough to text something embarrassing to my half-hearted boyfriend and then getting even more depressed when he didn’t text back as quickly as I would have liked.

It was awful.

I was awful.

Literally no one at that bar deserved to have some straight drunk girl sobbing over her phone while they were trying to enjoy a night out in one of the few safe spaces where they could exist free of judgement or persecution. They were all very nice, and every once in a while, someone would buy me shots, or commiserate about terrible relationships, but I’m sure my overall presence there was exhausting. Even I didn’t know what I was doing. Every once in a while I would get it into my head that I could probably get over my boyfriend if I went out dancing with people who might actually be interested in me and flirted a little with someone nice, but every time I broached the subject with Fabian he would puff himself up and give some very moral speech about how he wasn’t just trying to hook up and he was going to these bars because he just wanted to hang out with his friends, but if that was where my priorities are then maybe I should leave him out of it.

And I would feel dreadfully guilty and go off to The Compound with him and he would dump me at the bar and run off to do whatever while I sat there drinking, and texting, and crying.

I want to be very clear that everyone who wasn’t Fabian was very kind. Kinder than they had to be, honestly. I think they could all see that I was getting a bit off a raw deal.

Fabian wasn’t very reliable in other ways and eventually his shifts at the restaurant dwindled down to nothing and that ended our already dwindling and very one-sided friendship. I moved on, went to school, graduated, and eventually moved to a little apartment a few blocks down the road from The Compound.

It took me a while to realize that this was the same place where I spent so many nights shortly after I turned twenty-one. the exterior had changed. it used to be a dark green with a small oval sign and now it was bright red. Most notably, I was now seeing it during the day for the first time. I lived down the street from The Compound for five years and I never went inside. I was older, wiser. I was more understanding about other people’s spaces. Though my friendship with Fabian wasn’t good or healthy, I remember The Compound as safe and the people there as kind and incredibly generous with my younger self.

The last time I saw the inside of The Compound was shortly before I moved. I was working at a job that I loved, though it never paid me enough to survive in Denver. I was walking home with my headphones in, and I had to stop at the corner right before I would get to The Compound. there were these guys in front of me. I have no idea what they were doing in my neighborhood. They weren’t from there. They were obviously tourists, if not from out of state, then from the suburbs or from some other neighborhood—likely The Highlands. Frankly, they were being dicks and when one of them tried to talk to me, I just ignored him, even though I could then hear him telling his friend that I seemed to think that having headphones in gave me the right to be rude, as though I owed him anything.

The light turned green. We crossed the street. Then the one who tried to talk to me stepped forward and opened the door to The Compound and made some comment about how it was the perfect place for his friend, and they laughed like it wasn’t 2016 and something like that would be acceptable and the man dropped the door handle and they all walked on. But a man from inside the bar had noticed and he came out with the door open and yelled at them as they walked down the street, but then they were the ones ignoring the person talking to them.

I remember that man’s face because it was hurt and confused but it didn’t seem surprised. Maybe he knew before I did that my neighborhood was changing. Maybe he understood that the time they had in that building was limited. That eventually the changes that had come to so many other buildings around them were coming for them as well.

The walls of The Compound have come down. Anyone can look inside the building now. Of course, now it isn’t what it once was. Now it’s a chain restaurant–or really a chain wine and charcuterie eatery. Can we consider charcuterie a meal enough to qualify it as a restaurant? The walls have been replaced with big windows that let passersby know that you are a person with the kind of distinct palette that understands the minute differences between wines that were aged in different barrels.

It’s not the end of the world, is it—for a neighborhood to change and for the old bars to go away and be replaced by new, more overpriced bars where it’s much more socially acceptable to have lunch? I’m just not as sad about the other ones. There were other bars that left Baker. The neighborhood was changing in front of me and has changed even more since I left. The Compound hit differently than these other places—not because it was a place for me, but because it was so distinctly a place for other people. It was someplace safe and sheltered where the people were always very kind. I hope that, unlike me, they did not have to spend so much time trying to find the next place where they belonged.