The Silverado Franklin Historic Gaming Hotel is our glamorous breakfast destination. Once home to guests including William Cody, Buffalo Bill, we descend into its 1903 Art Deco depths for a feast. This, another movie set filled with cardboard cut-out presences of reconfigured spirits. So much mythology built on western air. And I have my digital recorder on the table but it doesn't feel right. I slip it back into my bag again and just listen to what Ernie has to say. Ernie, in his baseball cap and light sensitivity glasses, nervously handling cutlery as he waits to be served. Man can grow hunger as a tomb walker.
'Well, how are y'all?' cries the weight steady waitress, simultaneously decanting iced water, jams & preserves, ketchups, sauces and glasses from a gleaming silver tray. Shining full moon.
'Good to see you! Been some time. What'll you have coffee-wise?'
Greeted like old friends, Ernie and Sonja are, speaking warmly with all. And she's swift, this Wild West waitress. Efficient. We talk from behind mounds of food, sporadically. Then, replete, Ernie begins.
'I kept hearing this song,' he's saying, 'I'd be driving and turn the car radio up and the song would grow louder with me. So I went out to my sister's and asked her what it was but she didn't know. Went to a medicine man, someone from my childhood, and he said it's an ancestral song. You're being called.'
Ernie still suffers from flashbacks: PTSD. It’s Sonja who keeps him steady. Orphaned as a boy, he was taken in for a while by his aunt until he came of age and then had to look for work. He enlisted as part of the US Army before the draft and subsequently found himself in Vietnam. At first, it was just a sensation of doing his duty but swiftly he came to realise it went against everything he'd been taught as a boy that was honourable in Lakota warfare. The worst, he says, was when a man was brought in; a bloody mess of pulped chest and face. ‘There was nothing left,’ says Ernie, ‘he was without a face, he was dead. But something was still working. This guy was screaming. It was as if the only thing not blown away was his voice-box. Somehow this mass of blood and flesh was still screaming.’ Ernie returned a lonely young man with recurring nightmares. Hung out in bars. Drunken fights. Anger. Became homeless, living under a Denver bridge. Realised most of his fellow homeless were veterans. One day, he visits the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. and can’t cope with the endless list of names of young men who’d been killed. Wonders how he was allowed to survive. So gets a hotel room and a gun. Said he had the nuzzle in his mouth, trigger-tragic, ready to pull.
Then the song came.