A Book Review, sort of

By Travis Henry
RealNewJournalism.com

I used to hate Adam Cayton-Holland. Couldn’t get past his emasculated last name. Couldn’t stand his snarky prose and his seemingly all out coup of both the print and web pages of Westword, the alternative newspaper I had grown up reading.

Cayton-Holland was everything I wasn’t. I was a blue-collar journalist straight out of the public schools of Adams County. I graduated from Metro State, which is where Colorado kids with mediocre grades and no money went. As far as I knew, Cayton-Holland was a rich private school kid from Denver who went to an elite east coast university on daddy’s money.

I prided myself that Metro turned out a disproportionate amount of excellent “hard news” journalists, and felt a slight air of supremacy that I was taught by real newspaper veterans and not journalism theorists who had never smelled a real newsroom.

I had to work my way up grinding the night beat at a mid-sized daily.  I just knew Cayton-Holland was handed the Westword job straight out of school with no appreciation of the station in life he was given.

While I was adding thousands of miles to my barely-running Ford Escort chasing traffic fatalities in Boulder Canyon, Cayton-Holland was bombarding us with humor columns and entitlement pieces disguised as alt news. Disgusting.

The truth, of course, was that I was jealous. In 2005, I had given up my dreams of either being a famous newspaper columnist or the world’s preeminent crime reporter to start up a citizen journalism platform at the Rocky Mountain News. Sure, we flirted with some early success, but non-existent newspaper budgets and the Denver Newspaper Agency’s inept grasp of the future of the Internet doomed us.

By 2007, I had totally sold out and went chasing a startup Internet salary, which was beyond anything I had imagined in the world of ink and paper. When I heard Cayton-Holland was helping ignite a growing standup comedy scene in Denver my irrational disdain was still there. I had never met Cayton-Holland. But if there is one thing I learned in my newspaper days, it’s having your byline in front of thousands of people surfaces assholes with opinions about who you are. In this case, I was the asshole.

In 2009, I had to rethink my imaginary battle with Cayton-Holland when he landed a direct hit on a common enemy all journalists in Denver recognized as the devil: Troubleshooter Tom Martino.

Martino is a highly questionable “consumer advocate.” He’s a poor man’s Geraldo Rivera who seems to give his seal of approval to companies who pay him the almighty dollar. He’s known to use a camera and microphone to bully those who cross him, all the while pretending to be fighting for the working man.

After Westword published some investigative pieces on Martino’s shadiness, the Troubleshooter went ballistic, claiming inaccuracies, and unsuccessfully tried to ambush a Westword reporter on camera while holding up a picture of whom he thought was the reporter that had written an “inaccurate” article. But he was holding up a picture of Cayton-Holland, who had not written about Martino. The Troubleshooter’s shoddy research had been inaccurate.

Cayton-Holland, who had left Westword by then, did a little Troubleshooting of his own and spoofed Martino’s video gotcha schtick to much hilarity.   When I saw Cayton-Holland’s video I was rolling.

Damn. This guy is funny. Maybe he’s not so bad.

Fast forward nine years.

I hadn’t given much thought to Cayton-Holland over the years.

While flipping radio channels during drivetime, I landed on Colorado Public Radio and heard a snippet of an interview where a guy was talking about communicating with ghosts. It was a small part of the segment and sounded a bit weird. I listened a little more and realized it was Cayton-Holland being interviewed for a new book he had written.

Turns out Cayton-Holland had made it big for a Denver guy. Even had a TV show. Good for him. Seriously. Any undeserved ill will I had toward him was gone. I listened a bit more and then turned the station back to The Fan for more Broncos talk.

A few weeks later I was standing in Denver airport’s Tattered Cover bookstore looking for a quick book to read on a flight to San Francisco. One copy of Cayton-Holland’s hard cover book, Tragedy + Time: A Tragi-Comic Memoir was tucked among the biographies.

This was a real test.  Sure, I was happy for the guy I once loathed. But would I buy his book? At $25 no less?

Forty-five minutes later I was 30,000 feet in the air bawling my eyes out.

Cayton-Holland’s Tragedy + Time: A Tragi-Comic Memoir is both an exercise in self therapy stemming from the comedian’s younger sister Lydia’s suicide and a love letter to his family.  The sorrow, pain and love come through in brutally honest reflections.

But the real connection for me came from his descriptions of Denver, past and present. If you grew up in the Denver metro area, you remember the tornado drills he describes and the times the drills turned real. His revelation of gnomes at the Denver Museum of Natural History has me now looking for them when I visit with my kids (still haven’t found one.)  His tales from the downtown bars brought me back to my 20s. And his haunting (to me, anyway) admission of obsessive-compulsive disorder really hit home, although my channels of choice were 2 and 9 and were switched back and forth on an old black and white dial, not a remote.

What I had to reckon with while reading this book was Cayton-Holland DID go to a private school. And he DID attend an east coast university. However, his struggles with life, death, insecurity and family were similar, and in many cases much worse, to mine. To everyone’s.

What kind of prick was I to judge from afar? It’s a lesson that maybe I alone take from this book.

Personal realizations aside, this book, while steeped in sadness, is also hilarious and had me audibly laughing at times. Whether it was his retelling of a Full House episode he and his sister loved or the bits the two of them concocted for family entertainment, it’s clear Cayton-Holland has an extraordinary gift for both the written word and comedy.

Tragedy + Time explores how Cayton-Holland and his family, including his parents and older sister, were both supportive and powerless as Lydia struggled with mental health. It’s clear how much Cayton-Holland loved and admired Lydia, who seemed to be an empath feeling the sorrow of the world.

This book illustrates how life keeps moving, even when the world you know stops. Cayton-Holland lets us in on his childhood, his struggles in college, his triumphs moving up in the comedy world and now how his family works to cope, sometimes unsuccessfully, with the loss of such an important part.

Ultimately what I took from Cayton-Holland’s book was everyone’s family is pretty fucked up, and everyone’s family is pretty much perfect. Both can be true at the exact same time.

See Cayton-Holland live, support a great new local band and help out a family by attending the Tivoli Club Brass Band Album Release Party on April 26. Find out more information and buy tickets here.