Greg Pierotti

Journal Entry: Greg Pierotti

The altitude makes me thirsty, and I was totally parched as I came into Laramie on 287, so I drove passed Gardiner to go to the Kum and Go – yes, that is what it’s called…the Kum and Go. The decision was made so automatically, and it struck me. In the middle of a town like Laramie that should have been completely off my radar for my entire life, I know automatically and without question that there is a convenience store five blocks up on the right where I could get some water. It was the kind of unconcerned decision making I do when I am at home. This town has become part of me in the same complicated way that home is. The Kum and Go was there two blocks past the ranger motel – which has beautiful new neon signage.

It seemed like late night because the sky was completely obscured with a steep bank of blue black clouds. Over the Snowy mountains to the North and West, there was a little gap of bright light - tornado yellow and streaked with Verga. The freezing wind was tearing small branches from the trees and tossing them into the road. I was struck, just as I was the first time I came here, by the extremity of the environment. The land and sky here are massive full of power and threat. They seem to dwarf all my concepts about how Laramie should have changed. I feel intimidated in the face of this work. It’s hard, alone in the middle of the night, to get a perspective on it. Here I am again, eight years later, to ask these people living in this fierce vastness, how they have changed!

I’m at Beth’s now. I have arrived in Laramie in the wake of the other company members who left on the 15th. It is strange to be here alone. I was here one other time alone, for the interview with Detective sergeant Rob Debree after Aaron’s death penalty trial (Rob hadn’t been able to speak with us till the trials were over). But everything was such a hurry then, and I think I was only here for one day. This time I am here for 5 days with none of my collaborators. My friend, Beth Loffreda, whose place I am staying at, is gone too. She left for Caspar not long after I arrived. So this is new, this alone-ness. In the company of friends, I am talkative and love to laugh and joke. Without that to distract me, I am left feeling incredibly sad and shaky. Sad about Matthew and Aaron and Russell, sad as I read the other company members entries, sad about how time just keeps going for all of us. It doesn’t help the intensity of my mood that a branch that screeches shrilly against the window of the guest bedroom. It sounds like Freddy Kruger coming to get me.

I can hear a train passing.

I head back out again in the morning to see Rulon Stacy at the Poudre Valley Health Center in Fort Collins. This is a man who I have spent only a few hours with in my whole life; a Mormon, who once said to me that Homosexuality is not a lifestyle that he agrees with. Yet he has lived in my mind over the years as one of the purest examples of how courageous and tender hearted human beings can be in the face of great pain. Thinking of him, I feel lucky to have been a part of this.

More trains.