Popination Flirtation
a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: Nallen’s Irish pub.
Otherwise known as: Kiss me, I’m Irish.
This is the place where I learned how to drink Guinness. (Learning how to drink whiskey would come a few years later, after I learned to smoke.) It also wasn’t where I learned to smoke cigars. That too was a different place but I have a memory of it being nearby. Where would it have been? Anyway, no research, remember? And it’s irrelevant anyway, to this Irish pub. Not completely irrelevant–I did hang out here with the same people that I first smoked with, but. This old crusty pub was a regular haunt of mine during the time when I was doing a lot of sword fighting that brought me to downtown Denver for rehearsals and such. And, as the main director and choreographer of the sword bros was fanatically interested in his own Irish heritage, and as I had a fanatical thirst for his person (which he did nothing to quell nor indeed to quench), I found myself at Nallen’s relatively frequently during that sword slinging time.
Nallen’s
…has been there since only 1992? Wha? So it was new-ish when I first started going there? That doesn’t track. It seemed so old and established when I first became a regular in the mid-’90s; then again those years before the development of that area in the wake of the Coors stadium being built and bringing more of a less grungy thing to lower downtown all were a pretty big roller coaster. Literally—the venerable amusement park called Elitch’s moved down there vaguely around that time too, if memory serves. I dunno. It just doesn't seem right. Nallen’s feels way older than that. (Then again, so do I, so what do I know…)
I’ve described the basics of the Band of Young Men here before, and of my grooming (in both good ways and bad) by the head of same, and the rather fraught relationship we flailed through. We did have a lot in common, he and I, though I was an inexperienced idiot and he was an immature oversexed one that knew he had his hooks in me regardless of whatever (if any) sincere feelings besides lust he had for me himself. After all, there was the time we chatted together at my parents’ kitchen table for hours, getting to know each other’s backstory. No chance to take advantage of me then, as it was my last semester in school and, after two potential roommates bailed on me, I had been forced to move back in with my parents, and so there I was. They were lovely– that afternoon when they saw I had brought a boy home with me, they retreated decorously into the back room. But it was a trailer, so it’s not like anything could’ve happened, discreetly.
Then again, later that choreographer threw an intense party to both haze and welcome new recruits to the stage combat group–a tradition that was a scheduled sleepover including many martial arts films and lots of alcohol. The months of him flirting beyond flirting with me in his stage combat classes, using me as a (quite enthusiastic) sword lugging grunt, taking me aside and telling me how special I was, and in various other ways leading me on, culminated in a makeout session at the end of that night, after everyone else had already gone off to their several guest rooms. As I had been doing my best to actually get laid for once in my sorry post-college life, I was ready to be the Head Wolf’s Chick. Not a problem. It’d be worth it, I thought. And the interest was obviously there. Wasn’t it? But I underestimated my own weirdness and his cowardice, twofold. Mid-makeout, he told me that he never did relationships with those he worked with. Literally, he was shirtless and we were kissing and he stopped and told me this, and that he had my own room set aside for me.
At that point? I laughed—I knew very well he’d bang anything remotely female within his vicinity, work or no. This proved to me that no man was interested in me. Obviously I’m too weird. Too much one of the guys. Or maybe a bad kisser? You few, you happy few, who’ve kissed me, let me know, yeah? The point now is moot, of course, but. Anyway. Stay tuned for more of this nonsense in my memoir on Saturdays—I have a whole chapter on the Band of Young Men, my swordmates.
So. That’s what Nallen’s Irish Pub means to me: it means that guy, who wielded rapier and fist so beautifully and so skillfully, who took me down in a very different way. But the other reason I was there so much, besides partying with him and the rest of his wolf pack, is that downtown Denver was my access to all that stage combat training, and Nallen’s was adjacent to the Tramway building.
Tramway? No way!
The main rehearsal space for all my sword training was at the Tramway, a classroom building nigh to the Tony™ award winning DCPA complex, and also near to the big convention center. This building housed all the MFA acting students back when there were such there, and also is the place for any rehearsals of any of those high level theatre spaces. Plus us. I do admit to still harboring a bit of bitterness upon having used this building so many times for my arts and having never been hired by the DCPA, unlike my BoYM counterparts and those who came after and decided to swallow the men’s bad behavior to make their own road paved forward in those fields. I guess that was the better choice, wasn’t it, instead of what I did which was to leave that toxic arena and study real martial arts for a while, after which building my own take on the staged version after. Though that was with my first husband, which was a toxic miasma all its own. But more of that in my memoir, again.
Here’s an embarrassing story, lest I smack too much of holier-than-them: So this would’ve been in 1995 or 6, before any of us carried cell phones as a rule, certainly before I carried one. I had heard from the sword fighting guys that they wanted rehearsals before our weapons tests somewhere between 2 and 5 (the test being at 5:30). For some reason, my brain took this the way it sounded, which was that they had the space from 2-6 and we could show up anywhere between 2-5 that we wanted. I had work, so I did that and I bussed up at around 3:30, 4. I had another brain blip in that I had forgotten what block the Tramway was on, having usually been taken there by someone or other. But I found my way there. And realized when I arrived, that they had actually wanted to rehearse from 2-5, before the test. Ugghh. Devastated from embarrassment, I rehearsed hard for that last hour, and we ended up doing well. But not exceptionally, which I’m sure my then test partner still blames me for. Hey. I was young, I was alone, I lived in a different city and we didn’t have cell phones. And I didn’t drive. I was still good. I mean: dumb, but good.
To this day, my stage combat skills are not respected by any of the men in that organization, as much as I have the same years and a good pile of experience within the field as they do. I don’t get hired by the higher-end companies here; that’s all monopolized by them. But I do get hired by lots of others, and I do good work whenever I am hired. It’s just this little wedge, this adamant barrier that’s maintained by the monopoly, and the echoes of that rejection connect way back to that other humiliating rejection in the Irishman’s bedroom.
But the Tramway is not a pub!
Nallen’s Irish Pub is. And it’s a good one.
Back then, I’d go meet my choreographer crush and the rest of the BoYM there at Nallen’s, where we’d often hang out outside on the patio for the smokers, right under the vintage pub sign, which looks like it’s lifted straight from a Dublin lane. Inside, you have to let your eyes adjust to the dim dive lighting, and the grimy patina of the bar as you wait for the Guinness to settle. This is where that choreographer taught me that a properly poured pint of Guinness takes a while. That a good pint of Guinness is worth the wait. If a pint of Guinness is placed in front of you quickly, he said, it won’t be worth drinking. Even then, under his spell, it crossed my mind that he should follow his own advice when it comes to women. Then again, I waited way longer than I ever should have for him to come through, and I never got my pint, well poured or no.
The lower downtown area where Nallen’s resides (called LoDo) was famously rough, before it got gentrified and LoDo-ed and before the beautiful Coors stadium was built nearby. All of downtown was actually pretty iffy, and was only beginning to turn into something resembling a nice urban commercial hub when I began teaching down there in the early aughts. But back in my sword slinging days, we were still in the mid-1990s and it was much less safe and posh. Which made sheltered Boulderite me feel pretty special, hanging out there like a real live punk.
As the ‘90s dwindled away, along with my relationships with those men, as I entered and then graduated grad school, having gotten married in the middle of all that, I also drifted away from Nallen’s. Once I started teaching at the Auraria campus regularly, I’d go back to tooling around downtown again, but it wasn’t Nallen’s very much anymore. It was the tobacco shop where I’d buy Hobbit Weed, or the Denver branch of Old Chicago, or the Market Café, or Rock Bottom. But Nallen’s fell by the wayside, as did my smoking habit and my taste for Guinness.
I hadn’t been to Nallen’s in a very long time, in other words. So the other day, I thought, why not go see how it is? It’s one of those old pubs (that feels even older than it is, apparently) that was one of the last to close and the first to open back up from the pandemic in that area, and now it looks just the way it always did. The bartenders don’t have Irish accents anymore, but they still have a surly manner, and still know exactly how to pour a proper Guinness. Which is, of course, what I ordered when I went this time. It’s only proper.
Nallen’s really wasn’t any different, though many places around it had changed. The Uber dropped me off in front, in the heat and sun, and the soothing dark coolth inside, along with the scents of ancient cigarettes and the bartender’s cleaning supplies did infuse me with an aura of calm.But I don’t know exactly what I expected. Maybe that it had gotten refurbished and renewed? Or it had gotten older, and had settled into a burnished patina like good old pubs or dive bars often do? But it was neither; it was just… plain. A couple hung over young men on the one end of the bar and a high top table of folks in their late 60s being boisterously loud behind. The Guinness was poured correctly. The Tully tasted like Tully.
Like it’s not bad. But like…maybe that’s what’s bugging me? If it had been awful, that’d be something. Or if it had been wonderful, that also would be something. But it was just…fine. Just fine. No different. But then that’s not really anyone’s fault but mine–I’m way different, and obviously suffering from a case of intensive and misplaced nostalgia.
Do I still like it here?
Did I ever?
Will I be going back anytime soon? Probably not, if only because it’s a ways away and I’m never downtown anymore. Downtown has gone back to being iffy and rough, having descended into a dangerous drug-fueled gunfight these days, and it’s not like I’m taking any buses or trains back and forth anymore at any rate. I go downtown to see the opera, or to that new-to-me tattoo shop. But it’s not a place to hang out anymore. Nallen’s was a place of its time, in my life’s journey through Popinations past at any rate. And that’s okay–it can stay there in the nest of nostalgia where it’s comfy and the hype is real. No need to make it into anything it isn’t. And what is it? One place out of many that knows how to pour a proper pint. That’s enough.