Douglas Wilson - Ride, Sally, Ride (Or Sex Rules) : A Novel

Setting the Stage

The Cherry Creek neighborhood of the Denver area had been one of the swankiest for many decades, and the troubles of 2024 had only accelerated the coagulation of the swank. After the legalization of pot in the years before that, the downtown area of Denver had gone rapidly to the dogsand by the dogs, the reference is not to show poodles owned by rich ladies or anything refined and decadent like that. Rather, the dogs that everything had gone to would be more like the mangier packs that roam in and around the landfills outside Manila, the kind that would eat dead vultures and call it a treat.

And yet the swells of Cherry Creek had reacted to all of that deterioration with characteristic aplomb.

These were largely the kind of people who were directly responsible for the insane policy decisions that had led to downtown sidewalks being covered with feces and needles, but because they would rather be dead in a ditch than live in a place like that themselves , they quite naturally arranged for other people to have to live there. Such an arrangement seemed more fitting somehow.

These elites were really good at a few things. Their long-practiced art form, made up of a mysterious heap of closely guarded secrets of never having to deal with any of the consequences of any of their decisions, had really had an astonishing run. If success can be defined as retaining influence and power despite a long string of unbridled disasters and failures, the ruling Colorado elites were a success story for the ages.

In the Troubles of 24, when the whole country had shuffled the cultural and political deck, there had also been a drastic reshuffling with regard to all the ministries that had previously been congregated in Colorado Springs, just to the south of Denver. At least half of those ministries had relocated to states where their ministries would be able to remain legal, and where their newsletters would not be immediately prosecuted for hate speech. The remaining ministries had made the necessary accommodations with what they called the new realities, and had tripled their budgets for legal staff in order keep up with the never-ending directives from the Colorado Human Rights Commission. These directives were, in the words of the legal counsel of at least half the remaining ministries, demented, but these sentiments were only expressed in executive session, and even then pretty rarely.

Benson Hartwick was a senior staff member of one of these remaining ministries. He served as an elder in a Presbyterian church (ECPPA), one that still had the remains of a sort of evangelicalism about it. One could still detect, from time to time, something that resembled orthodoxy coming from the pulpit.

And, as it also happened, Benson was a most notable resident of Cherry Creek, having served three times as the secretary for that neighborhoods association. So while he did not feel directly responsible for the sunlight that was bouncing off his very green front lawn at this particular moment, he did feel a sense of proprietorship, and a modest but not unseemly glow of pride. The lawn was so green that if green had a word in its semantic family like red doesthat word being vermilion only that word and no other would have sufficed. Well, maybe the green equivalent of incarnadine might have sufficed, if the light was good.