Telluride, 1993
A Man, a Nod, and One Sentence Too Many This is why you shouldn’t mix draft beer, strong opinions, and proximity to the exit.
It was a cold January night in Telluride, back when Telluride still didn’t quite know what it was. No velvet ropes, no boutiques pretending to be mining shacks. Half ski town, half forgotten place where men once dug holes in mountains and called it a living.
The Floradora Café was warm and half full, the kind of Friday night crowd where no one was trying to be impressive. Draft beer was flowing. Cheeseburgers were doing what cheeseburgers are supposed to do. The room hummed at that perfect middle pitch — loud enough to feel alive, quiet enough to hear yourself think.
My late wife, Sarah, and I were in town from Placerville, Colorado, where we were living at the time. We had a table near the middle. I was a few beers in. Maybe two, four. Maybe more. Enough that the night felt friendly, but not reckless. Or so I thought.
That’s when I noticed Oliver Stone.
He was sitting across the room, between me and the door. No entourage. No crowd. No one hovering. Just another guy in a booth, drinking draft beer with a couple of friends, like the rest of us. This was before Telluride became a full-blown celebrity refuge, but word had already started to circulate. Oprah had a house. People came quietly. The rule was unspoken: don’t make a thing of it.
Platoon was long established, JFK had just landed, and The Doors was still fresh. Stone was at that moment where the industry hadn’t yet turned on him, and he hadn’t yet turned into a caricature of himself.
Now, I was—and am—a fan of Jim Morrison the poet. The writing. The seriousness. The part of him that gets lost when the mythology takes over. I liked the music too, of course, but it was the words that mattered to me. Stone’s version of Morrison had always rubbed me the wrong way. Too much leather. Too much self-indulgent chaos. Too much movie.
But that wasn’t on my mind yet. Not consciously.
When we stood to leave, I caught Stone’s eye. We locked eyes for a second—just long enough to register each other. I gave him The Nod. The small one, the quick uptick of the chin. The man’s nod. Acknowledgment without invitation.
He nodded back.
Fair enough.
We headed toward the door. There was no way around him. I had to pass his booth. And something about the nod — maybe the mutual recognition, maybe the beers, maybe the accumulated irritation of years — flipped a switch before my brain could intervene.
I leaned in slightly as I walked by and said, quietly but clearly: “By the way, you don’t know a damn thing about Jim Morrison.”
That was it. No follow-up. No smile. No explanation. Just the sentence.
Stone looked up at me the way someone looks when they’ve been interrupted by something they didn’t order. Not angry. Not shocked. Almost… familiar. Like he’d heard it before. Maybe he had. He remained silent.
The room went still.
Not dead silent—but close enough that you could feel the absence of sound. Forks paused. Conversations hesitated. Everyone knew something unscripted had just happened, and no one was sure what the next line was supposed to be.
That’s when Sarah’s hand found the inside of my right upper arm.
The pinch was immediate and surgical. Not angry — controlled. Precise. A message delivered in flesh: We are leaving. Now.
She didn’t look at me. She didn’t say a word. She just turned and walked out the door, five steps ahead, carrying the full weight of public humiliation with perfect posture.
I followed, suddenly aware of my surroundings again, suddenly sober enough to understand what I’d done. The door closed behind us. Cold mountain air hit my face.
On the sidewalk, she kept walking.
And I laughed. Out loud. The breath hit my face in the freezing air as I walked.
Not loudly. Not triumphantly. Just that quiet, helpless laugh you give yourself when the moment has already passed, and there’s nothing left to do but own it. I charmed myself with it. No one else.
He probably doesn’t remember it; for some reason, I’ll never forget it.
It was a hell of a night.