Road trip:

Genoa Wonder Tower
Genoa, CO

There aren’t many good reasons to wake up at quarter of six, but on this morning there were two.  That’s if you count each head on a two-headed cow as one reason.

After a few CDs, a trip back home to get the directions I left folded on the floor, and one latte’s worth of driving, we arrived at the Genoa Wonder Tower in eastern Colorado.  We drove up the dirt path and could see tourists taking in the view from the observation deck.

The car parked, we stepped out and into the yard.  It was filled with junk.  Bottles everywhere, lined up like the tacky empty liquor bottles frat boys like to arrange on the mantle.  There were three cars parked there, but only one, ours, was in any kind of driving shape.  The other two were Caddies that haven’t run since…well, maybe ever.  Both were resting on flaps of deflated tire, and both were stuffed up to the back windows and windshields with bottles.

The operator of Genoa Wonder Tower, Jerry, let us in the front door.  The front room was covered in junk.  Old pieces of leather and giant snakeskins were stapled and nailed to the ceiling.  Jerry told us we could see the entire place for a dollar apiece, but there’s a catch.  Just in case the one-dollar price tag is a tad too exorbitant, Jerry gives museum goers a chance to win their dollar back.

He took us over to a dirty glass case and slid one side open.  He pulled out a series of novelties, each time saying, “Okay, I’ll bet you can get this one.  Do you know anything about antiques?”  He showed us a variety of items.  Some were cheesy homemade gags, like the quarter laid into a block of wood with a little detachable wooden hammer standing next to it.  “Can you guess?” he said.  He pulled the little hammer out with his thumb and forefinger and started banging on the coin.  “It’s a quarter pounder,” he said, still tapping the coin with the wooden hammer.  He pulled piece after piece from the shelves.  One was what looked like a pair of pliers.  He handed it over to me.  I guessed it was maybe a medieval tooth-puller, but then he took it back and switched it around in his hand to show me I was holding it the wrong way.  Then he showed us the instructions that came with it.

The pliers were supposed to be a humane means of slaughtering chickens.  They came complete with a funnel that attaches to the wall, but Jerry didn’t have that part.  You stick the funnel on the wall, then gently, with the grace and care of the chicken’s own mother, you stick the chicken headfirst into the funnel so that only the chicken’s head pokes out. So there the chicken is, humanely suspended upside down a few feet above the floor, like it’s on some kind of wonderful humane carnival ride, when you stick the pliers in its face.  One of plier jaw goes on top of the chicken’s head, the other in its beak.  Then you just press the jaws together and crush the chicken’s brain.

The last thing Jerry handed us was a pair of clubs, long, thin sticks that he told us were used as weapons.  The trick was guessing what they were made of.  He put a club in each of our hands. He’s sure that everyone has a solid grip on their staff before he tells you that they are walrus penises.  I’ll just say, when animals evolve into making porn, and I do say “when,” walruses will be the John Holmes’ of the animal porn world.

After that, a few more wanderers walked into the building and Jerry set us off on our own, occasionally coming out of nowhere to flip on a light switch.  The rooms were filled with bottles and old books that stank with a sweet musk, like the paper was milled from rotting hay.

The thing about the Wonder Tower, unlike most attractions, is that 90% of it is on sale.  If, for some reason, you wanted to buy both a length of old rusty barbed wire and a broken Barbie record player, but you only wanted to make one stop, the Wonder Tower is the place to go.  There were boxes of sea shells for sale, unremarkable except that this was the only place I’d seen where one could buy a seashell with “$2” written in large, black, permanent figures across the shell’s top.

All the items for sale got me to thinking that the real exhibit would be the mountain of permanent markers Jerry must have dried out writing prices on thousands of individual bottles.  One got the idea that if a bottle broke he would have written the new reduced price on every glass shard before sweeping them into a dust pan ($7) and throwing them in an old barrel ($45).

We climbed to the top of the tower, which featured a broken stationary telescope.  The people we had seen up in the tower turned out to be dummies.  They were convincing from the road, especially considering that neither of them were sporting any kind of head.  The railing around the top had stripping paint.  Written in permanent marker on the railing were the names of the different states allegedly visible from the top of the tower, WYO, SOUTH DAK, etc.  I was unsure that SOUTH DAK was really visible from about a two-story tower, but either way I felt like counting COLORADO as one of the six states visible from the tower was sneaky.

We climbed down the candy cane-colored steps and went into the treasure room.  It was what we came to see, the few items not on sale.  Tucked in the corner was a two-headed cow, just a calf really.  He was normal up to the end of his neck where his head split in two the way two main branches split the trunk of a tree.  The heads both faced off to the side.  This looked inconvenient, but then again being a freak isn’t about convenience, it’s about showmanship.  The cow was old, and the leather skin around its nose was peeling off in scabby flakes.  It didn’t look unhappy standing there, jars filled with other freaks at its feet.  I wondered if the cow with two heads, given the opportunity, would trade lives with the pig with two bodies.  Two heads is a raw deal next to the prospect of two bodies.  The way I figure, two bodies means one to throw away and one to save for later.  You could have your one body exercising and eating right while the other one was smoking Parliaments and eating the sizzling butts.

As we left, Jerry tried to convince us to buy $1 t-shirts.  He said he’d just picked up a huge box, and they were, “Great for every day.  Not for dressing up, but for every day.”  He opened the flap on a box and pulled out one of the shirts.  It was screened with a giant American flag and the words “I support Desert Storm.”  These were shirts from the first go-round, and each one was big enough that I could have dried off with it after stepping out of the shower and still found enough dry space inside to wear it the rest of the day.

Leaving the tower, we put in another CD and I started driving.  The road signs flashed the number of miles to Denver, but instead of looking I was thinking about what my own version of the museum would be like.  “This?  I bet you can get this one.  No, you’re holding it all wrong.  See, it’s a lobster fork.  I stole that from the Space Needle way back in ’02.  And this here?  That’s an origami fortune teller. What you would do is pick a color, then a number, and folks say it could tell you your future.  And these are all for sale.  Let me just grab another permanent marker and ruin it with this price.”

Wonder Tower

Address:

30121 Frontage Rd, Genoa, CO

Directions:

I-70 exit 371 (Hwy. 109).

Hours:

8 am – 8 pm. (Call to verify)

Phone:

719-763-2309