DENVER – Sporting a Donald Trump sock on his right foot and a Bernie Sanders sock on the left – both complete with out-of-control three-dimensional hair – Gov. John Hickenlooper said his autobiography released this week is the anti-vice presidential bid.

“I ran for mayor in 2003 and I’ve stayed in public service because I think that people don’t believe in government very much – increasingly less each year – and part of that is that so many elected officials try to present this polished, gleaming image of themselves as pretty much always right,” Hickenlooper said Thursday. “I think most of us have done stupid stuff over the course of, certainly our youth.”

Hickenlooper said he balked at including some details in the book, but his ghostwriter, Max Potter, urged him to be “authentic.”

Those details include smoking marijuana with his brother while in high school, trying to grow a pot plant while living at his mother’s house, and his sometimes tortured relationships with women, including a broken engagement and a marriage that dissolved during his first term as governor.

He took his mother to see “Deep Throat,” a pornographic film released in the early 1970s.

And he took a naked selfie for an art class.

“I’m a little surprised that the press corps isn’t demanding to see that selfie,” Hickenlooper said, laughing as reporters who cover his cabinet pretended to recoil. “All the time you want transparency and suddenly you change your mind.”

It’s the kind of humor that Hickenlooper, the quirky entrepreneur who started a wildly successful brewpub in Denver and then one in Colorado Springs after losing his job as a geologist for the oil and gas industry, is known for.

But his book also reveals a darker and brooding side.

He said much of the motivation for writing “The Opposite of Woe: My Life in Beer and Politics,” was to preserve the memory of his father, John Wright Hickenlooper, known to everyone, including his two biological children and two stepchildren, as “Hick.”

Hick was the most fun person he knew as a boy, and no one explained to the 8-year-old Hickenlooper that his father was dying of intestinal cancer.

“Having been through the death of his own father, Hick had a sense of what was in store for us,” Hickenlooper writes. “He knew we probably would not remember much of him, and that much of what we would remember of him would be these months of his being sick and absent. Hick knew he was about to leave a hole.”

That the loss of his father might be at the heart of some of the governor’s relationship problems is a premise that kicks off the book.

The book details Hickenlooper’s political demons, as well. He said he treaded carefully with the Aurora theater shooting, and decided less was more.

The penultimate chapter – “Guns” – details Colorado’s political response to that tragedy: five gun-control bills that passed the state Legislature despite the loud and angry opposition of Republicans.

Hickenlooper writes that he grappled over the issues, but was persuaded the most controversial of the bills – a ban on high-capacity magazines and a requirement of background checks for gun sales between private individuals – would help keep guns out of criminals’ hands.

He was scheduled to sign the bills on March 20, 2013, but “then something happened that reminded me that a difficult day for me politically really isn’t a difficult day at all.”

Tom Clements, Colorado’s head of the Department of Corrections, a member of Hickenlooper’s cabinet and a personal hire, was assassinated on the front steps of his home by a parolee. That Clements was killed by the son of Hickenlooper’s good friend, Jack Ebel, sent Hickenlooper into a “wave of nausea.”

“Here, now, were Jack Ebel and Tom Clements, two of my friends, intersecting in this horror,” he writes.

Hickenlooper says the section on Clements’ death was one of few he let people review before the book was published. Lisa Clements and Jack Ebel read the passages before publication.

But the book isn’t titled “Woe is Me.”

The last chapter brings Hickenlooper’s life full circle. He’s become almost giddy talking about his wife, Robin Pringle, an executive with Liberty Media. Pringle and Hickenlooper kept their relationship a secret for as long as they could and then got married in a small, private ceremony.

The book, published by Penguin Books, sells for $30 and is available at bookstores. Hickenlooper said he will donate any proceeds to charity.

As for the Trump-Sanders socks, Hickenlooper said people like to say the left foot doesn’t know what the right foot is doing.

“In this case, that’s true,” he said.

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Contact Megan Schrader: 286-0644

Twitter @CapitolSchrader