The aged, large Brown trout, a trophy sought after by all who angled this or any section of the epic Colorado River headwaters, finned slowly at the lowest depths of a pool, languid, sated and content with his latest conquest of the fat Fall caddis flies that had sought respite upon the placid surface of his pool only to find, too late, that the serene waters upon which they had lit were but the antithesis of respite, rather, it was a canvas for slaughter, not unlike a sleek wooden cutting board that exists for the sole purpose of faunal relief before their methodical and intentional dismemberment, that which is necessary prior to the feast.
The Brown continued to rest, satisfied with all that he had accomplished, living at that moment within a state of supreme bliss; the thought of future glories or excesses nonexistent in his feeble brain, certainly not at this point of ultimate contentment and self-satisfaction.
And then, upon the surface of his domain, a ripple, a tremble showing desperation….the hint of a struggle, perhaps even weakness.…caught the Brown’s attention. Could there be room in his near-to-bursting stomach for another fat morsel; could one ever have too much of a good thing?
Without even thinking, even in his limited vision of what thinking and reasoning involved, the Brown shoots to the surface, mouth agape, ready to blindly gulp one more chunk of what, at first glance, albeit peripherally, seems appealing.
'Glump'….water is sucked in, along with the fat treat. 'Chomp', as the prey is quickly incised, tasted and devoured. These two naturally spasmodic actions, 'Glump' and 'Chomp', are but a split second apart from being simultaneous.
Next, a sting in the upper jaw, a pain so profound, quickly followed by a strain, a violent tug, then a steady flow that pulls and yanks at the Brown’s jaw with an intensity heretofore unimagined or experienced. Screaming downward, back to the safety of his pool, the tug gets stronger, and the pain more intense. He shakes his head violently to and fro, hoping to rid himself of whatever he has encountered, but to no avail; the unseen force continues to pull, and the burning in his mouth has now found its way into the bone and throughout his whole being. He continues to shake his head, he continues to circle his pool, his domain, but the tug and the pain persist and intensify. His energy spent, he gives in and follows the upward force, and in doing so, the pain in his mouth begins to lessen and the resultant shock to his body diminishes as well. He gives himself up to this higher force, his previous state of indolent satisfaction now replaced by an intense desire to survive, to vanquish the suffering which has been inflicted by this source unseen.
He breaks the surface, fleetingly seeing a world and a life that he’d never imagined, that he never knew existed so close to his world. Now in the grasp of the unknown force, he knows only that he is no longer in his world, he knows he doesn’t like this new world, but he has abdicated to this unknown place; sadly, he has no cognitive notion of the pain, the suffering and the violent demise that ultimately and swiftly will befall him as he crosses into this threshold unknown, in what he believes is a defensive measure necessary for his survival.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On December 27th, 2007, at approximately 5:00 PM MST, in front of family both immediate and in-law, a banker, a title company representative, a realtor and Abner Renta, my wife and I signed papers that made us joint owners of The Riverside Hotel, Bar & Restaurant.
Abner had signed his papers earlier in the day, and the money, $690,000, was already in his bank account. Nearly half of that money would immediately transfer to an individual who had loaned Abner $300,000 as an “investment” – an investment that not only earned the investor no dividends, but Abner had never even paid him a penny of the principal, as was their initial agreement and a condition of the loan. While this sucker made none of the promised gains, at least he got out whole.
We arrived at the hotel at 4:30 PM, having pulled a 9’x12’ U-Haul trailer, loaded with a sofa, chairs, our big screen TV and scads of other knick knacks, pictures, decorative items and on and on….the first load of what would ultimately be three additional loaded 9x12 U-Haul trailers and two 25’ Penske trucks comprised of all that we had acquired in 28 years of wedded bliss. The drive had been brutal, with a sideways snowstorm through most of Kansas the evening before, Julie sick as a dog, and the final push into Colorado, over Loveland Pass, up the icy roads, twists and turns of the Blue River Valley and slowly into Hot Sulphur…our new home that welcomed us after this bitch of a traverse like a massive mousetrap welcomes a timid mouse on an innocent quest for a bit of cheese.
The deal was for Abner to have all of his personal belongings out of the hotel at the hour of closing. The deal also included Abner leaving all of the furniture and fixtures germane to the operation of the hotel in place, as they were included in the price of the hotel. As you don’t have to imagine, the opposite had occurred. Anything of worth, including most of the nice antique pieces in the lobby and the rooms, were noticeably absent…absconded by Abner and held in whereabouts unknown.
Still present in the hotel, particularly in Abner’s living quarters, was his personal junk, trash, garbage…the effluvium of 20 years of pack-ratted living….the very shit of life that a person such as me or anyone would assume that they were paying hard money not to have to deal with. That shit, he left for us.
Step back and imagine me for a second, going into this major life altering venture, having driven through a blizzard, hauling a trailer with a sick wife and reluctant business partner, and walking into our new home, the previous owner sitting in one of the shit stained chairs that he was gracious enough to leave behind, sipping on champagne and chomping on celebratory shrimp that the realtor had provided, throwing the shrimp shells on the floor next to the worthless garbage that he hadn’t moved from the hotel, (not next to the antiques that I’d thought we purchased),…and as I'm smoldering to the point of spontaneous combustion, he says to me “I’ve got my personal effects in the back room, where I’ll still live for a while, if that’s OK with you? I've got nowhere else to go....sniff”
I took a Grand Canyon-esque deep breath and walked back into the living quarters. In one of the back rooms, actually the nicest back room…one that Abner and his kept illegal hadn’t fouled, were Abner’s clothes, personal effects and, believe this or not, his slippers sitting neatly near the side of the bed, his robe laid neatly on the bed and his toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste at the sink (this was a huge shock, taking into account the condition of his fetid dentia).
He sold us the building, he cashed his $690,000 check, he took and sold all of the good stuff out of the hotel, left the garbage and the trash, and still planned on living in the hotel rent free, with us, in the nicest room in the house.
If balls were cash, Abner would have the financial wherewithal to scare Bill Gates and Warren Buffet out of a game of Texas Hold-Em.
………….To Be Concluded
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Monday, December 12, 2011
Abner Renta.......Setting the Hook
Abner was broke.
Flat busted, tits-up, in the hole, impoverished, financially depleted, in the red, destitute, insolvent….you get the picture.
However, of paramount importance to this story was the fact that I didn’t get the picture, or worse and more to the truth, I knew but refused to get the picture.
Abner hadn’t paid his property taxes for three years. I learned, after not paying my property taxes the second year we owned The Riverside, that this wasn’t the end of the world. Kind hearted individuals would step up and pay your taxes, and when you could finally pony up with the money, you would pay your taxes to the County, plus a penalty and interest, which the kind hearted knights in shining armor would reap. CD’s were earning 2% and the stock market was anywhere from losing 100% to breaking even if you were lucky; buying up late property taxes and cashing in on the interest when finally paid netted the investor 10% interest – risk free.
Here was the ugly part, and the reason why Abner pleaded with a total stranger over the phone for a loan of $10,000. You had three years to get right with the County, at which point the kind hearted soul who saved your ass with the County by paying your taxes, at the worst case would gain 10% interest, but a best case scenario they would have first lien against your property when they sold it on the courthouse steps, 3 years to the date of your delinquency.
Simply put, let’s say I owed the County $6000 in property taxes on February 10th, 2004. I didn’t pay the money, but some nice guy did, and the County is cool, as they get their six grand and don’t even bother sending me a nasty notice. I pay $7000 one year later, for the 2003 tax, of which the nice guy gets $6600, and the County gets the $400 penalty. If I can’t pay the $7000 the following year, the compound interest grows into the next year and the next, until you hit three years past due. Let’s say I pay nothing for three years, as was Abner’s case, then on February 10th, 2007, on the courthouse steps in the County of Grand, CO, my property is auctioned off to the highest bidder – the nice guy that plopped down that initial $6000 investment three years ago gets the first grab at his six grand and 10% compounded interest over three years – that’s almost $2000 on a $6000 risk-free investment. In these and any times, buying up property taxes is a good investment. Instead of buying a dilapidated haunted shithole of a hotel, possibly I should have looked at that as a means to making a buck in Grand County…..but alas!
Abner was two weeks away from that three-year delinquent courthouse steps auction. He was about to lose the thing that he’d put 20 years of blood, sweat, tears and all of his monetary wherewithal into - his financial life was literally flashing before his eyes, and the ending was a cataclysmic event, from which there was no recovery; at best we’re talking homeless shelters, if they would have Abner and his cantankerousness.
The first $10,000 got Abner out of immediate trouble with the County and the really unpalatable ‘sale on the courthouse steps’ thing, which was bearing down on Abner to the point where it made Father Time look like a lazy good-for-nothing slacker. The next $10,000 that we sent went towards the next year of unpaid taxes and “a little credit card debt that I’ve compiled….”, a nervous little laugh accenting this profession. After submitting this second financial resurrection, now $20,000, we were a little more serious about buying the place, and we figured worst case, we’d get it back with interest if we didn’t buy The Riverside and one of the multitudes of interested parties that Abner had on the hook did buy the place.
A few blogs back I took a personal break to relate a childhood incident, possibly directly unrelated to the purchase of The Riverside, but probably subliminally related to the purchase of The Riverside – i.e. my early in life failed quest for the attainment of Sainthood. While I didn’t have a sit down with myself to discuss this, again subliminally, the notion of redemption and being back on the active board for Sainthood-liness festered in the dark recesses of my red-flag ignoring, financially deficient mind.
A visit to my banker in KC to discuss my wild notion of buying The Riverside wrought the following discussion. This was a banker that had financed my business for years, through times both lean and hardy – we’d become pretty good friends…as friendly as a banker can become with a borrower.
“We’ve found this place in Colorado that we’re considering buying. It’s a historic hotel in a beautiful little town. It’s something we’ve always considered doing, and now with the sale of the business, I think we’ve got the wherewithal to make it happen. I’ve got cash flow projections and pro formas for the next five years that I’d like you to look at. Any chance UMBig Bank would be willing to consider this?”
“Without even looking at your numbers, I’d be pretty certain that it’s not a loan we’d consider. Let’s be honest…you don’t have any experience in this type of business, and it’s in a remote spot that we wouldn’t be interested in investing in” said my friend, the banker, really looking out for me at this point and of course I FAILED TO SEE IT!!!
“But you’ve got locations in Denver! You’re trying to establish interests in Colorado.”
“Right, but they’re pretty selected investments in Colorado. Here’s the deal…we’re hesitant to loan money to established Kansas City restaurateurs with locations around the corner from our banks, let alone your venture, someone new to the business trying to make a go of it in the middle of nowhere.”
(A financially savvy friend, whose financial opinion I’d sought and trusted as Gospel for the past 20 years had just sat me down, looked me in the eye and told me in a fashion that a five-year old would have understood, that this was a bad deal and to make it but a funny point of cocktail party conversation in my future.)
“So, how serious are you about this deal?” my friend, the banker, inquired.
Sheepishly, “I’ve loaned him $20,000 to pay his delinquent property taxes, of which he’s guaranteed that he’ll pay me back when he sells the hotel.”
I’d known this banker for 20 years, and I’d never heard him cuss, not once. He was a Catholic, but his demeanor and apparent disdain with regards to booze, gambling, profane banter and all of the other fun things that Catholics are able to do whilst still being faithful to the their religion, would have made him a pretty solid Baptist.
“Tell me you are f-ing kidding me? You loaned him money to pay his property taxes so the place wouldn’t be seized and sold? Please tell me you didn’t do that? Do you realize you could have gone out there and bought that place for nickels…maybe pennies.. on the dollar??”
This is where the Sainthood thing comes back into play.
I knew damn good and well that I could have done that. I knew that I could have told old Abner that I too had not a pot to piss in and he was at the mercy of the State. I could have shown up two weeks after denying him his $10,000, and probably bought the place for 1/5th of what we ultimately paid for it. I knew this, I thought about it, and St. Richard decided against it as a course of action – a course that would hopefully define me and my future, a course that would give me good karma going forward, knowing that I allowed a human who’d given his heart and soul to this place, to walk away from that place with his head held high and some money in his pocket. I didn’t want to take ownership of The Riverside under any other scenario.
OK, so my Saintly actions weren’t reciprocated by the seller – after the deal, on paper, I am not Saint Richard, I’m Schmuck Richard. But to this day, as of this writing, I look into the mirror with aplomb, hoping that someone of a higher pose, someone beyond a banker, will note the good thing that we did; not for the purpose of a favorable reply, but for the sheer purpose of doing good.
To Be Continued…………..
Flat busted, tits-up, in the hole, impoverished, financially depleted, in the red, destitute, insolvent….you get the picture.
However, of paramount importance to this story was the fact that I didn’t get the picture, or worse and more to the truth, I knew but refused to get the picture.
Abner hadn’t paid his property taxes for three years. I learned, after not paying my property taxes the second year we owned The Riverside, that this wasn’t the end of the world. Kind hearted individuals would step up and pay your taxes, and when you could finally pony up with the money, you would pay your taxes to the County, plus a penalty and interest, which the kind hearted knights in shining armor would reap. CD’s were earning 2% and the stock market was anywhere from losing 100% to breaking even if you were lucky; buying up late property taxes and cashing in on the interest when finally paid netted the investor 10% interest – risk free.
Here was the ugly part, and the reason why Abner pleaded with a total stranger over the phone for a loan of $10,000. You had three years to get right with the County, at which point the kind hearted soul who saved your ass with the County by paying your taxes, at the worst case would gain 10% interest, but a best case scenario they would have first lien against your property when they sold it on the courthouse steps, 3 years to the date of your delinquency.
Simply put, let’s say I owed the County $6000 in property taxes on February 10th, 2004. I didn’t pay the money, but some nice guy did, and the County is cool, as they get their six grand and don’t even bother sending me a nasty notice. I pay $7000 one year later, for the 2003 tax, of which the nice guy gets $6600, and the County gets the $400 penalty. If I can’t pay the $7000 the following year, the compound interest grows into the next year and the next, until you hit three years past due. Let’s say I pay nothing for three years, as was Abner’s case, then on February 10th, 2007, on the courthouse steps in the County of Grand, CO, my property is auctioned off to the highest bidder – the nice guy that plopped down that initial $6000 investment three years ago gets the first grab at his six grand and 10% compounded interest over three years – that’s almost $2000 on a $6000 risk-free investment. In these and any times, buying up property taxes is a good investment. Instead of buying a dilapidated haunted shithole of a hotel, possibly I should have looked at that as a means to making a buck in Grand County…..but alas!
Abner was two weeks away from that three-year delinquent courthouse steps auction. He was about to lose the thing that he’d put 20 years of blood, sweat, tears and all of his monetary wherewithal into - his financial life was literally flashing before his eyes, and the ending was a cataclysmic event, from which there was no recovery; at best we’re talking homeless shelters, if they would have Abner and his cantankerousness.
The first $10,000 got Abner out of immediate trouble with the County and the really unpalatable ‘sale on the courthouse steps’ thing, which was bearing down on Abner to the point where it made Father Time look like a lazy good-for-nothing slacker. The next $10,000 that we sent went towards the next year of unpaid taxes and “a little credit card debt that I’ve compiled….”, a nervous little laugh accenting this profession. After submitting this second financial resurrection, now $20,000, we were a little more serious about buying the place, and we figured worst case, we’d get it back with interest if we didn’t buy The Riverside and one of the multitudes of interested parties that Abner had on the hook did buy the place.
A few blogs back I took a personal break to relate a childhood incident, possibly directly unrelated to the purchase of The Riverside, but probably subliminally related to the purchase of The Riverside – i.e. my early in life failed quest for the attainment of Sainthood. While I didn’t have a sit down with myself to discuss this, again subliminally, the notion of redemption and being back on the active board for Sainthood-liness festered in the dark recesses of my red-flag ignoring, financially deficient mind.
A visit to my banker in KC to discuss my wild notion of buying The Riverside wrought the following discussion. This was a banker that had financed my business for years, through times both lean and hardy – we’d become pretty good friends…as friendly as a banker can become with a borrower.
“We’ve found this place in Colorado that we’re considering buying. It’s a historic hotel in a beautiful little town. It’s something we’ve always considered doing, and now with the sale of the business, I think we’ve got the wherewithal to make it happen. I’ve got cash flow projections and pro formas for the next five years that I’d like you to look at. Any chance UMBig Bank would be willing to consider this?”
“Without even looking at your numbers, I’d be pretty certain that it’s not a loan we’d consider. Let’s be honest…you don’t have any experience in this type of business, and it’s in a remote spot that we wouldn’t be interested in investing in” said my friend, the banker, really looking out for me at this point and of course I FAILED TO SEE IT!!!
“But you’ve got locations in Denver! You’re trying to establish interests in Colorado.”
“Right, but they’re pretty selected investments in Colorado. Here’s the deal…we’re hesitant to loan money to established Kansas City restaurateurs with locations around the corner from our banks, let alone your venture, someone new to the business trying to make a go of it in the middle of nowhere.”
(A financially savvy friend, whose financial opinion I’d sought and trusted as Gospel for the past 20 years had just sat me down, looked me in the eye and told me in a fashion that a five-year old would have understood, that this was a bad deal and to make it but a funny point of cocktail party conversation in my future.)
“So, how serious are you about this deal?” my friend, the banker, inquired.
Sheepishly, “I’ve loaned him $20,000 to pay his delinquent property taxes, of which he’s guaranteed that he’ll pay me back when he sells the hotel.”
I’d known this banker for 20 years, and I’d never heard him cuss, not once. He was a Catholic, but his demeanor and apparent disdain with regards to booze, gambling, profane banter and all of the other fun things that Catholics are able to do whilst still being faithful to the their religion, would have made him a pretty solid Baptist.
“Tell me you are f-ing kidding me? You loaned him money to pay his property taxes so the place wouldn’t be seized and sold? Please tell me you didn’t do that? Do you realize you could have gone out there and bought that place for nickels…maybe pennies.. on the dollar??”
This is where the Sainthood thing comes back into play.
I knew damn good and well that I could have done that. I knew that I could have told old Abner that I too had not a pot to piss in and he was at the mercy of the State. I could have shown up two weeks after denying him his $10,000, and probably bought the place for 1/5th of what we ultimately paid for it. I knew this, I thought about it, and St. Richard decided against it as a course of action – a course that would hopefully define me and my future, a course that would give me good karma going forward, knowing that I allowed a human who’d given his heart and soul to this place, to walk away from that place with his head held high and some money in his pocket. I didn’t want to take ownership of The Riverside under any other scenario.
OK, so my Saintly actions weren’t reciprocated by the seller – after the deal, on paper, I am not Saint Richard, I’m Schmuck Richard. But to this day, as of this writing, I look into the mirror with aplomb, hoping that someone of a higher pose, someone beyond a banker, will note the good thing that we did; not for the purpose of a favorable reply, but for the sheer purpose of doing good.
To Be Continued…………..
Saturday, November 26, 2011
Abner Renta..........Master Angler
Although the piercing smile had not yet fully subsided from his face, Abner said “Of course I remember you Mr. Paradise. How could I forget a name like Paradise?”
“Well, my wife and I have always loved your place, and I’ve just sold my business here in Kansas City and we’re at a point in our lives where we’re looking for a lifestyle change, and we’ve always thought about owning The Riverside. Any chance you’re looking to get out of the business and sell the place?”
The smile was now back broadly, so profoundly, that he could barely operate his tongue to get words through his lips. The high elevation afternoon sun was reflecting off of his fully exposed rotting dentia, the reflection from his ragged incisors in the front window of The Riverside all but blinding Abner to the point where he couldn’t concentrate, but he summoned the necessary wherewithal to answer in something like a hissing purr…”Yes…yes… I might be interested in discussing a sale of the property. But it would have to be to the right people…people that would care for the place, people that would love the place, as I have.”
‘Oh My’, I thought, ‘beyond the financial, he has additional qualifications for who he’ll sell to.’ Could we be so honored, could we ultimately be selected and would we be chosen worthy enough to ably carry his water at The Riverside going forward?
I didn’t want to be cast out from consideration before a proper vetting so early in the game, a vetting that might show me and mine not worthy to bear the distinguished mantle of Proprietor of The Historic Riverside Hotel, but I had to come right out and get a price, as I had a maximum number in mind that I was willing to offer, but I feared that the number was maybe half what he was asking. No sense going any further if the place was immediately out of our price range.
“So Abner, I know there is a lot of water to cover between here and there, but so I don’t further waste either of our time, do you have a number in mind that you’d sell the place for?”
Abner said immediately, and emphatically, no doubt his arm was outstretched and his index finger pointing skyward in oratorical emphasis, “I won’t take a penny less than $800,000!”
Now the drunken pumpkin grin appeared upon my face. I’d imagined the place to be worth 2 million, maybe as much as 3 million, and my drop dead point with what I thought we could offer was 1.5 million. Here was a 13,000 square foot structure on 1.5 acres of Colorado River-front property – bona-fide Gold Medal trout water that people traveled from all over the world to angle. I’d read that people spent as much as 3 million dollars for 2500’ feet of undeveloped riverfront property on The Colorado, not but a mile or two upriver from Hot Sulphur.
“Well, that seems to be a price range that we can work in…let me talk with my wife and get back with you.”
I didn’t then know, but know now, that Abner quickly lost the smile at this point and went heavy into a ‘gotta sell this son-of-a-bitch at all costs as I haven’t had a serious prospect with the money to make this happen on the hook for the past 19 years’ survival mode …”I do remember you now…you had a family and you seemed to love this place. Not everyone could take this on, but I remember that you and your wife and kids seemed like you’d be the type of people that would be perfect for this place. Wasn’t one of your kids retarded?”
“No, uh, that was one of our friend’s kids you’re thinking about, and he wasn’t retarded!”
“Sorry. Sorry. I’ve had so many thousands of guests the past few years, it’s a wonder I can remember as many particulars as I can…given my advanced age…and my poor health…(cough…cough). I really would like to sell this place to you, as I’m really starting to wear down.”
“Well Abner, let me talk with my wife, and I’m going to put a list of questions together and I’ll call you in a few days.”
And now, here was not only the first red flag of hundreds that I would fail or refuse to see, but in retrospect, here was the biggest, football-field sized red flag of all times regarding our magnum f-up in the pursuit and eventual purchase of The Historic Riverside Hotel, Bar & Restaurant.
Abner opened up to me, a virtual stranger, over the phone on our first phone call…”I’ve got a couple of other parties interested in the property…I think you should know that.” (‘Damn!” I thought.) Abner continued…”Unfortunately, I’ve got myself into a little issue on my property taxes, and I could use $10,000 to get up to speed with the county. If you could send me the money, we could put it towards a down payment, or at the least, I’d pay you back at a generous interest rate when I sell the place to someone else if you’re not interested in purchasing the property. And if you were to send me the money pretty quickly, it would sure put you in a favorable position when I’m deciding who to sell the place to.”
At this point any normal human being and most abnormal human beings...probably even most cats and dogs… would have not only turned away from this deal, they would have snapped their necks turning away and running as fast as their fat little shanks would carry them, all the while laughing with glee, screaming to and thanking the Good Lord above about having almost gotten into a deal that would’ve involved sending big money on the come to a shifty, broke, tax-evading hotelier in a State that was not only accepting of him, but also the city of Boulder and it’s inhabitants.
Reality and simple common sense would then have its natural chance to kick in, and you’d reply to this outlandish request with a “What??? Do you think I’m out of my mind? I’m going to just up and send you $10,000? Are you insane???” You would then hang up the phone, probably chuckle to yourself, and then get on with your life.
I probably don’t have to tell you that the $10,000 check was in the mail, heading west to Abner Renta, but a few short days later…..
To Be Continued
“Well, my wife and I have always loved your place, and I’ve just sold my business here in Kansas City and we’re at a point in our lives where we’re looking for a lifestyle change, and we’ve always thought about owning The Riverside. Any chance you’re looking to get out of the business and sell the place?”
The smile was now back broadly, so profoundly, that he could barely operate his tongue to get words through his lips. The high elevation afternoon sun was reflecting off of his fully exposed rotting dentia, the reflection from his ragged incisors in the front window of The Riverside all but blinding Abner to the point where he couldn’t concentrate, but he summoned the necessary wherewithal to answer in something like a hissing purr…”Yes…yes… I might be interested in discussing a sale of the property. But it would have to be to the right people…people that would care for the place, people that would love the place, as I have.”
‘Oh My’, I thought, ‘beyond the financial, he has additional qualifications for who he’ll sell to.’ Could we be so honored, could we ultimately be selected and would we be chosen worthy enough to ably carry his water at The Riverside going forward?
I didn’t want to be cast out from consideration before a proper vetting so early in the game, a vetting that might show me and mine not worthy to bear the distinguished mantle of Proprietor of The Historic Riverside Hotel, but I had to come right out and get a price, as I had a maximum number in mind that I was willing to offer, but I feared that the number was maybe half what he was asking. No sense going any further if the place was immediately out of our price range.
“So Abner, I know there is a lot of water to cover between here and there, but so I don’t further waste either of our time, do you have a number in mind that you’d sell the place for?”
Abner said immediately, and emphatically, no doubt his arm was outstretched and his index finger pointing skyward in oratorical emphasis, “I won’t take a penny less than $800,000!”
Now the drunken pumpkin grin appeared upon my face. I’d imagined the place to be worth 2 million, maybe as much as 3 million, and my drop dead point with what I thought we could offer was 1.5 million. Here was a 13,000 square foot structure on 1.5 acres of Colorado River-front property – bona-fide Gold Medal trout water that people traveled from all over the world to angle. I’d read that people spent as much as 3 million dollars for 2500’ feet of undeveloped riverfront property on The Colorado, not but a mile or two upriver from Hot Sulphur.
“Well, that seems to be a price range that we can work in…let me talk with my wife and get back with you.”
I didn’t then know, but know now, that Abner quickly lost the smile at this point and went heavy into a ‘gotta sell this son-of-a-bitch at all costs as I haven’t had a serious prospect with the money to make this happen on the hook for the past 19 years’ survival mode …”I do remember you now…you had a family and you seemed to love this place. Not everyone could take this on, but I remember that you and your wife and kids seemed like you’d be the type of people that would be perfect for this place. Wasn’t one of your kids retarded?”
“No, uh, that was one of our friend’s kids you’re thinking about, and he wasn’t retarded!”
“Sorry. Sorry. I’ve had so many thousands of guests the past few years, it’s a wonder I can remember as many particulars as I can…given my advanced age…and my poor health…(cough…cough). I really would like to sell this place to you, as I’m really starting to wear down.”
“Well Abner, let me talk with my wife, and I’m going to put a list of questions together and I’ll call you in a few days.”
And now, here was not only the first red flag of hundreds that I would fail or refuse to see, but in retrospect, here was the biggest, football-field sized red flag of all times regarding our magnum f-up in the pursuit and eventual purchase of The Historic Riverside Hotel, Bar & Restaurant.
Abner opened up to me, a virtual stranger, over the phone on our first phone call…”I’ve got a couple of other parties interested in the property…I think you should know that.” (‘Damn!” I thought.) Abner continued…”Unfortunately, I’ve got myself into a little issue on my property taxes, and I could use $10,000 to get up to speed with the county. If you could send me the money, we could put it towards a down payment, or at the least, I’d pay you back at a generous interest rate when I sell the place to someone else if you’re not interested in purchasing the property. And if you were to send me the money pretty quickly, it would sure put you in a favorable position when I’m deciding who to sell the place to.”
At this point any normal human being and most abnormal human beings...probably even most cats and dogs… would have not only turned away from this deal, they would have snapped their necks turning away and running as fast as their fat little shanks would carry them, all the while laughing with glee, screaming to and thanking the Good Lord above about having almost gotten into a deal that would’ve involved sending big money on the come to a shifty, broke, tax-evading hotelier in a State that was not only accepting of him, but also the city of Boulder and it’s inhabitants.
Reality and simple common sense would then have its natural chance to kick in, and you’d reply to this outlandish request with a “What??? Do you think I’m out of my mind? I’m going to just up and send you $10,000? Are you insane???” You would then hang up the phone, probably chuckle to yourself, and then get on with your life.
I probably don’t have to tell you that the $10,000 check was in the mail, heading west to Abner Renta, but a few short days later…..
To Be Continued
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Abner Renta...........aka Not Martha Stewart
About 20 miles NNE of Hot Sulphur Springs lies the village of Grand Lake, Colorado, home to Colorado’s deepest and largest natural lake and the headwaters of the Colorado River; Grand Lake is also the western entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. In the county of Grand, with all of the spectacular vistas, fishing, hunting and recreational opportunities, Grand Lake, Co can lay claim to the first established vacation spot in the Colorado Rockies, dating back to the late 1800’s. The setting of this cerulean jewel surrounded by sloping pine forests and the ensuing spires of The Indian Peaks is rivaled by few places in terms of its natural beauty. Sadly, at the bottom of this visually bountiful natural bowl lies the actual town of Grand Lake, replete with a faux rustic Old West street of bars, restaurants, art galleries, souvenir shops, a bowling alley and some less-than-quaint motels and lodging establishments. Oh well, we all gotta make a buck.
The Historic Grand Lake Lodge, which opened in 1920, some 17 years after the opening of The Riverside, was the crown jewel of Grand Lake – a magnificent lodge, guest quarters and cabins – the standard bearer for food, beverage and lodging on the western slope of the Continental Divide; this until a fire burned the better part of the place to the ground in the summer of 1973. The owners took a painstaking 8 years to rebuild, careful to extract historic furnishings and native memorabilia from the charred rubble before finally re-opening in the summer of 1981.
Why is this little NNE travelogue germane to the story of Abner Renta and The Riverside?
Approximately 50 yards north of the resurrected Grand Lake Lodge, just at the edge of the majestic pine forests that surround this iconic structure, sat a pile of pre-1940’s kitchen equipment that barely survived the fire, and only because the fire didn’t get hot enough to melt the 2-ton cast-iron gas stove, oven and attached griddle that had been the heart and soul of The Grand Lake Lodge kitchen for the past 30 years. They’d been talking about replacing that big, old, outdated locomotive of a stove 10 years prior to the fire; it was now dead and forever out of that kitchen, figuratively if not literally buried at the edge of the woods - for the kitchen crew a silver lining in the dark cloud that was the destructive blaze of 1973. Truth be known, they’d hoped that it would sit there forever and become a permanent part of the flora and fauna, as the effort required of hauling it off would have been monumental.
Enter Abner Renta, Gollum on his eternal quest for a magic ring’s worth of cheap furnishings and equipment for his newly acquired mountain hostelry.
Abner bought the stove for $25, had his bus-depot servant and probably 15 others help load it onto a U-Haul trailer and install it in the newly remodeled kitchen at The Riverside in 1986, prior to the grand reopening. No big deal that not all of the burners worked, the flat top was half melted, it was rife with rust or that the scald and char from the 1973 fire was literally welded to the exterior of this gargantuan hot-box; what was key was that it was cheap, and it worked…..barely, but worked vs. not working at all, in a very black and white sort of way.
Stove assembled in place, to a yellow paisley linoleum sheet floor, probably installed in The Riverside kitchen sometime in the 1930’s, Abner and his servant adhered speckled, beige asbestos linoleum tiles – I’m certain upon completion, they stood back and proudly gazed upon the bright new floor, which now looked something like a glistening diamond in a goats’ ass.
The perimeter of the kitchen was then outfitted with built-in plywood and pine shelves, cabinets, pantries, drawers and worktops, painted with a heavy coat of high-gloss white paint; it was here that utensils and dry goods were stored, and food was ultimately prepared. These cabinets and shelving were very well constructed by Abner’s illegal; so well constructed that they would end up being a screaming bitch to remove 22 years later in our effort to get the kitchen up to code: (take a peek in any commercial kitchen - you won’t see anything constructed of wood, as wood tends to have a soft spot for harboring bacteria.)
The dining room tables and chairs as well as all of the furnishings in the guest rooms were a hodge-podge assortment of yard sale, estate sale and thrift shop items; an eclectic mix, but functional and inexpensive. Bedding, sheets and towels were also collected at various sales or second-hand stores – no boring, bleached white sheets for The Riverside beds; if the linen wasn’t loud enough to keep you awake at night, you wouldn’t be sleeping on it in Abner’s place. Many guests found the wacky sheets and funky furnishings charming, as it gave the place a ‘homey’ feel; we got rid of them the first week we owned the hotel.
The dishware, glasses and cutlery were also vintage garage sale – nothing was a set, no two pieces alike; it could be all but dizzying to look down at the swirls, stripes and floral patterns on the plates before stabbing your fork at some of Abner’s finest fare. Also, for certain an advantage to using loud, colorful stoneware was its ability to hide the adhered flecks of yesterdays’ food that might have been missed by the no-dishwasher sink dunking method of tableware hygiene that Abner chose to employ, as the Grand Lake Lodge did not have a rusted, charred, barely working dishwasher for sale.
And then there were the beds. Abner didn't need to go searching after bargains on mattresses, pillows and bed frames - they came with the hotel at the time of purchase...and had been there since the dawn of time. While driving home from The Riverside after our first extended winter visit, I realized for the first time in my life that I actually had a back, because it hurt so freaking bad after sleeping on that bed for four nights! Most of the beds consisted of a 6" thick 1940's era mattress laying on a frame of naked rusty bedsprings. Go back and watch some old war movies from the 1950's, and you'll see beds like this in scenes from German POW camps. We had Abner's beds at the curb within two months, replaced by new queen mattresses.
The final accoutrement to The Riverside was no bargain basement thrift shop fire damaged piece of junk, rather, it was arguably one of the most spectacular pieces of furnishing in all of Grand County – the magnificent, historical Brunswick Bar. Manufactured in 1895 in Dubuque, IA and eventually brought to The Riverside from it’s original home in Leadville, CO in 1920, the bar was a burnished oak and cherry wood masterpiece of ornately carved borders and corniced columns that beckoned the thirsty traveler to gaze in awed admiration, often forgetting that an icy beer sat sweating before him, waiting patiently to be consumed. When Abner arrived at The Riverside, the bar was stored out back of the hotel in one of the storage sheds amid piles of clutter that had accumulated over the past 80 years. Enlisting the help of a few locals with the promise of a round of free drinks after the bars assemblage, Abner had the booze-fueled locals lift, haul and reassemble the bar in what had previously been a small storeroom off of the kitchen. After a 20 year hiatus, the glorious Brunswick Bar was back in business at The Riverside.
And so began Abner’s tenure as proprietor of the newly refurbished Riverside Hotel, Bar and Restaurant; he had the roof replaced, the walls wallpapered, the rooms furnished, the bar stocked and the kitchen cooking in time for the start of the summer tourist season of 1986.
21 years later, he was pulling out every stop imaginable to convince a naive couple from Kansas, with just enough money to get their asses in serious trouble, that Hot Sulphur Springs was a garden spot that would rival Mecca, that there is nothing more satisfying than seeing the smiles of satisfied customers as they pass through your door having been unknowingly insulted and unwittingly filched to their gills, and that in spite of the seemingly high asking price, The Riverside was an idyllic yet affordable dream-come-true that these flatland hospitality rubes could make happen with the stroke of a pen.
To be continued………
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Abner Renta............aka Not Bob Villa
So who in the hell is this Gollum-esque miscreant, this Abner Renta, who found his way to a ramshackle old hotel in a desolate outpost in the frozen, unpopulated heart of Colorado, in the county of Grand, for what seemed to be the ultimate purpose of taking easy money from innocent, unsuspecting people whilst making them feel lower than a Gollum-esque miscreant?
Raised a Puerto-Rican Jew in the West Side slums of Brooklyn in the late 1940’s, Abner moved way further west to study at the University of Colorado in Boulder. (How on earth would Abner have chosen Boulder? one might ask; but I have mentioned before in detail in this blog of Boulder, CO being a magnetic force in the center of the universe for attracting the...uh.. odd.) Social Work was his degree, (very ironic…a degree you would normally pursue if you wanted to be in the business of helping the less fortunate), and he plied it for a while working for the Colorado Department of Unemployment. Possibly the notion of working with and trying to fleece people that had nothing to fleece moved him into the hospitality industry, where logic would follow that if you were staying at a nice hotel, you had to have some money to spend/lose/fleece. It was there that Abner found his home.
Abner worked at a hotel near the Denver Airport for the better part of 10 years, honing his multiple Riverside-worthy skills of hotel and restaurant management, biting sarcasm, short-sheeting, cost-cutting, bill padding, good eye contact while bald-face lying, code skirting, pouring rot-gut booze in empty top shelf bottles, dead-beating vendors and tax evasion….to name but a few.
Abner pounded out of Denver in the late 1980’s with a suitcase full of cash and an illegal that he picked up at the Denver Greyhound depot, bound for the mountains in search of a place where he could practice his newly-acquired art of hospitality on the paying public – far from the eyes of scrutiny.
He stumbled upon a sleepy little burg in Grand County, one block south of Highway 40 and found a building nestled against the banks of the majestic Colorado River, a football field away from the base of Mt. Bross, (a languid, lazy excuse for a mountain, but imposing nonetheless as it lorded over the town and valley like a fat uncle to whom either money or fealty is owed), and a stone’s throw away from a natural hot springs pool that had been frequented by the Ute Indians and other nonnative denizens as far back as the 1st century….possibly further.
What Abner found was a magnificent but neglected historic structure; a white, clapboard many-windowed building that jutted it’s façade in broad defiance of the southern exposure that pounded it with 300 days per year of an 8000 foot elevation dose of UV rays. The 3/4” thick pine slats that comprised the cladding of The Riverside had seen and needed a century’s worth of primer and paint to survive this environment; when Abner found it, the illegal-in-tow did a little scraping then added a heavy coat of 1980’s cheap white latex – that did for the place until we purchased it in 2007, badly in need of a new coat of paint.
The Riverside had been unoccupied for the better part of ten years when Abner purchased it in 1986. The roof was shot, and water damage had all but obliterated the place. Water, the stuff that we are all comprised mostly of, live for, die for, fight for and order with or without gas at fancy restaurants, when left to its own devices is brutal on buildings and building materials in general, and roofs in particular. This naturally destructive proclivity is magnified in a roller coaster-extreme climate like Hot Sulphur Springs. The building faces south to accept the warming rays of the sun for natural heat, while the roof slopes back away to the north so that the accumulated then melting snow drips and drains to the back of the building, away from the thronging public. That northern exposure snow, seeing no sun from October thru May, builds up on that roof all winter – 3’-4’ feet is common. The weight of that snow consistently squats on the roof, forcing and flexing the substrate with cooling and warming, all the while opening cracks and crevices that the melting snow seeks out. Unabated, this force, this unyielding flex and flow, and then the ensuing melting snow and dripping water, can buckle the structure of a building and obliterate its walls and floors in a few short years.
When Abner found The Riverside, it was on the perilous end of being decimated by the innocent but destructive forces of cold, hot, sun, snow, ice and water. Needless to say, Abner got a pretty good deal on the place.
One of the first things that Abner did, or rather had his indentured illegal do, was put a new roof on The Riverside. The existing roof was a flat layered hot asphalt and felt construction, known in the trade as a ‘built-up roof’ – the technology dates back to the late 1800’s, and is still a solid option for a flat roof today, much unchanged in both materials and application techniques. As opposed to tearing off the old and applying a new – standard protocol for a roof of this age and deteriorated condition – Abner went right over the old roof with interlocking metal roofing panels, roughly 3’ wide and 20’ in length. When I say ‘went over’, I mean that the help screwed this roof down to the old substrate with thousands of 3/8” x 1.5” screws – that would also equate to thousands of holes being put in the roof, leading to thousands of additional opportunities for future leaks. Not the best roofing practice, but quick and cheap!
When the metal roofing panels were delivered to Abner, laid in bundles on the roof by a crane, Abner went up and cut the bundles open for the purpose of counting the panels; By God, he’d paid for 120 panels and understandably, he was going to count and make certain that they shipped him the 120 panels that he paid for. All present and accounted for, Abner and the help turned in early for what would the following day be a grueling day of roofing. Abner didn’t account for the possibility of an evening windstorm, which in fact did occur, lifting all 120 panels (not simultaneously) and depositing them throughout the town of Hot Sulphur. It is a miracle that no one was dismembered or beheaded, as these panels are sharp-edged sheet metal, capable of literally cutting someone in half given the lethal combination of proper angle and sufficient force, both of which would be available as these things flew threw the air like big, rectangular Frisbees. It would not have been a good first impression on the town from the new hotel proprietor had one of the residents, due to Abner’s miscalculation, been sliced clean in half whilst taking an evening stroll.
After spending the better part of the next two days collecting the panels and toting them back up on the roof, without the aid of a crane, the help began attaching what in most cases were bent, misshapen and often out of square panels; square being important for the purpose of adjoining panel to panel in a tight, waterproof fit. This little whoopsie would be the cause of continual leaks and the resultant water damage from Abner’s first day of new building and roof ownership until the day he handed the keys over to me, and then beyond.
To Be Continued……..
Raised a Puerto-Rican Jew in the West Side slums of Brooklyn in the late 1940’s, Abner moved way further west to study at the University of Colorado in Boulder. (How on earth would Abner have chosen Boulder? one might ask; but I have mentioned before in detail in this blog of Boulder, CO being a magnetic force in the center of the universe for attracting the...uh.. odd.) Social Work was his degree, (very ironic…a degree you would normally pursue if you wanted to be in the business of helping the less fortunate), and he plied it for a while working for the Colorado Department of Unemployment. Possibly the notion of working with and trying to fleece people that had nothing to fleece moved him into the hospitality industry, where logic would follow that if you were staying at a nice hotel, you had to have some money to spend/lose/fleece. It was there that Abner found his home.
Abner worked at a hotel near the Denver Airport for the better part of 10 years, honing his multiple Riverside-worthy skills of hotel and restaurant management, biting sarcasm, short-sheeting, cost-cutting, bill padding, good eye contact while bald-face lying, code skirting, pouring rot-gut booze in empty top shelf bottles, dead-beating vendors and tax evasion….to name but a few.
Abner pounded out of Denver in the late 1980’s with a suitcase full of cash and an illegal that he picked up at the Denver Greyhound depot, bound for the mountains in search of a place where he could practice his newly-acquired art of hospitality on the paying public – far from the eyes of scrutiny.
He stumbled upon a sleepy little burg in Grand County, one block south of Highway 40 and found a building nestled against the banks of the majestic Colorado River, a football field away from the base of Mt. Bross, (a languid, lazy excuse for a mountain, but imposing nonetheless as it lorded over the town and valley like a fat uncle to whom either money or fealty is owed), and a stone’s throw away from a natural hot springs pool that had been frequented by the Ute Indians and other nonnative denizens as far back as the 1st century….possibly further.
What Abner found was a magnificent but neglected historic structure; a white, clapboard many-windowed building that jutted it’s façade in broad defiance of the southern exposure that pounded it with 300 days per year of an 8000 foot elevation dose of UV rays. The 3/4” thick pine slats that comprised the cladding of The Riverside had seen and needed a century’s worth of primer and paint to survive this environment; when Abner found it, the illegal-in-tow did a little scraping then added a heavy coat of 1980’s cheap white latex – that did for the place until we purchased it in 2007, badly in need of a new coat of paint.
The Riverside had been unoccupied for the better part of ten years when Abner purchased it in 1986. The roof was shot, and water damage had all but obliterated the place. Water, the stuff that we are all comprised mostly of, live for, die for, fight for and order with or without gas at fancy restaurants, when left to its own devices is brutal on buildings and building materials in general, and roofs in particular. This naturally destructive proclivity is magnified in a roller coaster-extreme climate like Hot Sulphur Springs. The building faces south to accept the warming rays of the sun for natural heat, while the roof slopes back away to the north so that the accumulated then melting snow drips and drains to the back of the building, away from the thronging public. That northern exposure snow, seeing no sun from October thru May, builds up on that roof all winter – 3’-4’ feet is common. The weight of that snow consistently squats on the roof, forcing and flexing the substrate with cooling and warming, all the while opening cracks and crevices that the melting snow seeks out. Unabated, this force, this unyielding flex and flow, and then the ensuing melting snow and dripping water, can buckle the structure of a building and obliterate its walls and floors in a few short years.
When Abner found The Riverside, it was on the perilous end of being decimated by the innocent but destructive forces of cold, hot, sun, snow, ice and water. Needless to say, Abner got a pretty good deal on the place.
One of the first things that Abner did, or rather had his indentured illegal do, was put a new roof on The Riverside. The existing roof was a flat layered hot asphalt and felt construction, known in the trade as a ‘built-up roof’ – the technology dates back to the late 1800’s, and is still a solid option for a flat roof today, much unchanged in both materials and application techniques. As opposed to tearing off the old and applying a new – standard protocol for a roof of this age and deteriorated condition – Abner went right over the old roof with interlocking metal roofing panels, roughly 3’ wide and 20’ in length. When I say ‘went over’, I mean that the help screwed this roof down to the old substrate with thousands of 3/8” x 1.5” screws – that would also equate to thousands of holes being put in the roof, leading to thousands of additional opportunities for future leaks. Not the best roofing practice, but quick and cheap!
When the metal roofing panels were delivered to Abner, laid in bundles on the roof by a crane, Abner went up and cut the bundles open for the purpose of counting the panels; By God, he’d paid for 120 panels and understandably, he was going to count and make certain that they shipped him the 120 panels that he paid for. All present and accounted for, Abner and the help turned in early for what would the following day be a grueling day of roofing. Abner didn’t account for the possibility of an evening windstorm, which in fact did occur, lifting all 120 panels (not simultaneously) and depositing them throughout the town of Hot Sulphur. It is a miracle that no one was dismembered or beheaded, as these panels are sharp-edged sheet metal, capable of literally cutting someone in half given the lethal combination of proper angle and sufficient force, both of which would be available as these things flew threw the air like big, rectangular Frisbees. It would not have been a good first impression on the town from the new hotel proprietor had one of the residents, due to Abner’s miscalculation, been sliced clean in half whilst taking an evening stroll.
After spending the better part of the next two days collecting the panels and toting them back up on the roof, without the aid of a crane, the help began attaching what in most cases were bent, misshapen and often out of square panels; square being important for the purpose of adjoining panel to panel in a tight, waterproof fit. This little whoopsie would be the cause of continual leaks and the resultant water damage from Abner’s first day of new building and roof ownership until the day he handed the keys over to me, and then beyond.
To Be Continued……..
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Mr. Abner Renta...."Unwelcome to My Hotel!"
We would visit The Riverside eight times in total before our seriously fatal pursuit of purchasing the place; the initial summer visit and one other, and six straight visits between Christmas and New Years. Our Colorado/Riverside holiday ritual involved blowing out of KC on Christmas afternoon, driving to Hays, KS, spending the night, and then heading straight the next morning to 7800 feet of Hot Sulphur Springs altitude and 139 pounds of Abner Renta attitude. There we would meet family and more often than not friends from KC who we’d drag to this little jewel in the mountains; The Riverside, an ideal place over the holidays for quality time with family and friends, in the town that progress forgot and the land that Jim Cantore feared.
One irony of our Riverside pre-purchase winter visits to Hot Sulphur and the mountains was that never, ever, did we experience the brutal weather and driving conditions that are commonplace in that neck of the woods. We ignorant flatlanders would head up I-70 out of Denver every December 26th, the sky blue and the frost glistening, and marvel at the beauty of the snow-laden pines and icy peaks on clear roads all the way to our destination. Not once, coming or going, were we treated to the normalcy of a winter blizzard, the kind where we bit our lips to bleeding and wore out our right arms sign-of-the-crossing whilst driving over Berthoud Pass; that is, not until we bought the place and there was no going back: and then, of course, we experienced them with Ex-Lax regularity.
From that first visit in the summer of 1993 to the final visit in the winter of 2000 where we left The Riverside saying “never in hell will we come back here”, Abner steadily transmogrified from a lovable old character’s character to an utterly untenable asshole’s asshole. I contend that many long-time customers continued to visit Abner and The Riverside in his later years only to savor the experience of seeing this miserable ill-humored insulting old fool in his penultimate assholiness glory, much as you watch a NASCAR event for hope of seeing a wreck, or a hockey game a brawl.
Here are some examples of the snappy repartee that I’ve tried to expunge from my memory that would inspire paying guests to consider any other available place on earth than Abner’s Riverside, including most prisons, to eat and sleep while on vacation.
- To friends of ours who visited during one winter trip with their 5-year old…“Your son is very ill-behaved. I'm assuming that he's mentally retarded?”
- To an overweight female guest in the restaurant, loudly enough for all to hear…”If you don’t see anything on the menu that suits you, the Dairy Dine is down the street. Their hamburgers are very good and very fattening, but I don’t suppose that will deter you from eating one.”
- To an innocent walking in off of the street…”What sort of a sty were you raised in where you find it acceptable to enter this room without wiping your feet?” (The prospective customer proffered his middle finger in response and quickly left the premises without describing to Abner the sort of sty in which he was raised.)
- Aloud to no one in particular as a female guest, clad in ski pants, walked through the lobby…”The nice thing about insulated ski pants is that people aren’t sure if they’re looking at your fat ass or insulated ski pants – but then I suppose that all of our asses look fat in ski pants! Bwahaahaahaa!”
These are a few of what I remember; there were plentitudes more that I thankfully succeeded in forgetting.
One of Abner’s trademarks was his dramatic falsetto creepy Tiny Tim freak show of a laugh; it is way beyond verbal description, and whenever you heard it, you’d cock your head like the RCA Jack Russell in aural wonderment. Those of you who visited The Riverside and knew Abner would then and could now attempt to mimic the laugh – it was like Elvis’s “Thank you…thank you very much…”; you heard it and you had to try and ape it yourself.
As the visits to The Riverside mounted up, the laughs lessened and the slyly caustic comments turned to brutal personal assaults. I don’t remember a seminal event on that last visit that made us stomp our foot and say that we were never coming back, rather, it was just a general feeling of ill will that Abner consistently exuded towards us, his paying customers. You knew he needed our money, but you also knew that the last thing on earth he wanted was our company.
I never complained to Abner, never said anything like “Dammit, we’ve come here for six straight years now, brought you a ton of business, spent a ton of money, but you’ve turned into a real shithead and we’re NEVER COMING BACK!” I never did because I knew that he couldn’t care less. At best, berating him and telling him the truth would have gotten me nothing more than one of his “BWAHAAHAAHAAs”.
Six years passed, in which only one of those years we returned to the mountains for our post-Christmas family visit - and not to The Riverside; the rest were spent in Kansas City, blissfully enjoying our home and family, replete with our own private toilets. Not one of us missed our Christmases past at The Riverside.
Then one day, in late February of 2007, as a result of a series of events that were in a domino line that began clickclackclickclackclickclackclicking their way towards the finish line, at which point wrought one of the most infamous phone calls in the universal history of pure dumb-ass foolishness….
“Abner, I don’t know if you remember me, but my name is Richard Paradise, and I’m wondering if you’re interested in selling The Riverside?”
The rotted-teeth grin that Abner displayed upon hearing that question beamed across 700 miles of fiber optics; a smile so profound that possibly the corners of his mouth deftly sliced into each of his earlobes……
To Be Continued…………
One irony of our Riverside pre-purchase winter visits to Hot Sulphur and the mountains was that never, ever, did we experience the brutal weather and driving conditions that are commonplace in that neck of the woods. We ignorant flatlanders would head up I-70 out of Denver every December 26th, the sky blue and the frost glistening, and marvel at the beauty of the snow-laden pines and icy peaks on clear roads all the way to our destination. Not once, coming or going, were we treated to the normalcy of a winter blizzard, the kind where we bit our lips to bleeding and wore out our right arms sign-of-the-crossing whilst driving over Berthoud Pass; that is, not until we bought the place and there was no going back: and then, of course, we experienced them with Ex-Lax regularity.
From that first visit in the summer of 1993 to the final visit in the winter of 2000 where we left The Riverside saying “never in hell will we come back here”, Abner steadily transmogrified from a lovable old character’s character to an utterly untenable asshole’s asshole. I contend that many long-time customers continued to visit Abner and The Riverside in his later years only to savor the experience of seeing this miserable ill-humored insulting old fool in his penultimate assholiness glory, much as you watch a NASCAR event for hope of seeing a wreck, or a hockey game a brawl.
Here are some examples of the snappy repartee that I’ve tried to expunge from my memory that would inspire paying guests to consider any other available place on earth than Abner’s Riverside, including most prisons, to eat and sleep while on vacation.
- To friends of ours who visited during one winter trip with their 5-year old…“Your son is very ill-behaved. I'm assuming that he's mentally retarded?”
- To an overweight female guest in the restaurant, loudly enough for all to hear…”If you don’t see anything on the menu that suits you, the Dairy Dine is down the street. Their hamburgers are very good and very fattening, but I don’t suppose that will deter you from eating one.”
- To an innocent walking in off of the street…”What sort of a sty were you raised in where you find it acceptable to enter this room without wiping your feet?” (The prospective customer proffered his middle finger in response and quickly left the premises without describing to Abner the sort of sty in which he was raised.)
- Aloud to no one in particular as a female guest, clad in ski pants, walked through the lobby…”The nice thing about insulated ski pants is that people aren’t sure if they’re looking at your fat ass or insulated ski pants – but then I suppose that all of our asses look fat in ski pants! Bwahaahaahaa!”
These are a few of what I remember; there were plentitudes more that I thankfully succeeded in forgetting.
One of Abner’s trademarks was his dramatic falsetto creepy Tiny Tim freak show of a laugh; it is way beyond verbal description, and whenever you heard it, you’d cock your head like the RCA Jack Russell in aural wonderment. Those of you who visited The Riverside and knew Abner would then and could now attempt to mimic the laugh – it was like Elvis’s “Thank you…thank you very much…”; you heard it and you had to try and ape it yourself.
As the visits to The Riverside mounted up, the laughs lessened and the slyly caustic comments turned to brutal personal assaults. I don’t remember a seminal event on that last visit that made us stomp our foot and say that we were never coming back, rather, it was just a general feeling of ill will that Abner consistently exuded towards us, his paying customers. You knew he needed our money, but you also knew that the last thing on earth he wanted was our company.
I never complained to Abner, never said anything like “Dammit, we’ve come here for six straight years now, brought you a ton of business, spent a ton of money, but you’ve turned into a real shithead and we’re NEVER COMING BACK!” I never did because I knew that he couldn’t care less. At best, berating him and telling him the truth would have gotten me nothing more than one of his “BWAHAAHAAHAAs”.
Six years passed, in which only one of those years we returned to the mountains for our post-Christmas family visit - and not to The Riverside; the rest were spent in Kansas City, blissfully enjoying our home and family, replete with our own private toilets. Not one of us missed our Christmases past at The Riverside.
Then one day, in late February of 2007, as a result of a series of events that were in a domino line that began clickclackclickclackclickclackclicking their way towards the finish line, at which point wrought one of the most infamous phone calls in the universal history of pure dumb-ass foolishness….
“Abner, I don’t know if you remember me, but my name is Richard Paradise, and I’m wondering if you’re interested in selling The Riverside?”
The rotted-teeth grin that Abner displayed upon hearing that question beamed across 700 miles of fiber optics; a smile so profound that possibly the corners of his mouth deftly sliced into each of his earlobes……
To Be Continued…………
Monday, October 24, 2011
Riverside Smoked Brisket Chili
Before fall is about turning leaves, pumpkins, high school football or Halloween, it is first about chili. Who doesn’t on that first weekend where the slightest hint of a nip is in the air, say to themselves “I could sure go for a steaming hot bowl of chili and a couple of big gin martinis!”
Synonymous with chili season is the season of getting bombarded by people wanting the recipe for the chili we served at The Riverside. I mean…..bombarded!
This recipe is arduous. It has multiple steps requiring multiple cooking methods – roasting, grilling, smoking, grinding and braising; but that’s why the end result is really good. If you skip the tough parts, then you’re just making chili. They sell chili in cans if you’re really lazy, and it’s not bad; but its not Riverside Chili – the chili that had one of the locals proclaim, (she owned the 2nd hand thrift store in Granby from which Abner Renta outfitted The Riverside) “this is the best chili I’ve ever had in my life. It would be even better with beans…” Her bill for the best chili she’d ever had in her life was $7.67, with tax; she left $8.00, which netted me a whopping thirty-three cent tip. Maybe beans in the chili would have gotten me fifty-cents.
Serves 8-10, or 2 with multiple leftovers
3 dried Ancho chilies (they smell of molasses – can you think of anything better?)
3 dried Guajillo chilies
5-6 dried Arbol chilies
2 tablespoons cumin seeds
1 – 5 - 7# Brisket flat, cut into ¾” cubes
1 pound bacon, diced
½ stick unsalted butter
2 – sweet yellow onions, chopped
2 - red bell peppers, chopped fine
4 – celery stalks, chopped really fine
4 – fat cloves garlic, chopped extremely fine
2 – 14 oz. cans pinto beans, drained and rinsed (optional)
1 – 46 oz. bottle low sodium V8 Juice
Step #1
I’m assuming you have a gas grill. Worst case, you’ve got a charcoal grill; if you have neither, go back to pre-Step -#1 and buy some canned chili.
Heat your grill hot and roast the dried chili peppers. They’ll puff up, and char – that’s what you want; get them to the point where they’re almost smoking, and dark but not burned, on all sides. Take them off the heat, bust the tops off, shake out the seeds, and put them in your blender or food processor, whirling them to a fine powder. You should have the better part of ¾ cup of roasted, ground chili powder.
Step #2
Toast the cumin seeds in a sauté pan over high heat – constantly shaking or stirring. When the aroma starts to permeate the room – don’t burn them or they’ll be bitter, they’re done. Put them in your mortar & pestle and grind them to a fine powder.
Step #3
Pull your meat straight out of the fridge and dice the brisket into ¾” cubes. ½” is too small, 1” is too big - ¾” is perfect. Fire up your smoker, very low heat – anything beyond 200F is too hot. Cherry, apple or pecan wood is the best; hickory or mesquite is a bit bitter, but if that’s all you have, it’ll have to work. You don’t want to cook the meat, just bathe it with the smoke. The colder the meat initially, the more time it has to accept the smoke and not cook.
As soon as you think the meat is starting to cook, pull it out of the smoker and set aside.
Step #4
Dice the bacon and fry until 3/4 crisp in your chili cooking kettle. With a slotted spoon, take out the bacon, leave the bacon fat and add the ½ stick of butter – this isn’t diet chili. Melt the butter then add the onions, bell peppers and celery. Cook 7 minutes, stirring fairly regularly, then add garlic, and cook 3 minutes.
Add the ground chilies and cumin. Stir. If the aroma isn’t making you weep at this point, you need to dump this concoction and go buy some canned chili.
Lower the heat a bit, throw in the bacon and the Brisket, and cook for 5 minutes, stirring constantly, as if you were making risotto. If you’re adding beans, put them in now, stir for 1 minute, then add the V8.
Cook over the lowest heat you can, as long as you can, making sure the chili never boils.
Stir it gently, every so often. It’s all the better if you can cook it low for a couple of hours, cool it down, refrigerate it and warm it back up and eat it the next day. (I’ve never done this, but I can’t imagine why you couldn’t put your covered chili cooker in a 220F oven and leave it be for three-four hours. Slow. Braise.)
Season the chili with a little salt, pepper and Tabasco to taste. Some people add shredded cheese, sour cream, or other fattening accoutrements, but this stuff doesn’t need it.
If The Riverside chili isn’t the best you’ve ever had, no need to leave me a thirty-three cent tip.
Synonymous with chili season is the season of getting bombarded by people wanting the recipe for the chili we served at The Riverside. I mean…..bombarded!
This recipe is arduous. It has multiple steps requiring multiple cooking methods – roasting, grilling, smoking, grinding and braising; but that’s why the end result is really good. If you skip the tough parts, then you’re just making chili. They sell chili in cans if you’re really lazy, and it’s not bad; but its not Riverside Chili – the chili that had one of the locals proclaim, (she owned the 2nd hand thrift store in Granby from which Abner Renta outfitted The Riverside) “this is the best chili I’ve ever had in my life. It would be even better with beans…” Her bill for the best chili she’d ever had in her life was $7.67, with tax; she left $8.00, which netted me a whopping thirty-three cent tip. Maybe beans in the chili would have gotten me fifty-cents.
Serves 8-10, or 2 with multiple leftovers
3 dried Ancho chilies (they smell of molasses – can you think of anything better?)
3 dried Guajillo chilies
5-6 dried Arbol chilies
2 tablespoons cumin seeds
1 – 5 - 7# Brisket flat, cut into ¾” cubes
1 pound bacon, diced
½ stick unsalted butter
2 – sweet yellow onions, chopped
2 - red bell peppers, chopped fine
4 – celery stalks, chopped really fine
4 – fat cloves garlic, chopped extremely fine
2 – 14 oz. cans pinto beans, drained and rinsed (optional)
1 – 46 oz. bottle low sodium V8 Juice
Step #1
I’m assuming you have a gas grill. Worst case, you’ve got a charcoal grill; if you have neither, go back to pre-Step -#1 and buy some canned chili.
Heat your grill hot and roast the dried chili peppers. They’ll puff up, and char – that’s what you want; get them to the point where they’re almost smoking, and dark but not burned, on all sides. Take them off the heat, bust the tops off, shake out the seeds, and put them in your blender or food processor, whirling them to a fine powder. You should have the better part of ¾ cup of roasted, ground chili powder.
Step #2
Toast the cumin seeds in a sauté pan over high heat – constantly shaking or stirring. When the aroma starts to permeate the room – don’t burn them or they’ll be bitter, they’re done. Put them in your mortar & pestle and grind them to a fine powder.
Step #3
Pull your meat straight out of the fridge and dice the brisket into ¾” cubes. ½” is too small, 1” is too big - ¾” is perfect. Fire up your smoker, very low heat – anything beyond 200F is too hot. Cherry, apple or pecan wood is the best; hickory or mesquite is a bit bitter, but if that’s all you have, it’ll have to work. You don’t want to cook the meat, just bathe it with the smoke. The colder the meat initially, the more time it has to accept the smoke and not cook.
As soon as you think the meat is starting to cook, pull it out of the smoker and set aside.
Step #4
Dice the bacon and fry until 3/4 crisp in your chili cooking kettle. With a slotted spoon, take out the bacon, leave the bacon fat and add the ½ stick of butter – this isn’t diet chili. Melt the butter then add the onions, bell peppers and celery. Cook 7 minutes, stirring fairly regularly, then add garlic, and cook 3 minutes.
Add the ground chilies and cumin. Stir. If the aroma isn’t making you weep at this point, you need to dump this concoction and go buy some canned chili.
Lower the heat a bit, throw in the bacon and the Brisket, and cook for 5 minutes, stirring constantly, as if you were making risotto. If you’re adding beans, put them in now, stir for 1 minute, then add the V8.
Cook over the lowest heat you can, as long as you can, making sure the chili never boils.
Stir it gently, every so often. It’s all the better if you can cook it low for a couple of hours, cool it down, refrigerate it and warm it back up and eat it the next day. (I’ve never done this, but I can’t imagine why you couldn’t put your covered chili cooker in a 220F oven and leave it be for three-four hours. Slow. Braise.)
Season the chili with a little salt, pepper and Tabasco to taste. Some people add shredded cheese, sour cream, or other fattening accoutrements, but this stuff doesn’t need it.
If The Riverside chili isn’t the best you’ve ever had, no need to leave me a thirty-three cent tip.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Speaking of Nuns.....
Contemporaries of mine who are products of a Catholic education were more than likely taught by Nuns; at the least, all of you have very strong Nun recollections, and most have more than a few good Nun stories. Some of the stories would involve acts of faith, kindness and charity; most would be stories of brutality, physical and mental abuse and in some cases, incidences of sadistic torture.
In spite of the irreverence and blasphemy that will follow, know that my recollections are borne from admiration and respect, for at the core of these Nun’s daily reign of terror was their heartfelt desire to transform us from slovenly, unappreciative little pagan babies into educated, unquestionably committed Roman Catholics – with the ultimate goal being our individual quest for Sainthood; nothing less was acceptable. In 1962, in Johnson County, KS, at Cure of Ars’ Parish School, we were taught to believe that Sainthood was attainable – it was all up to us.
I blew my chance at Sainthood early on, in the spring of my 2nd Grade year. I’d recently been blessed with God’s Grace, having confessed my sins to that point of my life, and then having taken my First Holy Communion. To those of you who aren’t Catholic and haven’t experienced this physical and spiritual transformation, as 7-year olds, we took this Sacrament, this Holy ritual, deadly serious, and for most Catholics, the seriousness of the ritual doesn’t diminish with age. Though as a newly Catholicized 7-year old, there was a bit more at stake with keeping up my end of the bargain with regards to being good, being Christian – I still at that time had Sainthood in my sights.
My 2nd grade fall from grace started with a lie – a big, spur-of-the-moment whopper; a lie that I still to this day am uncertain as to source of its summonance. It ended with the heretofore kind, reasoning, patient and all-knowing Sister Mary Joseph, Principal of Cure of Ars Parish School, kicking me square in the ass soccer-style, (way ahead of her time!) with the force of an NFL kicker going for a 65-yard field goal; jettisoning me out of her office and into the hall, tumbling once, twice…probably three times, head over heels. I knew at the end of the second tumble that my chance at Sainthood was shot, and it’s been downhill for me ever since.
It was a sunny spring day, lunchtime recess; the mid-day break consisting of twenty minutes to eat your lunch (which you ate in six minutes and fidgeted for the next fourteen minutes), and forty minutes out on the playground. On this particular day, I was treated in my lunch to a box of Cracker Jacks – which of course, in addition to caramel coated popcorn and peanuts, came with a ‘prize in every box’. My prize was a small, plastic magnifying glass. The lens was maybe ½” in diameter and the whole thing might have been 1 ½” long; with my current old man vision, I would need a big magnifying glass to even see this magnifying glass. Anyway, it was a prize, and I found myself absent-mindedly standing in the warm spring sun, farting around with it on the playground.
Were this a film, you would see me in a long shot; a sweet, innocent blond-haired little guy standing on the playground, minding his own business, and then, the soundtrack would begin playing something not unlike the theme from Jaws, as unaware to me, the class fat kid/bully was waddling his way towards me from behind. Totally unannounced, the ogre whammed me in the back, his two fat paws simultaneously colliding with my two shoulder blades, sending me face first towards the pavement; in short, the fat bastard walked up behind me and without provocation pushed me to the ground. With cat-quick reflexes I shot my arms forward in time to prevent myself from falling face-first, but the downside result of this nanosecond reflexive act of facial self-preservation was the loss of the little magnifying glass, as it flew from my hands and was never to be seen again.
I didn’t cry, but was on the verge of crying; I was for a fact pissed and quickly decided that this fat jackass had to have some payback. Unfortunately none of the Nuns or teachers who had playground duty witnessed this wanton act of aggression, and I didn’t feel that much would happen to him if I ratted him out for simply pushing me to the ground, so I decided, as I walked towards one of the teachers, angry and wounded, to sweeten the pot a little. This pot-sweetening would require that I lie.
“Mrs. Daly, Claude Oafbutt pushed me and when I hit the ground, I....I...I lost my contact lenses!”
I had no idea what contact lenses were, I just knew that they were small, expensive and hard to find when lost. Seems I saw something about this on TV the evening before.
Mrs. Daly instantly sprang into action, blowing her whistle and herding all of the other kids away from the scene of the crime. She cleared out an area that was about 200 square feet, and instructed everyone to stand back.
“Where did you fall?” she asked, panicked, all but breathless.
“Uh… right over there.” I pointed in a direction but to no spot in particular.
In short order, there were six Nuns on the spot, getting the lowdown from Mrs. Daly. Before my very eyes, and the eyes of the entire grades 1-8 recess crowd, the Nuns got down on their hands and knees and slowly began crawling in the cordoned-off area, their noses inches from the pavement as they scanned the ground; like a huddle of arctic penguins searching the desert sands for ice cubes, they diligently poured over every inch of the playground, looking in vain for something that, like ice in the desert, never existed.
I didn’t cuss at that tender age, especially having just made my First Holy Communion, but I knew the sight that lay before me caused me to mutter under my breath something very close to “Holy Shit, what have I got going on here, and how am I gonna get my ass out of it?” Even at that tender age, I knew that if you caused a Nun to crawl around on the playground,in her habit on her hands and knees because you lied, there would be unimaginably huge repercussions. HUGE!
Enter Sister Mary Joseph, Principal of Cure of Ars.
After getting the skinny from Mrs. Daly, she turned and headed slowly over to me.
“Richard, I’m very sorry this has happened, but we don’t seem to be able to find your lenses. Could there be a chance that you left them at your desk, or in the bathroom?”
“Uh, nope, I’m pretty sure I had ‘em on when I came out here.” Another lie.
“Well….maybe we should go inside and have a look, just to make sure. Don’t you think?”
So I followed Sister Mary Joseph into the empty school, down the hall and towards my classroom, knowing with every step that I was a dead kid walkin’.
Standing me before my desk, Sister asked “How about your pencil box, can you look in there for me?”
I pulled out my cigar-box, which held pencils, crayons, erasers – stuff that we used to write with before we had computers. I opened the lid and slowly fished around among the contents, thinking, hoping and praying that maybe I actually had contact lenses; ‘By Golly Sister! Here they are right here! How lucky was that?’
Instead, of course, I said “No Sister, I can’t find them in here…”
“Let’s go look in the bathroom. Maybe you left them in there.”
“Yeah… maybe I left them in there…..” I said, barely audible as we headed down the hall to look one more place for my fictional lenses. I think I remember starting to pray a bit harder at this point.
Needless to say, neither did I score the non-existent lenses in the bathroom.
Back up in the school office, Sister had me sit while she called home to give my Mom the bad news.
“Mrs. Paradise, this is Sister Mary Joseph at Cure….no, no…your children are all fine. But we do have a small problem. It seems that Richard lost his contact lenses on the playground during recess and….(my Mother became very audible on the other end of the phone, and although not intelligible, I knew exactly what she was saying)….Oh really. Is that so? I see….Yes, I’d be happy to let you talk to Richard.”
“Hullo?”
“What in the world are you doing?? What in God’s Name are you thinking?? Contact lenses?? What on earth are you talking about??” She was yelling these questions at me pretty loudly. She had probably been leisurely ironing my Dad’s handkerchiefs, thinking about what she was going to cook for dinner that evening, and then this call comes in!
“You know Mom….those contact lenses I had. I lost them when Claude Oafbutt pushed me for no reason...sniff…and I scraped my hands and knees…sniff…and it hurts really bad…..sniff….” I started to whimper a little, hoping the tears might allow me to buy some sympathy, but Mom didn’t have any sympathy for sale.
I handed the phone to Sister, my head down, waiting for God knows what to come. I’d seen Nuns draw and quarter kids for snickering in the bathroom line; I couldn’t imagine the hell that awaited me from the Head Knucklebuster for this infraction. I assumed she got the top position because she could out-sadist all of the other sadists, and I’d done some really bad stuff; stuff that would test her mettle as an administrator of punishment.
To my immediate surprise, all I got was a stern look and an outstretched arm, finger pointing down the hall as she hissed “Back to your classroom… young man!…”
Just as I was walking out the door, starting to think “Wow, that wasn’t so bad”, Sister Mary Joseph made her attempt at putting her name in the NFL record books.
As I lay dazed on the other end of the hall, I recall hearing one of the other Nuns in the office say something like “Excellent form Sister, and what solid follow-thru! And did I count three tumbles???"”
Sister Mary Joseph coolly nodded her head, wordlessly acknowledging the compliment, then said “Sister Ann.... go get the tape measure.”
At the end of the ordeal, Sister Mary Joseph was immortalized in the Official Record Book of Nun Brutality for ‘Longest Distance Kicked with Accompanied Somersaults, male, less than 60 lbs – 13 feet, 8 inches, 3 tumbles.’; all I got out of the deal was an early exit from the Sainthood sweepstakes.
In spite of the irreverence and blasphemy that will follow, know that my recollections are borne from admiration and respect, for at the core of these Nun’s daily reign of terror was their heartfelt desire to transform us from slovenly, unappreciative little pagan babies into educated, unquestionably committed Roman Catholics – with the ultimate goal being our individual quest for Sainthood; nothing less was acceptable. In 1962, in Johnson County, KS, at Cure of Ars’ Parish School, we were taught to believe that Sainthood was attainable – it was all up to us.
I blew my chance at Sainthood early on, in the spring of my 2nd Grade year. I’d recently been blessed with God’s Grace, having confessed my sins to that point of my life, and then having taken my First Holy Communion. To those of you who aren’t Catholic and haven’t experienced this physical and spiritual transformation, as 7-year olds, we took this Sacrament, this Holy ritual, deadly serious, and for most Catholics, the seriousness of the ritual doesn’t diminish with age. Though as a newly Catholicized 7-year old, there was a bit more at stake with keeping up my end of the bargain with regards to being good, being Christian – I still at that time had Sainthood in my sights.
My 2nd grade fall from grace started with a lie – a big, spur-of-the-moment whopper; a lie that I still to this day am uncertain as to source of its summonance. It ended with the heretofore kind, reasoning, patient and all-knowing Sister Mary Joseph, Principal of Cure of Ars Parish School, kicking me square in the ass soccer-style, (way ahead of her time!) with the force of an NFL kicker going for a 65-yard field goal; jettisoning me out of her office and into the hall, tumbling once, twice…probably three times, head over heels. I knew at the end of the second tumble that my chance at Sainthood was shot, and it’s been downhill for me ever since.
It was a sunny spring day, lunchtime recess; the mid-day break consisting of twenty minutes to eat your lunch (which you ate in six minutes and fidgeted for the next fourteen minutes), and forty minutes out on the playground. On this particular day, I was treated in my lunch to a box of Cracker Jacks – which of course, in addition to caramel coated popcorn and peanuts, came with a ‘prize in every box’. My prize was a small, plastic magnifying glass. The lens was maybe ½” in diameter and the whole thing might have been 1 ½” long; with my current old man vision, I would need a big magnifying glass to even see this magnifying glass. Anyway, it was a prize, and I found myself absent-mindedly standing in the warm spring sun, farting around with it on the playground.
Were this a film, you would see me in a long shot; a sweet, innocent blond-haired little guy standing on the playground, minding his own business, and then, the soundtrack would begin playing something not unlike the theme from Jaws, as unaware to me, the class fat kid/bully was waddling his way towards me from behind. Totally unannounced, the ogre whammed me in the back, his two fat paws simultaneously colliding with my two shoulder blades, sending me face first towards the pavement; in short, the fat bastard walked up behind me and without provocation pushed me to the ground. With cat-quick reflexes I shot my arms forward in time to prevent myself from falling face-first, but the downside result of this nanosecond reflexive act of facial self-preservation was the loss of the little magnifying glass, as it flew from my hands and was never to be seen again.
I didn’t cry, but was on the verge of crying; I was for a fact pissed and quickly decided that this fat jackass had to have some payback. Unfortunately none of the Nuns or teachers who had playground duty witnessed this wanton act of aggression, and I didn’t feel that much would happen to him if I ratted him out for simply pushing me to the ground, so I decided, as I walked towards one of the teachers, angry and wounded, to sweeten the pot a little. This pot-sweetening would require that I lie.
“Mrs. Daly, Claude Oafbutt pushed me and when I hit the ground, I....I...I lost my contact lenses!”
I had no idea what contact lenses were, I just knew that they were small, expensive and hard to find when lost. Seems I saw something about this on TV the evening before.
Mrs. Daly instantly sprang into action, blowing her whistle and herding all of the other kids away from the scene of the crime. She cleared out an area that was about 200 square feet, and instructed everyone to stand back.
“Where did you fall?” she asked, panicked, all but breathless.
“Uh… right over there.” I pointed in a direction but to no spot in particular.
In short order, there were six Nuns on the spot, getting the lowdown from Mrs. Daly. Before my very eyes, and the eyes of the entire grades 1-8 recess crowd, the Nuns got down on their hands and knees and slowly began crawling in the cordoned-off area, their noses inches from the pavement as they scanned the ground; like a huddle of arctic penguins searching the desert sands for ice cubes, they diligently poured over every inch of the playground, looking in vain for something that, like ice in the desert, never existed.
I didn’t cuss at that tender age, especially having just made my First Holy Communion, but I knew the sight that lay before me caused me to mutter under my breath something very close to “Holy Shit, what have I got going on here, and how am I gonna get my ass out of it?” Even at that tender age, I knew that if you caused a Nun to crawl around on the playground,in her habit on her hands and knees because you lied, there would be unimaginably huge repercussions. HUGE!
Enter Sister Mary Joseph, Principal of Cure of Ars.
After getting the skinny from Mrs. Daly, she turned and headed slowly over to me.
“Richard, I’m very sorry this has happened, but we don’t seem to be able to find your lenses. Could there be a chance that you left them at your desk, or in the bathroom?”
“Uh, nope, I’m pretty sure I had ‘em on when I came out here.” Another lie.
“Well….maybe we should go inside and have a look, just to make sure. Don’t you think?”
So I followed Sister Mary Joseph into the empty school, down the hall and towards my classroom, knowing with every step that I was a dead kid walkin’.
Standing me before my desk, Sister asked “How about your pencil box, can you look in there for me?”
I pulled out my cigar-box, which held pencils, crayons, erasers – stuff that we used to write with before we had computers. I opened the lid and slowly fished around among the contents, thinking, hoping and praying that maybe I actually had contact lenses; ‘By Golly Sister! Here they are right here! How lucky was that?’
Instead, of course, I said “No Sister, I can’t find them in here…”
“Let’s go look in the bathroom. Maybe you left them in there.”
“Yeah… maybe I left them in there…..” I said, barely audible as we headed down the hall to look one more place for my fictional lenses. I think I remember starting to pray a bit harder at this point.
Needless to say, neither did I score the non-existent lenses in the bathroom.
Back up in the school office, Sister had me sit while she called home to give my Mom the bad news.
“Mrs. Paradise, this is Sister Mary Joseph at Cure….no, no…your children are all fine. But we do have a small problem. It seems that Richard lost his contact lenses on the playground during recess and….(my Mother became very audible on the other end of the phone, and although not intelligible, I knew exactly what she was saying)….Oh really. Is that so? I see….Yes, I’d be happy to let you talk to Richard.”
“Hullo?”
“What in the world are you doing?? What in God’s Name are you thinking?? Contact lenses?? What on earth are you talking about??” She was yelling these questions at me pretty loudly. She had probably been leisurely ironing my Dad’s handkerchiefs, thinking about what she was going to cook for dinner that evening, and then this call comes in!
“You know Mom….those contact lenses I had. I lost them when Claude Oafbutt pushed me for no reason...sniff…and I scraped my hands and knees…sniff…and it hurts really bad…..sniff….” I started to whimper a little, hoping the tears might allow me to buy some sympathy, but Mom didn’t have any sympathy for sale.
I handed the phone to Sister, my head down, waiting for God knows what to come. I’d seen Nuns draw and quarter kids for snickering in the bathroom line; I couldn’t imagine the hell that awaited me from the Head Knucklebuster for this infraction. I assumed she got the top position because she could out-sadist all of the other sadists, and I’d done some really bad stuff; stuff that would test her mettle as an administrator of punishment.
To my immediate surprise, all I got was a stern look and an outstretched arm, finger pointing down the hall as she hissed “Back to your classroom… young man!…”
Just as I was walking out the door, starting to think “Wow, that wasn’t so bad”, Sister Mary Joseph made her attempt at putting her name in the NFL record books.
As I lay dazed on the other end of the hall, I recall hearing one of the other Nuns in the office say something like “Excellent form Sister, and what solid follow-thru! And did I count three tumbles???"”
Sister Mary Joseph coolly nodded her head, wordlessly acknowledging the compliment, then said “Sister Ann.... go get the tape measure.”
At the end of the ordeal, Sister Mary Joseph was immortalized in the Official Record Book of Nun Brutality for ‘Longest Distance Kicked with Accompanied Somersaults, male, less than 60 lbs – 13 feet, 8 inches, 3 tumbles.’; all I got out of the deal was an early exit from the Sainthood sweepstakes.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Mr. Abner Renta.....Dinner is Served
After a brief attempt at trout fishing in the Colorado River, a clean up and a few quick cocktails, we found ourselves in The River Room Restaurant, the early 1970’s addendum to the western edge of the original 1903 structure which overlooked the stretch of river upon which I’d just unsuccessfully attempted to angle.
Our group of nine – four adults and five children - was seated at a large table, hungry, anxious and eager to order; more accurately, the kids were ready to order, as the adults with the cocktails were less eager to do anything substantive beyond enjoying the moment. The adult mood was sublime, brought on more by the place than the booze, as this warm room and its immediate proximity to the mountain and the river had a wonderful affect on the best part of your psyche.
WHAM!!!
Abner’s easel/chalkboard, which contained the evening’s food offerings, slammed down next to our table for the threefold purpose of 1) abruptly/rudely getting our attention, 2) temporarily shutting up the kids and 3) letting the adults know that their brief stay in La-La Land was now over….Welcome to Abnerville!
“I’m pretty busy so I don’t have a lot of time.” (The restaurant was nearly empty.) “Our soup tonight is Ham & Veg…A...Ta…Ble.” (He said the word ‘vegetable’ not only as if it had four syllables, but as if it was four separate words.) “We have fried pork chops, fried trout or New York Strip Steak, all served with Spanish rice. We had some wonderful Cornish Game hens, but unfortunately we’re out of the game hens.” As Abner delivered the Cornish Game Hen news, his eyes rolled skyward as if an old friend had just passed. Oh….the drama.
(Again, we were at our table early, and the restaurant was empty. So I’m guessing that Jamie – Abner’s cook, plumber, landscaper and….I’ll leave it at that, prepared but one Cornish Game Hen, and Jamie and Abner had eaten it before the dinner service began.)
“Is the trout fresh from the river?” I asked.
“It’s from a river.... What do you know about fresh trout, or rivers….and why would you care where it’s from?”
“Could we ask about…?”
“MAKE YOUR CHOICES!! I’m VERY BUSY! I’ll leave you the board but be back in a minute…. FOR YOUR ORDER!!”
‘Wow, did I miss something? We’re in this guy’s place of business, ready to spend money, and he seems pissed that we’re here? How could this be?’
From grades 1 through 8, I had the honor of being educated by Nuns – real Nuns, from the 50’s and 60’s - not these new age Nuns that were all about peace, love and wearing civilian clothes. My Nuns were first and foremost about knuckle-busting, skull-rapping discipline whilst they were adorned in restrictive costumes that obviously brought them to the point of wanting to torture the rest of the world as a way of getting things on an even keel.
Abner Renta’s customer service style made me feel as if one of those All-Pro 1950 Nuns was standing at the edge of the table, not-so-gently tugging at the tender part of my upper ear, asking, no, demanding, “You don’t want the trout,…whap!... you want the fried pork chop, and if you think you don’t want the fried pork chop, …whap…put your knuckles on the table and I’ll make you wish….whap…whap…whap… you’d have ordered and enjoyed the fried pork chop.”
Seven minutes later, Mr. Renta reappears with an order pad in hand, noticeably very testy. (Had Abner been dressed like a Nun, I wouldn’t have been surprised, nor would I have found it out of character.)
“Alright, who’s ready to order???”
I decide to jump right in to the fray…
“I’ll have the New York strip steak, medium rare.”
Abner’s response…” I’ll bring it cooked, but there’s no guess as to how it will be cooked. You won’t get sick if you eat it… that’s about all I’ll guarantee. Bwa HA HA HA … (an over-the-top, hysterically theatrical laugh, unlike any you've ever heard).
“Ok, who’s next?” I say.
My fictional wife Julie steps up to the plate, and orders..”How about the trout? How’s the trout?”
“We’re out of trout. But we’ve got a few pork chops left, and a few steaks, cooked to the chefs liking…Bwa..Ha..Ha ..Ha!.”
“But your chalkboard had trout, and…”
“WE’RE OUT OF TROUT!!! DID YOU NOT HEAR ME? WE’VE GOT STEAKS AND A FEW PORK CHOPS!!!”
Sheepishly, my fictional wife orders the pork chop, and we order pork chops for the kids, as the $30, 8-ounce frozen steaks are but a bit beyond our budget.
The food was decent (being both famished as well as a little inebriated might have helped to soften the requirements of a particular palate), but the previously sublime atmosphere was darkened by the SS-like discipline that was practiced by the owner. Possibly at this point, the first seeds to growing the ultimate flowers of our eventual demise were planted….
“Wow. This place is awesome. If we owned this place, we wouldn’t be mean and shitty to our customers. We’d try to accommodate their desires, rather than verbally beating them up for expressing their desires. Gotta think that attitude would ultimately be better for business……If only we owned this place….”
To be continued......
Our group of nine – four adults and five children - was seated at a large table, hungry, anxious and eager to order; more accurately, the kids were ready to order, as the adults with the cocktails were less eager to do anything substantive beyond enjoying the moment. The adult mood was sublime, brought on more by the place than the booze, as this warm room and its immediate proximity to the mountain and the river had a wonderful affect on the best part of your psyche.
WHAM!!!
Abner’s easel/chalkboard, which contained the evening’s food offerings, slammed down next to our table for the threefold purpose of 1) abruptly/rudely getting our attention, 2) temporarily shutting up the kids and 3) letting the adults know that their brief stay in La-La Land was now over….Welcome to Abnerville!
“I’m pretty busy so I don’t have a lot of time.” (The restaurant was nearly empty.) “Our soup tonight is Ham & Veg…A...Ta…Ble.” (He said the word ‘vegetable’ not only as if it had four syllables, but as if it was four separate words.) “We have fried pork chops, fried trout or New York Strip Steak, all served with Spanish rice. We had some wonderful Cornish Game hens, but unfortunately we’re out of the game hens.” As Abner delivered the Cornish Game Hen news, his eyes rolled skyward as if an old friend had just passed. Oh….the drama.
(Again, we were at our table early, and the restaurant was empty. So I’m guessing that Jamie – Abner’s cook, plumber, landscaper and….I’ll leave it at that, prepared but one Cornish Game Hen, and Jamie and Abner had eaten it before the dinner service began.)
“Is the trout fresh from the river?” I asked.
“It’s from a river.... What do you know about fresh trout, or rivers….and why would you care where it’s from?”
“Could we ask about…?”
“MAKE YOUR CHOICES!! I’m VERY BUSY! I’ll leave you the board but be back in a minute…. FOR YOUR ORDER!!”
‘Wow, did I miss something? We’re in this guy’s place of business, ready to spend money, and he seems pissed that we’re here? How could this be?’
From grades 1 through 8, I had the honor of being educated by Nuns – real Nuns, from the 50’s and 60’s - not these new age Nuns that were all about peace, love and wearing civilian clothes. My Nuns were first and foremost about knuckle-busting, skull-rapping discipline whilst they were adorned in restrictive costumes that obviously brought them to the point of wanting to torture the rest of the world as a way of getting things on an even keel.
Abner Renta’s customer service style made me feel as if one of those All-Pro 1950 Nuns was standing at the edge of the table, not-so-gently tugging at the tender part of my upper ear, asking, no, demanding, “You don’t want the trout,…whap!... you want the fried pork chop, and if you think you don’t want the fried pork chop, …whap…put your knuckles on the table and I’ll make you wish….whap…whap…whap… you’d have ordered and enjoyed the fried pork chop.”
Seven minutes later, Mr. Renta reappears with an order pad in hand, noticeably very testy. (Had Abner been dressed like a Nun, I wouldn’t have been surprised, nor would I have found it out of character.)
“Alright, who’s ready to order???”
I decide to jump right in to the fray…
“I’ll have the New York strip steak, medium rare.”
Abner’s response…” I’ll bring it cooked, but there’s no guess as to how it will be cooked. You won’t get sick if you eat it… that’s about all I’ll guarantee. Bwa HA HA HA … (an over-the-top, hysterically theatrical laugh, unlike any you've ever heard).
“Ok, who’s next?” I say.
My fictional wife Julie steps up to the plate, and orders..”How about the trout? How’s the trout?”
“We’re out of trout. But we’ve got a few pork chops left, and a few steaks, cooked to the chefs liking…Bwa..Ha..Ha ..Ha!.”
“But your chalkboard had trout, and…”
“WE’RE OUT OF TROUT!!! DID YOU NOT HEAR ME? WE’VE GOT STEAKS AND A FEW PORK CHOPS!!!”
Sheepishly, my fictional wife orders the pork chop, and we order pork chops for the kids, as the $30, 8-ounce frozen steaks are but a bit beyond our budget.
The food was decent (being both famished as well as a little inebriated might have helped to soften the requirements of a particular palate), but the previously sublime atmosphere was darkened by the SS-like discipline that was practiced by the owner. Possibly at this point, the first seeds to growing the ultimate flowers of our eventual demise were planted….
“Wow. This place is awesome. If we owned this place, we wouldn’t be mean and shitty to our customers. We’d try to accommodate their desires, rather than verbally beating them up for expressing their desires. Gotta think that attitude would ultimately be better for business……If only we owned this place….”
To be continued......
Friday, September 16, 2011
Mr. Abner Renta....Introduction
After a slow rise, and a dramatic flourish of the arm, Mr. Renta all but exploded….
“Welcome to The Riverside! Go upstairs and pick any room you like!”
“Abner! Good to see you! It’s Roscoe Cowerd. Remember me??”
“Of course I do. Is the rest of your family with you? Have you brought your dogs? I don’t want the dogs down here.”
“No Abner, no dogs; just our friends from Kansas City and their kids.”
“Wonderful! How nice. Nice to meet you. Will you be having dinner with us tonight?”
“We wouldn’t miss it” interjected Roscoe, before I had the chance to say “Hell No!”
“What’s for dinner tonight, Abner? We’re all starved!”
“We’ve got Ham & Veg…a…ta…ble soup, Pork Chops, Trout and Strip Steak…all served with Spanish Rice.”
“That sounds great Abner. Sounds like what was on the menu the last 30 times we were here.”
“Well, yeah, I guess that’s true; we got it down pretty good. Dinner is at 6:00 O’Clock. Don’t be late! And make sure you put the bath mat on the back of the chair after you shower!”
And so went my brief introduction to Abner Renta. Not in a billion, trillion, ka-zillion years at that time would I have ever imagined that 14-years later, two days after our final Christmas feast in the family homestead that we built and in which we raised our children, my wife and I would have just driven 700 miles across an icy I-70, over a snowy Berthoud Pass, having pulled a U-Haul trailer loaded with lots of our precious stuff, to ultimately be standing in this very room giving this grimy little man a check comprised of the better part of our lives savings, in return for the honor of sitting in this lobby, greeting strangers and telling them where they would be sleeping, what they would be eating for dinner and at what time they would be eating it.
Who amongst us can at any time imagine and say what will ultimately be?
Not one of us; if we could, we would be King eternally.
Yet we can all accurately make pronouncements as to what absolutely will not be.
It’s funny how the unknown can so soundly trump the absolute.
To be continued....
“Welcome to The Riverside! Go upstairs and pick any room you like!”
“Abner! Good to see you! It’s Roscoe Cowerd. Remember me??”
“Of course I do. Is the rest of your family with you? Have you brought your dogs? I don’t want the dogs down here.”
“No Abner, no dogs; just our friends from Kansas City and their kids.”
“Wonderful! How nice. Nice to meet you. Will you be having dinner with us tonight?”
“We wouldn’t miss it” interjected Roscoe, before I had the chance to say “Hell No!”
“What’s for dinner tonight, Abner? We’re all starved!”
“We’ve got Ham & Veg…a…ta…ble soup, Pork Chops, Trout and Strip Steak…all served with Spanish Rice.”
“That sounds great Abner. Sounds like what was on the menu the last 30 times we were here.”
“Well, yeah, I guess that’s true; we got it down pretty good. Dinner is at 6:00 O’Clock. Don’t be late! And make sure you put the bath mat on the back of the chair after you shower!”
And so went my brief introduction to Abner Renta. Not in a billion, trillion, ka-zillion years at that time would I have ever imagined that 14-years later, two days after our final Christmas feast in the family homestead that we built and in which we raised our children, my wife and I would have just driven 700 miles across an icy I-70, over a snowy Berthoud Pass, having pulled a U-Haul trailer loaded with lots of our precious stuff, to ultimately be standing in this very room giving this grimy little man a check comprised of the better part of our lives savings, in return for the honor of sitting in this lobby, greeting strangers and telling them where they would be sleeping, what they would be eating for dinner and at what time they would be eating it.
Who amongst us can at any time imagine and say what will ultimately be?
Not one of us; if we could, we would be King eternally.
Yet we can all accurately make pronouncements as to what absolutely will not be.
It’s funny how the unknown can so soundly trump the absolute.
To be continued....
Monday, September 12, 2011
Mr. Abner Renta.......Proprietor
Note: As with all of the previous chapters of this blog, it is important to reiterate with the next few chapters that all of the characters featured in these stories are purely fictional. This next series of stories are about a fictional man who owned a fictional hotel in a fictional town in Colorado, which was ultimately purchased by a fictional family. Any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental; just good old fashioned, honest-to-God, blind-ass happenstance.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the summer of 1993, we made our first visit to The Riverside Hotel. It was the first stop in an extended trip where the ultimate destination was a five day visit to Julie’s family reunion (my fictional wife) in Anaconda, MT. A lot of driving in a 1992 Chevy Astro Van with my 8-year old daughter and my 5-year old son; this before they’d started installing DVD players in cars – having lived through the trip I can now say that was a good thing, as the kids were forced to drink in the scenery, as were we and any other of my generation fortunate enough to take a driving vacation. Remember, this form of recreation was pretty much new to the Post-WWII civilized world after the relatively recent advent of the car, the paved road and the job where you got time off. How quickly we’ve degenerated to the point where our offspring are entertained not by nature’s beauty and familial interaction, but only by Hi-Def 3D Pixar stuff.
The summer of 1993 was also famous for the Flood of 1993 – the heartland of our Country from the mouth of the Mississippi River in Minnesota, through Iowa to the heart of the Mississippi Delta, and the mighty Missouri River back through the upper reaches of the Dakota’s – was devastated by a 500-year flood, not seen again until 18 years later. The flood threatened my business, which was a few short miles from the point where the Kansas River (aka The Kaw) hooked up with the Missouri River; 3 miles downstream from our plant, trailer parks and a few businesses that had been there since the 1940’s were literally wiped from the map by the overflow of the Kaw – the land remains barren today.
We headed west from Kansas City towards Denver and the Rocky Mountains on I-70 – to many this stretch of road is the punch line to “What is the shittiest section of interstate highway in the US?” Having now made this trek I can’t remember how many times – 30, probably closer to 40 – I can tell you that stretches of this ride are singularly spectacular; 10-fold more scenic than the I-70 that stretches through the equally Kansas-flat cornfields of Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. Driving west out of Topeka to Salina, you will experience a nice stretch of the Flint Hills; hit them early in the morning or during a purple fall dusk, and you will experience a vision like no other. Mountains are quietly envious of this spectacle. The latter part of Kansas into the eastern stretches of Colorado gives you the gentle rumblings of the Chalk Hills, truncated by the jagged cuts and arroyos that exist with a vibrant purpose in the rainy spring, only to turn to wasted, unimportant ditches in the summer and fall. It is a barren land, hard and spent, but its starkness whets your appetite for the beautiful, yet brutal peaks and spires that lay ahead.
The summer of 1993 was the third time I’d made this trip, and the first time in my adult life. The first trip was in 1959 as a three-year old in the back of a brand new 1959 Chevy Station Wagon, (my memories of this trip are vague), the second in 1973 as a 17-year old protesting the fact that he had to go on a family vacation (my memories of this trip are also vague), and now, as the head of the family, I was essentially heading into lands unknown.
Our lunch stop off of I-70 was Wilson Lake Reservoir, about 200 miles west of KC, halfway between Salina and Hays, KS. I’d picked the place out on a map because it was right off the interstate and it had some decent looking picnic areas where our kids could run off some steam. Unbeknownst to me, two weeks before our visit an F-4 tornado had torched through the area. Shortly off the interstate, driving towards the picnic areas, the devastation from the storm was otherworldly – a shell of an old gas station, the pumps and its spidery twisted canopy turned on its side, a large stand of cottonwood trees turned into a spot for a massive fall bonfire, picnic tables and fire grills a jumble of iron and wood nested 10’ off the shore of the lake, forty yards from their original point of purpose. Add to the aura the fact that there was no evidence at this ‘park’ of any other human – we had the place so to ourselves that it felt as if we’d stepped into the Twilight Zone. Who would have expected such a surreal setting for the two month-prior planned consumption of our Underwood Deviled-Ham sandwiches, crunchified with straight-up Lay’s Potato Chips and washed down with Sunkist Orange Soda?
A deeper portent of things to come on this trip and our ultimate western journey..…. Perhaps.
Two nights were spent in Denver, me doing some business while Julie and the offspring hit the zoo and the Children’s Museum. My doing business was central to our being in Denver, and totally central to our ultimate involvement with The Riverside Hotel. My boss lived and operated several other businesses in Denver; in one of those businesses I found a kindred spirit, Roscoe, who became one of my closest friends. We were both at similar points in our lives with working wives and young children while toiling away for the same boss in related industries; tied into the package was our mutual love of sports, fishing, literature and fine food and booze.
When I’d mentioned to Roscoe that we were driving west on vacation for a family reunion, a stop in Denver followed by a night at The Historic Riverside Hotel – a getaway staple for my Colorado buddy since his youth – was etched into the trip. One of the things I love most about Roscoe is his tendency to embrace his knowledge of prose and literature and infuse it into every fragment of conversation. He can make a trip down the driveway to pick up the morning paper into an event….”the morning sun sparked the glistening snow into a field of blinding diamonds as I made my way towards the bundled journal, treading carefully…cautious not to disturb the surrounding glitter as I bent to gather the previous days’ news.” Roscoe’s propensity to elucidate on the most ordinary of tasks and events (certainly not a fault, as it is borne from the most genuine joie de vivre that I’ve ever encountered) made a trip to the Colorado mountains and an eventual visit to The Riverside seem as if we were in fact heading to Shangri-La.
The drive seemed endless, up and over Berthoud Pass, through one small town after another, before we took a right turn onto the main street of Hot Sulphur Springs, CO, heading slowly west towards Mt. Bross, the Colorado River and The Riverside Hotel. The white clapboard façade bared itself to the south and the rest of the town as if it were one of the worlds’ last outposts. It was truly as if all roads in Grand County led to this end, the juncture of farm, burg and field, river and mountain. I stood before the place awestruck; I knew that I was in the presence of time, history and past generations. Good Lord, but the place had a feel!
As I walked into The Riverside for the first time, bags in tow and eager for the experience, and more importantly eager for a cocktail after the long drive, I was greeted by the visage of this fantastically musty, cluttered old place – half-dead climbing vines clinging to the walls, window ledges and door jambs, a homey living area dominated by a massive limestone fireplace and a mounted trophy 7-point Elk-rack lording over the room. It was certainly as if the old-timey feel of the outside had pulsed its veins straight through the interior. I’m certain that if you’d have walked into the place in 1930, not much would be different, save for the raging 19” television in the corner, and the old man who sat in the chair, his eyes glued to that television; he wanly greeting us as we entered.
Meet Mr. Abner Renta, the proprietor of The Riverside Hotel.
At that time (before Peter Jackson’s rendering, and to the truth, Mr. Jackson and I were eerily on the same page) Mr. Renta would have been my vision for the Gollum character in Tolkien’s works; bloodshot bulging bug-eyes, sallow skin and rotting teeth under a wild unmanageable tangle of wispy, wiry hair. His lilting high-pitched welcome and his hysterical falsetto of a following laugh would have most certainly further chilled Gollum’s icy blood. I clutched onto my bags, forgot about having cocktails, and looked nervously for the exit.
On the spot I began to question the accuracy of my friend Roscoe’s tendency to creatively describe his past and present, thinking possibly that some serious drugs had played into his utopian world view way more than I’d imagined.
To be continued…..
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the summer of 1993, we made our first visit to The Riverside Hotel. It was the first stop in an extended trip where the ultimate destination was a five day visit to Julie’s family reunion (my fictional wife) in Anaconda, MT. A lot of driving in a 1992 Chevy Astro Van with my 8-year old daughter and my 5-year old son; this before they’d started installing DVD players in cars – having lived through the trip I can now say that was a good thing, as the kids were forced to drink in the scenery, as were we and any other of my generation fortunate enough to take a driving vacation. Remember, this form of recreation was pretty much new to the Post-WWII civilized world after the relatively recent advent of the car, the paved road and the job where you got time off. How quickly we’ve degenerated to the point where our offspring are entertained not by nature’s beauty and familial interaction, but only by Hi-Def 3D Pixar stuff.
The summer of 1993 was also famous for the Flood of 1993 – the heartland of our Country from the mouth of the Mississippi River in Minnesota, through Iowa to the heart of the Mississippi Delta, and the mighty Missouri River back through the upper reaches of the Dakota’s – was devastated by a 500-year flood, not seen again until 18 years later. The flood threatened my business, which was a few short miles from the point where the Kansas River (aka The Kaw) hooked up with the Missouri River; 3 miles downstream from our plant, trailer parks and a few businesses that had been there since the 1940’s were literally wiped from the map by the overflow of the Kaw – the land remains barren today.
We headed west from Kansas City towards Denver and the Rocky Mountains on I-70 – to many this stretch of road is the punch line to “What is the shittiest section of interstate highway in the US?” Having now made this trek I can’t remember how many times – 30, probably closer to 40 – I can tell you that stretches of this ride are singularly spectacular; 10-fold more scenic than the I-70 that stretches through the equally Kansas-flat cornfields of Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. Driving west out of Topeka to Salina, you will experience a nice stretch of the Flint Hills; hit them early in the morning or during a purple fall dusk, and you will experience a vision like no other. Mountains are quietly envious of this spectacle. The latter part of Kansas into the eastern stretches of Colorado gives you the gentle rumblings of the Chalk Hills, truncated by the jagged cuts and arroyos that exist with a vibrant purpose in the rainy spring, only to turn to wasted, unimportant ditches in the summer and fall. It is a barren land, hard and spent, but its starkness whets your appetite for the beautiful, yet brutal peaks and spires that lay ahead.
The summer of 1993 was the third time I’d made this trip, and the first time in my adult life. The first trip was in 1959 as a three-year old in the back of a brand new 1959 Chevy Station Wagon, (my memories of this trip are vague), the second in 1973 as a 17-year old protesting the fact that he had to go on a family vacation (my memories of this trip are also vague), and now, as the head of the family, I was essentially heading into lands unknown.
Our lunch stop off of I-70 was Wilson Lake Reservoir, about 200 miles west of KC, halfway between Salina and Hays, KS. I’d picked the place out on a map because it was right off the interstate and it had some decent looking picnic areas where our kids could run off some steam. Unbeknownst to me, two weeks before our visit an F-4 tornado had torched through the area. Shortly off the interstate, driving towards the picnic areas, the devastation from the storm was otherworldly – a shell of an old gas station, the pumps and its spidery twisted canopy turned on its side, a large stand of cottonwood trees turned into a spot for a massive fall bonfire, picnic tables and fire grills a jumble of iron and wood nested 10’ off the shore of the lake, forty yards from their original point of purpose. Add to the aura the fact that there was no evidence at this ‘park’ of any other human – we had the place so to ourselves that it felt as if we’d stepped into the Twilight Zone. Who would have expected such a surreal setting for the two month-prior planned consumption of our Underwood Deviled-Ham sandwiches, crunchified with straight-up Lay’s Potato Chips and washed down with Sunkist Orange Soda?
A deeper portent of things to come on this trip and our ultimate western journey..…. Perhaps.
Two nights were spent in Denver, me doing some business while Julie and the offspring hit the zoo and the Children’s Museum. My doing business was central to our being in Denver, and totally central to our ultimate involvement with The Riverside Hotel. My boss lived and operated several other businesses in Denver; in one of those businesses I found a kindred spirit, Roscoe, who became one of my closest friends. We were both at similar points in our lives with working wives and young children while toiling away for the same boss in related industries; tied into the package was our mutual love of sports, fishing, literature and fine food and booze.
When I’d mentioned to Roscoe that we were driving west on vacation for a family reunion, a stop in Denver followed by a night at The Historic Riverside Hotel – a getaway staple for my Colorado buddy since his youth – was etched into the trip. One of the things I love most about Roscoe is his tendency to embrace his knowledge of prose and literature and infuse it into every fragment of conversation. He can make a trip down the driveway to pick up the morning paper into an event….”the morning sun sparked the glistening snow into a field of blinding diamonds as I made my way towards the bundled journal, treading carefully…cautious not to disturb the surrounding glitter as I bent to gather the previous days’ news.” Roscoe’s propensity to elucidate on the most ordinary of tasks and events (certainly not a fault, as it is borne from the most genuine joie de vivre that I’ve ever encountered) made a trip to the Colorado mountains and an eventual visit to The Riverside seem as if we were in fact heading to Shangri-La.
The drive seemed endless, up and over Berthoud Pass, through one small town after another, before we took a right turn onto the main street of Hot Sulphur Springs, CO, heading slowly west towards Mt. Bross, the Colorado River and The Riverside Hotel. The white clapboard façade bared itself to the south and the rest of the town as if it were one of the worlds’ last outposts. It was truly as if all roads in Grand County led to this end, the juncture of farm, burg and field, river and mountain. I stood before the place awestruck; I knew that I was in the presence of time, history and past generations. Good Lord, but the place had a feel!
As I walked into The Riverside for the first time, bags in tow and eager for the experience, and more importantly eager for a cocktail after the long drive, I was greeted by the visage of this fantastically musty, cluttered old place – half-dead climbing vines clinging to the walls, window ledges and door jambs, a homey living area dominated by a massive limestone fireplace and a mounted trophy 7-point Elk-rack lording over the room. It was certainly as if the old-timey feel of the outside had pulsed its veins straight through the interior. I’m certain that if you’d have walked into the place in 1930, not much would be different, save for the raging 19” television in the corner, and the old man who sat in the chair, his eyes glued to that television; he wanly greeting us as we entered.
Meet Mr. Abner Renta, the proprietor of The Riverside Hotel.
At that time (before Peter Jackson’s rendering, and to the truth, Mr. Jackson and I were eerily on the same page) Mr. Renta would have been my vision for the Gollum character in Tolkien’s works; bloodshot bulging bug-eyes, sallow skin and rotting teeth under a wild unmanageable tangle of wispy, wiry hair. His lilting high-pitched welcome and his hysterical falsetto of a following laugh would have most certainly further chilled Gollum’s icy blood. I clutched onto my bags, forgot about having cocktails, and looked nervously for the exit.
On the spot I began to question the accuracy of my friend Roscoe’s tendency to creatively describe his past and present, thinking possibly that some serious drugs had played into his utopian world view way more than I’d imagined.
To be continued…..
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Justin Time for Dinner.........The Main Course
At our Meet & Greet, Justin was quick to offer me his wood for The Riverside. He was a young newlywed with another mouth to feed on the way, and free appetizers and decently prized booze not withstanding, he was at the HSS Chamber Meet & Greet to rustle up some new business.
It pained me to ask, but I had to. “If it’s a boy, will he be Justin Jr.?”
“We already know it’s going to be a girl. We’re thinking of naming her Precious. Get it? Precious Tiem?”
Obviously the nut had not fallen very far from the Tiem family tree.
“So what do you charge for a cord of wood, delivered and stacked?”
“Normally I get $175 a cord, but that doesn’t include stacking – I can get $200 a cord if it’s stacked. Now if you bought maybe at least 10 cords, I could deliver it and stack it for $2000. How’s that sound?” The concept of the volume discount had not yet made its way to the thin mountain air between Justin’s ears.
“Wow! That seems kinda steep. I paid maybe $150 bucks in Kansas City, delivered and stacked. Lemme think about that, Justin. That kind of cash is pretty hard for me to come up with in one chunk. What would you charge to dump some 10’-20’ logs in the backyard, and I’ll cut them down and split them myself?”
“Hmmm….I’d have to think about that for a minute. Everybody wants it cut already.”
I could see this new wrinkle to his wood business had thrown him for a bit of a loop. Justin may have been many things, but a savvy marketer wasn’t one of them. I came up with a better idea.
“How about this, Justin? You bring me a load of logs, and I’ll treat you and a guest to dinner in our restaurant, not including drinks. You gotta pay for your drinks.” (An extremely important caveat in Grand County when bartering goods and services– not on any deal would you break even if unlimited free drinks were offered in exchange for anything.)
“And every time you bring me a load of logs, you get a dinner for two.” A worst case cost for a dinner for two without alcohol, with both ordering rib-eyes and dessert, was a $60 tab, with an actual out of pocket cost to me of $20. If they ordered alcohol with dinner, that profit would help offset the $20 expense. I’d be getting loads of uncut wood for $15-$20 bucks a pop; you couldn’t beat that deal!
Justin was quick to accept, as his wife’s birthday was fast upon him, and he’d promised her a birthday feast at The Dairy Dine – The Riverside would be quite a step up on that promise. It really worked out well for both of us, as I needed wood, had limited funds to buy wood but had the nicest restaurant in town. Justin wanted a nice meal, had limited funds to buy a nice meal but had plenty of wood to deliver; kind of a Hot Sulphur Springs version of the Gift of the Magi.
The following Monday morning, I’m up early taking Lucy outside to do her morning business. There were no guests to check out and nobody checking in, and the restaurant was closed on Mondays – so it was as much of a day off as we got at The Riverside. Its 7:30 AM, cool, crisp, and I’m in my Riverside Signature flannel robe, leaning on the wood shed, watching and waiting as Lucy sniffed her way to where she ultimately wanted to be. The morning stillness is broken by the loud rattle of a rickety truck coming down the alley between our neighbor’s apartment building and Joe’s Auto Repair, which bordered the north (back) end of our property.
Enter an old, beat up, coughing, wheezing, barely running Ford Pickup truck – Google research tells me it might have been a 1965 model – rusted out with bald tires and a short bed to boot, a goofily grinning Justin Tiem at the wheel. In the back of that short bed were eight 6’ pine logs, each with a diameter of less than 8” - Tony’s free logs the summer before were 20’ long and 12” – 18” in diameter. Justin didn’t go up into the woods and lop these babies down – I think possibly he found them laying in the streets of Hot Sulphur, or in the woods of Pioneer Park….maybe even on the river bank next to our property. They were like big twigs – the stuff that you’d gather up at a city park if you were going to roast weenies.
“Here’s the first load” Justin said, proudly beaming, “Were do you want me to put the wood?”
“Uh, let’s just toss ‘em right here on the ground. They shouldn’t get in the way of anything.” I don’t think Justin picked up on the sarcasm.
“What time does the restaurant open?” Justin asked.
“We’re closed on Monday, so it’ll have to be tomorrow night if that works for you.”
“No problem, we’ll see you tomorrow. I’m coming hungry!!” Off chugged the oldest, still functioning piece of commercial wood hauling equipment in the lower 48. Possibly there were older ones in some Third World countries…..possibly.
Justin and his pregnant bride showed up promptly at opening time Tuesday night– actually early, waiting in front of the hotel for us to open up. I sat them at the corner table, the best one with the best view of the river. I treated them like royalty – Barack and Michelle would have had no less flourish from me. Of course, as expected, they both ordered appetizers, salads and the Dirty Rib-eye, plus desserts; but Justin decided to be a teetotaler that evening – no revenue-producing booze for which I could charge him, only the endless glass of free iced tea. (Perhaps he was being thoughtful of his wife, with child and probably not drinking, as he wasn’t the least bit shy about pounding down the hooch at the Meet & Greet.)
Justin and his wife had a lovely dinner – they ended up being our only customers that night. I fired up the kitchen, paid a cook and gave out two free meals for 8 logs that I could have cut, split and burned before I’d served Justin’s rib-eye. So far that ‘how could you go wrong with a deal like that?’ deal was tilted in the favor of Mr. Tiem. Within a few short days, that favorable tilt would turn to a 90o landslide of inequity; and true to form, certainly not in my favor.
Two days later I awake to find a load of ten logs, some but 3’ or 4’, and all skinny as fence rails, deposited in the back yard. 12 short hours after I’m thinking he must have deposited them in the yard, who shows up at The Riverside, this time with his mother, but Hot Sulphur’s version of Jack Haley, sans the suit of tin; two more rib-eyes with all the trappings and an endless river of iced tea refills. My good humor was starting to wear a little thin.
The following Tuesday, the third “pile” of logs is delivered by Mr. Tiem – while there were a few more logs, they were still of the same quality with regards to their length and diameter The good humor has now disappeared completely, to be replaced by a state of pure pissed-offedness; more at myself than Justin, for once again, I’d let myself fall prey to the Grand County hustle.
Justin shows up by himself that evening, and I take the opportunity to have a frank, man-to-man discussion with him about our previously agreed-to business arrangement.
“Hey Richard! How’re you doing this evening? Did you see the load I left this morning?”
“I saw a few small logs in the backyard that I hadn’t noticed being there yesterday.” I answered, somewhat icily. “Was that the ‘load’ you’re talking about?”
“Sure was – that’s why I’m here for dinner. I sure could use one of those rib-eyes. I love the way you cook those steaks.”
The attempt at flattery flew right by me, finding no purchase.
“Justin, I gotta be honest with you. Those aren’t exactly what I’d call Dirty Rib-eye logs. I’d even be stretching it to call them Chicken Spedini logs. If we served Hot Dogs here at The Riverside, those logs you brought me today would be Hot Dog logs. Get it?”
He cowered a little. “My equipment isn’t set up to bring big wood….you’ve seen my truck!”
Yes, I’ve seen your truck and I’m surprised that it would haul a case of toilet paper, I thought but didn’t say.
“But Justin, your business card says.…well…I assumed you had a real wood business…hell, you’ve even got a slogan! Are you telling me you can’t actually put the wood where I want it? ”
“I can…I have to split it to 18” lengths, deliver and stack it, one cord at a time. And for $50 a cord and a few more of those Dirty Rib-eyes, I can deliver all the wood you want….. Justin Time!”
“Still want that rib-eye, buddy… extra-well done?”
Eleven extra-well done rib-eye dinners later, and an extra few hundred bucks to boot, I had my wood for the final winter of Living Life Riverside……just in time.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Justin Time for Dinner....Second Course
The batch of wood that first Riverside summer was courtesy of our good friend, Tony the Sober Plumber. Tony and his Dad were the kind of guys that if they weren’t doing something highly physical and potentially dangerous, they may as well have been getting a pedicure. Tony had a friend who gave him access to all of the dead Lodgepole pines he wanted – all he had to do was cut them down and haul them off. That might sound easy to you flatlanders, but it involved driving a truck and trailer up a 15o incline, whacking down 100’ tall dead pine trees – TIMBERRRRR!!! – cutting off the branches, sawing the trunks into 20’ lengths weighing 1000 pounds apiece, and then the two of you man-handling them onto your trailer. After this blistering display of high elevation derring-do and Mountain Man machismo, Tony drove to the back yard of The Riverside and left us 20 of these babies, gratis. He was that kind of a guy.
Whilst we were winding down our stay in Hot Sulphur as it coincided with the demise of the Grand County economy, Tony’s ‘new construction’ plumbing business – along with all other construction related businesses – had gone straight down the toilet. Not one to sit around and feel sorry for himself, Tony bought an old diesel semi- truck and a log-hauling trailer and employed himself hauling dead pine logs out of the mountains. His summertime hobby of felling and gathering those logs for friends and neighbors was mere child’s play compared to his new winter profession. Imagine driving a semi-truck with tire chains, pulling a 40’ log trailer, up the side of a newly hewn, snowy mountain path in the middle of the freezing Colorado night. Logs loaded, he would carefully traverse his way back down the hill – foot all but always jammed on the brake, as the slightest bit of unchecked downward motion could cause the trailer to jackknife, upending both the cab and the trailer and sending it down the steep mountain side in a grisly, cacophonous pas-de-deux. Once safely down the mountain – the target time was always 4:00 AM – the real trek began, as the final destination for the load was a saw mill in Rifle, CO, 170 miles WSW of Grand County.
The quickest route that a normal person would take to Rifle from Hot Sulphur Springs during the winter was to take Highway 40 west to Kremmling, a flat, easy 17 mile track, and then head south on Highway 9 along the floor of the Blue River valley. During the fall, this 40 mile drive is as beautiful as any on Earth, with golden aspens ablaze against the jagged peaks of the Gore Range. In the winter, while still beautiful, you had better not notice the view; you’d best keep your eyes squarely on the often windy, sometimes treacherous two-lane stretch of highway. At the end of the road you will find yourself on I-70 in Dillon, CO, at which point you head west another 115 miles until you hit Rifle, CO.
That is the route I would travel, (it is the route MapQuest would suggest as well), and I would be cautious and generally white knuckled as I gently maneuvered my 2003 4-Wheel drive Chevy Suburban along the curvaceous, snow-packed lanes of Highway 9 during the winter. If you wanted to cut 30-45 minutes off of the drive, and if you had no regard for your life or limb, you would jump on the ‘trough road’ just south of Kremmling, and be deposited about 50 miles further west on I-70 in Eagle. The trough road was a mostly gravel, barely two-lane narrow road that snaked its way along the Colorado River – sometimes adjacent, sometimes 500’ above the river as it hugged the side of some of the Rockies finest granite. This was also the route that the Amtrak’s California Zephyr takes midway on its trek from Chicago to Los Angeles. (If you ever get the chance to jump the Zephyr in Denver and take the 4.5 hour trip to Glenwood Springs, CO, take it, as you’ll believe you’ve died and gone to heaven.) The drive was scary enough to be an attention-getter for tough guys in summer in a small car – to me it was an unimaginable feat in the winter while pulling a trailer loaded with 40,000 pounds of logs in the wee hours of the morning. The only possible upside to this pre-dawn journey, and I’m stretching hard here to find one, would be the lack of traffic.
The only time I took the trough road was in late spring for a brief trip to Glenwood Springs. There was still some slickness and the occasional snow and ice patch; a few points in the journey – narrow curves overlooking deadly drop-offs into the majestic Colorado River - I had to fight hard not to wet my pants from fear. On that return trip, I didn’t even for a second consider taking the road, rather, simply opting for the additional time and mileage of Highway 9.
Tony made this nail-biter twice a day, six days a week – at night, often in blinding blizzards with gale force winds.
He had some close calls and more than a few scares – once when his brakes were smoking-hot and non functional as he flew uncontrollably down a, thankfully, relatively straight stretch of road – and he was fully aware of and not enthralled with the danger he faced every night. More often than not upon his return home around 1-2 PM, dog tired from both the physical labor of maneuvering his belching diesel mammoth and the stress associated with keeping his load intact and himself alive, he would have to do one repair or another to either the truck or the trailer. You’d assume correctly that a guy that would buy a truck and do this sort of thing for a living would have the wherewithal to repair his own rig.
After trying to live a fragment of a normal family life and 4-5 hours of sleep, Tony was back up and in the truck, heading for another load of logs at 12:00 AM. He did this for $800 bucks a load. While that may sound like a lot - $4800 a week – the reality is that he spent $300 per trip on fuel and untold more on repairs; plus he had the truck payment and insurance. At the end of the deal he might clear $200 bucks a day – before taxes. Basically, Tony was risking his life, working his tail off and barely surviving. Sound familiar?
As I’ve stated previously, times are hard and living and surviving even harder in Grand County, CO.
Again, I digress…………back to Mr. Tiem, the provider of both wood and unintended mirth to the fine folks of Hot Sulphur Springs.
Whilst we were winding down our stay in Hot Sulphur as it coincided with the demise of the Grand County economy, Tony’s ‘new construction’ plumbing business – along with all other construction related businesses – had gone straight down the toilet. Not one to sit around and feel sorry for himself, Tony bought an old diesel semi- truck and a log-hauling trailer and employed himself hauling dead pine logs out of the mountains. His summertime hobby of felling and gathering those logs for friends and neighbors was mere child’s play compared to his new winter profession. Imagine driving a semi-truck with tire chains, pulling a 40’ log trailer, up the side of a newly hewn, snowy mountain path in the middle of the freezing Colorado night. Logs loaded, he would carefully traverse his way back down the hill – foot all but always jammed on the brake, as the slightest bit of unchecked downward motion could cause the trailer to jackknife, upending both the cab and the trailer and sending it down the steep mountain side in a grisly, cacophonous pas-de-deux. Once safely down the mountain – the target time was always 4:00 AM – the real trek began, as the final destination for the load was a saw mill in Rifle, CO, 170 miles WSW of Grand County.
The quickest route that a normal person would take to Rifle from Hot Sulphur Springs during the winter was to take Highway 40 west to Kremmling, a flat, easy 17 mile track, and then head south on Highway 9 along the floor of the Blue River valley. During the fall, this 40 mile drive is as beautiful as any on Earth, with golden aspens ablaze against the jagged peaks of the Gore Range. In the winter, while still beautiful, you had better not notice the view; you’d best keep your eyes squarely on the often windy, sometimes treacherous two-lane stretch of highway. At the end of the road you will find yourself on I-70 in Dillon, CO, at which point you head west another 115 miles until you hit Rifle, CO.
That is the route I would travel, (it is the route MapQuest would suggest as well), and I would be cautious and generally white knuckled as I gently maneuvered my 2003 4-Wheel drive Chevy Suburban along the curvaceous, snow-packed lanes of Highway 9 during the winter. If you wanted to cut 30-45 minutes off of the drive, and if you had no regard for your life or limb, you would jump on the ‘trough road’ just south of Kremmling, and be deposited about 50 miles further west on I-70 in Eagle. The trough road was a mostly gravel, barely two-lane narrow road that snaked its way along the Colorado River – sometimes adjacent, sometimes 500’ above the river as it hugged the side of some of the Rockies finest granite. This was also the route that the Amtrak’s California Zephyr takes midway on its trek from Chicago to Los Angeles. (If you ever get the chance to jump the Zephyr in Denver and take the 4.5 hour trip to Glenwood Springs, CO, take it, as you’ll believe you’ve died and gone to heaven.) The drive was scary enough to be an attention-getter for tough guys in summer in a small car – to me it was an unimaginable feat in the winter while pulling a trailer loaded with 40,000 pounds of logs in the wee hours of the morning. The only possible upside to this pre-dawn journey, and I’m stretching hard here to find one, would be the lack of traffic.
The only time I took the trough road was in late spring for a brief trip to Glenwood Springs. There was still some slickness and the occasional snow and ice patch; a few points in the journey – narrow curves overlooking deadly drop-offs into the majestic Colorado River - I had to fight hard not to wet my pants from fear. On that return trip, I didn’t even for a second consider taking the road, rather, simply opting for the additional time and mileage of Highway 9.
Tony made this nail-biter twice a day, six days a week – at night, often in blinding blizzards with gale force winds.
He had some close calls and more than a few scares – once when his brakes were smoking-hot and non functional as he flew uncontrollably down a, thankfully, relatively straight stretch of road – and he was fully aware of and not enthralled with the danger he faced every night. More often than not upon his return home around 1-2 PM, dog tired from both the physical labor of maneuvering his belching diesel mammoth and the stress associated with keeping his load intact and himself alive, he would have to do one repair or another to either the truck or the trailer. You’d assume correctly that a guy that would buy a truck and do this sort of thing for a living would have the wherewithal to repair his own rig.
After trying to live a fragment of a normal family life and 4-5 hours of sleep, Tony was back up and in the truck, heading for another load of logs at 12:00 AM. He did this for $800 bucks a load. While that may sound like a lot - $4800 a week – the reality is that he spent $300 per trip on fuel and untold more on repairs; plus he had the truck payment and insurance. At the end of the deal he might clear $200 bucks a day – before taxes. Basically, Tony was risking his life, working his tail off and barely surviving. Sound familiar?
As I’ve stated previously, times are hard and living and surviving even harder in Grand County, CO.
Again, I digress…………back to Mr. Tiem, the provider of both wood and unintended mirth to the fine folks of Hot Sulphur Springs.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Justin Time for Dinner
Early in the summer of 2009, The Riverside hosted the inaugural Hot Sulphur Springs Chamber of Commerce Meet & Greet. In a town of 400 people, obviously there were very few businesses, and perhaps the need even questionable for a Chamber of Commerce – two motels on Highway 40, the hot springs resort, two small diners (The Glory Hole and The Depot), the seasonally-open Dairy Dine, The Barking Dog Pub, a gas station/convenience store, a liquor store/video rental/fishing tackle/Laundromat, a mortuary and The Historic Riverside Hotel, Restaurant & Bar. Hot Sulphur Springs is also the county seat for the county of Grand, ergo; you had the courthouse, drivers’ license bureau, County Treasurer, Appraisers office, Building Department and the crown jewel of the public trust– the Grand County Jail, otherwise known as the DUI Hilton.
None of the aforementioned businesses were represented at the HSS Chamber Meet & Greet, with the obvious exception of yours’ truly. In place of the real brick and mortar town businesses were friends and neighbors who had small businesses on the side – Amway, Avon, Pampered Chef and Aveda sellers, four certified ‘life coaches’ and an income tax service, to name but a few. Mostly, it was a good excuse to get together and eat appetizers that we had prepared and belly up to the usually ‘not open to the locals’ bar at The Riverside; the appetizers were free, but the booze wasn’t.
One interesting thing about the get together that I noticed immediately – I’d never before seen any of these people frequent The Riverside as paying customers. A few I’d recognized from seeing them at the post office – located across the street from the hotel – but otherwise none of them had dined with us in our restaurant; you know, that room overlooking the river where we were trying to earn our living. This speaks to one of my major miscalculations when I was projecting revenue for our business venture; I’d made the incorrect assumption that locals would dine in our restaurant – nada, it didn’t happen.
One of the strangers that I met that evening was a tall, pleasant young man named Justin Tiem (pronounced ‘Time’). That’s right. Twenty-five years ago Mr. & Mrs. Tiem had a baby boy, and decided to make him the poster child for peer abuse, sending him out into the cruel world to be the eternal butt of one bad joke after the next. Really, what were they thinking? Justin was pretty good natured about it, even using the misspelling in the title of his business: his business card read:
JUST-IN TIME WOOD SERVICE, Justin Tiem, Owner. His mission statement, or motto, was “I’ll Put the Wood Wherever You Like!”
There was also a man who lived in our town with parents that named him Dick Johnson. Those long Grand County winters can have a crooked effect on the minds of its citizens.
In the land of eternal winter, the need for a steady source of firewood was profound. This profound need was ratcheted way up at The Riverside, as the two main rooms in the hotel had no source of heat – gas, electric, forced air or otherwise – other than two small fireplaces with non-functional heat-o-laters (blowers to disperse the heat). It wasn’t unusual to get up first thing of a frigid morning and find the inside temperature of the lobby to be hovering in the high 30’s. On killer cold nights I might leave an electric heater blowing, always weighing the notion of frozen pipes vs. the potential fire hazard; but then, I had insurance.
More often than not, the late nighters at the hotel would have expended all of the wood that was brought in throughout the day and night – that would generally be the reason people actually went to bed; no firewood, getting damn cold in here and way too damn cold to go outside and get anymore wood. Oh, and we’re out of beer. Most all of my days started with a trip through the bar, and out the backdoor to the woodshed – in a biting, dry cold that stung any exposed skin or appendage with the fury of a hundred angry wasps. It was the norm for early morning first light temperatures, December through February, on clear mornings to average -20oF.
The wood shed was roughly 10’wide and 14’ long with 7’ of clear headspace – that’s roughly 1000 cubic feet, which will house about 9 cords of wood. We filled that space to the brim both winters we owned The Riverside, with an additional cord or two stacked outside under a tarp. We used the outside wood first as the eventual snowfalls would make anything outside positively unattainable without the aid of a backhoe – I didn’t have one of those. All the wood stacked to the gills of that shed in late October was a little like a big paycheck – sitting full in the bank on day one, it seemed like a lot and looked like it was more than you could spend; come mid February, that wood, like the paycheck, dwindled down to pennies in your account, and you wondered how you were going to get to the next payday (spring and warm weather, in our case) intact.
Here’s one other little thing about that wood. It wasn’t the oak and hickory hardwoods of my Midwestern life experience; the kind that was a dense, heavy, slow-burning wood, generating hotter heat and prolific glowing coals. It was pine – dead pine, from the dead pine trees that dominated the Grand County landscape, courtesy of the dreaded pine beetle. Vast expanses of forests that were for centuries Christmas green from the curtain of a million Evergreens, Blue Spruces and Ponderosa, Pinion and Lodgepole Pines, were now dominated by the deathly ashen brown pallor of these heretofore regal Emerald titans.
There is good and bad associated with dead pine wood. The good is that it’s relatively easy to split, and Chef Danny, one of his buddies and I, chain-sawed into 18” lengths and split every stick of that firewood with a splitting maul – thousands of pieces of firewood, cut, split and stacked. That would have been an impossible feat for this fat old man were we dealing with hardwood and next to impossible for the youngsters. The bad news is that the easy to cut and split dead pine wood burned faster than a gasoline-soaked firecracker fuse. You would stoke a hot fire with three or four stout logs, and within 15 minutes, it would be as if you’d stoked the fire with heavy air – where in the hell did it go? On an average night, with guests in the hotel and hanging around the lobby, you could easily burn 40-50 logs in a 5 hour period. On a night when there weren’t guests in the hotel, in an attempt to conserve our wood resources, we kept the fire low, dressed in our warmest sweaters and froze our asses off. The others at the hotel cursed me on those nights, low and under their frigid, visible breath, as I was the keeper of the wood.
But I digress….back to our friend Justin.
To be continued......
None of the aforementioned businesses were represented at the HSS Chamber Meet & Greet, with the obvious exception of yours’ truly. In place of the real brick and mortar town businesses were friends and neighbors who had small businesses on the side – Amway, Avon, Pampered Chef and Aveda sellers, four certified ‘life coaches’ and an income tax service, to name but a few. Mostly, it was a good excuse to get together and eat appetizers that we had prepared and belly up to the usually ‘not open to the locals’ bar at The Riverside; the appetizers were free, but the booze wasn’t.
One interesting thing about the get together that I noticed immediately – I’d never before seen any of these people frequent The Riverside as paying customers. A few I’d recognized from seeing them at the post office – located across the street from the hotel – but otherwise none of them had dined with us in our restaurant; you know, that room overlooking the river where we were trying to earn our living. This speaks to one of my major miscalculations when I was projecting revenue for our business venture; I’d made the incorrect assumption that locals would dine in our restaurant – nada, it didn’t happen.
One of the strangers that I met that evening was a tall, pleasant young man named Justin Tiem (pronounced ‘Time’). That’s right. Twenty-five years ago Mr. & Mrs. Tiem had a baby boy, and decided to make him the poster child for peer abuse, sending him out into the cruel world to be the eternal butt of one bad joke after the next. Really, what were they thinking? Justin was pretty good natured about it, even using the misspelling in the title of his business: his business card read:
JUST-IN TIME WOOD SERVICE, Justin Tiem, Owner. His mission statement, or motto, was “I’ll Put the Wood Wherever You Like!”
There was also a man who lived in our town with parents that named him Dick Johnson. Those long Grand County winters can have a crooked effect on the minds of its citizens.
In the land of eternal winter, the need for a steady source of firewood was profound. This profound need was ratcheted way up at The Riverside, as the two main rooms in the hotel had no source of heat – gas, electric, forced air or otherwise – other than two small fireplaces with non-functional heat-o-laters (blowers to disperse the heat). It wasn’t unusual to get up first thing of a frigid morning and find the inside temperature of the lobby to be hovering in the high 30’s. On killer cold nights I might leave an electric heater blowing, always weighing the notion of frozen pipes vs. the potential fire hazard; but then, I had insurance.
More often than not, the late nighters at the hotel would have expended all of the wood that was brought in throughout the day and night – that would generally be the reason people actually went to bed; no firewood, getting damn cold in here and way too damn cold to go outside and get anymore wood. Oh, and we’re out of beer. Most all of my days started with a trip through the bar, and out the backdoor to the woodshed – in a biting, dry cold that stung any exposed skin or appendage with the fury of a hundred angry wasps. It was the norm for early morning first light temperatures, December through February, on clear mornings to average -20oF.
The wood shed was roughly 10’wide and 14’ long with 7’ of clear headspace – that’s roughly 1000 cubic feet, which will house about 9 cords of wood. We filled that space to the brim both winters we owned The Riverside, with an additional cord or two stacked outside under a tarp. We used the outside wood first as the eventual snowfalls would make anything outside positively unattainable without the aid of a backhoe – I didn’t have one of those. All the wood stacked to the gills of that shed in late October was a little like a big paycheck – sitting full in the bank on day one, it seemed like a lot and looked like it was more than you could spend; come mid February, that wood, like the paycheck, dwindled down to pennies in your account, and you wondered how you were going to get to the next payday (spring and warm weather, in our case) intact.
Here’s one other little thing about that wood. It wasn’t the oak and hickory hardwoods of my Midwestern life experience; the kind that was a dense, heavy, slow-burning wood, generating hotter heat and prolific glowing coals. It was pine – dead pine, from the dead pine trees that dominated the Grand County landscape, courtesy of the dreaded pine beetle. Vast expanses of forests that were for centuries Christmas green from the curtain of a million Evergreens, Blue Spruces and Ponderosa, Pinion and Lodgepole Pines, were now dominated by the deathly ashen brown pallor of these heretofore regal Emerald titans.
There is good and bad associated with dead pine wood. The good is that it’s relatively easy to split, and Chef Danny, one of his buddies and I, chain-sawed into 18” lengths and split every stick of that firewood with a splitting maul – thousands of pieces of firewood, cut, split and stacked. That would have been an impossible feat for this fat old man were we dealing with hardwood and next to impossible for the youngsters. The bad news is that the easy to cut and split dead pine wood burned faster than a gasoline-soaked firecracker fuse. You would stoke a hot fire with three or four stout logs, and within 15 minutes, it would be as if you’d stoked the fire with heavy air – where in the hell did it go? On an average night, with guests in the hotel and hanging around the lobby, you could easily burn 40-50 logs in a 5 hour period. On a night when there weren’t guests in the hotel, in an attempt to conserve our wood resources, we kept the fire low, dressed in our warmest sweaters and froze our asses off. The others at the hotel cursed me on those nights, low and under their frigid, visible breath, as I was the keeper of the wood.
But I digress….back to our friend Justin.
To be continued......
Sunday, July 3, 2011
The Chief..............Part II
Our bar featured a famous print of “Custer’s Last Stand”, gifted to us by a cousin; this print was supplied to bars throughout the west in the late 1800’s by Anheuser Busch to commemorate the Battle of The Little Bighorn – a slick marketing piece, with violence and mayhem about, our blond-haired hero standing tall amongst the savages and upon a Budweiser logo, seemingly oblivious to his impending doom. While most of our generation knows of this battle, and the annihilative defeat of this American icon/boob, they are unaware of the historical significance of the battle at its time. It was, in 1876, viewed by the press and public as horrifically assaultive on their peace-loving contemporary way of life as the 911 attacks. The news of the defeat and slaughter of this immensely popular figure of the day and 267 of his comrades staggered the American public to its knees.
Brevet General Custer has stood stoic and valiant in that print for 135 years, but I’m certain that his asshole puckered at The Chief’s pronouncement on that August evening. Mine certainly did.
Fast forward to 6:30 AM as I crawl, with a drugged reluctance, out of bed and make myself ready to face another day of living life Riverside. As it is still summer, my first chore doesn’t involve starting a fire – the only heat I need to administer is to a coffee pot. That task accomplished, I head to the bar out of curiosity of the preceding evenings events, which fortunately, I slept through soundly.
I don’t believe I’ve detailed the bar at The Riverside before, and will take this opportunity to do so. It was a smallish 20’x20’ room, dominated by an ornately carved, oaken/cherry wood masterpiece of an authentic Brunswick Bar; it was in my estimation, the star of The Riverside. The Brunswick Company, famous for pool tables and bowling balls, made ready-to-order back bars and bar counters to compliment the sale of their pool tables from 1895-1905 in Burlington, IA. You could order them in the Sears & Roebuck catalogue. Word had it that this particular Brunswick Bar was originally in a bar in Leadville, CO, and moved to The Riverside in the early 1920’s at the behest of Mr. Omar Qualls, the third owner of the hotel. The back bar consisted of four 6’tall, 12” diameter oak pillars holding up an ornately carved head piece, encasing a 6’x8’ mirror, dulled from the ages, but holding the faces and stories of a century. The bar was solid oak, weighing God only knows how much, with the original brass foot rail fronting the base. It was spectacular – Lord knows, I’ve been in a few bars, and I’ve seen few bars to compare; and for a while, I owned it.
The rest of the bar contained six small 3’x2’tables with two chairs each, a busted, out-of-tune piano in the corner (certain to be the one that John Lennon composed ‘IMAGINE” upon during his 1972 stay), a moderately functional juke box and a wild boars head, slain in Georgia, hanging on the North wall.
The walls had dark stained 1x4 cedar slats running vertically every two feet, with the most God-awful green & orange striped wall paper between; we were quick to have our painter, Crazy Mike, mud-stucco over the wallpaper and paint it a soothing celery green. The ceiling was a heinously dark brown cork board – in our dream world, we would eventually replace that with a pressed tin ceiling, typical of the type of ceiling in a turn of the century bar. That dream, along with a plentitude of others, never materialized.
At 7:00 AM, coffee brewing and doors unlocked, I walked into the bar. My first site was an estimated 50 empty bottles of beer, upright, judiciously distributed on three of the six tables, and an obviously empty bottle of Jagermeister lying on its side atop the bar. Wow! The businessman in me made a quick calculation that we grossed $150 on beer after I went to bed, but at what ultimate cost? I was surveying the scene quietly, imagining what in the hell I’d thankfully missed out on, when over my shoulder, causing me to jump full out of my boxers, The Chief appeared, asking, “Hey! What the hell does it take for a guy to get a Bloody Mary around here?”
“All you gotta do is ask. I make a pretty good Bloody Mary.” This is what I said, but what I was thinking was ‘are you kidding me? You’re standing amongst 50 dead soldiers that you helped obliterate but a few hours ago, and you’re now wanting more alcohol at 7:00 AM in the morning??’
“And I’ll take a beer chaser with that Bloody Mary!” said The Chief.
I’m making the Bloody Mary for the expectant customer, and decided that I’d make small talk as a way to stop me from screaming at him about his Dhoubian alcoholic excesses.
“So, out of the sack at 7:00 and thirsty for a Bloody Mary, eh?”
“Hell no! I was up at 5:00, and I’ve been fishing out there for the past two hours. Caught me a few nice ones too!”
“Wow. Up at 5:00? What time did you guys finally close it down here last night?”
“The wife and me headed upstairs at 2:30 when your daughter told us she’d get in trouble for keeping the bar open any longer. We’d a made you a bunch more money if she’d have let us keep at it.”
‘Oh my…’ I thought – for the love of a buck. Abe had duly warned me.
I proffered the Bloody Mary, with the beer chaser, and left him in the bar to start my morning rituals – checking people out, stripping beds, washing sheets, checking people out, making more coffee, stripping more beds, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseam.
About 9:00, The Chief’s wife came down, bags in tow, ready to check out. They’d paid cash as they went, for the room at check in, for the hot springs tickets, for dinner and drinks, and after a quick check with a ‘sleeping like the dead’ Rachel, they’d paid cash as they went for the debauchery in the bar. I even had a warm $10 bill in my pocket for the mornings Bloody Mary and beer chaser. They were good to go.
“We had such a wonderful time. We just love this hotel! The food was great, and your daughter is lovely. We can’t wait to come back!”
OK, so I felt a little crappy thinking the bad things that I thought about these folks. They were truly sweet people, absolute salt-of-the-earth. And they’d spent a big chunk of change, CASH MONEY, at a time when we were desperate for CASH MONEY. I gave a heartfelt wave goodbye as they puttered off in their loaded down late-model Subaru wagon.
Still kind of half waving goodbye, I saunter back into the lobby of The Riverside, and who is standing at our checkout desk but the Denver golf widow who stayed in Betty – the serenely appointed room next to Mary, where The Chief and his spouse shared a quiet, relaxing getaway.
“How was everything, and how did you sleep?”
“Well, we were sleeping very well until about 2:30. The people in the room next to us were, uh, really loud. Well, I’m sure you had to hear them too.” She looked more than just a little pained as she relayed this information. “And it didn’t let up for two hours. It was like we were being tortured!” I’m thinking that an on-line review that described your hotel stay as “like we were being tortured” wouldn’t exactly be good for future bookings.
I apologized profusely, but our guest couldn’t have been nicer about it; after all, it wasn’t me that had been up there war-whoopie-ing with the spouse in the wee morning hours. I didn’t have to say “Come back and see us again” because I knew that the only way this lady would visit us again would be in her nightmares.
I plodded upstairs to assess the damage in the Second Honeymoon Suite – it was a sight that would have put the second generation of any Hilton or Marriott out of the hotel business and into pig farming for the purpose of seeking a cleaner, more wholesome occupation. I cleaned 500+ guest rooms during my two year stint at The Riverside – only once did I feel the need to don rubber gloves and a mask.
Strewn about the room - on the bed post, on the window sill, on the sink and on the dresser - like so many scalps proudly earned in battle, hung the spent condoms of this warrior’s nights’ conquest. The bed sheets, quilts, pillows, towels and signature Riverside flannel robes were thrown about the room as if the occupants had been having a contest to see how badly they could scatter the bedding and such from its original places. One dozen empty Budweiser bottles decorated every level space in the room upon which you could stand a beer bottle, and an empty fifth of Smirnoff vodka had almost found its way into the trash can. On a positive note, I’m certain that the ghost that previously had inhabited this room was now screaming towards, and excited about the alternative prospects of, living out the rest of its days in Hell and eternal damnation. Had the ghost room for another passenger on it’s Southbound train, I would have considered tagging along as opposed to having to execute the clean-up task which lay before me.
On with the gloves, and out with the bleach. The CASH MONEY that came with this deal was dearly earned, but it wasn’t nearly enough.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
