Living Life Riverside

Mountains

2012-01-21T08:19:00.000-08:00

As you head west on I-70, when you reach the 371-mile marker at town of Genoa, CO, you get your first full view of Pike’s Peak, (one of fifty-three 14,000’+ mountains in the state), although it is yet still some 100 miles southwest as the crow flies; when the sky is clear, the smog is absent and the light is right, it is a view that ignites and rejuvenates the weary westbound traveler. I can only imagine the emotion that first view of the snow-capped peak inspired in Zebulon Pike and his crew, the sky then devoid of any 21st century visual encumbrances, and they not having had the luxury of traversing the prior 500 miles of flatness at 80 MPH in an IPod-playing, greenhouse gas-spewing Chevy Suburban.

To Zebulon Pike and to countless others, those mountains, those imposing peaks, were a welcoming sight, but to me, they were an imposing sentinel; a massive opponent that I would inevitably have to dual, yet, I knew before the battle that there was no chance for victory – the only hope my meager survival on the heartless terms of this enormous oppressor, this never-ending wave of one granite Goliath after another.

The city of Denver sits in a slight depression, a bowl, after the steady but gentle rise of the land which starts at Hays, KS, elevation 2000 ft., and ends 3240 feet later at the eastern edge of Denver. It then dips a bit, just a bit due to the valley created by the Platte River, and then ascends at a rapid rate into the foothills of The Rockies. Natives to Denver likely have a very different view of the mountains than do I; they view them as old friends, always there to have a little fun with on the weekends. To me, they were my challenge, a big Brutus that always had to be dealt with; a little like having to walk home past the house with the mean dog, having no safe alternative route – sometimes the beast was inside and no threat to you, yet you were always praying and looking over your shoulder in passing, mostly it was outside on a chain, barking ferociously and scaring the hell out of you but still only a perceived threat, and then that occasional time when the demon was roaming free, to chase and terrorize and yes, to possibly lay your ass to waste.

I grew to hate those mountains.

My first 10-12 encounters with the mountains were relatively friendly, i.e. there were no issues with the weather. We’d been to Hot Sulphur Springs on seven occasions and once to Glenwood Springs between Christmas and New Years, and not once did we encounter winter weather on the trip; not once! So I was totally dumb to the reality of a Rocky Mountain blizzard experienced behind the wheel of a car on I-70. As luck would naturally have it, I got my first taste of snow and ice on that initial trek to Hot Sulphur as the soon to be owners of the Riverside….pulling a loaded 9x12 U-Haul trailer.

If you’ve never pulled a loaded trailer, you’ve missed a chance to savor the taste of one of life’s real shit sandwiches. As your car groans and strains with the slightest acceleration, you are certain that at any moment your transmission will hemorrhage and vomit itself in the middle of the road. No matter how fast you’re traveling, there is a pervasive feeling that the trailer is milliseconds away from swaying itself to the left, then right, then left, eventually breaking free from the tow ball and somersaulting into the other lane of oncoming traffic. And all the while you’re driving, the thought of this thing attached to the back of your car is more than you can bear, as every sudden noise or unusual movement causes your asshole to pucker up near the bottom of your throat, your arms and shoulders get rigid as a Mormon, your jaw tightens like eighty-eight Stienway strings and your two hands clench the steering wheel in a death grip that turns your knuckles whiter than the blinding snow. To the novice, it is an experience that rivals very few for its propensity to thoroughly and most absolutely suck.

That first haul, December 26th, pulling out of KC at 3:00 PM, we encountered snow when we hit Topeka at around 4:30, some 60 miles west of KC; very light snow but enough to scare the bejeezus out of me – and it was getting dark. I felt as if I was working miracles maintaining a speed of 55 MPH and not losing complete control of the car or my bowels. The snow really started to pick up around Salina and it was now totally dark; the swirling flakes in the headlight beams making visibility extremely difficult. It was also at this time that Julie complained that she was freezing, huddled in the heated passenger seat wrapped in a blanket, her teeth chattering like a pair of dime-store castanets. With the heater blasting it was probably 80F in the car – I was so hot I’d stripped down to my Garanimals. ‘Great!’ I thought, ‘she has a raging fever.’ We made it to the halfway point, Hays, KS, at 9:00 PM, Julie sick as a dog and me as physically and mentally exhausted as I could remember ever being; I was in dire need of both a martini and a diaper change, confused as to what need to first satisfy.

The next morning dawned clear and crisp, the prior evenings snow universally glazed and frozen to the surface of I-70 from Hays to the immediate outskirts of Denver; I think I remember saying “Oh Yippee!”

Even in a bright sun with unlimited visibility, the drive was harrowing; the combination of the car and attached trailer gliding over the glazed surface felt a little like roller skating on an ice rink – there wasn’t one second, regardless of your speed, when you didn’t feel like you were going to lose control. Seven long hours later we arrived in Denver. At this point most of the roads were clear and free of ice, with the only issue being spray from the roads and the constant need for keeping the windows clean, hoping I had enough windshield juice to finish the trip – I had no intention of stopping and maneuvering highway ramps and side streets with the trailer.

Through Denver and the traffic, I started the climb up into the foothills, which all who have made this trek know strains your car’s drive train as you climb upwards at 5% – 7% grades. Pulling that loaded trailer up those hills had my Suburban’s engine and transmission screaming at me, and then cursing. Onward and upward I went, but not very quickly.

I’d been debating with myself for the last eight hours about my ultimate route over the Continental Divide – would it be Berthoud Pass, that Python of a roadway that climbed to 11,000 feet before snaking back down into Winter Park and on another 35 miles to Hot Sulphur? Or would I go the longer route over Loveland Pass on I-70, a slow, steady steep straight up, followed by a log flume ride straight down through the Eisenhower Tunnel to Dillon and the Blue River Valley, then north on the flat but crooked, narrow and windswept Highway 9; for whatever reason I opted for the straighter, longer route on I-70 over Loveland Pass.

No sooner did I pass the Highway 40 turnoff for Berthoud Pass and headed for Loveland Pass, than it began to snow hard; I suppose you’d describe the weather conditions as ‘blizzard-like’. It was a very wet, heavy snow; the kind that accumulates faster on your windshields than your wipers can manage. I wanted to pull over and cry, but we were so close to our destination; this was for certain a classic example of “always darkest before the dawn.” The Coloradans who shared the road with me flew by as if nothing was out of the ordinary, seeing a look of terror on my face and probably saying, “poor bastard…not only is he from Kansas…he’s pulling a damned U-Haul.” If they only knew our ultimate destination and eventual purpose, they’d know that pulling a U-Haul over Loveland Pass in a blizzard would be the easiest and most enjoyable part of our 2-year journey.

To Be Continued……….

Abner Renta............Mortis

2012-01-07T09:26:00.000-08:00

The deal was done and now there was no going back. Never in the history of people exchanging money for things, things large like houses, things small like Little Debbie Nutty Bars and things in-between like a full pallet of Little Debbie Nutty Bars, has there been a more immediate and intensely rueful case of buyer’s remorse than with our purchase of The Riverside Hotel, Bar & Restaurant from Mr. Abner Renta.

The ink on the deal hadn’t even thought about beginning to dry before we began discovering a treasure trove of ‘caveat emptors’, so many of so many varying degrees that if I didn’t already know the translation of caveat emptor, I would have thought for certain that it was Latin for "given any opportunity, Abner Renta will screw you".

Walking upstairs shortly after signing the deal, I discovered (all of this new since the quasi-mechanical inspection of the previous August – my last visit before the sale) a broken window pane in the John Lennon room, kind-of fixed in the most half-assed duct tape sort of fashion, with sub-zero air rushing in, two rooms with non-functional heaters, one room with a sink so stopped up that a stick of dynamite wouldn’t free it’s flow, the previously mentioned missing antique dressers, chairs and other pieces that gave the place but a little charm, and the coup de grace, a 10-gallon aluminum stockpot sitting in a back hallway, half full of water that had leaked from a massive gash in the roof, next to a wall so warped and misshapen by the leaking water that it bowed a good foot out of square at it’s center point.

I know for a fact that this was the exact hour that my body decided for me that, in spite of my previous good health and clean living, I would need consistent doses of blood pressure medicine to remain in good health from this point forward in my life, even as I rotted away in prison after having bludgeoned Abner to death with enthusiastic joy and a total lack of remorse.

Downstairs I went to the kitchen, my blood simmering at a steady temperature of 211oF; it wasn’t long before my temperature rose that significant extra degree. All of the commercial-sized pots, pans, serving trays and dishes were gone, left in their stead were a few small 10” frying pans, beat to absolute shit and in such an awful state that you would be embarrassed to offer them in a garage sale; a picker wouldn’t bother pulling them out of a trash can. In pre-sale discussions, I was promised by Abner and my realtor, who supposedly supervised Abner’s pre-sale packing of “a few personal effects”, that all of the commercial equipment would stay in the kitchen as a part of the sale. And then there was the commercial icemaker – silent, room temperature and totally barren of ice. This discovery made the cork officially pop.

I stormed out of the kitchen to the lobby, where Abner still sat in comfortable repose, still eating shrimp, still throwing the shrimp shells on the floor.

“Abner, where in the hell is all of the kitchen equipment… the pots, the pans? And what’s up with the ice maker? It’s not working?!?!”

“Oh” he said, quietly and coolly, not looking at me but casually examining his fingernails as if he’d just finished a manicure…”you noticed that, did you?”

It was at this precise point that a demon which had previously been unknown to exist in me, locked deep into the recesses of my inner most psyche, exploded out of my soul, through my mouth and into the lobby of The Riverside, making the famous chest-monster scene in ALIEN seem tedious.

I unleashed every sort of obscenity and invective that I could summon; the air in the room was searing and oppressive from my heated tirade as a continual stream of spittle flew from my rabid mouth, creating a fine mist that suspended in the atmosphere, all but afraid to find purchase on the floor below. This display was witnessed by my wife, my in-laws, the realtor and worst of all… my children, their eyes wide as pie pans as they had never heard me say anything harsher than the occasional ‘damn’, and only once a ‘shit’.

In response to this epic, Vesuvian explosion, Abner sat calmly, watching me in a fashion as wan and detached from reality as if he were watching a PBS special on fog. No doubt this wasn’t the first time that someone had dressed him down in such a manner. And really, what did he care? He had $690,000 nestled in his bank account, albeit for only a short while, and I held the keys to a 103-year old haunted, wooden, broken-down turd, permanently parked in the middle of a frozen, out-of-the-way hell hole.

His lack of a reaction only made me hotter, and it was at this point that my two brother-in-laws stepped in, both knowing that I was seconds away from diving at this lying, thieving pencil necked bastard and strangling him until his blood-shot bulging eyes popped from his sockets and rolled across the room; me laughing maniacally, gleefull as his face turned the color of Grape Fanta. They picked him up out of the chair, each grabbing an upper arm, and dragged him kicking and screaming across the floor of the lobby, through the front door of The Riverside, and literally threw him into the street.

Who would have imagined that this scene, this forceful ejection of Abner Renta from the pig in a poke that he had sold us, witnessed but one short hour after our purchase, would be my most joyful memory of Colorado, Hot Sulphur Springs and our ownership of The Riverside Hotel, Bar & Restaurant?

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The large brown gasped in the cool evening air, choking, retching, silently screaming for air….all new reactions never before experienced in his prior province. In spite of his confused state, he was aware that he had just taken a step that would forever doom him; he now wished for a swift, sudden and peaceful end to this suffering. But the pain and the suffering endured for what seemed an eternity, so long that he began to accept this state of agony as the dominant part of his new existence.

And then as swiftly and unexpectedly as he had crossed over this final threshold, the pain subsided and then vanished completely.

At long last, he found his final peace.

Abner Renta.........The Trophy Catch

2011-12-20T18:34:00.000-08:00

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.

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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

Abner Renta.......Setting the Hook

2011-12-12T19:34:00.000-08:00

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…………..

Abner Renta..........Master Angler

2011-11-26T15:36:00.000-08:00

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

Abner Renta...........aka Not Martha Stewart

2011-11-17T17:39:00.000-08:00

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………

Abner Renta............aka Not Bob Villa

2011-11-08T07:42:00.000-08:00

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……..

Mr. Abner Renta...."Unwelcome to My Hotel!"

2011-11-01T18:46:00.000-07:00

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…………

Riverside Smoked Brisket Chili

2011-10-24T16:39:00.000-07:00

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.

Speaking of Nuns.....

2011-09-29T15:49:00.000-07:00

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.

Mr. Abner Renta.....Dinner is Served

2011-09-22T19:18:00.000-07:00

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......

Mr. Abner Renta....Introduction

2011-09-16T18:35:00.000-07:00

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....

Mr. Abner Renta.......Proprietor

2011-09-12T06:29:00.000-07:00

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.

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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…..

Justin Time for Dinner.........The Main Course

2011-08-25T11:29:00.000-07:00

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.

Justin Time for Dinner....Second Course

2011-08-19T13:50:00.000-07:00

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.

Justin Time for Dinner

2011-08-13T07:02:00.000-07:00

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......

The Chief..............Part II

2011-07-03T07:51:00.000-07:00

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.

The Chief............Part I

2011-06-25T16:11:00.000-07:00

CAUTION – ADULT CONTENT: THIS TRUE STORY (save for the legally safe inclusion of false names and heritages) IS FRAUGHT WITH OVERT SEXUAL REFERENCES, FULL FRONTAL AND BACKAL NUDITY, EXCESSIVE USE AND ABUSE OF DRUGS AND ALCOHOL, RAW POLITICAL INCORRECTNESS AND THE MANIPULATION OF SEXUAL DEVICES WITH RUBBER GLOVES.

BE FORWARNED!!!

THE SQUEAMISH AND PRUDENT SHOULD ABSTAIN AND FORWARD TO THE NEXT CHAPTER, WHICH DETAILS CLEAN, FAMILY-CENTERED EVENTS ABOUT KITTENS AND PUPPIES; (ALTHOUGH WE DO END UP GRILLING THE KITTENS, OVER MESQUITE!)

It was mid summer, 2009, and the first few notes of our swan song were wafting through the air; nah, those notes were barking, bleating, honking through the air. I knew that I was out at the end of the month, heading for a paying job in Mississippi – leaving the dregs of our dream to be dealt with by my wife and daughter. Needless to say, my heart wasn’t in it anymore, but my mind knew that we needed every nickel we could squeeze from whatever source of revenue that literally stumbled our way.

Enter Chief Drink and Do the Deed All Night and his spouse; both natives of some country - maybe America, maybe France – political correctness prohibits me from being specific. The Chief was a hulking mass of a man – not as big as that Will Sampson guy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but pretty damn big nonetheless; you’d notice him when he entered a room. They were wonderful people; warm, friendly and open about their joy of being able to spend a romantic weekend in Hot Sulphur Springs at The Riverside and enjoy the fine fare of The River Room Restaurant before basking in the luxury of the adjacent hot springs. Seasoned high-end travelers would consider that trifecta a proper prelude to a life in hell, but no matter.

They checked in at 4:00 PM and I showed them to their room, Mary, the haunted room at the end of the hall; the room that our dog Lucy wouldn’t enter, not even if there was a juicy smoking rib-eye sitting in the middle of the bed. I put them in this room not for any other reason that it was the last available room – for some unknown reason, we were all but booked this weekend, possibly the only weekend that summer we were fully booked.

I mention this now because it’s ultimately germane to the story. The room adjacent to Mary was Betty; pastel greens with all of our pictures from France – photos we took at Montmartre, Versailles and travel posters purchased at both locales. ‘Betty’ was a very serene room, very calming, but for some reason, it seemed to be the last room we put people in; was I a guest, it would have been one of my first choices. In the Betty room that evening was a couple from Denver – I’ll be judgmental here and call them high-enders; were there a Ritz Carlton in Hot Sulphur, they would have forsaken our homey little hostel and opted for the luxury. But one nice thing about these folks was the fact that while they knew the amenities that they normally sought in a hotel were screamingly absent at The Riverside, the charm of our place served as an adequate substitute. The husband had an early tee-time at Dead Pines Golf Links with some buddies; they’d do the spa, eat dinner, sleep, and the husband would bolt early with his sticks and the wife would sleep in and leave at her leisure. This was our idea of perfect clientele.

In the next room, Mary, was our idea of the clientele we’d pursue if we were broke.

Chief Drink and Do the Deed All Night and his spouse headed to the hot springs shortly after checking in. Not much was thought about them, as the restaurant was packed that night with a full hotel and a crowded town. Near closing time at The River Room, the Chief and his wife sauntered into the restaurant looking for dinner – hair wet and reeking of sulphur from the springs. Showing up in our restaurant in this fashion wasn’t unusual nor unacceptable – like it or not, the raison d’être of our town, our hotel and our restaurant were those dog-ass smelly hot springs and the denizens who’d pay good money to park their bottoms in the sulphurous stink of their healing waters. I went there once, in 1997, and prayed for a heart attack so I’d be taken out in an ambulance so I didn’t have to walk out on my own power through the fetid dressing room.

‘Nuff said… it’s a Colorado thing.

(Small wonder why the locals have less than fond feelings for me.)

The Chief and his wife had the Prime Rib special, a couple of beers and each a glass of wine, then scuttled out at 9:00 PM for one last go at the hot springs, which closed at 10:00 PM. We closed The River Room at 9:00, cleaned up and started to wind down for the night. The hotel was full, but full of a genteel tourist crowd; most had toddled off to bed by 10:00. I was shutting the bar down when The Chief and his wife came in from their last soak in the heated dung water.

“You’re not closing the bar down, are ya?” asked The Chief.

“Well…… maybe. …..Would you like a drink?” I asked with a sense of trepidation so intense that the least observant of people would've immediately known that not only was I not wanting to serve a drink, I was hesitant to take my next breath, even if my life was dependent upon it.

“Hell Yes we want a drink! We came here to party! It’s only 10:00 O’clock!”

“Dad, you go to bed. We’ll take care of things.” my brave daughter Rachel offered. She and Chef Danny were decompressing from the busy restaurant night and had no intention of calling it quits at 10:00 PM.

Without question, that was the best offer that I’d had all day, and I accepted it as quick as a hiccup.

As I quickly slunk out of the bar and headed towards our living quarters, feeling giddy as if I’d just gotten away with stolen money, I heard The Chief loudly proclaim to no one in particular, as if he were exhorting the tribes before battle, “My spirit was low, and my heart was heavy. But the waters have revived me. We will party tonight, and the drinks are on me! Owweeeee!”

I slunked out even more quickly……and double locked the door between the lobby and our living quarters.

To be continued……………

The River Room.....Part XIII

2011-06-09T15:31:00.000-07:00

His real name was Chef Poopy Pants.

This poor guy had something seriously wrong with his intestinal tract that caused him to continually emit the foulest of foul BM odors with unheralded regularity. And to make matters worse, they were silent emissions; without any noise to serve as a harbinger to the impending assault, you’d find yourself suddenly engulfed, overwhelmed, olfactoraly assaulted if you were anywhere within 10 feet of the dude. The fact that he wouldn’t profusely apologize after besmirching not only the immediate air, but more than likely the ozone layer as well, tells me he was possibly oblivious to his condition and certainly devoid of a sense of smell.

That wasn’t the half of it. When Chef Poopy Pants used the facilities in the lobby to expunge his system of the viral monster that created the gas, he would literally clear the room. The first few times he did his business, before we knew what ‘doing his business’ wrought, there would be me and whomever else – my spouse, Riverside employees, hotel guests – innocently occupying the lobby, and then WHAM; it was as if a lethal stink bomb, the kind that they used in WWII in deadly combat, exploded and sent those assembled scrambling for the nearest exit. I AM NOT EXAGGERATING!

After those first few tear-inducing, eye-popping bowel movements, we knew to head for the fresh Colorado mountain air the second that he made a move for the commode door. How in the world did he live through it? Again, he absolutely had to have no sense of smell, nor I’m certain a sense of touch, as the heat from the act had to have been searingly intense.

On a positive note, he really didn’t have any kitchen experience either. It turns out that the only thing he had cooked professionally was crystal meth on the summer concert festival circuit. And as far as being able to pass a drug test, he did that with flying colors. Ask him anything you’d want to know about drugs, illicit or otherwise, and he’d know all of the answers.

I will say this for the young man – he worked hard and gave it his all; but if hard work and giving it your all made you successful, I would be King of Hot Sulphur Springs, sitting riverside on a pile of gold. One week after arriving at The Riverside, Chef Poopy Pants was back in his beater of a car, heading to parts unknown.

Darin, thank you for the new kitchen equipment, but no longer will you oversee human resources at The Riverside.

The final addition to The River Room staff, before we gave up the ghost at the end of 2009, was a friend of a friend who lived in Winter Park; enter Chef Ryan, one massively large human being. Our friend played baseball with him in a recreational, all blood and guts Sunday league (fast-pitch & serious hardball played by 20-30 year-olds who were good enough to have played some small college ball). Ryan was the pitcher, and the sight of this 7’ human being on the mound with his wild hair, thick glasses and control problems would have put the bravest of hitters into the fetal position before stepping out of the dugout. This dude was huge! When looking through the food service window into the kitchen, you could see Chef Danny’s torso and the lower half of his face; Chef Ryan, you could see only his knees.

No funny stories or odd habits from Chef Ryan – he was big, quiet and steady as a rock; not in Danny’s league for being able to cook, but more than adequate in helping Danny put together stellar meals night after night. The last summer of the restaurants operation, which other than the 2009 Christmas season and a few weekends here and there in 2010, was when Danny really had the opportunity to come into his own as a ‘Chef’, and he took full hold of it. His menus were sophisticated, but accessible to the type of clientele that lived in Grand County or would visit a historic hotel in an out-of-the-way locale; you didn’t need a degree in ancient colloquial Italian to select an entrée. Herewith follows the final official menu of The River Room restaurant, courtesy of Chef Danny.

Winter, 2009

Appetizers

Wild Mushroom Bruschetta- A plate of our house made crostinis topped with black olive tapenade, shitake, oyster, and cremini mushrooms sautéed with garlic, fresh basil and lemon juice…………$8
Roasted Garlic Hummus- A mixture of smashed chick peas, roasted garlic, fresh lemon juice, spices, finished with a touch of black truffle oil, served with warm pita bread……………………………..$7
Smoked Salmon- Fresh salmon, brined then slowly smoked over hickory & mesquite wood, served with our house made crostinis, lemon wedges, capers, and truffled aioli………………………………………$9

Entrees
All entrees served with either house salad or soup of the day

Trout Almandine- a filet of ruby red trout, pan seared, topped with sliced almonds and finished with Triple Sec, served with Riverside mashed potato and seasonal vegetables………………$20
Swai Jardiniere- A delicate white fish filet, pan seared with garlic, shallots, roasted tomatoes, and fresh thyme, finished with white wine, fresh lemon juice and a splash of cream, served with Riverside mashed potatoes and seasonal vegetables………….………..$17

Chicken Picatta- A tenderized 6oz chicken breast, pan seared in butter with garlic, capers, and fresh thyme, deglazed with white wine and finished with a splash of cream and fresh lemon juice, served with Riverside mashed potatoes and seasonal vegetables …………………………….$18
Pork Chop with Port Sauce- An 8 oz. bone-in sweet brined pork chop, seared and finished with roasted shallot raisin port sauce, served with Riverside mashed potatoes and vegetables……..$21

Braised Lamb Shank- a 20oz lamb shank, slowly braised and served fork-tender, set upon a bed of Riverside mashed potatoes in a rich gravy, served with seasonal vegetables………….……$23

The Dirty Ribeye- A Riverside tradition, this 16oz. cut of choice ribeye steak is cooked directly on a bed of hard wood coals, sliced on the diagonal and drizzled with a balsamic reduction, served with Riverside mashed potatoes and seasonal vegetables……………..………………..$26

Dessert

Crème Brulee- the classic French dessert custard, made with fresh cream and vanilla beans, finished with a delicate layer of caramelized sugar…………………….……..………………$7

Riverside Tiramisu- A twist on the classic Italian dessert, made with fresh cream, mascarpone cheese, marsala wine, fine ground coffee, coco powder, and finished with espresso and brandy dipped lady finger cookies…………………………………..…………………………………$7

Mocha Pots De Crème- A French mousse, made with a mixture of chocolate, espresso, rum, and cream, served chilled……………………………………………………………………………$7

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All of this was prepared superbly and impeccably presented, all with touches in taste and visuals which Danny had gleaned from his predecessors. To the end, broke and fighting heaven and earth for ways to pay the bills, we never compromised on quality or ingredients – as previously stated, we went tits-up, but we did it with our chins held high. I can say this with all honesty and without bias, prejudice or subjectivity: I still have a hard time finding a restaurant, in The River Room’s price range, that equaled Danny’s consistent output in our last few months of operation – this includes KC, Jackson, New Orleans and a dozen other cities and restaurants that I’ve dined in this past year. As I taught him most everything he knew, I’m proud to report that Danny left The Riverside and, after knocking around Denver for a few months, is now Chef de Cuisine (#2 in charge) in one of Kansas City’s finest restaurants – they knew talent when they saw it.

Our venture was categorically a financial failure, but my dream for what I envisioned in a restaurant was a rousing success – first and foremost in my mind, and by most everyone else who dined with us, exclusive of a couple of nameless, raging jackasses. If I had a plethora of restaurant choices tonight, I would pay good money to eat one last time at Chef Danny’s nearly up-to-code River Room Restaurant.
…………………………………………

One year after the fact, and one thousand three hundred safe, warm miles from our ground zero in Hot Sulphur Springs, CO, when discussing The Riverside with friends and family, Julie will say that she has many wonderful memories, perhaps enough good memories to actually drown out the sobering reality of what we lost. I will profess the opposite – from the beginning, I knew that we had made a horrific mistake and as I was the one that bore the daily, nay, hourly burden of mentally dealing with our inevitable date with doom, I could never with a clear conscience enjoy what good there was in the experience. Walks with Julie and the dogs alongside the frozen river, through crystalline snow under the imposing façade of Mt. Bross, itself made all the less imposing by the serenity of the blue sky and the timeless peace of the cottonwoods; whenever I’d lose myself in a moment that many would risk all to be able to experience on a daily basis, I couldn’t help but zap myself back to the reality of the fact that I had risked all, and the painful foreboding knowledge that all would eventually be lost. It was as if I was renting those good feelings, experiences and pleasant memories of our time in Hot Sulphur and The Riverside; I knew that eventually I’d have to turn them back in, and there would be an ugly bill due at the end of the deal – one that I couldn’t afford to pay.

In addition to carrying this psychological burden, there was physical burden that came with running The Riverside. And truthfully, I have no fond memories of doing 7-10 loads of laundry per day, 20+ loads of washing and drying dishes, glasses, pots and pans, setting and unsetting and resetting 14 tables, making and unmaking then remaking 8 queen beds, 6 fulls and 2 twins, scouring and disinfecting three showers and 6 toilets or chain sawing and hand splitting 10 cords of wood every fall. I do have very pleasant feelings knowing that I no longer have to work like a dog and net nothing.

But in honest retrospect, I can say the times I was happiest at The Riverside – when I was able to put the worries aside and get lost in the joy of the moment – occurred in The River Room. With but a very few previously noted exceptions, I enjoyed waiting on customers, interacting with them and watching as they savored the food and the ambience. I derived a great amount of joy and satisfaction from knowing that we were able to greatly exceed the expectations of most who found their way into this rickety old building in the middle of the Colorado wilderness. And although our dream turned into something of a nightmare, for a while, in a small 14-table restaurant overlooking the Colorado River, the dream was sweet.

The River Room........Part XII

2011-05-31T18:41:00.000-07:00

Dhoubi’s exhaust fumes hadn’t left the front parking lot of the hotel before Darin – the town mortician, gadabout, accused felon and our quasi restaurant manager (all of this is another chapter or ten) – showed up with a replacement for Dhoubi. Her name was Carrie Trent, and she was as sweet as Steen’s Cane Syrup – and to those of you unfortunate souls that don’t know about Steen’s Cane Syrup, that is about the highest sweetness compliment that could possibly be paid to a person.

Carrie had worked at restaurants all over Grand County, and had even tried her own little pie/diner/café place. She was in the process of trying to open another take-out only place that would serve to-go breakfast and lunch, but in the interim, would love to help us out by putting in a few hours here and there. Once again, I viewed her appearance at the doorstep of The Riverside as a serendipitous event. At the worst of it, if things went bad, I didn’t see myself fearing for my life if I had to let her go, as was the case with my last chef.

Carrie was a baker extraordinaire – bread was her specialty, and pies were a close second. The first day she was there she whipped up about a dozen loaves of the most airy, hard crust baguettes imaginable this side of Montmartre; she finished the day with a few Apple Jalapeno pies for dessert – flaky crust and sweet apple cinnamon filling with just enough of a hint of a peppery attitude to let you know that this wasn’t your Mama’s apple pie. Like Dhoubi’s ‘first day in the kitchen champagne cream sauce’, I’d never had anything quite like it.

Carrie also helped do some of the food prep for Danny – mostly chopping, slicing and dicing. What Carrie couldn’t do – and what we needed the most – was helping Danny on the front line during the dinner rush. So basically, to sum it up, Carrie would show up early afternoon, make all of the bread for the evening, and leave before the dinner rush when we really needed help; she would then give me a bill for her services for $300 - $400 at the end of every week.

Have I mentioned previously that we gave bread away for free?

So here’s the reality of the situation – here I was, nearly broke, paying someone $350 bucks a week to make something that didn’t make me one red nickel. And it gets worse! As her bread was so awesomely good and free, people ate tons of it, creating the need for Carrie to spend more hours baking for us. Those $350 labor bills were growing to $500-$600 per week. Couple this with the Black Olive Tapenade spread that Danny spent 30 minutes every day making by the gallon, which accompanied this awesome bread – also at no charge.

Have I mentioned previously that I went broke in the restaurant business?

Thankfully, Carrie left of her own accord to open her business, a successful one where she charged people money for the bread she baked.

Carrie’s last day was March 27th, 2009 - Easter Sunday brunch - our last day open before shutting the hotel down to take two weeks vacation back to the Kansas City area. Waiting for us when we got back was a kitchen that we intended to gut, put in a new floor, and re-equip with up-to-code stainless steel prep tables, a new cold table, a new freezer, a new flat top, a new oven with a six-burner cook top and new piping, plumbing and electrical. Danny and I would dismantle and dispose of the old tables and equipment and install the new tile floor, our friend Tony from down the street – Grand County’s only sober, reliable plumber – would do the plumbing and electrical, and Darin supplied all of the new tables and equipment, which he’d purchased at an auction in Denver. (Yes, there is a story to that as well which will be told later.)

Hopefully any of you who are potential restaurateurs have picked up this nugget of wisdom from reading about The River Room – you work your ass off when the restaurant is open, and you work your ass off even more when the restaurant is closed.

For the next six weeks, we flat worked our asses off. First off, dismantling the wooden work surfaces and shelving, next taking apart and hauling off the 1920’s era God-awful piece of crap stove, oven and flat top combination that was about the size and weight of small locomotive, and about as functional as a locomotive in a kitchen as well. Everything else was then moved out of the kitchen and we got on with tearing up three layers of old flooring – scraping up the top layer of 1950’s asbestos-reinforced vinyl tile, pulling up the mostly rotted, moldy ¼ plywood deck to which it was attached, then ripping up sheets of 1930’s asphaltic linoleum that was tacked (and tacks were apparently plentiful, cheap and really easy to hammer back then) to the original 1903 tongue and groove 1x4 wood floor. To this original floor we affixed, with screws, thirty-eight 3x5 sheets of 3/8” backer board – picture thin sheets of plywood that are made out of concrete. All of this was topped off by approximately 3700 hexagonal, industrial-grade ceramic floor tiles that were adhered with quick-curing epoxy onto the backer board. This is possibly the highest-end and highest-priced floor system you could purchase for a commercial kitchen – I received it for free from a friend in the business, overage on a large food storage freezer job in New Mexico; it was cheaper for him to give it to me than ship it back to Pennsylvania. The net result was a floor that will probably still be intact after the wrecking ball and bulldozer have had their way with The Riverside.

The new equipment was then installed, and by the end of May, just in time for our Memorial Day weekend re-opening, we had ourselves an honest-to-God, functional and mostly up-to-code commercial kitchen. Only one thing was missing, and that was kitchen help for Chef Danny. Once again, who stepped up to the plate for us in the personnel department but our good friend Darin.

Darin placed an add on Craig’s List – “Assistant Chef position at historic hotel located in the beautiful Colorado Rockies. $10/hour plus room and board. Prior cooking experience required. Must pass drug test.”

Even with economic times being what they were, Darin got very few hits on the ad (might have been that drug test requirement) – but all he needed was one, and he did get one. A young man from the Great State of Alabama was in his 1974 Cadillac Sedan Deville and headed west to Colorado at the end of his three minute phone interview, (Red Flag) ready and anxious to assist in the newly remodeled, almost up-to-code kitchen at The Riverside for $10 bucks an hour and room and board at Darin’s’ house.

Enter……….Chef Stinky Butt.

(Not his real name – but close.)

To be concluded.......

The River Room........Part XI

2011-05-24T18:53:00.000-07:00

The Great Flood of 1927……The Dustbowl of the 1930’s...The Tsunami of 2003….Hurricane Katrina - natural disasters of Biblical proportion; events that define disaster.

Colorado was also witness to a natural disaster so profound, so horrific, that the elders will only mention it in hushed tones; contemporaries tremble and turn ashen at the memory.

The Great Colorado Pot Shortage of the fall of 2008

No one knows for certain who or what sinister series of events conspired to cause the shortage. Was it the prolonged Mexican winter of 2007? Possibly it was the recent locust infestation on Maui, while others suspected the Jamaican Drug Embargo. More than likely it was none of the aforementioned; rather, the shortage happened to coincide with the recent State election which legalized medicinal marijuana in Colorado, causing most of the 4.8 million unhealthy Coloradans to flee to their doctor for some much needed relief. Just like that, overnight, the demand for weed far exceeded the supply. There wasn’t a joint left to be had in the State.

Dhoubi took the pot shortage hard….. very, very hard.

His carefree, fun-loving demeanor took a nasty turn for the worse; he became quiet, sullen and quick to temper. His alcohol consumption, already epic, went off the charts. During the dinner shift, whenever I was out of the bar in the dining room, he would go into the bar, grab a bottle by the throat and swig gulps from the Hornitos Reposada Tequila or Johnny Walker Red - his brands of choice. On a positive note, he was very picky about the booze he’d chug, preferring not to drink if we were out of his favorites. This knowledge caused me to begin hiding the Hornitos and the Johnny Walker in my bedroom closet; made for a bit of a trek when someone ordered a top-shelf margarita, but so be it, as hidden away in the bedroom, I’d at least have top-shelf booze to serve.

He began all but accosting people – anyone and everyone, including our guests – as to whether or not they had any pot he could buy. At the slightest rumor of there being pot, he’d hop in his truck in pursuit; there was a midnight run to Aspen, next a three-day trek to Durango. I swear he would have climbed the nearest 14-er in a raging blizzard at the hint of a possibility of scoring a roach.

To say this lack of weed had a negative affect on his job performance is a few kilos short of an understatement. His kitchen deportment was horrific, to the point of everyone threatening to walk out if he didn’t get some control. His food preparation became so sloppy that I’m certain it cost us our third Michelin star. I strongly considered firing him, but with the holidays coming up – sold out weekends, group Christmas parties – I had no other choice but to put up with his God-awful behavior.

In mid-December, Christmas came early; not only for Dhoubi, but for all of the ailing Coloradans – weed had suddenly reappeared. Like a Times Square New Years Eve, the smoky streets of Boulder were filled with revelers, (although they were like way more laid back than those New York Times Square revelers) a healthy, hazy fog hanging over the pie-eyed throngs.

I was glad for this change in fortunes as I felt it would get Dhoubi back on an even keel - but such was not the case. The constant combination of a freshly stoned-again Dhoubi and a liquid diet of pricy tequila made for a brand of intoxication heretofore unknown to the consuming public. Even some of Grand County’s finest drunks were aghast at Dhoubi’s perpetual, high level state of self-medication, “Sheesh, but that guy can shure put away the saush…what a booze hound…hic….shimply shamelesh.”

His menu choices, while already a little on the eclectic side for Grand County, became so over the top that Thomas Keller would have been perplexed. “Yes Dhoubi”, I’d say when looking over the evenings specials, “perhaps if I was smashed on my ass and hadn’t one solitary functioning brain cell would I then be tempted to order the Ox Tongue Stew with Candied Jicama and Hot Buttered Groat Clusters. Honestly, where do you come up with this stuff?” He would then try to tell me, through a tongue that was as thick as a 4’x4’ and eyes that were glazed like a fat man’s dream donut, that the reintroduction of pot into his life had awakened his senses and expanded his mind and his culinary imagination to unimaginable levels of creativity. I certainly couldn’t argue with the ‘unimaginable levels’ part.

The last night Dhoubi worked at The River Room was Saturday, February 14th, 2009 – Valentine’s Day. The hotel was booked solid, and the restaurant was essentially sold out with reservations. Dhoubi had a special menu full of Italian-themed obscurities that were guaranteed to furrow the brow of every Grand Countian who would dine with us that evening. Try some of these on for size:

Cappezoli Mucca con Limoni e Salssicia

Brasato di rana pescatrice con i Piedi Maiali e Broccoli

Zuppa di Lumache, Noci e fagioli Lima

Mmmmm. Makes you hungry, doesn’t it? It was one thing trying to read it; having to pronounce it and explain it to our patrons that evening was next to impossible.

A sample of one of my many exchanges with the paying public that evening: “The Zuppa di lumache, noci e fagioli Lima is a soup of snails, walnuts and lima beans. I know it sounds a little unusual, but our chef told all on the staff that it is sublime.”

"Have you tried it?" the patron asked.

"Uh, no, not in hell. But I hear it's really good if you like snails!"

“Think I’ll pass on that. What is the Brasato, ....how do you say the rest of it?”

“The Brasato di rana pescatrice con i piedi maiali e broccoli, is a delightful little dish of braised monkfish, known as 'poor man's lobster', with pigs feet and broccolli. Again, an unusual combination, but I’m told by the chef that it’s quite tasty!”

“Whoa! Could maybe I get like an Italian hamburger or something?”

And on it went.

At the end of Dante’s Valentine’s Day Inferno at The River Room, and in true post-pot shortage fashion, Dhoubi was absolutely, positively 100% trashed to the max at the end of the evening. He literally couldn’t speak; I’d ask him a simple question such as “Hey Dhoubi, can you get up off of the floor and help Danny and Anthony clean the kitchen?”, and he’d look in my general direction, make a pained effort to open his mouth and form words, and say something like “plawd mullied gippo roaberdy.”

I simply couldn’t take any more of it, and however difficult for all of the parties involved, I knew what had to be done. Danny had the Sunday night dinner shift, and we were closed the following two days, so I had to agonize over the inevitable until Wednesday morning when Dhoubi arrived at the hotel. He seemed moderately sober, as I was able to understand a ‘morning’ as he flew by my office. I was quick to track him down and give him the news that I no longer required his services. Simply put, he did not take the news well. I recall that “F-you” was possibly the nicest thing he said to me as he exited our hotel for the final time. The honeymoon and the wedding had come to a disastrous end – Thank God.

The mantle of ‘head chef at The River Room’ was finally passed on to its rightful heir, Chef Danny. He’d worked for a year now under two capable trainers, and he’d soaked up all of their good habits like a sponge, and fortunately hadn’t seemed to pick up any of their bad habits. But he was going to need some help in the kitchen, especially on busy weekend nights……enter Chef Carrie, a hippie chick from Minnesota who came to Colorado in the 70’s, looking for snow, slopes and….have I mentioned the Colorado weed thing?

To be continued…….

The River Room........Part X

2011-05-17T18:17:00.000-07:00

“Richard, I hope you remember me. Joe Amato gave me your phone number. My wife and I are out here on vacation, and I wanted to stop by and see your place. We’re in Grand Lake right now planning on heading your way.”

His name was Dhoubi Nhutjob, and he was a strapping, 6’2” Iranian whirling dervish (figuratively, not literally) full of cooking energy and enthusiasm. He was planning on moving his wife, dog and cat to Colorado at the end of the summer, and when I told him that Thomas was leaving in August, he said “no need for you to even look…I’m your new chef!” We knew him from when he’d worked as a waiter at Il Pene, our favorite restaurant, Italian or otherwise, in Kansas City. I didn’t know he could cook, but he promised me that he could, they just wouldn’t let him in the kitchen at Il Pene. (Red Flag!)

“I’ve worked in the kitchen at ABC Cafe and for the past six months I’ve been working the pasta station at Il Cuoco Lapidato” – both top end places in Kansas City – “this will be incredible. We’ll make this into the best restaurant in the mountains.”

I couldn’t help but love his attitude, and had enjoyed him as our waiter – always full of energy and passionate about the food he was serving. So I figured, ‘what did I have to lose?’

And so it happened; mid-August, Dhoubi showed up with Brody, his border collie mix, a suitcase and a beat-up Toyota truck pulling a really sketchy trailer full of hardwood – oak, hickory … the good stuff from the Midwest. He claimed that he’d been stopped and hassled a little by the Kansas Highway Patrol because of the lack of tags on this trailer thing he was pulling; it was basically on old 1950’s pickup truck bed that had some wheels cobbled onto it and a cheap camper top affixed to it – it looked like something 10-year old boys would have assembled, bored, with nothing better to do on a summer afternoon. Couple this vision with a wild haired Iranian driving this unlicensed contraption through the flatlands of western Kansas, and there’s a question why he was pulled over? Knowing him, he was probably driving this prairie schooner at 90 mph plus.

Dhoubi, welcome to The Riverside, you’ve had a long drive today…perhaps a shot of Johnny Walker Red will make things right for you. Ok, sure, maybe two or three shots…well, ok, here’s a tenth shot. 'Hmmm', I thought, 'he’ll fit in well in Grand County.'

Dhoubi’s first day of work was a lunch shift. We had a menu with about six items – KC BarBQ brisket, a hamburger that we made from daily fresh ground rib-eye steak (cheap butcher cuts from the end of the roasts), a chicken sandwich, a soup of the day and a few lunch salads.

“No problem with any of this” he said as I showed him this and that about what we served, “I’m also gonna have a pasta special today. Some of the veggies in the walk-in are about out of time. I’ll make a vegetarian dish, say maybe Fettuccine with red peppers, celery, maybe some snap peas and finish it with a champagne cream sauce – very light, but fantastic flavor.’

“Uh, gee, that sounds great.” I was stunned, almost speechless - here he was, excited about lunch; Thomas and Danny had lost their zest for the lunch shifts half-way through their first day.

We sold every order of the pasta special – it was out of this world; there were literally moans and groans of ecstasy from the patrons as they ate. I honestly hadn’t eaten anything that good in forever – and that’s no slight to the current Riverside crew, as they put out terrific food; but this sauce was in another league. Honest to God, we had lunch patrons come back that evening and request the same dish for dinner; it was that good.

During his first dinner shift of that same evening, the plan was for Thomas to show him the Riverside ropes; in fact, Thomas agreed to stay with us for two weeks for the sole purpose of training Dhoubi. I think it only three days later that Thomas packed up and headed for his next gig in Charlotte, NC – Dhoubi clearly didn’t need any training. He took over that kitchen without any hesitation; his presence during the heat of the rush was a commanding one - saucing here, searing there, and barking orders all the while.

The only person in this mix who was less than thrilled was Danny, as he’d had aspirations of taking over the head job, but he quietly stepped back; he didn’t need to have it spelled out for him that Dhoubi intended to take a back seat to no one. And that ‘no one’ included me.

Things seemed to be going well, especially with regards to the originality and quality of the food. Every day Dhoubi made fresh pasta for a nightly pasta special – fettuccine, tagliatelle, raviolis; and the sauces were beyond better than any you could imagine. He made his own fresh mozzarella cheese from curds. His lasagna was unlike any you’d ever had – it was the kick-ass béchamel sauce that he layered into the mix. The oak and hickory he’d brought from Kansas City went towards making ‘dirty steak’, a rib-eye thrown directly on the glowing coals which seared a smoky flavor into the steak; it was then finished inside on the flat top, sliced on the bias, drizzled with reduced Balsamic vinegar and served with an arugula salad tossed with a hint of truffle oil. It was killer! His soups were to die for, and his desserts….magnifico!

There was a period early in Dhoubi’s tenure that I would have put us up against any restaurant in Denver, and most from Denver who ate at The River Room agreed that there wasn’t a better restaurant in the Mile High Stoned City.

So you might ask “why then, seven short moths later, was Dhoubi storming out of the hotel, amidst his hail of insults, threats and F-bombs, after being fired?”

It started in late-September on a beautiful fall Monday– the sky a blue that could only be imagined, the Aspens at the peak of their golden majesty. The kitchen was closed and the hotel unoccupied, and one of our neighbors who ran the bar at Dead Pines Golf Club gifted me and Dhoubi a round of golf. As Dhoubi got in the car with me to head to the golf course, he was accompanied by a King-sized reek of marijuana – it was as if he had a smoldering bong stashed in each of his pockets.

I didn’t think much about it other than I hadn’t realized that he was a stoner. He never acted stoned, he never looked stoned – his manic behavior was the polar opposite of stoned – and he’d never even mentioned anything about pot or drugs. It just kind of surprised me because there had been zero behavioral traits exhibited that would cause me to connect those dots.

This might be the end of the ‘no big surprise, he’s a stoner’ story, as I’ve mentioned earlier, smoking weed in Colorado is as prevalent as those big, pointy mountains that they’ve got there; it’s essentially legal. All you need is an ailment – from tennis elbow to toenail fungus – and a prescription from a Pot Doctor and you’re good to blow. Couple that with the proclivity of those in the restaurant industry to abuse drugs and alcohol, and you’ve got yourself a genuine reason for an Iranian kid who’s about as outdoorsy as Truman Capote to pack up and move to the mountains of Colorado.

But we were soon to find out, the problem with Dhoubi wasn’t when he was stoned - it was when he wasn’t.

To be continued….yet again……

The River Room........Part IX

2011-05-09T18:01:00.000-07:00

The morning after what most would consider an epic display of debauchery, but in Hot Sulphur...another Sunday night at the local watering hole, the damage was assessed and fortunately, there was no significant physical damage, only psychological damage at the reality of what lay ahead of us in this Colorado ‘adventure’. On the upside, there was a big fish bowl full of dirty, crumpled up bills. Nice, but had the sum been ten-fold, I would have made the same post-game day decision to follow Abe’s advice – not in hell would we have a functioning bar in Hot Sulphur Springs open to the local trade.

We said our goodbyes to Gabe, and shut the hotel and restaurant down for two months while we installed the new dishwasher and began the first few steps of rebuilding the kitchen. Thomas and Rachel took some time off and came back to KC, and the plan was for them to both go back in mid-April; Thomas would start working on the kitchen, Rachel painting rooms, cleaning and getting the hotel ready for the summer season and our eventual arrival. We had also hired a jack-leg contractor to redo our living quarters before our arrival, and someone needed to be there to oversee the remodel – in reality, to report daily that NO remodeling was going on as it should have been.

With Gabe gone, and me having seen what a busy night at The River Room entails, I knew we’d need some additional kitchen help for the summer – especially when you threw a lunch shift into the equation. A mention of my need for additional help was made in passing to my brother in KC, who thought that a good friend of his had a son that worked in a restaurant in high school and was looking to move to Colorado – he’d mention the Riverside to his friend.

One phone call and two weeks later, Chef Danny shows up at The Riverside with a suitcase full of bad clothes, a guitar, and a few boxes of books and LP’s. As bad luck would have it, some of those LP’s, and his iPod full of music, followed Thomas’s bent – including The Mars Volta. It was at this point that I decided to hide my guns for the ultimate safety of all who could be exposed.

Danny’s prior cooking experience included summers working at a country club bar & grill, and a stint a Garozzos, a Kansas City Italian eatery famous for Chicken Spedini, a dish which we stole and made our house specialty. I had no idea as to what he could do in a kitchen, as his first month was spent redoing ours – damn, but the kid was handy, and a hard worker.

The place re-opened on Memorial Day weekend, 2008. Julie and I were in KC, watching from the sidelines. We had most of the rooms booked from a wedding party, and the place was hopping – bar and restaurant both. Thomas took Danny under his wing, and quickly into the deal, we had two of the best chefs in the mountains, putting out heretofore unheard of fare in Grand County.

A beautiful white linen dining room, thanks to Julie and the iPod playlist, complemented by food and presentation that were off the charts – by my standards, and I had some damn high restaurant standards – and The River Room had become a fine dining destination.

Don’t get me wrong. We had our share of assholes.

“How is everything this evening?” I asked a table of four, two couples in their early 60’s - the obvious alpha male looked like a cross between a rutting bulldog and Oliver North.

The bulldog replied, in a bit of a bulldog way “OK”.

“Just OK?” I asked.

“Yeah, just OK.”, the chip on his shoulder growing like a bag of microwave popcorn.

Chipper and cheerfully from me, “What can we do to make it better than ‘OK’?”

He held up a small piece of the grilled bread that we served, FOR F-ING FREE, - grilled bread that Thomas sliced on the bias, painted with butter, olive oil and garlic, then grilled with burn marks to a crunchy, crispy “Oh my God this is awesome can I have some more?!” – and said, “How about serving soft dinner rolls?, NOT BURNED BREAD!!!”

His wife cowered, and looked at me apologetically; no question she’d suffered through scenes like this for the sad past 40 years of her life. It is important to note, that the foursome had choked down three FREE orders of this burned claptrap, but no matter.

This was my first lesson in ‘opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one, but acknowledging that, this guy was the consummate major asshole for all time!” I think that’s how that saying goes.

Summer went on…good food, decent business and the establishment of the building blocks of a place that could actually become a dining destination in Grand County. Groups started calling about Christmas parties, fall weddings and group events. But in spite of the successes, there was some unrest with one of the major cogs in this seemingly well-oiled machine - Chef Thomas was ready to blow this pop stand for brighter pastures and bigger cities.

His discontent may have coincided with our arrival in mid-June; we put demands on all of the employees that weren’t existent while we watched from afar in KC; demands like getting out of bed before 2:00 PM and actually working. But more importantly, he was getting pounded by his former employer, McCormicks & Schmicks, with opportunities in Chicago, Charlotte and everywhere other than Hot Sulphur Springs - for way more than we could pay. No question, the dude could cook.

It wasn’t but a few weeks into our full time late-June arrival that Thomas told us he was planning on leaving at the end of the summer. The fun was done. We’d need to find a replacement; although Danny was picking things up well, there was no way he could singularly manage the kitchen going into the fall, especially with all of the specialty business we’d booked.

There is a quote from a classic 1970’s movie “Once Upon a Time in America”…great cast, great director, and this bit of simply, wonderfully expressed profundity from Burt Young…“Life…(dramatic pause) ..is stranger than shit!”

Now for a fact, life is stranger than shit, because not one day after Thomas gave us the devastating news that he was checking out of The Riverside, I got a call from an old KC contact from our favorite KC restaurant, “hey, how’s it going? I want to move to Colorado, and I’m wondering if you’ve got any openings in your kitchen?”

Life.....is stranger than shit.

To be continued…………..

The River Room........Part VIII

2011-05-03T19:16:00.000-07:00

Early in my discussions with Abe regarding our purchase and subsequent operation of The Riverside, he took the time during one of our inspection visits to sit me down by the fire and give me some unsolicited advice; the do's and don’ts of running The Riverside, if you will – the benefit of his 20 years of experience. I should have paid better attention.

“Ricardo” Abe began, then paused, as if he were waiting for me to scribe these edicts for eventual inclusion on stone tablets “you do not, under any circumstances, want to open your bar to the locals – only to the hotel and dinner guests.”

“Abe, are you serious? You’ve got this beautiful bar and you want me to keep it closed up? I’m going to be looking for every bit of revenue I can get from this place. I’ve even got a decent amount of bar revenue factored into my projections.”

Answering me in his high pitched sing-songy falsetto, and for added dramatic effect halting for ½ second intervals between each word, “you do not want to open your bar to the locals! Trust me on this. That’s all that I’m saying. Take it or leave it!”

I didn’t trust him, and I didn’t take it - I left it; bad decision #46 in what would total 792 bad decisions that I would make during the next two years.

Late afternoon, December 28th, fresh from our buying spree in Denver, in barges one of the locals – and when I say barges, I mean barges. Bigger than life and louder than a Buckethead/The Mars Volta double-bill, Patty (not her real name, but pretty close) exploded into the lobby and yelled “I hear you bought Abe out. Are you guys gonna open the bar to locals? I sure hope so, ‘cause I could sure use a rum & Coke about now!” She forgot to say another rum & Coke, as it was obvious that this wouldn’t be her first of the day... or hour, for that matter.

Patty was not the owner of a Size 4 dress; in fact, I doubt very much that Patty had ever worn a dress of any size. She was a cowgirl to the max, rough and tough, with coarse, thick dark hair and massive pigtails that resembled those gym ropes that you used to straddle and inch up towards the top of the gym upon, all the while praying that you wouldn’t fall to your death.

“My name’s Patty, and I’ve been coming here for years. You got a room up there named after me. Could I get that rum & Coke?”

"Whoa", I thought. If Abe had only mentioned this local, I would have possibly taken heed of his advice; in fact he said ‘locals’, in that there may be more like this that will descend upon us in their quest for rum & Coke. Oh my, what have we gotten ourselves into?

Patty was served a rum & Coke, and Gabe, who quickly stepped in as both bartender and bouncer, charged her $5 for a shot of Old Jamaica rum and a hefty pour of Coca-Cola. Patty rummaged through her jean pockets until she came up with the cash, and said “If you guys wanna get the local trade, you gotta charge less than five bucks a drink for house booze. Just a friendly piece of advice, since you’re new around here….”

Unlike my educational session with Abe, I took stern notice of the advice I’d just been given by Patty; the price of a rum & Coke just went up to seven bucks.

---------------------

Thomas was kind enough to prep me regarding the impending blues/booze fest that I’d fallen prey to the old Hannibal double-shuffle into allowing to let happen.

“Uh..., Uncle Richard, I’m a little worried about this concert we’re having here Sunday night…”

“Why’s that, Thomas? Because there are 500 posters plastered all over Grand County advertising free music and cheap booze on a Sunday, when all of the other bars in Grand County are closed?”

“Oh, so you saw the posters? Yea, I thought it was a little excessive; could be a good time though….”

‘Nice…’, I thought, picturing buses pulling up in front of the hotel, the doors springing open, Patty and hundreds of her ilk barging out, then reeling into The Riverside; next, wadded up dollar bills being fished from dirty dungarees, eventually flying through the air, as the din from the calls for 2-for-1 PBR’s and rum & Cokes were drowning out Gabe’s high-voltage, bluesy, Marshall-amped up bye-bye to Grand County. The only upside to this scenario was that the whole sight and sound of it might possibly, once and for all, vanquish the hotel of the pranksterous spirits that wreaked havoc upon our person and our plumbing, providing we made it through the evening alive and didn’t end up joining them in permanent, immortal residence.

So I girded my loins, and stocked up on cases of cheap beer and cheaper hooch. Gabe and his band buddies set up stage in the Green Room, moving this and that to form an impromptu stadium, in the smallest sense of the word. Gabe prayed for a crowd; I prayed that my insurance agent and all of her office staff, relatives and neighbors were vacationing on Mars, or possibly a more distant locale.

God kind of answered my prayers…… with a blizzard.

At about 4:30 in the PM, an all-out, Grand County hum-dinging Son-of-a-bitchin’ blizzard unleashed from the Heavenly skies; not even for cheap beer and free music would a Grand County drunk venture out in this weather. Oh, don’t get me wrong; they’d break a sweat, they’d prowl around their house and suppose, they’d think that maybe it might be worth the risk – but at the end of the discussion, they’d lose out to a wiser spouse, a pleading child or the sober voice in their head that would say “are you out of your mind? It’s a freaking blizzard out there!! Plus, it’s not like we don’t have a jug of Popov in the cupboard.”

When I said God ‘kind of’ answered my prayers, I meant that the blizzard neutered all of the Grand County drunks that would have to drive to the Riverside Blues Fest. Unfortunately, there were those in Hot Sulphur that could get there by walking, blizzard or not; and for a fact, there’s no worse kind of drunk than a Grand County drunk who doesn’t have to worry about driving.

At 7:30, in walked Patty, in walked Jane, Isaac, Brad, Jim, and fifteen to twenty more of the Hot Sulphur locals; they’d braved the weather, and they were in the mood for some live music and Sunday night bar booze; after all, the Barking Dog wasn’t serving.

“What’ll you have?” I asked in cheerful bartender fashion to the first young man who sidled up to the bar.

“Gimme a rum and Coke; heavy on the rum and a little Coke for color!” (I’d soon learn that this was the Grand County bar mantra…heavy on the booze, light on the non-booze whatever else.)

“Done deal”, I said, “that’ll be six bucks.”

About four minutes went by, and the same young man came back and said “Gimme another rum and Coke, and go lighter on the Coke, heavier on the rum this time.”

“Here you go! That’ll be seven bucks.”

Pockets were searched and wrinkled bills were proffered. “Much better; pour me another one of those cause I’ll be back in a minute.”

This pattern would continue for the next few hours.

Gabe and his group got things going at 8:00, and he was fast ripping it up – great music, good time. But the locals were only perfunctorily interested in the music as a means of having access to a walking distance ‘Open on Sunday’ bar in a damn blizzard; Gabe was rocking his little heart out, but for all that the locals cared, he could have been playing a solo kazoo in the Green Room, so long as the rum & Cokes were flowing in the bar.

At 10:00 PM, as proprietor and owner of The Riverside Hotel, Bar & Restaurant, I’d decided that I’d had about enough. Our rum & Coke dude was all but having sex with one of the local maidens on one of our rickety bar tables. Some of the others in the bar were throwing darts – not at a dart board, but at each other. The Rook pieces on our Chess table had found their way into one of the patrons nostrils, and a Pawn in each of his ears. His attempt at bad bar humor was going unnoticed, as most of the patrons were cheering on the carnal performance of Captain Morgan and his table wench.

One of the locals that I’d previously seen at the post office – she was a sweet, grandmotherly looking lady that more than surprised me by her attendance – asked me to total up her tab, and would I take a personal check?

“Not a problem” I said. “That’ll be $32.00.”

“Thirty two dollarsh” she slurred, “How many beersh d’I have?”

“16 beers” I replied, “2-for-1 is 8 times four bucks apiece equals $32 dollars, assuming you don’t want to add a tip.”

“16 beersh!! Thash crazy! I coulda shworn I only had 14…hic”

It’s 10:07, and I loudly announce, “Last call Folks! The music’s winding down, and the bar is closing!”

At this pronouncement, Captain Morgan disengages himself from his local Hot Sulphur hottie of the night and staggers up to the bar, steadies himself, violently slams his fist on the bar –as much for ballast as exclamation - and says,

“BULLSHIT! Last call in Colorado is 2 AM. It’s only 10 OClock!” I was truly surprised he could tell time at this point. He had a look of wildness in his eyes that I’d never seen and wasn’t quite sure how to deal with; but I’d really had enough and decided I’d have to grow a pair. I looked him squarely back in the eye with a little wildness of my own and calmly said “Last call in this Colorado bar is 10 PM, and that’s right now. So what’ll it be?”

Shrinking back a little, he said “Gimme six Rum & Cokes; heavy on the rum, a little Coke for color.”

As I began lining up those six rum & Cokes, under duress and fear that the man may kill me in the event that I didn’t serve him, Abe Rodriguez seemed to me, at that moment, the wisest man in all the world.

To be Continued……….

The River Room...........Part VII

2011-04-25T18:52:00.000-07:00

The first three months of operation went fairly smoothly, mostly because I wasn’t there to analize over the details or agonize over the defeats. Julie and I were still working in Kansas City, and my only involvement with The Riverside was through nightly updates from Rachel or the American Express card statements, monthly evidence of the daily ‘going to the store for supplies’ thing. I’m thinking things were especially good for our two chefs – limited work as we were only open for dinner Thursday thru Sunday, which led to copious amounts of downtime for snowboarding, Nintendo playing, guitar plucking (Gabe is a player of professional quality) and lots of late night partying which led to lots of late morning waking up. There didn’t seem to be much time left for hotel fixing and cleaning, which was one of the things that I’d hoped our chefs would do to round out the forty hours per week of pay they were receiving vs. the 20 hours of work they were doing in the kitchen. I didn’t stress too much over it, as I viewed this whole period as a dry run before Julie and I arrived at the beginning of the summer season; again, Julie and I were still getting paychecks which allowed for the funds to fuel this fantasy.

The only discordant note in this scenario involved the personal interaction between the three young participants, which was understandable, considering you’ve thrown three family members into a badly insulated mausoleum located in an isolated mountain town. Picture a low budget version of The Real World – too bad, as this whole ordeal damn sure would have made for some fine reality television. One of the issues involved Rachel ratting out the chefs for playing music loudly enough in the kitchen that it would drown out the lilting strains of the classical music that we featured in the restaurant – more than just a minor pet peeve for me.

As good as is Thomas’s taste in food, his taste in music is bad (singularly unique) – wretched, heinously, God-awful bad. For example, anyone here ever heard of The Mars Volta? Of course you haven’t, because if you had ever listened to this band for more than a few minutes you would’ve already grabbed the nearest 12-gauge and blown your head off; it’s that bad. And then there’s Buckethead; two obvious reasons why he wears a bucket - for drowning out the noise that he’s making so he won’t suffer as the rest of us who have to listen (truth be known, he has really good headphones in that bucket and he’s listening to Brahms), and second, to retain his anonymity, ensuring that people of good sense won’t recognize him and kill him dead on the streets for the damage he’s done to our musical culture. And these were but just a few of the musical gems that were thrust upon the ears of our genteel restaurant customers. I’d say it to myself again…this to shall pass.

Gabe and I didn’t promise each other much in terms of commitments; he wasn’t sure how long he wanted to stay, and I wasn’t sure how long I’d need him once I got to the hotel full time. It worked out well as I was glad to have him there for however long, as he served as referee between the two first cousins, he helped Thomas get the kitchen off to a running start and he gave the place an air of uniqueness – like it needed any more of that – for Gabe truly is a characters definition of ‘a character’.

In what I quickly learned was Gabe-like style, about two months into the arrangement he informed me that an opportunity for a sculpture project (he was a sculptor, amongst his many other talents) was opening up in Washington DC, and he was planning on leaving the hotel in mid-March. After that, he might pursue some travels with his band, or do some cooking for a Mississippi Blue Cruise, or whatever; he was bound by no calendar, reliant upon no clock and responsible only to himself.

The middle of March coincided with our spring break visit to the hotel; we’d be there all week to work our asses off – painting, cleaning, decorating, hauling trash, installing new beds and tossing out the old, and on and on and on. Friends from Kansas City were coming with us to help in the effort, and in a dizzying display of the illogical, they remain friends to this day, possibly out of pity. A few weeks before our trip, Gabe called to ask if he could have a farewell concert at The Riverside, as two of his band mates were coming to pick him up, and he’d promised some of the locals that he would play for them before he left Colorado.

For a fact, our Property, Casualty & Liability insurance strictly prohibited us from having live music, due to either the increased risk of people drinking to excess and getting rowdy when exposed to live music, or to the one in a million chance that Buckethead or The Mars Volta would show up, play live music (?) and the ensuing potentially lethal effects that exposure to their live music would incur upon a tort-hungry public. But I relented, thinking ‘what harm could come from a little concert for some close friends’? Heck, I’d always wanted to hear him play anyway, as Gabe had advertised himself as a bluesier version of The Black Keys – a group that occupied more than a little space on my iPod.

“Sure Gabe, go ahead, that’ll be fun!”

I didn’t give it another thought until I stopped for gas at a station in Winter Park, some 35 miles from The Riverside, on our way into Hot Sulphur for Spring Break. Plastered in the window of the gas station/convenience store were several posters, advertising, no, screaming,

“THE RIVERSIDE HOTEL BLUES FEST”

Featuring

The Gabe Meyer Band

Sunday, March 19th 8:00 PM

$10.00 Cover Charge
All beers 2-for-1 !!!
$5 Jaeger Shots

The Historic Riverside Hotel
Hot Sulphur Springs, CO

“Holy Schitt!”, I thought; not only did our insurance policy prohibit live music, but it also prohibited any type of drink specials, especially the men’s bathroom cleaner’s worst nightmare, the dreaded 2-for-1 beer special. The situation became more dire the nearer we came to Hot Sulphur; for on every store window in every town, Fraser, then Tabernash, and finally Granby, the posters were everywhere, a loud and clear beacon pointing the way to every Grand County drunk in search of an ‘Open on Sunday’ place to pound down beers at half price.

As I’ve mentioned before, excessive consumption of alcohol is a Grand Countians' National Pastime – it was something that came as naturally to them as getting out of bed in the morning, albeit always late and terribly hung-over; they damn sure didn’t need an excuse, or an invitation, and here were both, everywhere you looked. Possibly even the churches in Grand County mentioned it in their weekly announcements on that Sunday at the end of their service – “and in case you haven’t seen the 500 posters scattered about Grand County, there’re ½ price beers and live blues at The Riverside tonight…Now go in peace, Amen.”

While I had to give Gabe an A+ in the art of self promotion, I quickly had to figure out a way to delicately rain on his parade without his losing face with me and those thirsty locals.

To be continued……

The River Room........Part VI

2011-04-20T10:35:00.000-07:00

I swear to God, these were the first words out of our first customers mouth; “My Mother is gluten-intolerant. I don’t know what’s on the menu tonight but I hope you’ll be able to accommodate her.”

Thinking gluten was maybe a type of fish, or perhaps a derivative of tofu, I promptly replied “Nope, we’re not serving gluten tonight. We’ve got Prime Rib, Tilapia, an Asian pork dish and a chicken dish!”

“And do none of those contain gluten??” he asked me in a somewhat challenging form, appearing mildly irritated.

This stopped me for a second, before I finally asked him, “So, …just what is gluten?”

He looked at me like I had a turd balanced across the bridge of my nose. And so it would go for me in the restaurant business in Colorado.

----------------------------

During the two hours prior to this seminal exchange, I had survived my first encounter with The Riverside ghost in the shower and guest bathroom, Julie and Rachel had arrived safely back at the hotel from their Colorado Winter Wondercruise, I’d checked in all of our guests (36 people in 13 full size beds and two twin beds) and turned down requests from countless more snowbound travelers. Those that weren’t lucky enough to have snagged up a local hotel room spent the night on cots or blankets in the Kremmeling High School gymnasium.

30 minutes after my crash course in “Dammit, I’m Gluten Intolerant, I’m Mad as Hell and I’m Not Going to Take it Anymore!” I’m in the kitchen and the restaurant is packed. The only place I can be of any use is washing dishes. I’d long since been banished from the salad prep table.

“Hot pan!” yelled Thomas, as he tossed a small sauté pan on the table (not stainless steel) that stood nearest to the three-compartment sink; the pan now fighting for space with the rest of the dirty plates, cutlery, water glasses, sauce pots and pans that I was struggling to wash, rinse, dry and put back into service. The first compartment of the three compartment sink had hot soapy water in which the dirty dishes were washed, the middle sink contained warm water where the dishes were dipped for the purpose of getting rid of any soap residue, and the final compartment contained cold water with bleach; a final attempt at sanitation before setting them on a rack to air dry. That first sink had to be changed out quite a bit, as the residue of dirty plates and sauté pans floated on the hot, soapy surface like so much indigestible flotsam and jetsam.

The bigger factor in my falling behind with the dishes was my morphing from restaurant owner/dishwasher into a passionate observer of the stadium event that is high pressure, commercial food preparation. Never having been in a restaurant kitchen during the heat of battle, I’d never witnessed anything like the requisite speed, deftness of hand and all-but acrobatic symmetry that these two Chefs exhibited. Thomas had 6 pans going at once – all the time, without so much as a hiccup. Sautéing vegetables in one large pan, while the other five had either the pork, fish or chicken sizzling away in a pat or two of melted butter and a dash or three of olive oil. Thomas also had this thing going on where he would twirl in the air and click the metal tongs “clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack” together every time after turning the food in the pan or plating the entrée – he was really good at it, and at that early point in our adventure, it hadn’t yet gotten to be annoying. (I’m betting that there is now a common Spanish phrase in the commercial kitchens of Chicago that goes something like “clack those one more time and I’ll shove them up your culo!”)

Gabe was non-stop banging out soup, salads and doing the majority of the plating. He had also taken on the leadership role, as Thomas seemed to be at his best reacting to directions as opposed to giving them. This was amazing for me to watch as it unfolded; all of this was going on with a quiet confidence that would have made you think they’d been doing this together every day for the last 20 years. Possibly they were just stoned.

As the evening concluded – we shut the kitchen down at 8:00 as we were absolutely out of every scrap of food – I stood in awe of what Thomas and Gabe had pulled off. Not only were 68 people (including one gluten intolerant septuagenarian) fed in an organized, timely manner, but they were fed food of exceptional taste and quality. There were lauds and bravos aplenty from all who had dined with us. I’m certain that if there were any food or service glitches they were minor, as most who dined with us realized they could be eating microwave Mac & Cheese in the Kremmeling High School Gym, and compared with that The Riverside had to seem like Le Cirque.

The only hitch to the evening came at the end, when one of our guests – a Russian couple with two small children, she spoke broken English and the others not a word – came to the restaurant at 8:00 with a brown paper lunch sack. I sat them and told them we had very limited offerings – I think all that was left was some pork and some rice. The woman then pulled from the sack two plastic bags, one containing a yet to-be-determined raw meat, the other some chopped raw vegetables – some sort of gourd thing; she asked if we could cook this for her family. I was a little dumbstruck, but what the hell, “why not” I told her. When I brought the bags back to the kitchen and told Thomas and Gabe what was going on, they protested as loudly as if I’d had asked them to cook while straight.

“Tell them No Way! That is totally against the health code” said Gabe, while standing amidst a room full of equipment that’s mere existence within 100 yards of a kitchen violated most every known rule in the Colorado health code. Some of the equipment would make them rethink the rules as to what is and isn’t allowable in junk yards.

A little deflated, I went back to the Serbian Nationals and told them our State law didn’t allow for this sort of thing and they’d have to buy food from us if they intended to eat in this restaurant. I had to explain this slowly, and loudly, so the woman could understand me, and as she explained the situation to her husband in their native tongue, he unleashed at me what I’m certain must have been naughty words in Serbia and were not intended to wish me well. But eat they did, and they paid in cash.

I was abuzz at the success of our first night, both from a culinary and financial position. All were equally excited as we cleaned the kitchen, washed and dried the dishes, reset the dining room and generally decompressed from the rush of the rush. We were to repeat this performance the next two nights, including another 180 mile round trip to Denver the next day to buy more stuff. Thomas and Gabe would continue to wow our guests every weekend for the next three months, bringing high end, inventive cuisine to Grand County that was heretofore generally unavailable. I can’t recall any of Abe’s old customers who visited those first three months saying anything like “I sure miss Jamie’s fried pork chops and Spanish rice” or “Grey Goose! No, I prefer the Popov vodka that Abe used to serve.”

By golly, unlike Abe, we may have gone belly up, but we did it with style!

To be continued……

The River Room...........Part V

2011-04-13T19:51:00.000-07:00

The only task ahead of me more daunting than dealing with outdated, out of code kitchen equipment that I couldn’t afford to replace and the Colorado Department of Health and Safety, was the task of dealing with the human beings that would utilize that equipment – the cooks. I had no idea of what that would ultimately entail, as I had not one greasy minute of prior experience working in a restaurant; heretofore, I’d only eaten in them. All of my high-school and college job experience was spent working in a Thom McAn Shoe Store in the Metcalf South Mall, Overland Park, KS. Perhaps I would have been wiser to buy an old shoe store rather than a hotel, bar and restaurant.

Never in the plan did I have any intentions of being the cook, and it wasn’t because I didn’t think I could do it, rather, I wasn’t sure I could deal with the criticism of the paying public. One thing for certain that any person who seriously cooks will take too much to heart is when those that you cook for don’t like, and tell you that they don’t like, what you’ve busted your ass to make for them. Truth being, I found out the first furiously busy night we were open, while watching those cooks operate, that there would have been NO WAY I could have cooked anything beyond sloppy PB&J’s under commercial conditions in a busy restaurant, and my fear of criticism had nothing to do with it. I would have exploded so quickly under the demands mandated by the pace and the pressure to perform, there’s no telling the cacophonous blend of invectives and flying cookware that would have ensued.

The first night our restaurant was open was pure, unintended happenstance. We’d purchased the hotel on December 27th, 2009, and intended to open both the hotel and the restaurant for the first time on December 30th – a one-night dry run before New Years Eve. Abe had quite a few rooms booked for New Years, and we intended to jump in feet first and make our big Grand Opening splash to bring in the New Year. (Abe had actually asked if he could sell us the place on the 27th, yet still run it on New Years Eve and take the revenue from the rooms he’d booked and the meals he would serve. As you’ve now surmised from previous discussions, Abe had no shame.)

On the 28th of December, we drove to Denver to buy food and kitchen supplies, as the aforementioned Mr. Abe pretty much left the cupboard bare with regards to pots, pans and the other utensils necessary to operate a kitchen. The ‘we’ who went to Denver that day included Julie, our two 'chefs' and I. (I think the difference between the title of cook vs. chef has to do with ones’ level of training, education and experience. I don’t believe either of our hash slingers had attained enough of any of the aforementioned attributes to be designated as chefs, but referring to them in that manner gave the restaurant an air of professionalism, in stark contrast to our total lack of same.) Two chefs, you ask? That seems a pretty lavish staffing arrangement for a broken down start-up hotel restaurant in an out of the way locale. The original plan involved only my nephew Thomas, who had been a front line cook at McCormick & Schmicks Restaurant in Kansas City, moving west with us and grabbing hold of The River Room restaurant – we felt it a great opportunity for him, and a blessing for us to have an experienced cook who we knew and trusted. A small article in the local Grand County paper proclaimed our re-opening with the line “…featuring the cuisine of Chef Thomas Paradise.” Chef Number 2, Gabe, my second cousin from Hannibal, MO was a late arrival to the party, having signed on about two weeks before we bought the hotel as much for the adventure as for the paycheck. Gabe is just a bit of a free spirit, and the notion of throwing all to the wind for the opportunity to cook in a haunted hotel in the middle of The Rockies suited him to a “THC”.

Our trip to Denver netted us the makings of our first menu – Seared Asian Pork (Gabe’s recipe), Prime Rib, an Italian take on Chicken Cordon Bleu (my recipe which Gabe dubbed “Chicken Dick”) and Crusted Tilapia with Fried Capers, a dish that Thomas had mastered from Mc&S. It was a total crap shoot regarding how much of what to buy – a crap shoot that I would forever continue, and continue to lose at, ad nauseam throughout my brief stint as a restaurateur. Back we came, loaded down with food and supplies, but lightened by the act of leaving around $1200 at Sam’s, Costco and Applejacks Liquor Emporium. Several days later when I tallied up the $4000 worth of food and room revenue from that $1200 investment at the store, I gleefully thought “Wow! It’s going to be easy making a living doing this!”

So back to that first night.

December 29th dawned like most every other winter day in Hot Sulphur – colder than most mortals can imagine and looking as if it seriously wanted to snow. Julie and Rachel headed to Dillon, CO – about 50 miles southwest of Hot Sulphur on State Highway 9 – to buy yet more supplies for the hotel. (I was to quickly learn that this ‘going to the store for supplies’ thing was pretty much what running The Riverside was all about.) About noon the grey skies turned to a blistering white, as the snow pounded down in astonishing fashion – my first encounter with a Rocky Mountain blizzard. On and on it raged, and I was starting to get seriously worried about Julie and Rachel. They had 4-wheel drive, but the lack of visibility would have made 40-wheel drive irrelevant; not to mention the roads upon which they had to traverse were winding, two-lane, up and down affairs that also featured that little bit of excitement with the occasional severe drop-off into a bottomless chasm, should you decide to take a curve a little wide. It was about 3:00 in the afternoon when the phone started to ring – they’d closed down I-70 at the Eisenhower Tunnel, and at the rate it was snowing, the odds of reopening it any time that evening were slim; one after another, requests for rooms were coming from the soon-to-be snow-bound skiers, unable to make it back to Denver. In less than 30 minutes, all of the 16 guest rooms were filled; it dawned on me that they’d need to eat, and as for The River Room Restaurant at The Riverside Hotel, one day earlier than scheduled, it was now Go Time!

To be continued..........

Riverside Braised Short Ribs

2011-03-05T12:12:00.000-08:00

During one of my numerous trips to Las Vegas, all of course due to very important, high-level business-related trade shows – World of Concrete, International Roofing Expo, Home Building Expo, International Gutter & Downspout Extravaganza, National Conference on Cotter Pin Safety, etc. – I’d had just about one too many bone-in rib eyes in a row, yet, found myself in a fabulous steakhouse; Jean-George Jagermeister’s PRIME, located in the beautiful Bellagio Casino. I told the snooty waiter that I just couldn’t handle another beautifully marbled, succulent, medium rare bone-in Kobe rib eye, having had them the previous five nights at other high-end Vegas meat emporiums. Obviously annoyed with my lack of degustatory gusto, he icily suggested that I might enjoy something beefy, yet quite a bit less expensive, his nose getting skinny as he lifted his chin skyward – braised short ribs. This encounter happened a few years back, say 10 years ago, when beef short ribs weren’t on most menus; in fact, they would have been considered a throw-away cut of meat, something you’d never imagine finding on the menu of a pricy restaurant, much like skirt steak, flank steak and brisket, which now, thanks to celebrity chefs like Jean-George Veganbanger, are no longer throwaways, but ‘hot’ cuts of meat. (Or were last week at the time of this writing; perhaps this week, they too are now passé.)

Anyway, I bit, as the description of the fatty beef that would fall off the bone like a Valentine’s Day chemise and melt in your mouth like a hollandaise-flavored cough drop was simply too much to resist; couple that with a White Truffle Gruyere potato gratin and a hearty Barolo, and we could just begin to forget about the travails of suffering through a night without a cut of béarnaise-drenched Japanese beef.

Needless to say, the meal was sublime – the short ribs presented in a small copper pot, with the cooking vegetables and braising liquid as accompaniment. The flavor was so round, so rich; I had to ingratiate myself upon the snooty waiter and beg as to what gave this beef it’s smoky, salty, sweet flavor. I had to have that damn recipe!

The waiter was forthcoming enough with the goods just to the point of teasing me; yes, yes I know, brown the ribs, braise them with carrots, celery and onions in some stock and red wine, and….”I’m afraid I can’t tell you what the special ingredients are that give them their sweet, salty finish”; seemingly gleeful that he had this little power thing going with me.

So I had to wing it and guess at what else might be included in the recipe to give them their unique, never before experienced flavor. I’m pretty sure I eventually hit the mark, as this recipe, at least for me, recreates the splendor of the original dish at PRIME. When we first featured these short ribs on a new fall menu, winding down our first year in operation, they were a huge hit – we couldn’t make enough of them as almost every diner ordered them those first few weekends in October. We actually had guests dine with us on Friday, order the short ribs, and return the next evening for a second go; should have charged more for them.

This dish takes some time to make, as it cooks low and slow; so you probably don’t want to plan on throwing it together some Tuesday evening after work. Also, you can use the method and ingredients in this recipe on chuck roast with equally great results.

Serves 4
3-4 pounds beef short ribs – bone intact
Salt & Pepper
1-2 cups flour
½ cup vegetable oil
1 - Large yellow onion, chopped
3 – Carrots, peeled and chopped
3 – Celery stalks, chopped
1 – Cup rich beef stock which you’ve made yourself (Do they even sell rich beef stock?)
1 – Cup red wine (Shiraz works nicely)
2/3 - cup Soy Sauce (No low sodium stuff, you putz!)
2/3 - cup dark molasses (Steen’s, if you’re lucky enough to live where they sell it)
2 – Bay leaves
12 – Sprigs fresh thyme

Preheat oven to 260F

In a Dutch oven, heat the oil to near smoking, and brown the short ribs that you’ve salted, peppered and dredged in the flour. Set them aside. In the same oil, sauté the vegetables until they just begin to take on some char. Remove and set aside. Put the ribs back in the Dutch oven, arranged so there is a little space between them; space which you will fill with the sautéed vegetables. Now pour your liquids in, slip in the bay leaves and evenly distribute the thyme over the top of dish. The liquid will come close to drowning the ribs, with maybe ½” – ¾” of the meat peeking over the brim of the liquid.

Put the lid on the pot, slide it in the oven and leave it be for 4 hours. No need to open it and jack with it to see if it’s done. It’ll probably be done in 3 ½ hours, and at that low temperature, it’ll still be okay if you get sloshed on the rest of the Shiraz and forget to take it out until it’s cooked for five hours. Keeping the damn lid on keeps all the damn moisture in the pot; and moisture is what makes that meat tender, silky and falling off the bone delicious – so keep the damn lid on!

Serve over a bed of creamy polenta, into which you’ve slipped some butter and a good Parmigiano Reggiano, and ladle just a little of the braising liquid over the meat and polenta.

Mmmmmmm…welcome to Flavor Country!

The River Room........Part IV

2011-02-24T18:06:00.000-08:00

Mr. Green was the Chief Inspector of Food Safety for the Colorado Department of Health & Environment in the counties of Grand and Routt; if you bought food and ate it in these counties, Mr. Green was the major dude for making sure that it was fit to be consumed. Area-wise, Grand and Routt are two of the largest counties in Colorado; population-wise, they are two of the smallest. Mr. Green’s job entailed going into every commercial kitchen – restaurants, hotels, bars, grocery stores, schools, nursing homes and hospitals – and making sure that all facilities met the Colorado State Code for Food Handling, Preparation and Storage, an 86 page document that Mr. Green strongly suggested I make myself intimately familiar with if I intended to operate a restaurant in his jurisdiction. He also had responsibility for dairy farms, of which there were more than a few in Routt county, grocery stores, convenience stores, food warehouse and distribution centers – anywhere that food was grown, made, stored, handled, prepared, served, sold and eaten... Mr. Green was your Salmonella Warrior. He took his job damn seriously.

Simply put, Mr. Green had a pretty daunting job – while not hugely populated, his physical area of responsibility was massive - 4230 square miles; bad for him, but good for most of the restaurant owners, as his surprise visits were few and far between. Upon entering any small mountain burg, such as Granby, Kremmeling, or Parshall, the site of his green Mazda station wagon would get the phone trees buzzing from diner to diner. If you owned a restaurant, the mere mention of his name, let alone the actual sighting of his visage as he appeared at your doorstep, would cause your mouth to go dry, your throat to constrict and your gut to roil and rumble like the morning after the Annual Grand County Beer, Poppers & Chili Fest.

So back to our initial January 3rd phone meeting; after peppering me with the brapp-a-papp assault of necessities for legal operation of The Riverside restaurant, his tone calmed, and in fact, my quest for his sympathy seemed to have gone fulfilled.

Mr. Green relented and told me that we could operate the restaurant – today, tomorrow, whenever we chose. He would get the paperwork started for renewal of the restaurant license; all I needed to do was send a check for $150 and we’d get everything legal.

But here was the story.

Mr. Green told me that he visited Abe in September of 2007. It was the “first time in years” he’d been able to find the place open and Abe on the premises. He didn’t hide the fact that his feelings for Abe were less than fond, as I’m sure Abe was a constant foil to Mr. Green and the rules and regulations that he was sworn to enforce.

“I went through that kitchen with a fine tooth comb”, he began, “as I hadn’t been in there in a long time, and busted him on 20 things - major things. I knew there was no way he had the money to get that kitchen up to code, so I just held him to things that he and his help could fix and clean.”

“What were some of the major things?” I asked.

“I’ve already hit on a few of them with you. The biggest one is that fume hood. It’s not stainless steel and it has an old dry-powder extinguisher system that’s not only out of code, it doesn’t even work. I’ll be real surprised if you make it through your insurance inspection.”

Great to know that as well, I thought.

“What is it going to cost me to replace the fume hood?”

“Oh, I’d say installed.... you're probably looking at $50,000 - $60,000.”

I think I said something like “Holy Shit!”

Mr. Green continued “Then there is the walk-in. Sounds like your mechanical inspector caught that one; must’ve been the duct-taped box fan that got it on his radar. And the list goes on. You need to get rid of the refrigerators and freezers and replace them with commercial models. You need to get rid of every wood prep surface and replace it with stainless steel. You need a commercial dishwasher. You need to re-plumb the pipes, get some drains in the floor and put in a new grease trap. You need new walls that can be cleaned – no drywall like you’ve got now. You need to lose the old asbestos tile floor and replace it with ceramic tile. Shall I go on?”

“If you had to guess, what do you think it’s going to cost to get everything done to where it’ll pass code?” I asked, not really wanting to hear the answer.

“Conservatively, if you buy the stuff right and do a lot of the labors yourself” then a pause…..’ ”I’d say you’re looking in the neighborhood of $125,000 to $150,000.”

“Good God, there’s no way I have that kind of money.”

“I know, and I knew Abe didn’t have that kind of money. That’s why I let him off the hook on all the major things. But I told him ‘Abe, I’m not gonna make you fix all of this, but before you sell this place to someone else, you’ve got to let me know and have them get in touch with me, because they’re gonna have to fix all of this before I give ‘em a license’. And do you know what he said to me when I told him that? He said ‘Mr. Green, I have no intentions of selling The Riverside. I haven’t given the first thought to retiring.’ That’s what he told me in September. When did you approach him about buying the place?”

“It was March of 2007. But do you know when we signed the papers where there was no going back without losing our $40,000 worth of earnest money?” I asked Mr. Green. “That would have been August 30th of 2007, the month before your visit. The month before he stood there and told you he had no intention of selling the place. That lying bastard!”

(Again, caveat emptor. Abe might have been a lying bastard, but I for damn sure was a stupid one.)

So let it be known, that good old Mr. Green, the man that struck mortal fear into the meanest and toughest of Grand County restaurateurs, had a heart and a soul after all.

He could have shut Abe down years ago, but chose to leave it be. He could have shut me down immediately, but instead chose to take pity on me and leave me be. He said there were a few things I had to address immediately, the principle one being the walk-in – that as much for the energy savings it would net me (the old compressor ran 24-7 and still didn’t properly cool the walk-in) as well as the obvious health aspects of not being tempted to cook and serve the spoiled food that dwelt in the non-functional cooler. He also was adamant about the commercial dishwasher, but gave me the number of a company that rented and maintained them for $80 bucks a month. He then asked that I make an effort, year-by-year and bit-by-bit, as my funds allowed, to start replacing the old, out-of-code equipment with new stuff. He said “as long as I see continual improvement on an annual basis, you and me’ll be OK.”

Perhaps it’s like I’ve said before, God seems to have a soft spot for idiots like me and it’s apparent that Mr. Green does as well; as God, Mr. Green and hopefully now you know, you’d have to be an absolute idiot to get into the restaurant business.

To be continued.........

The River Room...........Part III

2011-02-18T15:49:00.000-08:00

Fast forward to January 3rd, 2008.

As the new owners and proprietors of The Riverside Hotel, Bar & Restaurant, we’d just enjoyed/suffered through our first week of operation. During the last week we’d experienced pulling a 9’x12’ U-Haul across an icy I-70, a major Colorado blizzard that filled our hotel and restaurant on our third night of ownership, two encounters with the otherworldly inhabitants of The Riverside and an outdoor vomiting incident that still has some of the local fauna shaking their heads in disbelief. This doesn’t even begin to cover the emotional roller coaster that we were riding, without seat belts, over the life-altering signatures that we’d just affixed to paper.

I casually noticed on the evening of December 31st 2007 that our restaurant license expired on the evening of December 31st, 2007. “Damn that Abe!”, I thought, as he’d told me the license was good until next September; in amongst all of the little ‘caveat emptors’ that I’d discovered the last few days regarding Abe and, let’s kindly refer to it as, his lack of forthrightness, this one didn’t even raise an eyebrow – just a “Damn!”

Back in Kansas City, I searched the web and made a few phone calls to find out where I needed to go and who I needed to talk to regarding renewal of the license. I finally was able to get a name and number, and I called, got his voice mail, and left my message saying something like “Mr. Green, this is Richard Paradise, new owner of The Riverside Hotel in Hot Sulphur Springs, and I’m calling to see what I need to do to get the restaurant license renewed. The man we bought the hotel from told me it was good until September of 2008, but it looks like it actually expired at the end of the year. Please call me at your earliest convenience to discuss. Thanks!”

Within the hour, Mr. Green called The Riverside – I believe my nephew Thomas, who was our cook/chef, took the call – and said something like “You will immediately and indefinitely cease operations of the restaurant, and I need you to have the new owner call me ASAP!!” Thomas casually mentioned that Mr. Green seemed just a little ‘pissed’.

So I called Mr. Green, and here’s what was discussed, to my best recollection.

“Mr. Green, I’m Richard Paradise, the new owner of The Riverside in Hot Sulphur Springs” I said proudly.

Mr. Green did not respond warmly to my proud proclamation. “Mr. Paradise, you are in violation of the law by operating your restaurant without a license. You had a list of the things that needed to be done to that kitchen before we would consider granting a new license, and you were told to contact me for an inspection when all of the items were addressed. The quickest I can get up your way to inspect is the week of the 15th, so until then, you had better not open that restaurant!”

Thomas was right; Mr. Green was pissed.

OK - so I had to take a deep breath and stop and refocus on what I had just heard. I was a little dizzy, and the surrounding world seemed to be floating away from me.

“Uh, Mr. Green,” I began “I have to plead ignorance here and say that I don’t know what items you’re talking about. I was told by Abe that his restaurant license was transferable – I know the liquor license wasn’t, but he told me the restaurant license was. I’m kind of at a loss for words right now. We just bought this hotel and I’ve got my life savings tied up in this thing, and now you’re telling me I can’t operate the restaurant? Good God, what I’m I going to do? What do I need to do?”

Mr. Green, now calmer and his demeanor noticeably changing for the better, “Are you telling me Abe didn’t go over with you what needed to be done to get that kitchen up to code?”

“No sir”, I replied. “The man that did the mechanical showed me a few small things that he said would need to be addressed, and I planned on doing those after we purchased the place. Nothing really seemed to be that big of a deal, except for I learned that the walk-in was going to cost me some money, and I’ve got a guy coming to look at that this week.”

“Well let me mention just a few things for starters. Did you get a new fume hood?”

“Uh, no. Do we need a new fume hood?”

“Damn right you do! That one’s made of galvanized metal and it has to be stainless steel. It doesn’t even have a functioning fire suppression system. How about a commercial dishwasher; did you get one of those, or do you still have the old three compartment sink in there?”

“Uh, yea, still got the sink. No dishwasher.”

“How about all of the wooden prep tables, do you still have those, or did you get stainless steel tables?”

“No stainless; still got the wood.” I said, softly. My ‘proud new owner of The Riverside’ voice had disappeared; I was now all but whispering my responses.

“Well Mr. Paradise, I’m thinking that maybe Mr. Rodriguez didn’t give you the full story about his kitchen.”

“No, Mr. Green, apparently he didn’t. I have to tell you, that I’m a little bit in a state of shock right now. Had I any idea about all of this a few months back, I can tell you that you and I would’ve never made this acquaintance. I damn sure know I wouldn’t own The Riverside right now, at least not near for what I paid.”

I have to admit, that while I was shocked – truthfully, still too shocked to be rightfully seething with anger or able to grasp the reality of what I was facing – I was also working hard to play the pity card with Mr. Green, and it seemed to be working as his tone had gone from accusatory to conciliatory. I was also cognizant enough to know that I needed every friend I could get in Grand County, and Mr. Green as a friend had to quickly become a reality, or my ass was doomed; (er, at least doomed a little quicker than when it ultimately ended up being doomed.)

To Be Continued…………..

The River Room........Part II

2011-02-10T19:00:00.000-08:00

The actual physical commercial kitchen that we inherited (purchased) from Abe was a perfect microcosm of the larger mess, in the shape of a hotel, that we purchased (inherited) from Abe. Not having any actual restaurant experience beyond dropping bucket-loads of money in them, I wasn’t savvy enough to see the pratfalls to success that were, unfortunately, the foundation of our venture; nor was the bank, and most importantly, neither was the gentleman that did the property inspection for me and the bank. He was touted as an expert in 1) old buildings and 2) commercial kitchens; when viewed in retrospect, he knew as much about commercial kitchens as I did – that kinship of ignorance equated to a tasty recipe for disaster.

In August of 2007, I flew out to Denver, and then drove to Hot Sulphur to be present at the mechanical inspection. At this point, we were still contractually able to walk away from the deal - no harm, no foul. If things were obviously askew, i.e. if there were blazing, flying, roaring red flags – red flags that someone would be looking for before throwing their life and money at a lark – we could’ve still simply said at that point ‘thanks, but no thanks.’ Anyway, I meet Mr. Inspector on a sunny Saturday, and he takes me on a tour of the physical being that is The Riverside Hotel. I’ll skip the discussion of the roof, the foundation, the crawl spaces, etc., and jump right to his assessment of the commercial kitchen – his advertised area of expertise.

“All in all” he began, “the kitchen and the equipment are in decent shape, considering their age. Let me show you a few things that you’ll need to address for the Health Department. See this gap on this (food prep) table? Food particles can collect in that and it’ll be a trap for bacteria. There are four or five of those in here that need to be covered up. Here’s another one. See?”

Didn’t seem like too big a deal; get a little silicone, a spatula and ‘presto’, no more little bacteria farms. He continued:

“One thing you’ll have to fix pretty quickly is this fluorescent light fixture. First off, the bulbs can’t be exposed like they are – they could break and send glass bits shooting all over the kitchen; definitely bad for business if people have glass in their food.”

(I stood in awe while listening to this expert assessment.)

“Plus, the grease on those bulbs has caught all those little bugs – again, you don’t want those gnats falling off those exposed bulbs and ending up on dinner plates. I’d get a new compliant fixture first chance you get.”

(I hastily took notes – no glass in the food or bugs on the plates. This info was killer to a novice such as me.)

Next he went to the equipment. “The stove works fine, again, considering its age; all of the burners work and both of the ovens. It’s missing a knob here, but you should be able to find a replacement pretty easily.”

“Fume hood works fine” he said, as he flicked the switch and the blower motor creaked to a rolling crescendo.

“Here’s the ice machine”, as he opened the door and showed me copious amounts of crystal-clear ice cubes. “No worries.”

Then, “three stainless steel dish sinks; everything drains and flows nicely.”

Good, I thought. Draining and flowing is good.

“Now I have to show you a few areas of concern that I have with the walk-in (cooler).”

I’d been in The Riverside kitchen maybe a dozen times to that point, but I never knew that that there was a walk-in cooler in the back room.

“Cool”, I thought. Then I saw the cooler.

Outside of the cooler, perched upon an 18” square platform that was precariously affixed to the wall was a black machiney-looking thing, with a little motor, a small tank and coils that looked a little like a mini-distillery; in total, it was a mechanical contraption that Tom Edison would have regarded as primitive.

Pointing at this little humming conundrum, Mr. Inspector said “this is the compressor. It’s on its last leg and will have to be replaced. I’m actually amazed that it runs and cools at all.”

He then opened the cooler door and said “you won’t believe this!”

To those of you who don’t know anything about refrigeration – I was you at that point – on the opposite end of a compressor there would be a condenser, with cooling coils and a blower to disperse the cold air about the space. In reality, suspended from the ceiling of the walk-in, there was a condenser, resting on a rotted piece of plywood which was affixed to the ceiling by pieces of cheap, electrical flex conduit. The cooling coils – picture a small car radiator with frost all over it – were fronted by a $10 box fan that was attached to the whole Goldbergian contraption with 100 yards of the finest duct tape. A continuous drip of water from the condenser found purchase in a massive pot situated beneath it on the floor; there was science project fungi floating in that pot. I shit you not.

“Oh my!” said I. “Is this up to code?”

“Not hardly!” said our commercial kitchen expert. “You’re looking at a few grand to get this whole thing up to snuff. Plus, you’ve got a few more of those bacteria catchers in the gaps between the floor tiles and the walls that you’ll need to caulk. I’m guessing you’re looking at $3000 - $5000 to get this up to code.”

“Wow!” I thought. ‘I didn’t even know that there was a walk-in cooler, let alone a walk-in cooler whose main functional attributes would have been a hysterical stand-up routine at a refrigeration specialist’s annual award banquet.’

So there I was, standing in this commercial kitchen, with a commercial kitchen expert, on a beautiful August day in the mountains of Colorado. I was looking at, ....what... not much bad shit... really? Some silicone caulk, a new $30 fluorescent light fixture and maybe $3000 - $5000 to get the walk-in up to shape.

"That’s it???"

"Geez, I’d have thought it to be much worse. Lucky me!"

To be continued…….

The River Room........Part I

2011-01-09T19:43:00.000-08:00

Over the course of the next five or six chapters, I will attempt to tell but a small part of the heaven and hell of thrusting one's novice-ass self into the restaurant business. Those with similar aspirations, pay heed.

..--------------------------------..

I like to cook - a lot. I like to cook for family, for friends, for holidays, for relaxation, for fun, for serious and mostly, for myself, as like all cooks, eating and enjoying what you cook is at the end of what it’s all about. Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years got to be where they weren’t about anything more important than opportunities to showcase my culinary skills to an adoring, friendly and mostly familial, kept crowd.

There are millions of us out there who share this passion for cooking, and most of us are smart enough to understand the chasm-atic delineation between farting around in your home kitchen and cooking in a commercial endeavor. The ones that aren’t smart enough end up borrowing money from banks, friends, family and personal savings to learn that difference after they’re about three-quarters of the way from going tits-up in the restaurant business.

Never did the original plans for buying The Riverside include me being the chef and cooking for a paying crowd. I knew that putting out a Thanksgiving feed for 25 family members wasn’t the same as consistently and competently dishing out six to eight different menu items to a busy 40-seat restaurant. What I felt I did have was a vision for what a good restaurant was supposed to be, what type of atmosphere and service would make people feel special, and what type of food our patrons would find appealing. I felt I knew this because of my prior experience of traveling the country and eating in literally thousands of restaurants – from local diner ‘meat & threes’ in Dangerfield, TX and duck blood soup-serving Croatian buffets in Cleveland, OH, to some of the finest and most famous restaurants in California, New York and everywhere in between. I shudder, and am a bit ashamed of myself, when I begin to calculate the amount of money I’ve spent dining out both for business and personal meals; I could feed a lot of hungry people well with the gratuities alone.

The River Room Restaurant in The Riverside was added to the west side of the building in 1971. It is 40’ long and 14’ wide, with 14 tables that seat 42 diners. There are five tables that seat two diners – two-tops, in restaurant lingo – that run along the western wall; all have excellent views of the Colorado river, Mt. Bross and the more than occasional spectacular sunsets. The room was impeccably decorated by Julie, always changing with the seasons, with fresh flowers on the table in the summer or small artfully-arranged centerpieces the other 11 non-summer months. There is a wood burning stove in the middle of the room that is no longer used, serving now as a substrate upon which faux greenery and twinkling lights have found purchase. The soft visual experience is topped off by an aural delight, that of the lilting strains of carefully selected classical music (with an occasional show tune – those Grand County cowboys are crazy for show tunes) gently floating through the air.

The previous owner didn’t build the room, having purchased The Riverside in 1980, but he did have the vision to make it into a one-of-a-kind, white table-cloth, elegant dining room; the kind of place that you know the second you enter, it’s not a place where you’ve come for a $7.00 burger in your camos. In fact, if you walk in clad in camos, if you’re the kind of patron we’re targeting, you’re saying, “Oh shit, I’ve got camos on, and even though I’m in Grand County where camos are at the high end of the sartorial ladder, this is not a camos kind of place.” You make amends for the fact that you’re ill clad by sitting down, ordering a $9.00 martini, a $24.00 Rib-Eye, and now acting, that in spite of your outlandish, but geographically proper garb, you belong in this place.

It was The River Room that made me fall in love with The Riverside. My best memories as a customer involved long dinners with family and friends during our holiday visits, the snow gently falling outside on the frozen river, while we sat safe and warm, and more often than not just a little inebriated, talking, laughing and whetting our appetites while waiting for the sumptuous feast that Jamie, Abe’s cook, was preparing. (Sumptuous, at least, when compared to the other fine dining establishments in Hot Sulphur Springs.......of which there were none.)

After every Christmas visit to The Riverside, on the subsequent ride home to Kansas, Julie and I would discuss the dream of what we, as owners, would do to make this wonderful place….more wonderful. The excited chatter of “why doesn’t Abe do this?” and “if we owned it, we’d do that” made the bleak, frozen, unappealing vistas of eastern Colorado and western Kansas, combined with the rote yardstick that is I-70, glide quickly by as we headed back to the New Year and the resumption of our daily grind. That distillation of the warm post-holiday/vacation feelings of staying in an out of the way wintery haven, fresh with memories of good friends, family and food, topped off by 10 hours in a car spent upon reflection of good and introspection of what could be, distilled the fuel for the engine that ultimately drove us to Hot Sulphur Springs and The Riverside.

Unfortunately, all of this windshield time happened before IPods were invented.

To be continued............

Prime Rib for Vegans

2010-12-24T07:15:00.000-08:00

As we approach our first Christmas season in Mississippi, I’m finding myself with just a tinge of nostalgia for winter in the mountains. Well, maybe half a tinge. It’s warm down here; warm unlike any Christmas I’ve ever experienced. One thing you could count on in the mountains was snow and cold temperatures at Christmas; for that matter, you could count on snow and cold in July. While it will take some adjustment getting used to a sunny, 74 F day on the winter solstice, I’m confident that I’ll be able to deal with it in time.

One constant with Christmas and me, be it in Mississippi, Hot Sulphur Springs or Shawnee, KS, is the art of the feast. The menu has been unchanged for years – a standing rib roast on Christmas Eve, and Thanksgiving dinner redux on Christmas night. The standing rib roast recipe was handed down by my father, and all of the prime ribs made at The Riverside were prepared in this fashion. Prime Rib was our standard offering on all of our holiday and special event meals – New Years Eve, Valentine’s Day, wedding meals and large group dinners.

As this crust bakes and mingles with the marbled fat exterior of the roast, it takes on a life of its own, almost eclipsing the flavor and splendor of the smoky beef; kind of like finding cash inside of a gold nugget. By last count, I swear to God, we had eight, full bore, dining room conversions of vegans jumping ship as they rediscovered the wonders of carnivorousness. It brought tears to my eyes watching the color return to the cheeks, while smiles returned to the faces of these ill-humored, wan, sallow jicama junkies as they scarfed down these blood rare bits of roasted goodness, shouting “Amen Brother!” and “Hallelujah Sweet Jesus but this is tasty!” between mouthfuls.

Serves 8 (or 4 reformed vegans)

1 – 4 bone Prime Rib roast (6-7 pounds)
½ cup Dijon mustard
½ stick unsalted butter
6 cups non-seasoned bread crumbs
8 cloves finely minced garlic
1 cup finely shredded Parmigiano Reggiano
3-4 healthy sprigs of fresh rosemary leaves, finely chopped
½ cup Kosher salt
¼ cup freshly ground coarse pepper

Melt the butter in a saucepan and whisk together with the Dijon Mustard. Using a pastry brush, literally paint the exterior of the roast with the mixture until all is covered.

Mix all of the remaining ingredients in a large dish, and roll the coated roast in the mixture until all is covered. This can be done early in the day, storing the roast uncovered in the refrigerator. (The ‘store in the refrigerator’ part wasn’t necessary at The Riverside, as room temperature was typically in the low 40’s.)

Preheat oven to 475F. Put the roast on a V-shaped roasting rack (they sell these at Wal-Mart for 6 bucks) and put it in the oven for 20 minutes – this will sear and crunchify the crust.

Reduce the heat to 275F and slowly roast until the internal temperature hits 125F – that’s the high side of rare. Remove the roast, tent with foil and let rest for 30 minutes. The roast will still be cooking, and the internal temperature should get to 135F – medium rare – at the end of the resting period.

Slice, serve, stand back and watch, whilst even the most strident of the anti-red meat crowd quiver in anticipation, before caving and succumbing to that which must be enjoyed.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and all the best for 2011!

Friday the 13th......The Final Chapter : Fin

2010-12-03T14:36:00.001-08:00

Our two-year story of Living Life Riverside is a classic comic-tragedy; the last seven installments of this blog detailed the tragic side of the story. Yet, I reported this side of the story at the end of the ordeal, in retrospect, after the building burned down and all that was left was to sift through the ashes (metaphorically speaking). Truth be known, beyond the dread, the vomit and the immediate buyer’s remorse, my first experiences of The Riverside were filled with hope and excitement. If you were to go back and read this blog from the beginning, you’d find that I was reporting our life from a state of awe and wonderment; always at the ready for what great things awaited us – no hint in my writing or mood of despair or failure. While I knew at the start that this was going to be an uphill climb, with a potential quick slide into financial hell were we unable to reach the apex, I had no choice but to cheerfully continue that climb. I had terrific experiences with people that still bring tears to my eyes; once in a lifetime experiences that continually reminded us why we chucked it all to risk everything and do what we did. Those memories will always be there for me, and they will one day hopefully overwhelm the reality of the financial ugliness.

I’m often asked if I have regrets.

Knowing what I know now???

Hell yes!! I have regrets. There isn’t one thing about this experience I don’t regret. Daily! Hourly!

“Well”, people say, “you can check that off your bucket list.”

Dear God, if only I could do it over and have it eternally on my bucket list. The pain of wishing you could do it and not having done it has to be miniscule in comparison to the pain of having actually done it and having that experience bludgeon you to death.

I beg of you, please consult with me if owning a bar, restaurant or B&B is on your bucket list.

Many have lauded us for simply trying. While I truly appreciate the lauding, the folks at WalMart don’t yet accept lauds in lieu of cash when purchasing Cheetos and Little Debbie Nutty Bars. The truth be known, I wish I was being lauded for showing restraint and sticking with the dull but ‘sure thing’ corporate gig. While I wouldn’t have the memories of charming Hot Sulphur Springs, $750/month water bills and all of the wonderful people we met the past two years (“Yuk! Clean it up!”, “Dog attack at the Riverside!”), I would instead have memories of fabulous meals in Paris, quaffing fine wines in Verona and most importantly, memories of quarterly meetings with my financial advisor.

But alas, I opted for that bucket list thing. And I blame nothing, or no one, but myself.

I do know that we bought an old hotel, an icon in the area and an important slice of history in Grand County, and for two years, we made it a warm and shining place in a cold, desolate outpost. We welcomed strangers who left as friends. We entertained guests from all over the world who hugged us as family when they departed. I truly believe that we brought new life to a dying town and county, if only for a short while.

While there were many wonderful guests and moments, there was a particular guest and moment that still makes me think that our adventure wasn’t a total failure. A delightful German couple stopped in one summer afternoon looking for a room for the evening; they ended up staying with us for four nights. The husband played first chair French horn with the Frankfurt Symphony Orchestra - a gentle man of class, culture and great elegance; he’d traveled throughout the world as a professional musician, and was in the midst of a month long ramble throughout the United States as a prelude to a two year resident teaching position in China. During their last evening with us, while dining in the restaurant, I stopped by the table to ask about their dinner. The man’s eyes were closed and his hands were clasped, as if he was praying, but the meal was over. He looked up at me and said “Everything is perfect. The beer and the food were wonderful, this room is wonderful, and you are playing Schumann’s Fourth Symphony. I can’t believe I am here in this place listening to Schumann. This is Allesklarbeidir. I know you’re not familiar with that word, but it is a German word that is even hard for me to explain the meaning, because I don’t know of the English word that exists to describe the meaning of the word, but I will try. I think a literal translation in English is the word ‘adore’, but you would never use this word to say you adore something in the German language, as it goes far beyond adoring something. And this is not a word that is used lightly, as very seldom do you experience the feeling of Allesklarbeidir. It describes an internal feeling that you have of total comfort and wellness, a feeling you have when you are wholly in love and at peace with all of your surroundings. It is a warm feeling, a feeling of quiet joy. I have that feeling, now, in this place of yours’.”

At that moment, the feeling was mutual.

...................................................

After I assume room temperature and should my life ever be examined by someone other than creditors, I’m hoping that it will be discussed by close friends at a nice bar; one that pours a good drink, as we did at The Riverside. I’m certain that after the cussing and discussing, all will agree that if I did nothing else, my greatest accomplishment in this life was that my follies were occasionally capable of inducing a feeling of Allesklarbeidir and my failures did well to serve as a warning to others.

I am at peace with my fuck-up.

It ain’t cancer.

May God continue to bless us all……

Friday the 13th...The Final Chapter / Part VII

2010-11-18T16:59:00.000-08:00

Note: I'll apologize in advance for the F-bomb contained in the following entry. But really, there is no other applicable word.

The auction was held as scheduled and after numerous unanswered emails and phone calls, two weeks later I finally made contact with the auctioneer, who reported that the sale of the kitchen equipment (which we didn’t own) and the beds and remaining few personal items that we did own, netted us around $5000. He then asked where I would like the proceeds mailed, and said he’d get me a check. That was three months ago, and as of this writing, I’ve not received a penny.

Many of you might find it hard to believe that someone would, essentially, steal (auction) your belongings in broad daylight as you stand by and watch and then thumb their nose at you when reproached. It used to be hard for me to fathom the notion that people can be so blatantly dishonest, but my Colorado experience has shown me that no matter how solid, legal and on the up-and-up people and professions may appear, the reality is that thieves, cheats, liars and crooks can mask themselves with legitimate facades and walk and operate openly among us, and more often than not, with total impunity. Certainly I’m not inferring that this sort of behavior is peculiar to Colorado; it just happened to be in Colorado that I put myself in such a position of vulnerability as to be exposed to the predators that are licensed to prey and kill, and then next, be fodder to the vultures who feast upon the remains. Needless to say, this newly found knowledge and experience has hardened me a tad, as it is no longer elementary to my nature to give people the benefit of the doubt; ‘tis indeed a shame.

Friday, August 13th, 2010, 10:00 AM MST came and went without a whisper. It was the day after my 54th birthday, and a normal day at the office for me in Jackson, MS. I didn’t mark the minute, or even recognize until an hour later when it dawned on me that the foreclosure had occurred; no tremor in the force such as Obi-Wan Kenobi felt when Alderaan blew up. It just came and went; I didn’t feel sad, happy, relieved, depressed, jubilant or defeated, broker or richer. I think the fact that I’d been physically removed from The Riverside and Grand County for so long helped to ease the suffering, and it shook me to imagine the suffering I would have endured had I no place else to go, having had to stand my ground in Colorado and bear witness to the process to which I’d just been subjected. It was also important for our general health and well being that we so resolutely decided back in March to walk away from the venture, to quickly shed the pain of the struggle, the failure and the loss, and begin life anew in another locale. As someone on Madison Avenue so succinctly put it, “know when to say when”; I strongly suggest to one and all, when the opportunity/need arises, take heed in those words.

It’s easy to be philosophical and wax poetic about the laws of physics after you’ve been run over by a truck and survived. I can look back now and see with clarity the red flags that prior were obfuscated by my desire to live, what I thought at the time was, my dream job in my dream locale. The truth of the matter is that the night we signed the papers to purchase the hotel, December 27th, 2007, I had such an immediate, overwhelming feeling of dread and remorse that I literally became physically ill. My first night sleeping in the hotel and the new life that we’d just mortgaged our souls to obtain, I awoke at 3 or 4 in the morning with a high fever, bone-rattling chills and a bout of overwhelming nausea. Perhaps a nasty dose of altitude sickness for this unsuspecting heretofore flatlander? I think not, rather, a severe physical reaction to the notion that I’d just done something fatally stupid and irresponsible.

For a fact, the body’s natural defenses to illness can quickly break down when exposed to a severe stress, becoming impotent to the onslaught of a phantom virus seeking harbor in a fertile port which lacks the will or resistance to send it packing. If stress was luck, I had a boatload of it that night, enough so that there wasn’t a lottery that was safe from me the night of December 27th had I a free dollar left to play, and to wit, that transient virus found solid purchase upon my stressed-ridden body.

I made it through that miserable night, but midway through the next morning, I walked out of the hotel into a frigid day, a bright sun in an emerald sky and headed west down Grand Street, to stagger across the bridge over the Colorado River and walk through waist-deep snow on to the isolated western riverbank until I was out of sight and sound of the hotel and any human who might be wandering by, and I vomited from the very depths of my person, profoundly, loudly and violently.

As I trudged back to the hotel through the waist-deep snow and bitter cold that I realized was not just a winter vacation accoutrement but now a part of my day to day existence, the gut-wrenching nausea was gone, but the feeling of dread persisted. As forcefully as I had expunged the bug that had so quickly invaded me and rendered me a staggering, vomiting slug, I knew that the real source of my heartburn was yet eternal within me, both physically and mentally. Once back at the hotel, a hard look at the man in the mirror and a subsequent discussion with same found that we were both in agreement; buddy, you fucked up bad: HUGE – BIG TIME.

This was within 24 hours of our ownership of The Riverside Hotel. Talk about your classic case of buyer’s remorse.

To be concluded.......

Friday the 13th......The Final Chapter/Part VI

2010-11-10T15:04:00.000-08:00

No sooner had the auction been advertised throughout Grand County and on the auctioneers website, than the emails from the bank & the SBA’s attorneys started flying – not directly to me of course, but to my designated $300/hr legal counsel. The auction was advertised as a ‘Foreclosure Sale’, giving the public the opportunity to snatch up countless bargains on priceless antiques; antiques that were advertised as having had inhabited The Riverside since the turn of the century. There were pictures of 30+ pieces of dressers, armoires, tables, chairs, ornate clocks, beautiful wooden bed frames, and so on; both of the attorneys claimed that all of these pieces were part of the property, germane to the operation of the business and needed to remain at The Riverside. There was also the SBA’s assertion that due to provisions in our loan, they had a security interest the items; they were in fact encumbered. And as for that Brunswick Bar, it took less than 24 hours after hearing from Billy Banker “it’s theirs if they can haul it out of there” for someone at Grand County Bank to wise him up on the value of the bar, at which point he, uh, reneged on his generous offer. I imagine the real scenario involved one of the cowboy bankers on the bank’s Board having found just the spot for that old bar in his $1,000,000 log home on the 14th fairway of Pole Creek Golf Course.

However, there was one small issue that these lawyers failed to consider before raising the hackles on their clients back to the point where they were asked to write expensive emails to my lawyer. Not one of the items advertised in the auction preview was at The Riverside – they belonged to the auctioneer, who intended to cart them from Denver to Hot Sulphur for sale, using The Riverside as nothing more than a vessel to give what weren’t probably genuine antiques in the first place a needed air of authenticity. Trust me; other than the Brunswick Bar, Abe left nothing of value at The Riverside after selling us the hotel and certainly not a valuable ‘antique anything’ that he could have otherwise carted off.

Back and forth, the emails went between the SBA, the bank and my attorney regarding this auction that was to be held for items that didn’t belong to any of the participants. The SBA attorney was including terms such as “in violation of the law” and “punishable by fines, imprisonment or both”; I just wanted to sell the beds we bought for the hotel, not rip the tags off of them. What we were talking about selling in the auction that did belong to us – remember, most all of value that we had left behind had already been pilfered – were principally the 14 primo queen beds that we’d purchased for the hotel, and are still technically paying for on our Master Card. I sat back, helplessly, as I watched one email after the other fly back and forth between my attorney and the attorneys for Grand County Bank and the SBA, all the while envisioning the dollar signs mounting into an ever burgeoning pile.

Finally, at about 10:00 PM that evening after the umpteenth email, I could stand the legal raping and pillaging no longer. I sent all three attorneys the following email; I won’t deny that alcohol might have helped fuel this rant.

Gentlemen: Re the auction of assets.

We're talking about selling some beds, beds that I'm still paying for on my Master Card, that were purchased after the 2007, bifurcated, 504, blah, blah, blah screw job loan that I signed without the aid of counsel. The auction company that we hired (after being given the OK by the bank to auction the furnishings) is bringing onto the site numerous items that are their property to sell, and using the old hotel as nothing but a backdrop for the sale of these antiques. Pay Attention - the items being auctioned are not the property of your client, the bank, or either of my LLC's, and are not subject to your lein, or were ever previously at The Riverside; they are being trucked up from Denver to be sold at the site.
Mr Jones (a fictitious name for the SBA lawyer), you say your client is now willing to discuss the ramifications of the bifurcated 504 loan application with me - too late. A representative of your client, Suzy SBA, did not answer 20+ calls, nor respond to any of the 20+ voicemails I left for her, placed between December 1st, 2009, and February 1st, 2010, to discuss her promised 6-month payment deferment due to my hardship. After Grand County Bank (GCB) declared the loan in default in early February, and I did finally get to speak with your client, Ms. Suzy, she rather sheepishly informed me that she was instructed by both Billy & Betty Banker @ GCB, not to return my calls and discuss my situation. I'm guessing the SBA deferral would have interfered with the banks plans to foreclose on the loan and get their guaranteed SBA paycheck.

My wife and I have left our $XXX worth of life’s savings in Colorado at The Riverside. We were trying to sell a few thousand dollars worth of personal effects to defray credit card debts - now it will be used to pay for expensive emails sent by lawyers. I don't know the definition of a bifurcated loan, but I do know the definition of carrion – that’s all that I have left for the bankers and the lawyers.

Mr. Jones, you threaten to come after my assets if we sell our personal items out of The Riverside; good luck with that, as I have no assets for you or anyone to come after. I'm broke! I live in a shitty little rental house in Mississippi, living paycheck to paycheck, and as of this writing, I have $242 in my bank account to get me to my next end-of-the-month payday. Had your client and GCB been as open, honest and diligent about the X's & O's of loaning money as they are about collecting it, neither of us would be in our current situation.

You can have the money from the sale of the beds. May you all sleep well.

That stopped the emails.

To be continued....

Friday the 13th...The Final Chapter / Part V

2010-11-01T18:23:00.000-07:00

The deeper we went into the summer of our fiscal discontent, the more it became apparent that I was going to have to go back to work full time, way sooner than I had imagined; I was going to need every penny I could muster to help keep the sinking ship afloat. The plan involved me moving back to Kansas City, living in our unsold house and working at my old KC office. When our KC house sold, I’d move to an apartment in Jackson, and Julie would join me when the hotel sold. This solution to our problem, which involved living apart, was beyond distasteful to us, but there was really no other available alternative. We felt in our hearts that someone would come along and buy the place within the next two years, and with my job, Julie getting a job and the help of the bank in refinancing the loan (Not!), we’d be able to hang on long enough to sell.

After the Labor Day holiday weekend – the final thud to the summer from a revenue perspective – I packed some clothes, a few personal effects, a picture of Lucy and my fishing rods, and headed back to the old homestead in KC. As luck would have it (or perhaps by dropping our asking price by 30%), we had two offers on the house after two days on the market, and quickly selected what seemed the better of the two. This didn’t come without some wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth, as even though the house was now priced considerably below its appraised value, it was, after all, still a buyers market. To ultimately close the deal, we had to put in four new windows, a new furnace, cut down a tree, paint some trim, fix part of the roof and throw in the brand new washer and dryer we’d just purchased. No hard feelings though, I wish the buyers well; and may they have all of their toilets simultaneously clog while prepping for their joint colostomy procedure!

The rest of the story has been told, including most importantly the bank and the SBA’s nefarious dealings, and we can fast forward to closing down the hotel, Julie moving to join me in Mississippi and me trying to get out of our ownership position with grace, notwithstanding already having had our financial asses handed to us.

On June 15th, 2010, I received a letter sent regular mail from the Grand County Treasurer. It stated, that “on August 13th, 2010, at 10:00 AM MST, on the steps of the Grand County Courthouse, the dwelling and real estate that is comprised of Plat # 23, 509 Grand Street, Longitude 32, Latitude 44, yadda yadda yadda....will be sold at public auction.”

So this is what our dream had come to; it was as cold and impersonal as Grand County itself.

There was no adjoining letter from the bank, nothing from the SBA – not a phone call or email to explain, describe, question or quantify the process to which were to be subjected. I had a lot of questions, but the only person who might be able to answer them would charge me $300/hour, and to this point, I’d have had more substantive results from my dealings with the legal profession regarding The Riverside by pissing away the money that I’d already given the lawyer on lottery tickets.

I didn’t hear anything from anyone for the next few weeks, until I received a call from a friend who was watching the hotel. He was contacted by that kind banker who called me with the bad foreclosure news, asking for a tour of the hotel. I guess he wanted another look at the property that they were going to purchase and own, if only for a few weeks before the SBA purchased it from them. When we left the hotel, we left it in stellar shape – show ready condition for a sale. The only thing we took were our personal furnishings, leaving all of the furniture we acquired from Abe, as well as the bar and restaurant furniture, all of the beds and bedroom furniture, all of the kitchen equipment (which we didn’t own), our two leather sofas and my favorite rocking chair.

We hadn’t been gone a week when it was reported to us that most of the remaining furniture – certainly all of the good stuff - ended up finding its way to various residences throughout Hot Sulphur Springs. Next went most of the pictures and decorator nick-nacks; those same pictures and nick-nacks that I literally risked my life transporting one night whilst pulling a 12’x 9’ U Haul trailer over Berthoud Pass in the middle of a big ass, total white-out blizzard.

So, as the banker was touring the place, my friend apologetically explained that we had left the place in better shape than it now appeared, and we had left quit a bit of furniture that was no longer on the property, the banker said “I couldn’t care less about the furniture, I’m only interested in the real estate.” Upon hearing this, I asked my friend to clarify a few things with his contact at the bank, mainly, could we auction off what of value we’d left behind that hadn’t been absconded with by the locals, including the original Brunswick Bar? While the thought of that bar not being at The Riverside pained me – it’s been there for 100 years – the thought of maybe getting a good chunk of money for it and helping to salve a few of our financial wounds at least had to be perfunctorily examined. The answer I received back from the bank was “we’re not interested in the contents, including the bar. If they can haul it out, they can have it.”

We only had two weeks before the foreclosure, so I quickly went about trying to find an auctioneer in the Denver area who would be interested in helping us unload what was left of The Riverside, sans the real estate; and oh did I find one. My hot streak of bad decisions being buffeted by worse luck was still solidly intact. It wasn’t long before it occurred to me that the auctioneer I hired, while not coming in very high on the Google list of ‘Denver-area auctioneers’, would have been first on the list had I Googled ‘disreputable, thieving, crooked Denver-area auctioneers’.

After a brief description of the property and the limited items we had to offer, not only was the auctioneer interested in holding the auction, he was most interested in the Brunswick Bar, as he said the current demand for these is “through the roof”. He was so interested that he drove to Hot Sulphur Springs the next morning, toured the hotel, stopped at the bank to discuss the auction and had me a contract to sign by that next afternoon. Can you say it again with me, le big-time, grand drapeau rouge?

Friday the 13th...The Final Chapter / Part IV

2010-10-16T08:55:00.000-07:00

Our only possible way out of this financial doomsday was to try and sell the hotel. It had been our plan to give the hotel business at least five years, and as many as ten, at which point we’d have the business soundly established, the place refurbished, the mortgage retired, and we’d sell the joint for $2 million bucks and move on to the next phase in our lives. Can you guess how far reality has taken us away from that scenario?

Now comes proof positive that not only is there a just God, but more importantly, proof of the existence of a God that seems to have a soft spot for idiots. In April of 2009, my old employer called, out of the blue, and asked if I’d be interested in working on some special projects for them. It had been a year since I’d left their employ, and had virtually no contact with them during that time; regardless of how dire my situation had become, my last expected source of relief would have come from a company that, with no warning, I had walked out on. There were some in the organization that were upset with me for leaving; they’d had plans to promote me and move me to Jackson, MS, and my leaving put a bit of a hole in their organizational chart. I didn’t figure they’d have me back if I’d have come begging and crawling, let alone have them initiate my return; I’d have never hired me back. Wonders truly never cease, and the sun occasionally shines on the simple minded.

The offer was for me to work ‘part-time’ for as long as the next two years, during which time we would sell the hotel, and then come back to work full time; and no ifs, ands or buts, that full time thing included relocating to the corporate office in Jackson. Some might have cautioned that I play harder to get, as it was they who contacted me, and in spite of the Business Boner of the Millennium that I had committed, they still placed a value on my services. Let me tell you, I was as coy with them as a Times Square hooker; a nanosecond seems an eternity to the speed at which I accepted their generous offer. The only one who moved faster than me at accepting their largesse was Julie in pushing me to accept; I believe I still have the bruises on my shoulder blades where she pushed me.

And then came Miracle #2 – we had a buyer for the hotel. We were approached by an individual – a local – who expressed what I felt at the time was a serious and sincere interest in buying the hotel. Not only did they have the desire to own The Riverside, but I believed that they had the resources; mentions were actually made of “cashing in CD’s” to fund the purchase of the property. It was at this point that Julie and I mentally checked out as the owners and operators of The Riverside. Julie immediately went from looking online for 2nd income opportunities to looking for tony residences in Mississippi. We weren’t going to sell the hotel for that gaudy dream sum I mentioned earlier, but we were going to recoup all that we had invested into the business, and that was enough to get us out of debt and put us into a home in Jackson.

However, that “mentally checking out” thing ended up being critical towards our ultimate demise, as we would have definitely done things differently if we didn’t think (actually, we were 99% certain) that we had the place sold. I’m not saying we would have been able to salvage the place, just that we would have put time, money and resources in different areas that may have allowed us to ultimately sell the property, and at the very least, minimize some of the bleeding that ultimately occurred.

I really checked out, as I started traveling a bit for the new job in early June, leaving Julie and Rachel behind to fend for themselves. I also quit paying attention to the business side of the business, the penalty of which I would later pay for with some late, frantic nights trying to assemble for the IRS the gory financial details of a year in ruin.

In the middle of July, the buyer for the hotel swiftly, and without warning, backed out of the deal. We quickly contacted a realtor – a friend who was confident that if properly marketed, we’d be able to sell the hotel, even in the current economic climate – and officially put the hotel on the market. In the first few weeks, we had a few people kick the tires, but no serious buyers. What appeared to be our first serious prospect were a young couple who flew down from New York to look at the place – it was their dream to own a B&B in Colorado; and while they loved The Riverside, they were savvy enough (as savvy as your average 5-year old would be savvy, which is unfortunately savvier than me) to know what a tough go it would be to make a living in the out-of-the way shithole that is Hot Sulphur Springs. “Thanks, but no thanks”, they said.

Next we had a business owner from nearby Glenwood Springs, a man who’d made a good living in the construction supply business and was looking to sell that business and make a lifestyle change. (Take it from me; buying The Riverside and moving to Hot Sulphur Springs would slake the thirst of the thirstiest lifestyle changing wanna-be.) This really had me excited, as here we had an individual that was a native, already accustomed to the brutal life and winters of small town, mountainous Colorado, which was the major put-off for our heretofore interested Yankees; and more importantly, he had the money to actually make it happen. His first tour of the property had him salivating, envisioning then vocalizing the improvements he would make, including building a covered, heated deck overlooking the river, with French doors out of the dining room onto the deck. I watched with muted glee as he excitedly painted a picture of the life he was going to change and the business he was going to transform. As he left, he made arrangements to come back and spend the next weekend with his family at the hotel. I never heard from him again.

Then there was a woman from Iowa, who’d inherited a large sum of money and “really wanted to do something crazy with the rest of her life”, something I suppose that wouldn’t ultimately define her as an Iowan. It turns out she met a man from Denver, (in an ‘online’ dating forum, that sacred place where those oh-so strongest of personal bonds are formed), and he knew of The Riverside and knew with the right people running the place, they could make a go of it. He actually told our realtor that we were idiots and had no clue about what we were doing, which was why we were failing so miserably; while his assessment of us was spot on, my hurt feelings would have quickly disappeared when the check cleared. The woman was making the arrangements to visit us, and her cyber beau for the first time, when she called to ask me some questions. It was maybe a few words into the conversation when it occurred to me that if there was someone on this earth with less sense than I, she was in fact now on the other end of the phone line, in Des Moines. She told me that she was starting to have second thoughts, not so much about buying the hotel and moving to Colorado, but about her boyfriend, as in their last few discussions, he had become verbally violent and abusive towards her, and she wasn’t certain if she still wanted to include him in the venture. “Oy!” I thought. She never heard from me again.

And so went the attempted sale of The Riverside…….

Friday the 13th...The Final Chapter / Part III

2010-10-10T17:22:00.000-07:00

The previous owner of The Riverside ran a cash-only business, (I think, duh, maybe for screwing the IRA tax reasons) and therefore, kept no reliable records as to the earning potential of the hotel and restaurant; no occupancy rates, no average # of diners/month, no monthly or annual revenue figures – nothing. So not only did we quit good jobs and leave friends and family to buy a 106-year old haunted building in need of major repairs with fetid living quarters in an out-of-the-way town that smells like rotten eggs in a climate that would freeze the ass off of Nanook of the North for nine months out of the year, we also invested our life savings into the textbook definition of a financial "pig-in-the-poke".

The business plan that I developed for the bank was based upon some wild-ass guesses using formulas that involved days of operation, number of rooms, number of dining room seats, room rates per night and price of the average meal ticket, and put that against estimated monthly expenses – most of which came from Abe; no, unfortunately not Honest Abe Lincoln, but Abe Rodriguez. I conservatively figured, or so I thought at the time, that our break even point was at a 20% occupancy rate. I actually took a lot of time putting occupancy numbers together, with bell curves trending during busy seasons along with expenses, and felt that I had a pretty good grasp of things. After all, (although most who’ve read prior entries to this blog and have marveled at my lack of business acumen, nay in many instances, my lack of a single, properly functioning brain cell, will call absolute screaming BS on this) I ran a successful business for the better part of 20 years, a large part of which involved the financial management of budgets and expenses and generation of revenues. So while I was a neophyte in the hotel and restaurant business, I certainly wasn’t a neophyte in running a successful business. While The Riverside was nothing but an endless string of bad decisions, I previously had a history of making mostly good decisions; the bank relied upon that fact in buying into my 20% occupancy rate business plan, which included 5-year cash flow and pro-formas.

The first summer seemed to go pretty well, in spite of the fact that we’d done zero marketing or advertising. We ended up being at full occupancy every Saturday night from the middle of June until mid September, with numerous near sell outs throughout the weeknights. Our lunch traffic was steady to good throughout the summer, with bustling dinner business on the weekends. I was able to comfortably pay the bills, and even had the cash to make an extra mortgage payment in September. But in October and November, our business dropped like a Boulder boulder; but the expenses held steady. I started eating through our cash like a victorious football team at a post-game buffet. A decent Christmas season helped momentarily to right the ship; then came the off-season (January, February and March), followed by the dead season, or more commonly referred to as ‘mud season’, which is comprised of April, May and the first two weeks of June. I terrifically miscalculated the amount of business that was available to us during Ski season; from a lodging perspective, it was virtually non-existent, as skiers want to be on the slopes, and we were 25 miles away from Winter Park. If not for Valentines Day weekend and a couple of group events, our first full winter would have been disastrous. It was in March that I went to the bank for that promised line-of-credit that was ultimately denied; if not for me raiding my 401k, we wouldn’t have made it to our second summer season.

We shut the hotel down in mid-April after an Easter Sunday brunch and headed to KC for a few weeks. We still had our unsold, unoccupied home in KC that we were making payments on – a situation that never even in my ‘worst case scenario’ plan occurred to me when we packed up in June of 2008 and headed west; not only was I not budgeting in a house payment, I had budgeted in the income from the quick sale of that house at pre-depression real estate values.

There was another nasty little ‘what if?’ that I missed when I was running the business plan numbers on this venture that was now strangling us to a slow, very intense fiscal death – the depression. While I now have profound doubts about our ability to have been successful at The Riverside in a robust economy, I for damn sure know the current state of the economy didn’t do anything but hurt our situation. As bad as things are nationally, they’re far worse in Grand County, CO, with the hub of the pain and suffering being centered in Hot Sulphur Springs – the county seat. The whole raison d’être behind Grand County, CO is tourism, and tourism is fueled by discretionary spending and discretionary spending is the first thing to dry up in a depressed economy.

The difference between our first summer (economy still robust) and our second summer (economy in the toilet) was profound and immediately discernable. Our bustling lunch business of 2008 disappeared in the summer of 2009; on many days not a single soul walked through the door, but a cook was paid and the prepped food went to waste. It was a slow, agonizing financial death; by August I’d sent home all of the peripheral help, and it was down to Julie, our cook and me to handle all of the chores. I had way too much 10:00 AM – 2:00 PM empty lunch time, listening to the dining room playlists and reading books, whilst sitting, hoping and praying that a customer would walk through the door; not one second of it was relaxing or enjoyable.

Our 2009 pre-season hotel room bookings were non-existent and the Saturday afternoon walk-in crowd of 2008 that filled the hotel every single weekend was hunkered down someplace else. Business was in the toilet but the fixed expenses were still in the penthouse.

We were bleeding, we were dying, and the coffers were bare….

Friday the 13th...The Final Chapter / Part II

2010-09-16T19:20:00.000-07:00

Our first six months of operation were not indicative of the financial struggles that lay ahead. First of all, Julie and I weren’t there to experience the experience; rather, we were relying on three un-supervised inn-keeping novices under the age of 25 to manage our life savings. The business still had a decent amount of money in the bank, and Julie and I both still had jobs and incomes. I’d sit down monthly to pay bills and payroll for the distant business without feeling much of a sting; I went along as happily as if I had good sense.

Things started to get a little hinky when we hired the previously-mentioned bar-tender/building contractor to redo our living quarters. Again, this was an instance of me ignoring the fact that I was all but being beat to within an inch of my life by red flags, as prior to engaging Irish Car Bomb Bob the Builder to tackle the big job of renovating our quarters, I hired him to redo our walk-in cooler that the State Department of Health mandated be redone. That job went 40% over budget and took two weeks longer to complete than promised; yet armed with this knowledge, I went ahead and rehired Farson & McBytemee for the living quarters. Their proposal seemed sound, and while at the high end of what we could afford, the numbers still fell within my worst-case budget for the project. There was one important little fact that the contractors held from us in their proposal; a fact that would play heavily into the project taking five weeks longer to complete than promised.

In fact, Farson & McBytemee, while tackling the Riverside renovation, were also in the midst of building a competing bar and restaurant in neighboring Tabernash, CO – their bar and restaurant. The plan was for them to have their place, The Tabernash Tavern, open by Memorial Day weekend, 2008 – the same Memorial Day weekend that Julie and I had intended to take up residence in our new living quarters, so we could manage our first, busy, sold out holiday weekend on site. This didn’t happen, as I’m strongly supposing that any extra of F&McB’s workers, time and efforts went to meet their restaurants deadlines; the fact that July 4th was the first night we were able to spend in our bedroom tells me my supposition is more than just such. I wouldn’t dare either insinuate that the 25% overage they hit us with in labor and materials would have been due to any bad accounting or misallocated costs from their restaurant project. Why, only a thief or a crook would do something like that, and there certainly weren’t any of those in Grand County that hadn’t already been signed on to work at the local bank.

That first night sleeping in our new bedroom opened my eyes to another issue that I’d never considered before buying a hotel, bar and restaurant, and had I considered it and given it the necessary due diligence, no way would I have pulled the trigger on the purchase; that issue was vomit. Those that know me well know that I would rather face a pack of hungry lions while wearing rib-eye underwear than deal with vomit; the only possible thing worse than dealing with a vomiting human would be dealing with a vomiting tarantula. Oh Lord, let us not go there.

The restaurant was busy, and the hotel was sold out on this Grand County 4th of July night. Fortunately all of the diners and hotel guests ate early, and all but one couple departed for the fireworks extravaganza at Grand Lake – a good 45 minute drive from the Riverside. This would be the first time since moving to the hotel 10 days earlier that I would be able to sit quietly in the lobby and enjoy a cocktail in peace, as the couple that remained went quietly to their room. They were the last to check in that evening, not having a reservation and taking our only available room. When I was showing the gentleman the room, he asked if we had an elevator, as he told me his wife wasn’t in good shape and would be unable to go up and down the steps. When I said no, I felt certain that he would leave and I wouldn’t see any more of him; but I was wrong. A few minutes later, his wife and he were standing in the lobby, asking to check in; they’d flown to Denver from Kentucky that morning, driven through Rocky Mountain National Park, over the 11,000 foot summit of Trail Ridge Road, and were hungry, tired and ready to settle in, stairs or no stairs. His wife, who was 60-ish and not able to wear slim dresses, felt that she could make it up and down the stairs, although she was admittedly having a difficult time breathing, she felt, due to the altitude. She had me just a little worried.

Our visitors from Kentucky were the last to be seated for dinner, and after getting over the crankiness that often comes with traveling, they seemed to begin enjoying themselves and The Riverside. The wife had our Pan-seared Scallops w/Asparagus Tips in a Buerre Blanc sauce, while the husband enjoyed Prime Rib, with both enjoying a bottle of Riesling then desserts; a $100 restaurant tab on top of an $80 room rental that I didn’t think I’d get for the evening. Off they went to bed, off everyone else went to the fireworks and off I went to my quiet lobby and cold martini. Even Julie had decided to pack it in early, anxious for a rest in our own king-size bed, a bed that had been sitting for 10 days in the unfinished bedroom of the unfinished living quarters.

I had less than an hour of uninterrupted bliss, when the guest from Kentucky appeared in the lobby with a concerned look on his face.

“Can I help you?” I asked with a smile that tried to hide what I really wanted to ask – “what in the hell are you doing down here disturbing my peace???”

“Your scallops have made my wife sick. She’s thrown up all over the bedroom. Can you call 911?”

“Oh My God!” I thought, “I forgot about vomit. How in the hell could I have forgotten about vomit? Who in the hell is going to clean up the vomit?? There’s no way I can clean up the vomit! I doubt I’ll ever even be able to go upstairs again, let alone clean up the damn vomit!”

“You’re serious?” I asked. “You really need me to call 911? I mean, the vomit is about the worst thing that could have happened at this point in my life, but I don’t need 911!”

So I called 911, which will have to come from Granby, some 14 miles away. I stand out in front of the hotel, waiting anxiously for help, hoping the lady doesn’t die in our hotel, but more importantly hoping that she’ll be well enough to help clean up her vomit.

Within 15 minutes that seemed like the proverbial eternity, the ambulance showed and I pointed the Paramedics in the direction of the vomit-filled room. A few minutes later, the two male Paramedics, (there was a third female Paramedic), came down to retrieve the stretcher.

“How is she” I asked.

“Severe altitude sickness”, one answered, “a really bad idea for someone her age, in her shape, to come from sea level to 11,000 feet in an 8-hour period.”

“How bad is the room” I asked, cognitive of my being polite to ask first about the lady before asking about what really concerned me.

“Pretty bad” was the answer.

Pretty bad!!! These guys are used to dealing with all sorts of nasty stuff, and he said ‘Pretty bad’. Oh my God, what awfulness awaits me?

It was another 30 minutes before the ambulance crew started to traverse the stairs with the stretcher that contained our guest. It’s work to slither up and down those stairs with a box of donuts; imagine transporting a human cargo on a 7’, wheeled gurney. My hat’s still off to those dudes, who were making something that I would have considered impossible look easy. Our guest didn’t look well; she was pale, sweating and strapped to the gurney with much needed oxygen being tubed to her nostrils. She gave me a sad look, a faint wave and mouthed “I’m sorry!” I know she felt sick, and worse, badly for me and the situation.

By this time, guests had begun to return from the fireworks and were milling around the front of the darkened hotel. Off went the ambulance, followed by her husband in their rented Ford Taurus; that being followed by $180 that went unpaid for the room and the dinner, half of the latter of which was left behind in the ‘Linda’ room.

When I finished dealing with the guests and locking the place down, and thanking my darling daughter Rachel, to whom I will forever be eternally grateful to for her courage in cleaning up the vomit, I went back to spend my first night in my old bed in my new room. I belive it was 2 AM.

Julie awoke from a deep sleep, to mumble/ask, “how’d things go?”

“Before or after the ambulance left?”

To be continued………..

Friday the 13th.........The Final Chapter

2010-09-09T19:45:00.000-07:00

No, this isn’t another Riverside ghost story, but it is for damn sure a horror story. And as for the ‘Final Chapter’, is it the end of the blog?

Maybe….

There are still untold stories – some really, really good untold stories. I’ve yet to tell the story of the previous owner, and that is one humdinger of a story. There are other stories, partly written, about other characters and events that need to be told; but I want to make certain that we’ve been totally immersed into the Mississippi Witness Protection Program, with the requisite assumed identities, before exposing all of the juicy details of the people we encountered and events that occurred during our two year fling in the mountains.

No, these untold stories will be for the book. Let’s face it. I was foolish enough to think that I could chuck it all and make a go of it in the mountains of Grand County, CO; getting a book written and published would be folderol compared to the task of paying the bills and earning a living, during a depression, in a ramshackle, haunted hotel in Hot Sulphur Springs, CO.

During our first full weekend of living at The Riverside, I received a harbinger of things to come that made my already nervous self-examination about “have we done the right thing?” look like a hungry buzzard hanging around the back door of a Kobe Beef processing plant.

A quick update; we bought the hotel on December 27th, 2007. My daughter Rachel, and two other family members, ran the place the best they could under the circumstances, until Julie and I showed up on June 25th, 2008. As I was driving into Hot Sulphur Springs on June 25th, following the jack-leg moving company that I hired on the cheap, I took a deep breath and drank in the moment. The sun was setting over Mt. Bross and the spacious valley that was carved by the Colorado River, the valley that is Hot Sulphur Springs; it all lay before us in spectacular fashion as we drove in for the first time as residents.

“Ahhh”, I exhaled, and said out loud to both Julie and myself, “it’s June 25th, and we’re arriving at our new home, and our new life. It’s hard to believe that we live here! Let’s never forget this date!”

No sooner were the words were out of my mouth, when my history-loving nerd-gene grabbed me by the ear in a combined Jesuit/nun-like fashion, and screamed the following at a deafening level, to which only I was privy – “JUNE 25!! YOU IDIOT!!! THAT’S THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE BATTLE OF THE LITTLE BIGHORN!! YOU KNOW, CUSTER’S LAST STAND ??!! HE WAS A FOOL, RUSHING BRAZENLY INTO THE UNKNOWN, FOR GLORY, FOR HIS EGO, AND HE WAS SLAUGHTERED ON THIS DAY, 132 YEARS AGO.BRUTALLY SLAUGHTERED, I TELL YOU! DO FOOLS NEVER LEARN FROM HISTORY???”

My history-loving nerd gene has a bit of an attitude, and typically offers me way too much information. But he often motivates me, and this is what he tossed out regarding Custer’s quest for greatness; a quote from Teddy Roosevelt that was offered in defense of Custer’s folly. I relate to it, and embrace it as an excuse for my Colorado brain fart.

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat”

The content of this fine quote gives me great comfort as I chastise and feel superior to you poor spirits, you that live in that gray twilight; you that still have your 401K’s intact in the bank.

So much for the pursuit of glory….

So back to the harbinger. Our first weekend had us hosting guests in 6 rooms, and one of the couples were old time ‘Abe’ guests, i.e. people that had stayed at The Riverside for years and knew both its charms and its foibles. They were celebrating a wedding anniversary, and were staying in the two-room suite overlooking the river; a wonderful couple who were very supportive of what we’d done to improve the hotel. They had a lovely dinner that they raved about, complete with wine and champagne, then retired to the bar for a ‘final-final’. Through bar chatter I learned that the gentleman was a Circuit Court Judge in Denver; a very distinguished, gentle, intelligent man – a man who’s opinion would hold some weight.

After I shared our story of quitting our jobs, packing it up and moving to a brave new life in the mountains, he looked at me, and earnestly said, “I really admire you for what you’ve done. You’ve done great things with this place, and I really hope that you’re able make a go of it. But I can tell you, Grand County is a damn tough place to make a living. I can only wish you the best.”

When he told me this, the economy was still robust, or as we know now in retrospect, was still robust on the surface to us idiots. The bubble had yet to burst, and this guy who dealt with the day to day reality of making a go of it in Colorado, looked me in the eye, with a face that showed genuine concern, and said “….Grand County is a damn tough place to make a living. I can only wish you the best.”

After our first weekend in our new venture, it began to occur to me that the carrion of Kobe Beef might stand a better chance against vultures, and our ultimate demise, than we.

To Be Continued…………

Chicken Spiedini for the masses

2010-08-08T19:04:00.000-07:00

I thought it only fitting that I should follow up a story about the bounteously heinous discovery in the kitchen crawl space with a recipe for one of our restaurants best selling, if not our signature, entree – Chicken Spiedini.

We brought this dish from a storied Italian eatery in Kansas City, Garozzo’s Ristorente, which built a bit of an empire on the back of this grilled, garlic-laden fowl. The first time I ate at the original location on 5th & Harrison, down near the KC City Market, the waiter suggested the Spiedini over a pasta dish I was tempted to order; I took his advice, and found that I’d never tasted anything quite like it. It was one of those seminal degustatory moments that jarred you into the realization that there was a whole culinary world beyond your mother’s meatloaf. Mr. Garozzo went on to open three more restaurants, including one in Wichita, KS, all of which were fueled by the success of his Spiedini. Chicken Spedini even wrought new, competitive restaurants from former Garozzo employees, including the original Garozzo’s chef who opened his own place, loudly proclaiming himself the inventor of the dish; he didn’t make it a year, while all of the Garozzo’s are still churning out Spiedini.

At The Riverside, we never claimed Chicken Spiedini as an original recipe, but gave due credit by referring to the dish on our first menu as ‘Chicken Spiedini a la Garozzo’. (I’m not certain what ‘a la’ means, but I’d seen it on a lot of other menus, and thought, ‘what the hell’.) I do steadfastly believe that our version was better than Garozzo’s; an opinion that was shared by numerous Kansas-Citians who had eaten the dish in both KC and at The Riverside. The only restaurant review that we ever received in the local paper, good or bad, was a one-line mention in a “What to do this weekend” column from the Sky-High Daily News entertainment writer, saying “try the Chicken Spiedini at The Riverside – it’s incredible!”

While it was immensely popular, it was also very labor intensive to prepare, and in our last few months of operation, down to a single chef, we decided to scrap the dish in favor of easier preparations. Make it at home, and you’ll get a feel for what our kitchen help had to do on a daily basis for the throngs (ok, maybe not throngs; if there had been throngs, we may yet still be in business) of dinner guests who ordered, and adored, Spiedini. I’m proud that we threw very little un-eaten food away at The Riverside, and when we did, never was it Spiedini.

Serves 4

2 lbs boneless, skinless chicken breasts
¾ cup flour
¾ cup olive oil
2 tablespoons dried sweet basil
½ cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
1 ½ cup bread crumbs (buy ‘em, don’t make ‘em)

AMOGIO SAUCE

¾ cup olive oil
¾ cup vegetable oil
1 medium-sized head of garlic
1 thin-skinned, damn juicy lemon, juiced
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh basil
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh parsley
A few hefty grinds of fresh black pepper and a few stout pinches of Kosher salt

You’ll need ka-bob skewers, and in a perfect world, a nice, hot bed of coals to grill the Spiedini over; if you can’t grill, you can also cook the skewers indoors on a hot griddle. Spiedini is an Italian term with the loose translation of ‘skewers of meat or fish, grilled over a flame’; the direct translation is ‘skewers of meat that are slowly prepared, to the sound of blaring heavy-metal/ bad rap music, by highly paid kitchen staff.’

Pound the chicken breasts thin, about a quarter inch thick, and cut length-wise into 1” wide strips. If you’ve pounded your breasts thin enough, you should get 14 – 16 strips from the 2# of chicken.

You’ll also need three prep bowls, one which will contain the ½ cup of olive oil, one the flour, and the third a well-mixed blend of the bread crumbs, the grated parm cheese and the basil flakes.

Lightly salt and pepper the chicken strips, thoroughly wash your hands (this is an important step that was often overlooked by our kitchen staff, no matter how much I yelled at them when I found them preparing this dish, and others, with dirty, filthy hands), and grab a chicken strip. Dredge it in the flour, shake off the excess, dip it in the olive oil, drip off the excess, and dredge it in the bread crumb mixture. Place the coated strip on your work surface and roll it into a pinwheel. Stick this onto a skewer, obviously jamming the business end of the skewer through the entire diameter of the pinwheel, and repeat the process with all of the strips. Dependent upon your dredging, dripping and shaking skills, you may end up needing more flour, oil or bread crumb mix; but you’d have hopefully figured that out on your own, as any cook knows that a recipe is but a yardstick, not a micrometer.

Let your skewered, Spiedini-ed chicken sit patiently on your cooking sheet, and begin preparing the Amogio sauce. Peel your garlic cloves, and chop to a fine dice. Don’t use a garlic press; there is a profound difference in how garlic tastes and reacts to other ingredients when it is chopped versus pressed. Throw your finely diced garlic in a mixing bowl along with all of the other ingredients, and stir it gently with a spoon every so often. Don’t whisk it, as you don’t want to emulsify the lemon juice into the blend. Be gentle.

You can make the Amogio sauce the day before, but needless to say, the longer it sits, the more potent it gets. If you do make it the day before, I’d leave out the freshly squeezed lemon juice; add that closer to meal time. Stir gently after adding the lemon juice.

Grill or griddle your chicken to doneness – and you have to be careful about this, as the rolled up chicken will need to cook through; but be careful not to burn the crap out of the outer portion of the chicken in the process. Grilling is a skill, not to be maligned, chided and laughed at by those who don’t practice, but only eat the fruits of the hot iron grate. The first time we had the dish at the newly opened restaurant of the ‘inventor’ chef, the inner part of our Spiedini was RAW; not undercooked, but blind-ass, naked RAW! The waiter was flustered, and actually said, “Uh, keep this quiet, and the Tiramisu is on the house!” Mmmmm, raw chicken and Tiramisu, one of my favorite Italian delights! What wine goes with that?

To plate, liberally spoon 1/3 cup of the Amogio on a plate, un-skewer the properly grilled chicken onto the pool of sauce, top the chicken and rim the plate with a little finely chopped parsley, spoon another tablespoon or two of the remaining Amogio over the top of the chicken and accompany with sides. I’d suggest a nice penne pasta with a light, slightly sweet marinara sauce as an accompaniment, as you’ll want something all-but bland to offset the punch-in-the-nose you’ll get from the Amogio sauce. Nicely prepared fresh green beans or broccoli will seal the meal.

Listen to some Sinatra and quaff some Chianti, or Amarone, if the finances will allow.

The Three Portals of Hell....Part V

2010-08-02T08:17:00.000-07:00

Really Awful Offal....

In many cases, one would save the best for last. I’ve done the opposite, as the final story of the three Riverside portals is indeed saving the worst, most offensive, most God-awful for last. Portal Number One involved snakes in the bedroom – BUPKIS! Portal Number Two involved bad plumbing, raw sewage and a Meth addict manhandling a rented high-pressure Jetter in the underbelly of the hotel – Sheer Folly!

Portal Number Three involves the kitchen; it involves grease, old food and bad dishwater festering in a darkened crawl space – it involves an agglomeration of things so bad that people actually go to school to become lawyers, so that they can avoid ever having to be within anything short of tort distance from this holy trinity of gluck.

As mentioned previously, the space under the kitchen was original to the hotels 1903 construction. It had a shorter head clearance than the crawl space under the hotel lobby, by maybe a foot; you were in a serious crouch in this space, and in most cases to get done what you had to do when you were down there, you had to kneel on the lengths of 2 x 12s that ran the length of the space. The two kitchen drains ran under this section, both ultimately leading into the infamous ‘grease trap’, a 16” square box that collected…well…the sort of things that would not only turn you into a Boulder-proud vegan, you’d possibly never eat again if you saw what it contained. The exit side of the grease trap consisted of a 3” pipe that ran into the main sewer line in the crawlspace in Portal Number Two, where it joined with the 3” exit pipes from the toilets, sinks and showers.

(Side Note from Richard Paradise, Restaurant/B&B Consultant LLC: If you, the prospective first-time restaurateur and B&B Operator, just read this last paragraph, and you still want to get into the restaurant & hotel business, quickly send me another $10,000, so that I can further counsel, advise and save you $1,000,000 worth of blood, sweat, tears and actual cash money; not to mention the eventual date with your grease trap.)

It was the end of the Easter weekend, 2009, when we were shutting the hotel down, for both a vacation and a kitchen reconstruction. The plan involved a big-bang, farewell Easter brunch, two-weeks out of Hot Sulphur, then a return to gut and replace the old, inherited equipment we’d been dealing with the past year, replace the existing slippery linoleum floor with some kick-ass commercial floor tile I’d scored from an old adhesive-business contact, and be ready to fly by Memorial Day, 2009.

I can’t remember why our chef went into Portal Number Three shortly before our two-week vacation, but he did, and he reported something pretty wretched.

“The pipe from the dishwasher/disposal has a crack in it, and the crawl space is flooded with….uh….well…some pretty bad stuff. There’s, like, a foot of really bad water down there.”

This was one of those times when procrastination seemed the wiser option. There was a basement full of fetid water, that wouldn’t be added to when we were on vacation. We’d rent a pump when we got back from vacation, drain it, fix the pipe, the floor, the kitchen, etc. No point in delaying our much anticipated and much deserved vacation to deal with this seamy little issue. Unlike us, it sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere.

Two weeks later, we’re back at the Riverside, ready for one hell of a floor ripping-up, crawl-space draining good time. I didn’t even bother to look in the flooded crawl space before heading to the local equipment-rental place for a portable sump pump. Money down, pump in hand, we sucked it up and opened the crawl space, to find….no water! Closer inspection found a substance that, much unlike water, was indefinable. Several months full of restaurant flotsam and jetsam, discharging through the dishwashing system through the crack in the exhaust pipe, in small dribs and drabs over the past few months, into the dirt floor of the crawl space, to sit, stew and percolate, had turned into a gel, a goo, an all but living, breathing, writhing clot. There is really no better way to describe this substance other than it being a grayish, rubbery subterranean pudding, smelling like no pudding you could imagine. If evil sought out a smell, it would have latched onto this layer of gloosma like corruption seeks out politicians.

“Crap!” I thought, “I planned on being able to pump this problem out of my life.” No, it would require a shovel, some plastic bags, and me kneeling/crouching in the cramped quarters of the Third Portal of Hell. While my chef honorably offered to do this dirty beyond dirty job, I couldn’t reasonably ask anyone that I was paying less than $140/second to perform this horrific task.

I previously might have mentioned that it smelled really bad; it did, but when the gelatinous smelogma was actually disturbed, i.e., turned and probed by the peak of the spade, the odor that was unleashed from this custard of a thousand previous Riverside dinners was indescribable. It was very quick duty; throw a plastic trash bag in the hole, hold my breath, descend and scrape two or three shovelfuls into the bag, stick my head above the crawl space for a breath of air, hold my breath, and repeat. There were a few times I had to exhale and breathe on my way back up, and the gag reflex was major; just a momentary whiff of what I was excavating was potentially lethal. Any bad human act – you name it; robbery, terror, murder, greed, vengeance - could be averted by the threat of having to smell this hellish concoction.

It took a while, but the job was completed. I might have imagined this, but I don’t think so, as the trash dumpster, containing the bags of crawl space sploojisma, emitted a fluorescent greenish glow from beneath its lid as it sat in our side yard, waiting patiently for the 2nd Tuesday of the month pick-up.

The puddinous spoosma collected, a layer of lime was deposited upon the crawl space floor, eliminating any of the remaining odors, and slaying the resident microbial villains that had been wrought from the no-longer festering foodsmegjisma.

I now live in Mississippi, and am fortunate to have a job with a large corporation. People often ask me “Why would you move from Colorado to Mississippi? Didn’t you love the restaurant business? Aren’t you sorry that you gave up your dream?”
Those are fair questions. If you want the real answer, please contact me at:

rwparadise.restaurantconsultant.com/hellportal

Be prepared to spend a Grand. I’ll save you a fortune.

The Three Portals of Hell....Part IV

2010-07-23T20:22:00.000-07:00

After about twenty minutes that seemed an eternity, the Critter Ridder emerged from this subterranean snake farm empty handed. No writhing, slithering masses were clutched in his clenched fists, nor did he triumphantly hold up a squirming gunny sack.

“I can’t find a single snake. I looked all the way back into the deepest corner – no live snakes, no dead snakes. Whatever problem you had is gone now.”

“Well I suppose that’s good news.” I said; now for the tough part. “How much do I owe you?”

“$140.00”

“Per second?” I asked, praying like hell that he would say “No, per minute.”

“No, I charge $90 per call, plus any materials, and there’s a $50 fee for driving over from Kremmling.”

As I wrote the check, I worried that perhaps crawling around in the dank, moldy darkness had terribly skewed the poor mans cognitive ability, and during his drive home, reality would re-inhabit his skull, the car brakes would be slammed, and he’d steam “Wait just a minute. I only charged that repto-phobic bastard $140 to crawl around in the dark, under his house and look for snakes??” Never have I written a check so quickly, and never have I been happier to write one. Julie went back to sleeping in the house, and never again did we find a snake in the Riverside.

Portal Number Two, the middle portal to hell, contained the plumbing guts to the Riverside. All of the main valves that shut the water on and off were located in this space, along with the main sewage line, which when I inspected the space during the mechanical, had no threaded cap, but a few rags jammed into the open end. I was to learn later that quick access to the sewer line was needed so often, that taking the time to continuously and under duress wrench open a 3” pipe plug would get cumbersome. Again, these little red flags flew right by me, unnoticed, during the due diligence process.

I’ve told previously in this blog the best story relating to Portal Number Two, and for the six of you who’ve already read this story, my apologies.

The Second Portal of Hell

It was January 2nd, 2009, the butt end of a busy holiday weekend. I was back in our living quarters taking my shower, getting ready for the evening, when I noticed the shower drain wasn’t draining so well. Out of the shower, I then notice the toilet is also backed up. Our newly remodeled and re-plumbed living quarters had already had a few issues with the plumbing, so I cursed the plumbing issues and the half-assed contractor who did the half-assed job, quickly got dressed and told Julie I’d plunge later, as the dinner rush had started. I’m not long in the kitchen when I see that one of the sinks, one that is supposed to be used only for washing hands but is also frequently used by our cooking staff as a dump sink for food stuffs, has standing water and isn’t draining. I throw my first bona-fide fit in front of the help since owning the hotel – cussing, throwing things, yelling “how many times have I told you not to dump food in the sink!!” at everyone but no one in particular. They weren’t impressed. I then notice the floor drain isn’t draining. I was then quick to deduce that there was a pattern, a pattern that I’d seen once before – I knew we had a clogged main sewage line.

The State of Colorado Department of Health & Environment – the folks who oversee the safety and sanitation of our restaurant – have a pretty basic rule about not being able to prepare or serve food without access to a free-flowing water and waste disposal system. Damned pesky bureaucrats! I had no choice but to close the restaurant; a nearly full restaurant, with a nearly full bar waiting for tables, as well as numerous reservations for tables later in the evening. My hope was that I could get this problem solved in time to at least re-open in an hour and accommodate the evening’s second seating. But wait a minute….I suddenly remembered we weren’t in Kansas anymore. I remembered that you can’t get a plumber in Grand County to show up for a scheduled job at 10:00 on a Monday morning (unless maybe it’s to fix the dispensing valve on your beer keg), let alone answer an after hour emergency call on a Friday night. I tried my best, going alphabetically through all of the Grand County plumbers, all of whose ads touted “24 Hour Emergency Service”, and got not one, not a single one, who could make it to The Riverside that evening.

(Shortly after moving to Hot Sulphur, one of my neighbors told me a story about how they went to one of the local plumbers who lived across the street from them on a Saturday, and begged him to come fix a plumbing emergency. They promised double the amount, in cash, that he would necessarily get for such a job. “Please, Please, Pleeeeze” they begged of him. His simple and direct reply was “I’m not feeling it today.” I’ve come to learn that is pretty much the working man’s mantra in Grand County.)

I was left with no other option than to call my friend Tony, (who lives up the street and is an excellent plumber), of whose good and reliable nature I hate to take advantage. Tony is in Denver and unable to help, but as luck would have it, Tony’s company has a plumber, Ron, on call, and he also lives in Hot Sulphur. I call the number, but it goes to voice mail; I leave my pleading message with Ron, and then go to my second-to-last resort.

I send my son Scott up to the Barking Dog Pub in search of another local plumber who has the same name as a deceased rock star, (first name rhymes with “Jan” and last name rhymes with “Hogleberg”), and is known to frequent the Barking Dog. More to the truth, he lives at the Barking Dog and is occasionally known to frequent his house. (I don’t mean to malign that un-named plumber, as he has saved our plumbing bacon on more than one occasion, and were he to read this blog and figure out who I’m talking about, I thank him for his past fine efforts on our behalf.) Scott triumphantly returns with good news – no, the deceased rock star-named plumber isn’t there, but there was another plumber sitting at the end of the bar who volunteered his services, and he would be down shortly. And who says only the Irish have such fine luck?

In walks our Johnny-on-the-spot plumber, Ron; this would be Tony’s Ron who was on call that evening. Did I say “in walks”? Perhaps I should say in reeled, in staggered, in swayed, in teetered, in lurched, in weaved; Mr. Roget doesn’t yet have a synonym for the one word you would use to aptly describe Ron’s’ mode of locomotion. I direct Ron, with great effort, back to the kitchen, where he immediately spots the backed-up hand sink. Without saying a word, he plops himself down on the floor and begins to attempt to dismantle the P-trap under the sink. I say to Ron, and I was being very dramatic at this point by raising my voice, waving my arms about and pointing in all directions, “It’s not the P-trap! We’re backed up in our bathroom, we’re backed up in the bar, we’re backed up in the kitchen; WE’RE BACKED UP EVERYWHERE. THE MAIN IS BACKED UP!!” Ron looks up at me and, uttering his first words of the night, says “Shlow down a minute, will ya?” He then turns his glazed eyes back on the P-trap, which he successfully dismantles, and watches as the turbid water rushes from the sink drain into his lap.

I help a very wet and still very drunk Ron up from the floor, and lead him to the main hotel lobby, where the entrance to the crawl space, which contains the main plumbing lines, is located. Down into the space we go, and I point out the main sewage discharge line. Ron looks all around the crawl space as if he was looking for an “Easy” button, or perhaps a detonator that would blow this plumbing problem into the next county. Remember, he’s having a tough time with his equilibrium, so the sight of this man half hunched over in the 5’ tall crawl space looking and pointing at the pipes all about him took on the appearance of a drunken sailor swatting at bees below deck in a violent sea.

Ron finally gets his bearings, and faces me with his assessment of the situation. He also delivers this assessment in a dramatic fashion, similar to my aforementioned dramatic outburst in the kitchen. “Everythings backwards down here. Thish pipe ish running backwards, thish pipe should be goin th’other way. Whoever built thish thing got it all screwed up!” He then proceeds to crawl slowly and carefully up the steps, and sits on the edge of the crawl space, his legs dangling over the abyss, his elbows on his knees, and his face buried in his hands. He doesn’t move for 15 minutes. When he finally stirs – I wasn’t there to see this but heard it second hand – he gets up, says not a word to anyone present, then staggers/reels/teeters/sways/weaves/lurches his way out the front door and into the cold, dark, January night.

In walks one of our kitchen employees, who happens to have a drug connection who is also a plumber. (This drug connection thing is not uncommon in Grand County, or in the restaurant business.) I previously mentioned that the dead rock star-named plumber was my second-to- last resort – this drug connection plumber was indeed my last resort. That story about “I’m not feeling it today,” - that might also be this guy. But then I figure, “What do I have to lose?” At the very least, I’ll have more fodder for the blog.

Enter Plumber #3, the most unreliable plumber in Grand County. That’s like being the worst sinner in Las Vegas or the biggest drunk at Mardi gras, or…..you get the point.
Not only am I stunned that he showed up when summoned, but he’s bright eyed, he’s clean, he’s sober, and he’s ready to tackle the problem. All those present, at least those who knew this gentleman and his predilections, could’ve been knocked over by a puff of bong exhaust.

Four hours and $400 dollars later, our local hero has the lines flowing free. He worked down in that fetid crawl space from 8:00 until midnight, flushing the line with a high pressure “jetter”, and then cleaning up the offal responsible for the clog. This was a job so nasty and so incredibly filthy, that the Dirty Jobs guy on TV would’ve hired it out; and our man did it with a smile. No matter what Plumber #3 didn’t do before, or what he may yet not do in the future, the night of January 2nd will forever be known in local lore as the night that Grand Counties most infamous slacker plumber, actually plumbed, and in doing so, saved our bacon and allowed The Riverside to continue to serve some of Grand Counties finest food in a sewage-free environment, per the State code.

To be concluded........

The Three Portals of Hell....Part III

2010-07-16T05:24:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the cheap suspense, but there was no body or human remains under the hump in the floor; just a big heave-ho of expansion and contraction in the floor boards. However, knowing Abe as I did, it would not have surprised me if some unsuspecting visitor to the Riverside ended up bludgeoned and buried under that floor – particularly a sales tax collector from the Colorado Department of Revenue.

The building contractors, Farson & McBytemee, were hired to renovate the Riverside living quarters; while they came with a few good recommendations, truth had it they were two bartending ski-bums who, during a normal Grand County night of drunken debauchery (probably a Tuesday), set a friends deck on fire, burning it to the ground, then in a fit of soberness, rebuilt the deck. Rumor has it that the deck rebuild was true, level and square; they then deemed themselves building contractors.

25% over budget and one very expensive month behind schedule later, we had our new living quarters. Caveat Emptor, again.

It was Labor Day weekend, 2008, and the hotel was full for the entire three days. Full hotel means non-stop busy; up at 5:30 AM making endless pots of coffee, chatting with and checking people out, starting laundry, cleaning rooms and changing sheets, more laundry, helping with lunch-prep dishes, more laundry, lunch service, doing lunch dishes, cleaning the dining room and setting up for dinner service, more laundry, chatting with and checking guests in, helping with dinner prep, more laundry, grabbing a bite to eat on the fly, a quick shower, doing dinner prep dishes, dinner service, bartending, closing down the kitchen, bartending until 12:00 AM, closing down, locking up……then to bed.

It’ll start all over in four hours. This was our dream job. WTF were we thinking???

It was Sunday evening of Labor Day weekend, maybe 10:30ish, when Julie came back from our living quarters into a fairly busy bar to announce, in a slight panic, that there was a snake in our bedroom. As I was pretty damn busy manning the bar, I was unable to manhandle that snake, as would have been my normal duty. Yes sir, I would have normally jumped right in and handled that sort of task. Fortunately our good friend and neighbor, Tony the sober plumber, was quick to step in, and went back into our living quarters to slay the monster. After playing a little bit with Julie, telling her that it was a poisonous copperhead, he dispatched the 8” long, pencil thin snake. There’s one nice thing about the Hot Sulphur Springs 7700’ altitude and the long winters – it allows for no snakes or big hairy tropical spiders. The only snakes to be found at that elevation are small, non-poisonous black snakes, and the 9-month winters never give them the opportunity to grow much beyond 12” in length.

But let’s be honest here – a snake is a snake, and you damn sure don’t want them crawling around in your bedroom; not even a tough guy like me likes that sort of thing. Julie calmed down a bit, as I tried to assure her that this was an anomalous occurrence, and I doubted very much she’d see another snake in the living quarters. With the busy day we’d had, doors open and closing all day with people coming in and out, the slinky little fella had probably slithered his way in to get out of the blistering high-altitude afternoon sun, and found a nice, cool quiet place to lie on our closet floor. So back Julie went to bed, and back I went to tend bar.

It wasn’t five minutes before Julie was out the door of our living quarters, looking anxiously into the noisy, crowded bar for the specific purpose of getting my attention. While I’d actually never before seen Julie’s “Holy shit! There’s another snake in the bedroom!” expression, I was pretty sure that I was seeing it now. And in fact, there was another small snake in the bedroom, and another, then another. They were crawling through ¼” gaps between the floor and the trim that our crack deck builders had left open and unsealed. What was strange was why, all of a sudden at 10:30 on this Sunday night, were the snakes coming through all at once, right before our eyes? They even began crawling through another gap in the floor in the back bathroom. Was it a simple game of follow the leader – one snake made it through and then yelled back down into the crawl space, “Follow me boys, I’ve found some people up here to scare the shit out of!”

Most of the snakes were really small, not much bigger than your average fishing worm. But they had that big snake head that a worm doesn’t have, and they glided along the tile floor in that ssssnaky manner that makes those of you wussies that are afraid of snakes even more afraid of them. No question, this was not a good situation, and there was only one thing that could put a temporary halt to this situation – duct tape. I grabbed the roll that I keep on my bedpost for night time emergencies, and began taping the gaps in the floor, temporarily holding the little devils at bay. With the living quarters secured for the evening, Julie finally settled down enough to go to bed; I think she slept in the car.

The next day brought an end to the busy holiday weekend and a trip to the hardware store for a tube of clear silicone caulk to seal the gaps in the floor. I wasn’t sure what I’d see when I removed the duct tape; i.e. would the little buggers start flying through the cracks in an Omaha Beach sort of onslaught? Fortunately that wasn’t the case, as there was no evidence of snakes when they tape was removed, and I quickly went to the task of caulking the gaps, hoping it would dry quickly enough to offer the resistance necessary to forestall another PM snake blitz.

Caulk one up for polymer science and the fine folks at Dow Chemical, as the silicone cured and the reptilian onslaught was abated. That was good enough for me; but not for my business partner.

“Do you seriously expect me to live in a house that’s built over a set from an Indiana Jones movie?”

“Well of course not dear, but, who’s gonna, I mean, how would I……there ain’t no way I’m going down into that crawl space after a nest of snakes. In fact, I wouldn’t go into that crawl space after a treasure chest full of gold coins…..and we could damn sure use some gold coins!”

The internet was perused for methods of getting snakes out of your crawl space. I read numerous links, with a myriad of suggestions – from the ASPCA green, organic, non-kill recommendations (reason with them; tell them in a soothing tone that a better life awaits them in the neighbors crawl space), to the toxic – Ted Nugent’s web site suggested a modified flame thrower, which, coincidentally, he had for sale, free shipping included. Without a doubt, the best method involved hiring someone else to do the dirty work, and I found a business in nearby Kremmeling, CO; the “Critter Ridder”.

The Critter Ridder showed on time, with an assistant, equipped with flashlights, ladders and glue traps. When I explained the situation, the man quietly went to the truck, and returned with a TyVek jumpsuit, a respirator and a miner’s hat.

“Where’s the crawlspace?” he quietly asked.

I took him to the first portal of hell, the entry to the crawl space under our living quarters with the three full feet of headroom; the crawl space I’d never been in, and was certain I’d never have any reason to enter, in spite of the possibility of it containing a fortune in gold coins.

Mr. Critter Ridder donned the jumpsuit, strapped on the respirator, and topped it all off with the miners hat. He switched on the miners hat light, switched on his kick-ass big-time halogen flashlight (the kind most guys would kill for), and slowly descended into the first portal of hell. Off he crawled, without a “wish me luck”, into the inky darkness, in search of this nest of vipers.

Two things immediately occurred to me as our brave servant disappeared beneath the floor joists. One, suppose he finds the snake nest, he appears to be totally unarmed; what will he use to eradicate them? He had no flame thrower, no AA-12 automatic shotgun, no light saber – what in the hell would he use to kill these slinky little bastards? Two, how much was he going to charge us to do what he was in the process of doing? We didn’t discuss this before his descent into the abyss, and it quickly occurred to me that I wouldn’t climb down there, and LOOK FOR SNAKES, for a penny less than $500,000. While I didn’t have that sort of ready cash, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he would have emerged from beneath the floor, the flashlight between his teeth, and hundreds of writhing, tiny snakes clutched in his fists, saying through clenched jaws “You owe me $500,000!” Let’s be honest; any guy that would be man enough to crawl under your floors and capture live reptiles would have no problem shaking you down for cash.

To be continued……..

The Three Portals of Hell................Part II

2010-07-09T16:43:00.000-07:00

The arrival of the automobile brought about the departure of the livery stable. I don’t know the exact year that the Riverside converted the stable into additional hotel rooms, but I have to think by looking at the pictures that it was in the early 1920’s. The transformation from horse house to guest house - (horse house to whore house would have been more alliterate, and possibly more accurate) - gave the hotel 11 additional guest rooms and new living quarters for the owner or manager. In subsequent years, two of the downstairs guest rooms were converted into the laundry room and tool room, while the remaining two downstairs guest rooms were seldom used by the paying public.

When Abe owned the hotel, the living quarters were separated from the hotel lobby by two doors, always closed and somewhat foreboding. It was a bit of a mystery as to what was actually behind the doors, as Abe himself was….uh… a bit of a mystery; but Abe is for another chapter. It’ll be a long one.

During our tire-kicking phase of deciding whether or not to buy the hotel, we made four visits over the course of the spring and summer of 2007. We never saw the owner’s quarters, the place where we would live the next X years of our lives, until the fourth and final visit. The truth was, we were both afraid of what lay beyond those doors – afraid that it would be so despicable that it would immediately squelch our desire to make this radical lifestyle change in this idyllic setting on the banks of the Colorado River. While we wanted a change, we didn’t necessarily want to leave our house in Kansas City – a beautiful house that we built and in which we raised our family.

At the end of that fourth visit, our cars packed and goodbyes being said, Abe finally asked if we’d like to see the owner’s quarters. With just the slightest bit of trepidation (I’m being sarcastic here) we headed through the foreboding doors, back into the unknown world of Abraham Rodriguez. We were accompanied by friends from KC who went with us on this trip to see, as they couldn’t help but believe, if we’d totally lost our minds.

In we went, me in front with the others lagging behind. I didn’t spend much time in the place, and didn’t talk or discuss with the others what we were seeing. I had no questions for Abe, who kind of stood back, very quietly, with a sheepish look on his face that said “I sure hope they don’t notice that 500-pound turd sitting in the middle of the room.”

When we got in the car to leave, Julie started peppering me with question after question – “did you see this”, “did you notice that”, “could you believe what was in that one room”, etc. The truth of the matter was, I didn’t see or notice much of anything, as I walked through that place much like you’d walk through a busy hospital emergency room trauma ward – with your eyes straight ahead, not looking to either side for fear of what horrific thing to which you might be a witness.

There was a simple answer to this hell on earth, this fetid collection of cobbled-together rooms, shelves, nooks and crannies that was the Riverside living quarters – “don’t view it as it is, view it as what it can be.” That philosophy, adopted before I ever set foot in the place, was what allowed me to walk through and not be affected by the horrors contained in this sub-human dwelling. If only there had been a 500 pound turd to be affronted by; trust me, it would have been a classy addition to the actual contents of Abe’s inner sanctum. Pure and simple, the place had to be gutted down to the studs. Any vestiges of the previous owner had to be banished, burnished, bazooka-ed, burned, banned, bulldozed and buried; then fumigated.

The Riverside was purchased, and a contractor hired to literally strip the living quarters to the studs and the bare earth below, down to the floor of the crawl space. This would be the first time in 130 years that the earthen floor had seen daylight. And although Geraldo has moved on to less risky stunts, there was a little bit of ‘what would we find??’ when we exposed what lay beneath those floors. The biggest question came from a noticeable hump – a hump shaped suspiciously like a human body in repose – from a floor section in Abe’s bedroom. No lie; to the right of Abe’s bed, in an open spot of floor in front of the entry door – conspicuously hidden under a throw rug – was an 8” hump that was 6’ in length and 2.5’ in width. Poe’s vulture-eyed antagonist surely would have fit nicely in such a space. What could be the cause of this unnatural protuberance?

To be continued…………..

The Three Portals of Hell

2010-06-30T21:11:00.000-07:00

The Riverside Hotel, whose construction date is officially noted as 1903, is comprised of four sections, two original structures and two later additions, which have been morphed into the seamless white façade of its current iteration. We had pictures hanging in our lobby that showed the progression of the buildings architecture, starting with what we believed to be the first 1903 picture, which shows a six window, two-story clapboard structure with a large “HOTEL” and “CAFÉ” painted on the front, adjoined with a turreted building which housed a livery stable. There are pictures of the stable that date back to 1870, and while the two buildings literally shared a wall in 1903, there was no congress between them. Picture #2 is from approximately 1915 with the livery façade still evident, but the two buildings made to look as one with the use of a faux brick, tar-paper façade. The next picture was taken in the 1920’s, and the turreted roof line of the livery stable – you’ve seen this roof line in pictures of old western towns, as it denoted a stable as a steeple denoted a church – was replaced with a straight ridge line across the entire front of the hotel, making it look for the first time in it’s 20 year existence as one building. Finally, the fourth picture, taken in the 1930’s, shows the hotel with the edition of the West wing, a 15’ widening that ran the length of the hotel, adding four rooms upstairs, and doubling the downstairs dining room and kitchen. The fourth and final addition, the single story River Room restaurant, was built onto the western side, or river side, of the hotel in the early 1970’s. It is the only part of the building that has foundation and structural problems.

One of the things I loved about these pictures was the fun in dating them by the type of transportation that was parked in front of the hotel. In the 1903 picture there were horses and a hitching post; in 1915, horse-drawn carriages along with a 1910 Model T Ford. The 1920s-era picture showed no signs of hitching posts, with equine power being replaced by a fancy sedan of unknown make and model. Finally, the 1930’s brought us a regal awning spanning the front of the hotel, offering afternoon shade to a sporty, 1932 Ford Coupe. These pictures were all taken in the summer, as traversing Berthoud Pass in a 1932 Ford Coupe during the winter would have been impossible; much as it can be today, even in a 2003 4WD Chevy Suburban.

It was often while viewing these pictures that our guests would have their feeling of awakening to the history that engulfed them as the stood in the lobby of The Riverside – you could figuratively see the light go on in their head, as their eyes would widen and a smile would break the plane of their face. It is a feeling you don’t often get anywhere else as we live our daily lives in the cities and suburbs of America, and it was certainly one of the feelings that brought us and our dreams to live in Grand County, in this magnificent building.

Each of the three sections of the building built before 1935 have their own separate foundation, constructed of native stone of irregular size and shape and tightly cemented together. It is as stout today as it was when it was built 100+ years ago. Each foundation also contains a crawl space, differing in size and depth, with the first construction under the stable literally being a ‘crawl space’ as the distance from bare dirt to the floor above is but 3’ in height. The crawl space of the middle structure, which housed the hotel lobby, café and 8 upstairs guest rooms and living quarters, is deep enough in the front end of the building to allow a person to stand almost upright, narrowing in depth as you move towards the back of the hotel. The third section of building, the 1930’s addition, has a real-life, honest-to-God basement, with poured concrete floors and enough head space to walk upright, assuming you’re me and not Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

In August of 2007, before purchasing the hotel, I visited the Riverside to meet with Tim, the man who was hired to perform the mechanical inspection. After learning that the roof needed to be replaced, the kitchen didn’t meet all of the state health requirements, and a host of other things that would have sent an intelligent person back to Kansas with a pocket full of cash, searching for a new dream, Tim suggested we go down into the crawl spaces.

“Crawl spaces? Why do we have to go down in the crawl spaces? I really don’t need to see the crawl spaces” I whined.

Tim had shown me the exposed foundations while we toured the outside of the building, demonstrating – I think he pounded his clenched fist against them – how sturdily and solid the foundations were constructed. That was good enough for me; I didn’t need to see them from the inside of a dark, mysterious, possibly big hairy spider-containing crawl space.

Tim said “I’ve got to show you where all of the mechanical stuff is – the water main, the grease trap, the sewage main, the sump pit…..”

It was at this point that I really should have allowed myself to be beaten to death by an army of do-it-yourselfers bearing red flags. Grease traps, sump pits and sewage lines in a subterranean spider farm – and I was interested in owning this place???

The first space we entered – an outside entrance from the rear of the hotel - was the newest of the three, the one where you can stand upright. I entered cautiously, and no big deal, as it was well lit, spider-less and it looked as if someone had actually attempted to turn it into a living space by portioning off rooms and paneling the walls and ceilings with dog-eared, cedar 1x4 fence slats. This space was important as it contained the two relatively new 200-gallon hot water boilers. The current owner had them installed when he purchased the hotel in 1980, replacing the coal fired boiler that sat dormant, a permanent unmovable behemoth, in one of the little rooms. I didn’t think to notice at the time that in the event the boilers needed to be dealt with in the winter – you know, that time of the year in Hot Sulphur where it’s extremely cold, there’s 30 feet of snow piled in the back of the hotel, and the need for hot water in your shower really takes on a whole new dimension – that there was no way you could access this basement to fix those boilers without blasting caps and a Caterpillar tractor, as there was no entrance from the hotel above.

The back of the space contained an un-paneled storage area that was filled with old bed frames, mattresses, desks, chairs, doors….quite an assortment of old junk and furnishings not fit for the current hotel. If you saw what was at that time actually in the Abe-owned hotel, you could only imagine what lay fallow in the space below. The term ‘worthless junk’ has never found a more suited partner.

On to crawl space #2, this located under the original main building. There were two entrances to this space, which actually had a dividing wall, making two separate crawl spaces under the one structure – I didn’t have to pay any extra for this feature. I helped the inspector lift a 3’x5’, seemingly 200 lb. trapdoor from the floor in the back of the kitchen. It was very dark, and the cold air and dank moldy smell attacked us as we peered into the space below.

“Looks good to me!” I said.

“No” Tim replied, “I’ve got to show you where the main kitchen drain runs into the grease trap. You’re going to have to clean that grease trap fairly regularly to keep your lines from clogging.”

This is sort of like when the professor says to the students in medical school “you’re going to have to put this rubber glove on and stick your finger in…”, and the prospective Internist quickly switches over to Radiology. But no, more fool me; I forged ahead, bought the hotel and kept my appointment with that grease trap.

On to the next crawl space; this was accessed through a trap door on hinges located in the main lobby floor, just outside of the public Men’s & Women’s restrooms. This crawl space was approximately 5’ in height at its entry point, and sloped down a little towards the front of the building, enough so that you could all but stand upright. Standing upright would come in handy if it was ever necessary to unclog the main sewer line with a high-pressure sewer line jetter; it was ultimately necessary.

This space also contained the main water shut offs, which a person would have to quickly access and shut off in the event an old pipe burst, or a toilet got jammed up and overflowed; those events ultimately occurred.

Finally, on we went to the last crawl space, this one under the original stable; this one, the very shallow, literal crawl space.

Tim told me, as he struggled to lift the trap door, “There really isn’t much under here, except for water pipes and electrical conduit. No mains, no valves, breakers or shut offs. Not sure there’s really anything to show you. ”

“Great”, I smiled, “I’ll defer to your higher knowledge of crawl space amenities and pass on this one.”

I never did go into this creepiest of crawl spaces, but it wasn’t long before someone did.

To be continued………

John Lennon slept here......

2010-06-10T19:18:00.000-07:00

As you already know if you’ve visited the Riverside under our tenure as owners, it is purported that John Lennon slept at the Riverside Hotel – not exactly sure when, obviously before 1980. I was told this by the hotel’s previous owner, Abe Rodriguez, who even claimed to have a copy of the signed registration receipt. Abe mentioned that we would ultimately own that important little piece of history when we bought the hotel, but regretfully, that promise was never fulfilled. Caveat Emptor. This story was also verified as truth by some of the folks at Grand County Bank; I’m certain they wouldn’t lie to me.

Abe didn’t have a lot of details to pass along regarding Lennon’s visit, but did say that he stayed in what is known as the ‘Mil’ room, which is located at the southwest corner of the hotel. The Mil room is nice in that it is one of the larger rooms, as well as having the best views of the river, Mt. Bross, the town and the hills south of town. It is generally also the brightest room in the hotel.

When we bought the hotel and were in the process of redecorating, we thought it important to recognize the importance of this historic visit by hanging a picture of Mr. Lennon and a plaque detailing a short story of the stay in the Mil room. Julie scoured the internet for just the right Lennon picture, but nothing obvious stood out as the one we had to have; until we stumbled on a print in a dingy old shop on Chartres Street in New Orleans, of John standing in front of the Statue of Liberty waving the peace sign. You’ve probably all seen the picture, and we chose it because it seemed to sum up the John Lennon we loved and wanted to remember – still boyish and fun-loving – and it would have been taken around the time that John stayed at the hotel.

Julie was in charge of the picture, but I was in charge of the plaque. Tough to come up with an informative plaque when you have no information – I knew absolutely nothing other than ‘John Lennon stayed here’. So I did a little research and the first tie that I found to John Lennon and Colorado was that the Beatles played at Red Rocks Amphitheater on their first US tour in August of 1964. That Denver show was preceded three days earlier by a show in Los Angeles at The Hollywood Bowl. There it had to be! Here was Lennon in the Denver area, with three days unaccounted for. Surely he must have taken some tourist time to visit the majestic Rocky Mountains, Grand Lake, the National Park, the Colorado River, and naturally, The Riverside. But I needed a story for the wall, not just a string of dates where this could’ve happened; so I made one up.

Borrowing a little from Mr. Kerouac, the story went something like this. ‘On August 7th, 1964, after the conclusion of the Beatles concert at The Hollywood Bowl, John Lennon left the touring party and with two friends, drove east across the great American West, en route for the Beatles next show on August 11th at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Denver, CO. On the evening of August 10th, he pulled into Hot Sulphur Springs in search of a meal and a bed, and found the Riverside Restaurant and Hotel. He stayed in this room.’ I printed it, framed it and hung it in the room next to sink – the sink he would have washed in.

We always took visitors to the room when they toured the hotel, and watched with delight as they smiled at the thought of John Lennon one time habiting the space where they now stood. Many would get their picture taken in front of the plaque, while a few even went as far as to wash their hands in the sink. I often even offered guests the opportunity to vacuum the floor upon which he trod, or clean the windows through which he gazed, but never had takers.

Everything was going smoothly with the fabricated John Lennon legend until the arrival of Ms. Janet, one of our guests, who stayed in the John Lennon room one night while visiting the Rocky Mountains from California. Janet called immediate bullshit on the story, saying there was no way that Lennon left the group and drove across the desert with his buddies. In fact, she informed me that the first American Beatles tour was planned down to the second, and nowhere on the agenda would there have been a day away from the group for open time.

All right, so she caught me. But she was intrigued enough by the legend of his visit to do some research. Her job as a consultant in historical building and landmark preservation bent her towards a proclivity to get to the bottom of things and places. It wasn’t long after her visit that I received an email from Janet, detailing her best guess at when and why John Lennon would have visited The Riverside.

In the summer of 1974, four years after the breakup of The Beatles, John Lennon traveled to Caribou Ranch, a music studio in Nederland, CO, to record a few songs with Elton John; among them was Elton John’s cover of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Lennon was accompanied not by Yoko, but May Pang, Yoko’s personal assistant, who at the time happened to be assisting Yoko by taking care of John’s…uh…personal needs.

After the recording session, John and May struck out on their own for a few quiet days in the Rockies. They were spotted buying a pair of cowboy boots in Boulder, and there are a few snapshots in May Pang’s book of John in a mountain meadow, and John lying in a mountain stream, but beyond that, not much else exists as a record of their Colorado visit. Being the internationally famous icon that he was, odds are he travelled the back roads, visiting quiet, out-of-the-way places, all the while keeping a low profile.

When you say things like ‘back roads’, ‘out-of-the-way places’ and ‘low profile’, what on earth would spring more quickly to mind than Hot Sulphur Springs, CO. And Lennon wouldn’t have wanted to stay at a busy summer-time hotel, one with a bunch of nosey, autograph-seeking tourists; again, what better spot for solitude in a deserted hotel than The Riverside. It makes perfect sense to me.

So did he or didn’t he stay at The Riverside? And if he did, did he play Imagine on the piano in the bar; that same bar piano that I have for sale on EBay right now? Did he eat in the restaurant, and did he really use the utensils that I sold for $600 on EBay last month? We’ll never know for sure, but I’m going with Janet’s theory and Imagine that he did.

Losing Life Riverside

2010-05-23T18:23:00.000-07:00

Part VI………………………EASTWARD HO!

On Sunday, March 21st, at 6:15 PM, we closed and locked the doors of The Riverside for the final time. It was a beautiful evening – the kind that I grew to relish, the kind of evening that made all of the pain and struggles inherent of living in Grand County worthwhile. All of my favorite Grand County early evening accoutrements were on display, particularly the emerald blue eastern sky which starkly contrasted the pumpkin-colored alpenglow on the rise of Cottonwood Pass. Many an evening I sat in front of the hotel, regardless of the temperature or the crowd in the restaurant, (“Have you seen our waiter???”) and drank in that ‘has to be seen to be believed’ vista to the east. I guess I always new that our time in Hot Sulphur Springs would be relatively short lived – 5 to 10 years at best – and I took advantage of every opportunity to gaze at the surrounding spectra as if it would be my last. The time for my last gaze had come, albeit a lot sooner than I had either imagined or intended, and I witnessed that natural spectacle for the final time through eyes blurred by tears of both joy and sadness.

We’d succumbed to the forces that were thrashing our dream – the economy, the bank, our ineptitude and our newfound lack of desire due to all of the afore-mentioned. We were leaving good friends and a lifestyle in a vacation setting that most people only dream of realizing. The tears shed on the wings of such failings, such sadness, were expected and require no explanation.

Yet, there were also tears of joy?

Yes, tears of joy indeed, at the immitigable delight of a fresh start, in a new place; another exhilarating go at embracing the unknown. This speaks to why we left our Shawnee, KS comfort zone and did this crazy thing in the first place. We were the new pioneers, giving up the safety and security of our cushy life in the suburbs and packing up our belongings to head west into the unknown. And not unlike the old pioneers, that unknown held the promise of a radically different, and a hopefully better, way of life. We knew there were risks, both in the journey and at the destination, but we looked beyond the rational and forged ahead. We focused on the joy of change and the excitement of the unknown, concentrating on the glory of what could go right as opposed to the agony of what might go wrong.

I don’t wish the feeling of failure and nothingness at the end of the rainbow on anyone, but I can tell you that the feeling you experience at the onset of the quest is an elixir that cannot be reproduced, bottled or sold, not for any price. I also have many regrets about our ‘mid-life’ crisis, our westward digression, but one of them isn’t the indescribable feeling that you experience when you step off the ledge into the unknown.

And here we were, two short years later, stepping off another ledge. I was short of breath; my head swirled, and yes, melded into the burnt orange and azure eastern evening vistas, there were indeed tears of joy.

Back to reality, as our 2003 Suburban was absolutely crammed to the gills with stuff that we didn’t want in the moving van. Most of it was booze-related. Specifically, 50-60 bottles of wine, collectable stuff that I took better care of than my kids. And for good reason, damn it! Add to these a dozen Riedel wine glasses, very carefully packed, and my crystal Riedel phallic wine decanter. You look at this thing wrong and it breaks. No way its going in a moving van – even crated in a 4'x 4' x 6' box with 96-pounds of packing paper. We also had several crates of hard liquor that we took from the bar; stuff Julie and I didn’t drink, but you never knew when you were going to be invited to a ‘bring your own Grasshopper’ party down in Mississippi; If that call came in, I had the juice. Add to this our traveling clothes, last-minute nik-naks, some yard and garden things....and of course, Lucy.

The plan was to pull out of Hot Sulphur whenever we did, and drive as far as we could that evening. I didn’t care what time we left or how far we got; whatever it be, I didn’t want to spend one more night at The Riverside. I even had discussions with myself all day about the ultimate departure, and ‘not looking back’. You’d have to experience what I’d gone through the past eight months, with me living in Mississippi, Julie living in Colorado, the bank giving us the old jail house chi-chi, etc, etc, etc, before you'd understand why I wouldn't want to look back. I loved the place, I had great times and better memories, but I WANTED OUT OF GRAND COUNTY!

6:15 PM, the door was locked, hugs and tears to all assembled at our farewell. We climbed in the Suburban, backed out of the alley, and headed east on Grand Street. I hadn’t driven thirty feet, and in spite of what I promised myself I wouldn’t do, I looked back, into the drivers-side rear view mirror. It was a spectacular vision, as the magnificent white façade of that grand old girl was bathed in the luminescent orange glow of the setting sun. It was my favorite Grand County evening vision; it was alpenglow on The Riverside. I didn't take my eyes off of the place for the half-mile up Grand Street that I could still see her. In my last view of the place, she looked as beautiful as I’d ever seen her look. It was a 240-volt jolt reminding me of why I shucked it all to move west, move here. The tears flowed, unabated.

The rearview mirror view dissipated. We hit Highway 40, and headed east. The tears abated.

Eastward Ho!

Losing Life Riverside

2010-05-15T06:51:00.000-07:00

Part V…………………….A Fluid Farewell (continued)

I’d made 8, 10, 12 trips – I’d lost count - back and forth in my Sisyphean effort to keep the water from flooding our bathroom, but to no immediate avail. The water just kept coming, but from where? During bucket-running trip number X, I noticed the sound of running water as I ran past the laundry room. Instantly it registered to me, as I’d heard that sound before; the upstairs toilet in bathroom #2 was running, as occasionally the flapper valve in that toilet would stick. Not often, but occasionally. But the previous occasions of stuck flapper valves had always involved actual humans being upstairs, actually flushing the toilet. No one had been upstairs for an hour.

I dumped the bucket and ran upstairs to fix the toilet. "Holy Shit!" The bathroom door was locked. “You’ve got to be kidding me! The freaking bathroom door is locked!”

This would be the bathroom on the left, bathroom #2, for which we have no key. It wouldn’t be the bathroom on the right, bathroom #1, for which we have a key.

“All right” I said to myself, “Take a deep breath and gather your thoughts. Let’s see. Five of us have been in the house for the past hour, and none of us have gone upstairs. I’m certain of this, as we were all downstairs together, and all within earshot as the water started rising in our bathroom toilet; water from which I now know is from this running toilet. So within the last 10 minutes, this toilet flushed, the flapper valve got stuck, and now the door is locked.”

I didn’t have too much more time to stand around and talk to myself and examine the implications of obvious physical activity without the presence of physical beings. I ran downstairs and told my neighbor what was up, his wife stepping in to vacuum the water, while he took over the bucket-running duties. Darin still stood quietly in the office, with a mad grin on his face and a glazed look in his eyes.

Three or four times during our ownership this bathroom door had been inadvertently locked by guests. You’d think that I would have gotten a new lock with an actual key, but noooo, I’d found a cheaper way around this problem, as I was able to pry the door molding ajar with a putty knife then use a small saw to jimmy the lock. I would have run to get that prying tool and small saw, but I knew it a wasted effort as they were probably packed in a 36”x24”x24” box with 24 pounds of packing paper, labeled “BATHROOM #2 JIMMY TOOLS”. The box was certainly well hidden in the moving van; in fact, all of my tools, and anything that even resembled a tool, was in a box in the van.

At this point, I was literally running around pell-mell downstairs, resembling something like a wild-eyed, sweaty, fleshy pinball, as I ran from this room to that, looking for something, anything, that I could use to get in that bathroom. I’d run by the large silverware tray four or five times - the silverware tray that contained 150 knives, any of which would have worked beautifully for both the molding pry and the lock jimmy process – before it hit me like a big “W”. I grabbed a knife – a simple dinner knife – ran upstairs and within a matter of seconds, pried open the molding, jimmied the lock and silenced the toilet.

The water stopped rising. The bucket brigade ended. Darin was still smiling.

The ghost had to be laughing hysterically, proud as a peacock of his final Seinfeldian prank. If there are multiple Riverside ghosts, I’m certain there was back-slapping, high-fiving and exploding fists as well. While humored, I’ll hope that they were also heartbroken at our impending departure – we were not only good stewards of their domain, but even better foibles for their ghostly folly.

To be concluded................

Losing Life Riverside

2010-05-09T07:23:00.000-07:00

Part IV...............A Fluid Farewell

On March 21st, at 6:15 PM, we closed the doors, gave a local caretaker the keys, tearfully hugged our close friends’ goodbye, and drove out of Hot Sulphur Springs, away from the Riverside Hotel. The flood of emotions that came with that action were literally metaphorically a flood - a massive, violent, lifting, rumbling jumble of both destruction and cleansing; washing away the old and clearing a way for our ultimate rebirth. A flood is the perfect metaphor for what occurred, as we stood back, helpless, and watched a force much greater than us sweep over and destroy our dream, and despite our protestations and earnest but futile efforts, take that dream and leave us with little more than the reckoning of what comes next. What hopefully comes after a flood, provided it didn’t kill you, is rebirth, reorganization and the realization that you got smacked hard, but you’re still alive and, Thank God Almighty, you’re able to smack back.

What destructive force took us under? The list is as long as a Grand County winter and it would be small of me to blame first and foremost anyone but myself for my bad business acumen. Couple that with a horrible economy in an out-of-the-way place whose sole existence and economy is based upon discretionary income – the first type of income that goes south in a bad economy. Add to this volatile mix the local financial institution, the supposed backbone of this beautiful, rugged but financially strapped area, run by a bunch of wealthy ranchers that combined a lethal mixture of financial naiveté, avarice and a moral compass that would make you pray for Somali pirates as your business partners. The final F-up would be our poor choice of location – a small, out-of-the-way town whose only raison d’être is to draw a select group of clientele to a hot springs complex that ranks at the bottom of all hot springs complexes in the State/Country/World. We’re catering to a very small, very select group, going to the (arguably) worst of all possible very small, very select places. No knock on those that love the place, as we did, but honestly, it’s a very select group; and a depressed economy can be a financially fatal time to cater to a select group. Oh well, I’d been lucky in life up to this point; odds dictated that there eventually had to be a bump in that road.

The packers were supposed to show up on Thursday, March 18th, and the moving van on the 19th to load us up and take us to our new world. But Colorado had a parting gift for us – a blizzard the morning of the 18th that shut down I-70, Berthoud Pass and most of Grand County; to this point, the largest snowfall of the year in this snow/water starved environ. Unfortunately the ski slopes closed the weekend before – no question, timing is everything. The blizzard put the move back two days, with the packers now scheduled to arrive on Saturday, March 20th, and the moving van on Sunday the 21st.

When I awoke early on the morning of the 20th – the first day of spring – the temperature in Hot Sulphur Springs was a robust 18 degrees……below zero. While there were innumerable things I would miss about living in Grand County, CO, the blissful memory of greeting spring with 18 degrees below zero would be tossed quickly into the recycle bin. As the packers had to have doors open to move in and out of the building, the temperature for most of the morning – in the hotel – was below zero. Recycle bin that memory as well.

I learned something interesting about the relocation industry that day, especially those involved in corporate relocations – the kind where the company picks up the total tab. I would have assumed the cost of the move was based upon mileage and cubic feet of truck space; in fact, it is based upon gross weight. This would explain why a packer would use a 24”x12”x12” box, loaded with 3-4 pounds of packing paper, to carefully and thoroughly wrap a box of paper clips, a roll of scotch tape, a small stapler and a pencil holder from the top of our office desk. In total, the carton and its contents weighed 7 pounds – the actual contents (things I would have thrown away vs. packing) weighed less than a pound. We had large moving boxes – 36”x24”x24” – containing two 8- ounce lamp shades, secured by reams of packing paper, total weight approaching 15 pounds. Oh, and they also charge per box and per 1000 sheets of packing paper. They were nice people, but what a racket!

Sunday arrives, along with the moving van, and the 10AM thermometer reads 30F; that’s a 50 degree swing from the previous morning. It took the movers until about 4:00 PM to load all of our furniture, appliances, a 1300-pound gun safe (cha-ching!) and 123 boxes of various weights, shapes and sizes. As the movers emptied a room, we cleaned behind them, as our intent was to leave the place spotless for future sales showings, then get out of town before dark. At 3:00 PM, I did the final upstairs walkthrough. We’d left all of the furnishings in the rooms, so there wasn’t the empty feel that our downstairs living quarters would offer. A sad, slow walkthrough, room by room, filled me with a thousand memories – things like “I’ve made this damn bed a thousand times” and “I’ve scrubbed this damn toilet a thousand times.” I said my final goodbye – aloud, in case I wasn’t alone - knowing that I’d made that bed and cleaned that toilet for the last time.

I joined Julie downstairs, watching as she made her final pass with the vacuum. Speaking of doing something 1000 times, Julie knew every square inch of that floor from the handle of our Riccar, and I know for certain that her vacuuming memories would soon be joining a few of mine in the recycling bin. We were joined by a few remaining friends as we wrapped things up, preparing to leave the Riverside forever, as the owners. I needed to make a final pit stop in our bathroom before heading out, and I headed back to our living quarters for what I thought would be the last time.

Business completed, I gave one final flush, and watched in horror as the water in the bowl began to rise. Oh my, how could this be? After all, it was business #1, not the number of business that typically clogs a toilet. I quickly shut the water off, and headed to the tool room to retrieve the plunger. Needless to say, I’d done this more than a few times in this plumber’s nightmare of a house.

Plunge. Plunge. Plunge………nothing. Damn!

One other time during our ownership did the plumbing main back up – I’ve chronicled this New Year’s Day nightmare in a previous blog. But that clog was the result of full hotel rooms for 3 straight days, which equates to pretty extensive number two-ing. We’d had no guests in the hotel for the last two weeks; I couldn’t imagine how – and why now, why today – we could have a clogged main sewer line.

I checked another downstairs toilet, and sure enough, the main was backed up. I shut the water off to all of the toilets, and stood looking at the throne in our bathroom, wondering just what in the hell I was going to do about this. And as if a switch had been turned on, the water in our stool began to slowly rise. Holy crap! I’d shut the water supply off. What could be causing this? In a matter of seconds, the water began flowing over the brim of the bowl, onto the just cleaned and disinfected tile floor. My neighbor came running when he heard my screams, and quickly surveying the situation, he ran to the tool room to grab the wet vac. He began vacuuming the water out of the bowl – it took less than 10 seconds to fill the 5-gallon vacuum canister. I grabbed the 40+ pound bucket and moved outside as quickly as I could, dumping it into the street in front of the hotel. I won’t get graphic here, but suffice to say, the water wasn’t fresh and clear. Back and forth I went, filling the vac and dumping the water into the street, all the while the water continuing to slowly rise.

(An important aside to this part of the story; Darin, the local mortician who had seriously considered purchasing The Riverside, was standing in the empty office, watching quietly as I ran back and forth, gently carrying, so as not to spill it on the cleaned floors, the 40 pound buckets full of flotsam and jetsam before dumping them into the street. I've never seen the face of a man who’s just learned that he’s been given a death sentence commutation, but I was pretty certain that was the look I was seeing on Darin's face.)

Where in the hell was the water coming from?

To Be Continued....................

Losing Life Riverside

2010-04-26T19:17:00.000-07:00

Part III……………………………Making Like The James Gang

As Billy Banker never said anything in our subsequent discussions like “How dare you infer that Hell won’t have me!”, I never found out whether or not he read the original unedited letter that I inadvertently sent; (or was it really inadvertent – is there such a thing as a physical Freudian slip?) After what they did to us, I would’ve loved to have the opportunity to scream those nasty things to their face. And for the record, I would like them to rot in hell. And I also believe that hell is too good for them. And yes, Big Fat Hairy F-You!! It’s not like they could do anything worse to us than they are currently doing; (“Oh yea? Well if that’s how you feel about us, we’re gonna double foreclose on your property!”) so why not let them know how we really feel about them.

Billy Bankers only response to the letter was a terse email saying that there was no written record that I’d ever requested a line of credit, and when questioned, Betty Banker told him she’d never promised us a refinancing, and finally, that he was left with no choice but to proceed with the foreclosure process. Well, I had written proof of our credit line discussions in the form of my bank-approved business plan; and as for Betty Banker lying to Billy Banker about not promising us a refinance – who would ever expect her to tell the truth about anything? I’m certain she looks in the mirror every morning and lies to herself about her not actually being a lying, heartless, thieving bitch.

After reading the email, the reality of our situation was paralyzing, suffocating; it literally took my breath away. And couple getting this email prior to an afternoon meeting with my largest account – me getting Billy Banker’s email then having to sit all afternoon in a rather tense meeting, acting to the assembled crowd as if my entire world hadn’t just come to an end. Oh yes, then I had to call Julie, still fighting it out at the hotel in Colorado, with the news that Billy Banker and his scythe-wielding, sulphur-breathing she-bitch-from-hell may show up at any moment and demand that she vacate the premises. I had no idea what to expect, as I’d never had anything happen like this before. Julie was only slightly hysterical beyond the point of being consolable.

Our next step involved finding a real estate attorney who was licensed in Colorado. I was led to a highly recommended gentleman with a pricy firm whose first words to me, after I explained our dire situation, were “Mr. Paradise, I want you to calm down and relax. They can’t throw you out of your house or take your possessions. There is nothing about this situation that can’t be fixed.” So calm down I did as the attorney laid out the options.

Option #1 involved getting current on the loan– he echoed my friend’s opinion, that in this economy the legal system would look very harshly upon the bank if they tried to foreclose on a current loan. We can then fight them in court as to the validity of the ‘material change in the operation of the business’ reason for calling the note. However, Option #1 involved us coming up with a lawyer-load of money for legal fees, (it could ultimately cost $50,000 - $100,000) and we still had the potential for a downside if we didn’t prevail in court. Well heckfire, if I had $50,000 or $100,000, I wouldn’t be in this mess; so, cancel Option #1.

Option #2 was to move heaven and earth, pull a rabbit out of my hat, part the Dead Sea and then find a buyer for the hotel in the next 60 days. In the 10 months the hotel had been on the market, we had one potentially serious buyer, and he backed out when the sale of the adjacent hot springs fell through – it was kind of a package deal. So I didn’t hold a lot of hope for coming up with someone in 60 days, and certainly not someone who would buy the place for a reasonable sum.

Option #3…… walk away. That's right.....just walk away. Walk away from our investment, our equity, our labors, our memories, our friends, our dream, our successes, and sadly, our failure. Walk away from a lot of good things, but more importantly, walk away from a boatload of bad things. It’s referred to as a 'Deed in Lieu of Foreclosure’. You simply give the bank the deed to the property, the bank excuses the indebtedness and you walk away clean.

No more $5000/month mortgage payments, no more $1000/month electric bills, no more $750/month water bills. (Yes, that’s right; our water bill, regardless of usage, was a fixed $750/month.)

Most importantly, no more Julie and I living apart.

When the lawyer explained this to me, and how easily it could be accomplished, I literally exhaled all of the air I’d been suffocating on since early that afternoon. I began to breathe normally again. The tightness in my jaw and chest relaxed, this time without being the normal result of swilling a couple of Bombay’s. The massive weight and profound stress that had been burdening me the past two years slipped off of my back like a cheap kimono.

Just walk away.

But what about our equity and all that we’d invested? Equity is only equity if you sell X for Y. There wasn’t a chance in hell of us selling X for Y anytime soon, yet the thousands of dollars in monthly expenses would continue indefinitely – the biggest percentage being never-to-be recovered interest to those slimy, scum-sucking bastards at Grand County Bank. Realistically, how much longer could we continue to fund this financial Waterloo, all the while living like paupers in Mississippi?

Knowing that all of the pain and suffering could be over, and we could begin to live a normal life again, albeit broke, for the price of something that may never have existed or been attainable anyway, was almost too good to believe. When I explained the situation to Julie, I could hear her smile over 1000 miles of fiber optics. No question it SUCKS that it ended the way it did, BUT IT ENDED, and the peaceful feeling of realizing that it was finally over was worth more money than you can ever imagine.

To Be Continued……….

Losing Life Riverside

2010-04-19T18:48:00.000-07:00

Part II - You Can Edit That Out, Can't You?

I called a good friend, who is an attorney, with my devastating news. Devastating on two fronts – the obvious one where I realized that all that we’d invested, both financially and emotionally, and all that we’d accomplished the last two years at The Riverside was at the stools edge, ready to topple into the bowl and be flushed down the toilet. But perhaps even more disturbing was me coming to grips with my naiveté regarding the banks total manipulation of us and our money. I trusted them implicitly, viewing them as my most essential and necessary partner in this venture. Learning that they were anything but a partner, in fact, they were an adversary, made me question my core ability to comprehend the most basic mental tasks – reasoning, deducing, anticipating, obviating, etc.

I also always thought I was a pretty good judge of people – well go right ahead and throw that notion to the four winds. To think that this bank lady that I trusted so entirely – I can’t begin to tell you the information I shared with her, not only financial but personal – was probably the most devious, evil, dishonest person I’d ever encountered. It was as if I decided that it was probably OK to try and French kiss a hooded cobra. I sat in this woman’s office and cried both in sorrow as I recounted my financial situation, and in joy, as she told me everything would be alright. Little did I know that as I was pouring out my heart & soul, her hands were under her desk sharpening a scythe that would make the Grim Reaper envious, while her gentle demeanor was masking what she was really probing for as she looked at me with her comforting eyes; namely, the best part of my fleshy personage to whack away at with that toad sticker she was honing.

My lawyer friend was fired up when I told him the situation, saying “just because the bank says it’s so doesn’t mean it’s so! Let’s put these bastards on notice that you’re not going to just sit back and let them have their way.” His thought being that in these tough financial times, and with the current national and legal mood regarding financial institutions, that there wouldn’t be a judge in the world that would let them take our hotel from us if we were current on our payments. But first and foremost, I needed to go on record with the bank and write them a letter detailing some of the issues – the fact that they lied regarding a refinancing, and another heretofore unmentioned issue of them promising, and then reneging on a line of credit.

When we were in discussions regarding our loan before purchasing the hotel, it was discussed at length and I was promised a line of operating capital, which was to be secured by the equity we had in the hotel. It was detailed in every cash flow statement, every operating statement, and explicitly discussed in my business plan; all of which were approved by the bank loan officer, the loan committee and the board of directors. I would have never considered purchasing the hotel without a line of credit. Not even close. Take that cash infusion out of my five-year projections and the venture would be dead after two years, as all of my numbers reflected.

When the time came to sit down and request the line, about 10 months into the venture, the loan officer had me give him year-to-date financials and a write up on the general state of the business, including improvements we’d made to the hotel and actual sales and expense numbers vs. budgeted numbers. I complied, and off he went to the loan committee for what I was assured was a done deal. (I wasn’t asking for much – less than 5% of the equity we had in the hotel – just enough to get through the end of the year until the busy holiday season refilled the coffers.)

When I received the news that, in fact, the line of credit was denied, I said to the banker, “We’re dead”, and he didn’t deny it. As previously mentioned, every financial blueprint I’d come up with had that line being essential to our survival; I never figured it any other way.

So a letter was written that detailed what I felt were misrepresentations by the bank that were critical in the failure of the business. My job in writing the letter was to enlighten Billy Banker regarding some of the past history, regardless of his professed lack of interest in “past history.” The letter was to be written in three parts, part one being “we were promised this”, part two was “you welched on your promises”, and part three, to be completed by my lawyer friend, was “now here’s what we’re going to do if you don’t make things right.” I had no clue as to the legal what we can and what we can’t do, so I let the lawyer have at that.

I write parts one and two, and when I get to part three, I decided to have a little fun and vent, as I knew my friend might get a kick out of it, and it might make me feel a little better. In lieu of the legalese that my friend would supply, I started part three of the letter with “So, Grand County Bank, all I can say is BIG FAT HAIRY F**K YOU! You lying, thieving pack of bastards can rot in hell, assuming hell will have you!” Then I emailed the letter to my friend.

He sent me back an edited version, changing some of my text in parts one and two, and adding the all important legal piece at the end of the letter. He used that Microsoft Word program where the deletions are shown in red with a line through them, and the additions are in blue. I cleaned it up, or so I thought, and sent it on to Billy Banker. I then went to lunch. After lunch, I decided I’d open the email I sent to the banker and re-read the letter, trying to get the feeling Billy Banker would get when he opened and read this legal tour de force.

“Ohshit ohshit ohshit ohshit ohshit!”, I said to myself; I inadvertently sent Billy Banker the original, the one where I end it with “So, GCB, BIG FAT HAIRY F-YOU!”

I thought I got rid of all of the colorful deletions and additions; especially that real colorful part at the end of my original letter. But nooooo; unfortunately, and again with very bad timing, there are still some applications in Microsoft Word that I’ve yet to master.

So really really fast, I sent another version – this time as clean as our bank account – to Billy Banker in an email that said “Please disregard the previous draft submission. Clean version attached.”

To be continued……

Losing Life Riverside

2010-04-10T07:38:00.000-07:00

Part I - Black Tuesday

It should be no revelation to those that knew us and our situation that we were struggling to make a go of it at The Riverside; we were struggling hard. I didn’t move by myself to an apartment in Mississippi for the view. Our timing flat sucked in purchasing a business that had no record of profit, in a real estate market that, arguably with maybe an idiot, is the worst real estate market since real estate markets were valued. Like my grammar and my luck, our timing couldn’t have sucked more worser.

But ‘woe is me’ aside, we did everything we could to keep the place afloat. Thank God for Ergon. And Thank God for the fine folks at Grand County Bank, who promised to work with us in re-doing our loan to make the monthly nut more affordable. In October of 2009, when we were struggling to keep current with our payments, the bank sent us an angel who promised us that if we got current on our 1st mortgage and paid up another short term loan they’d given us, our loan would be refinanced, allowing us a reduced monthly payment where we could keep our mortgage current with only my job revenue. This sweet-faced, seemingly innocent Bank VP – she could be mistaken for an ex-nun – looked us in the eye and promised us a sanctuary from the impending financial doom, provided we did our part in getting current. Our part included depleting both Julie’s and my retirement accounts, which we gladly did in an effort to satisfy the bank and pave the way for a new financial future. Even better news, as in early December, our ex-nun bank angel brought a savior to The Riverside, a savior who was brought in from the outside to help us with our situation. Julie made them coffee, showed them around the hotel, and bid them off with the feeling that our fate was in the hands of these caring, helpful souls. There was a light at the end of the financial abyss, provided we kept up our end of the obligation.

As promised, and with much effort and at the expense of vendors and creditors, we paid the bank every owed cent by years’ end; a gut-wrenching process, but what a feeling of relief when the bill was paid.

During this process, in early November I received an email from our realtor, which brought news to which I was uncertain of its affect regarding our situation – Grand County Bank had been issued a “Cease and Desist Order” from the feds. A modicum of research – Wikipedia, I think – told me that this is what the feds do before they barge into your bank unannounced and seize it at 4:30 PM on a Friday afternoon; a not-so-gentle last warning to ‘get your financial shit together’, or you’ll quickly have no financial shit to get together. This wasn’t a surprise to me, as I’d weekly seen numerous foreclosures on $600,000 weekend getaway homes, crumbling Grand County businesses and a major financial sinkhole in a 36-hole golf course/fly-fishing resort, on the banks of the Colorado River, that went totally tits-up 1/3rd of the way through the development process – all on the balance sheets of Grand County Bank.

All of a sudden it dawned on me that Grand County Bank giving us a loan might not have been the vote of confidence I was looking for in higher financial powers having an educated insight into the potential success or failure of our dream. Throughout the process of our buying The Riverside, Julie would ask me “I wish we could get a sign as to whether or not we’re doing the right thing.” I would answer, “The banks will give us that sign. If we can’t make this work, they’ll have smart people that will blow my numbers out of the sky and we won’t get a loan.” I naively relied on the bank, knowing every last one of our intimate financial details and relying upon my ‘worst-case-scenario’ 5-year pro-formas, to tell me whether or not we had a viable business venture. What a fool I was.

January came and went without news from our sweet angel from the bank regarding our refinancing. At the end of the month, I sent her a brief email saying “waiting to hear from you re our refinancing. Don’t want to get another month behind…” February came and went, with no news from the bank. I was worried, but I knew that our angel was working behind the scenes to make our path easier. But now I was coming up to being two months behind on the mortgage.

Tuesday, March 2nd, the Grand County Bank savior sent me an email. “Mr. Paradise, you are two months behind on your mortgage. Make payment immediately or we will begin foreclosure proceedings.” Wow! I’d never met or spoken with him, but Julie said he was a nice guy who said he wanted to work with us; this email was a little chilly. I called our new friend and explained that I’d held off making payments as I was waiting to hear from the bank regarding my promised refinance. If need be, I could make the January payment immediately, and the February payment by March 15th.

This is where the story turns. This is when I realized there was more at play than us being late with the mortgage. Billy the Banker told me how it was going to be:

“Mr. Paradise, first and foremost, you need to take that money and hire legal counsel. Regardless of whether or not you get current, we are going to declare you in default. You have a clause in your loan that states if there is a material change in the ownership, management or operation of the business, and you living in Mississippi with plans to close the hotel April 1st certainly qualifies as a material change in the operation of the business, the bank can declare the loan in default. We are going to exercise that right.”

“But what about our refinancing? All we want to do is hang on to the place until we can sell it.”

“Mr. Paradise, the Cease & Desist order that we are operating under doesn’t allow us to refinance your loan.”

“Wait a minute!!! Betty Banker promised us that if we got current, we would get refinanced, and you’ve been under the Cease & Desist since early November. Did she just flat lie to us to get every last penny we had before you called the loan?? She knew we couldn’t refinance yet she strung us along until we drained our retirement accounts and handed them over to you??? She seemed so sincere. How could anyone be that evil and not be doing life somewhere?”

“Mr. Paradise, that’s past history. I’m only concerned with the here and now.” (That is a direct quote.)

It was at this point that the disdain and vitriol that I usually reserve for the legal profession was now borne by those in the banking profession – particularly these lying Grand County bastards. In fact, I now needed to embrace the legal profession, as it was my only course for being able to deal with this den of thieves.

To be continued…..

The Riverside is gone, but the blog lives on...

2010-03-30T19:19:00.000-07:00

Closing the hotel, escaping Grand County under the darkness of night, arranging for assumed identities in Mississippi....Damn it, I've been busy!!

The blog is not dead, as our Grand County exit, replete with a final good-bye from the Riverside ghost, is forthcoming.

Au revoir....for now

2010-03-14T19:10:00.000-07:00

This is a tough one. It’s not a blog about Grand County drunks, dogs, ghosts or ketchup. It’s not about the magnificent Colorado, the spring lupine or the majesty of Byers Canyon. It’s about our life.

I’ll try not to be bitter, and try to keep it beyond the sort of thing that would tip the scale on your not visiting here.

Let's see...Rome, Grand County; Rome, Grand County; Rome, Grand County…oh, that nasty, bitter blog – Rome it is!!!

Effective March 13th, 2010, we have closed The Riverside; forever, under our ownership.

We gave it our all – mentally, physically and financially. We poured our heart, soul and savings into the old girl; they’re all still there, but we are off. As you might already know, I left the hotel in October to take a job in Mississippi, and Julie will join me this next week in Mississippi, as it should be. We’re walking away from a lot, both personally and financially, but nothing in this world is worth being without the person you love; nothing.

Please don’t feel sorry for us, as we are at peace with what we did, and for how we are ending things. There is no question that our timing in undertaking this endeavor couldn’t have been worse. ‘The perfect storm’ is an over-used descriptive term for Murphy’s Law being fueled by Armageddon; over-used, but still very applicable in our situation. Oh well….

What happens next? Lot’s to be sorted out, hopefully with a buyer, but most likely with the banks, the feds and the lawyers. At the end of the day, we’ll be in a new place, with our health, good jobs, and memories and experiences that you simply can’t put a price upon. We can walk away with our heads held high, in that we succeeded in our goal of taking this beautiful old building and turning it into an extension of ourselves; a warm, welcoming place of good taste and good cheer. And we have you, our friends, family and patrons, to thank for helping us realize our dream.

I won’t hang my head over our situation, as I am daily reminded, by the travails and real sufferings of others, that we are still blessed. Our situation is a little business deal gone badly; it’s not health, life or death.

I’m not bitter. I'm sad, I’m proud, and I'm ready to move on.

Bad Blood

2010-03-05T18:49:00.000-08:00

Editors Note: This blog has nothing to do with living life in Colorado or Mississippi. If either of those topics are essential to your reading this blog, then save your time on this one. On a positive note, this posting isn’t a bitter rant, nor should it dissuade anyone from vacationing in any particular locale.........

BAD BLOOD

An internet-alert friend of mine made me aware of the following, long-overdue technological advancement in the field of consumer product packaging. Surely you’ve all learned of this by now, but in case you haven’t:

http://fastfood.freedomblogging.com/2010/02/06/heinz-testing-new-dip-squeeze-ketchup-at-fast-food-chains/50795/

My friends interest in this story centered on the fact that previous ketchup packaging – those little foil thingies – have been used by Heinz for the past 50-years without any change or advancement. In that 50-year span, technology in all areas has grown at warp-speed, and you’d have thought someone in the packaging department at Heinz might’ve stumbled across some sort of package improvement in the past 50 years. Damn, you might think they’d have stumbled on some new ideas from screwing around and perusing the internet during their work day, in lieu of actually spending time developing new packaging products! Anyway, 50 years later, Heinz has delivered us an improved ketchup package.

Why, you might now be asking yourself, would I take yours and my time to carry this discussion any further? Well I’ll tell you why – the old Heinz ketchup single use package has a very special place in my heart; it ties in to one of my early life memories so solidly that every time I see one of these packets of sugary, red goo, I’m drawn back to a hot summer day in July of 1967. In retrospect, I thought it was much earlier – and when you discover what a senseless thing I did on that fateful day, you’ll be astonished that I was 11 years old, and not 4 years old – but I dated it with the release of the album ‘The Doors’, which I remembered listening to ad nauseam that summer. And in subsequent summers.

When we were kids, and we weren’t privy to the economic struggles that adults encounter trying to house, educate, feed and clothe kids – 5 kids, no less – we thought my Dad was a bit of a tightwad. (I now wonder and marvel at, how on one salary, he did what he did, and made us feel like we were rich – I’m certain if you’re in my age group you wonder the same thing about your parents.) Tightwad or not, my Dad did Christmas and vacations right. Regardless of how often he reminded us throughout the year that “we can’t afford that!” or “you eat that cereal like you’re getting paid for it!”, he never disappointed us come Christmas and vacation time. Again, I don’t know how my parents did it.

However, our summer vacation of 1967 was substandard compared to all of the others; I know now because my parents were in the process of building our final family house – the five bedroom one with central air and all of the 1967 bells and whistles. Instead of a week at the beach or a northern lakeshore, we went to visit family in St. Louis for a few days, then on to Chicago to visit the Museum of Science & Industry – an absolute requisite for a WWII-era engineer with three sons.

Chicago was awesome, but it’s St. Louis where my ketchup connection occurred. I was born in St. Louis, but moved to Kansas City at the age of three – I’ve got peripheral memories of St. Louis at best - but my older brother and sister had some solid memories of St. Louis, and some of their fondest memories involved the St. Louis Zoo. All kids love the zoo, and my 11-year old standard for a zoo was the Kansas City Zoo – damned fine by my estimation, but then it was all that I knew, and I was informed by my older siblings that the KC Zoo was bupkis compared to the St. Louis Zoo. So needless to say, being a normal, zoo-loving kid, I was unconcerned about our truncated vacation and jacked about a visit to what had been described to me, by reliable sources, as the Mecca of all zoos.

The St. Louis Zoo was all that was promised, and far superior to KC – an entire building dedicated to reptiles, a massive big cat house, Phil, the poop-slinging gorilla, a walrus pool – that’s right, a freakin’ walrus pool.

I was in heaven, but I was hungry; time for lunch at one of the crowded concession stands. Hot summer day at the zoo, lots of people at the concession stand, waiting in line, hungry for lunch; lots of kids, lots of dads – lots of hot hungry kids, lots of hot, hungry, cranky dads. No matter to me, as I told my Dad what I wanted to eat, he got in line, and I moseyed around taking in the sights. There were perhaps twenty or thirty people huddled around the concession stand counter – it wasn’t organized in an airport security checkpoint back-and-forth fashion; it was kind of a mob at a counter – one of those situations where the loudest guy got waited on. People were hot, people were hungry, and people were cranky. No worry for me, as I was waltzing around in zoo la-la land, waiting patiently for my father to fight that crowd and bring me a burger with fries.

“Oh, what’s this?”, I asked myself, “an empty counter to lean against, with lots of napkins, plastic eating utensils and mustard and ketchup packages.” So lean I did, and I can’t say that what transpired next involved an orderly, rational discussion with myself. Perhaps it was the mid-day summer heat, or the hunger, or the lingering euphoria of experiencing the walrus pool – I honestly can’t say what drove me, in an unconscionable instant, to grab about a dozen of those ketchup packages, put them on the ground, and stomp upon them with all of my might.

You golfers know what it feels like to connect with the ‘sweet spot’ on a drive. It’s a feeling so clean and so pure that the second it happens you know you’ve hit pay dirt. My Size 6 sneaker absolutely experienced that sweet spot feeling as it laid into those 12 grounded ketchup packets; really bad timing for that ‘sweet spot’ thing. That hot, hungry, cranky crowd that was huddled, begging, growling and fighting for food at the concession counter was, in an instant, taken away from their heat and hunger pangs, and left to concentrate on a blistering Heinz ketchup assault from their unprotected rear flank.

I knew immediately that I had made a mistake. It was much like jabbing a rutting lion in the ass with a hot poker, having it turn to see what poked it, and standing there to face that angry beast – naked and unarmed. My action didn’t kill anyone, or cause any actual physical harm, but the crowd looked as if lots of them were dying. The masterful distribution of the 12 ketchup packs – it wasn’t a linear distribution, it was exponential – made it seem as if I’d spurted 50 gallons of ketchup at that crowd with a sophisticated piece of spray equipment; the kind of spray equipment that firemen would lust after. There were big gobs on this guy, fine spray on that guy, ribbons on the next one. And in 1967 fashion, all of the dads had on white shirts, and all of the kids had crew cuts. I still have this vivid image of a dad on his knees, his white shirt splattered with ketchup, him furiously wiping ketchup from the side of his 5-year old crew-cutted son’s head. He was cussing; he was not remotely jolly about his clean-up effort.

As I was surveying the carnage that I had wrought, my Dad was on me in an instant. He grabbed me by the shoulders and started shaking me, saying “What in the hell were you thinking??? What made you do a stupid thing like that??” I think I still remember a lot of the other dads saying “You’d better kill that little SOB, or we sure as hell will!” I clearly remember that no one laughed it off. These guys were going to have to walk around for the rest of a 100 degree day at the St. Louis Zoo with ketchup sprayed and splattered all over their clothes, crusted in their hair and the sweet, sickly smell of Heinz’s finest permeating their nostrils into the late afternoon hours.

The great thing about this, and the great thing about my Dad, was that there was no serious aftermath to this incident. He probably thought it was funnier than anything he’d seen in a while, and he knew his little display in front of the angry mob was all he needed to teach and all I needed to learn regarding the negative consequences of a once in a lifetime opportunity to plaster a crowd of people with ketchup packages.

I have one little experiment yet to conduct. What would happen if I were to take these new-aged, high tech ketchup packs and stomp on them? If you nailed them as I did the old-fangled packets, just right, would they wreak the havoc that was wreaked on that sunny St. Louis day in 1967? What if I could hit that sweet spot again?

It’s a comfort to know that if the new ones don’t work so well, I’ve got a trusty, proven, low-tech 50-year old back up.

Just when is the next Hot Sulphur Springs town meeting?

The First Amendment

2010-02-19T20:45:00.000-08:00

I received an email the other morning from a good friend in Grand County; one who’s opinion I value as much as their friendship. She was concerned that this blog is painting a negative light not only on me, my family and the Riverside, but on the town and all of Grand County as well. She asked that I either write more positive blog entries or none at all. She was basing her opinion on the following email that she received from another Grand Countian.

Subject: article about Riverside Hotel

I was reading your Winter 09/10 issue today, was inspired by the articles about the Hotel Riverside and the Grand Lake Touring Center. Plans for trips started formulating in my head.

I went to the Hotel Riverside website for more info, and noticed the invitation to " Visit our Blog to learn more about the Riverside Experience."

Hoping to find more information about the accommodations, I went to the blog, but instead found posting after posting of bitter commentary from the owner about the hotel, the guests, the town, and his family's personal struggles. YUCK!!! There went my plans for a Grand County vacation, as well as my trust in the stories in your magazine and his website.

Before you waste paper and ink promoting a local business, I'd suggest doing a bit more research on what they're really selling.

And you might mention to the owners that linking to a nasty blog from their website is probably not good for business.

Signed.......Unsigned

Wow! Someone actually decided not to visit one of the most spectacular places on earth, and certainly in the Continental US, because of a blog? A potential tourist, who was considering drinking in the vistas from Trail Ridge Road, considering wetting a line in a pristine section of gold medal trout water on the majestic Colorado River, considering hiking to the verdant glen beyond Grand Lake’s Angel Falls and being overwhelmed by the spectacle of some of Rocky Mountain National Parks most prominent peaks, then deciding to spend their time and money elsewhere because of a blog.

Because of my blog???

Do I actually have that sort of power?

My inflated ego only wishes it were so, but I think not. And oh, if it were only so; I’d blog about the need for world peace, brotherly love and the end to unfair taxation and government oppression. My negative blog thoughts drove someone from a Colorado vacation; maybe positive blog thoughts could help end a war, or pass an important bond issue, or save a life.

The truth be known, I don’t know who reads this blog or why. I know why I write it – for my fun, entertainment and self gratification. I love to write, and this blog is a free, unedited forum for me to express myself. Most of what I try to write involves a satirical and (hopefully) humorous rendering of my life and my family’s unique situation as we live life in the Colorado Mountains. I’ve also chronicled the knee-buckling, heart-rending moments of people and events that humble me in my stewardship of this fantastic building.

The aforementioned email mentions “bitter commentary from the owner” – I call super-huge BS on this. They’ve not read a single story on this blog, as I continually laud this beautiful county, our magnificent river and this wonderful historical property we’ve been entrusted with. Our blog drove this person away from Grand County? I can’t tell you how many people have been drawn to our legendary property and renegade lifestyle because of the blog.

I believe that the author of this email is not a legitimate “tourist” who happened to stumble upon a Grand County Living Magazine article and found our blog so offensive that it changed their vacation plans. But if that is the case, Grand County can thank me. These people will be happier vacationing in a remote part of Iowa. Survival in this world in general, and Grand County, CO in particular, requires its successful inhabitants to possess, at the bare minimum, a sense of humor. The really successful will have an appreciation for and understanding of satire as well. Those of you that don’t get it; you can go to Dubuque.

Sorry my dear friend, but the blog lives on…..

Living Life Lakeside..........Part III

2010-01-28T20:03:00.000-08:00

As I’m starting to ‘kind of’ get acclimated to living in Mississippi – heavy emphasis on ‘kind of’, thus the quotation marks, for effect – I think it time to get into the nuts and bolts of what constitutes “Living Life Lakeside"; and living life lakeside is all about exclusive keyed entry into 2945 Layfair Drive, Apartment # 1122, at the beautiful Reflection Pointe apartment complex, a literal stones’ throw from the Ergon HQ’s at Mirror Lake Plaza.

The Reflection Pointe Apartment complex, (the ‘e’ at the end of the traditional spelling of ‘Point’ indicating an air of elegance; this isn’t your normal old point, no, this point is dripping with…well, something special that warrants it an ‘e’ on the end) is a 100+ unit development that was built in, I would guess, the early 1970’s. They haven’t done much to the infrastructure since then, save for repairing what breaks, as it breaks, in the individual units. My heater/air conditioner sounds a lot like a 1954 Ford truck with bad wheel bearings flying out of control down a gravel road; the few times that it’s kicked on in the middle of the night had me fast awake and scrambling for cover. They are at the point where they’re replacing carpet when the units turn; my unit had fresh paint and new carpet when I moved in, but that still didn’t mask the smell of how many months/years of cigarette smoke infused into the walls by the previous occupants. It was so bad, that even when wearing clean, newly washed clothes that had hung in the closet for a few days, I still smelled of rank, old cigarette smoke when I went out of the apartment.

The 40+ year-old vinyl siding, and all of the interior and exterior wood trim, which is rife with rot, is in desperate need of replacement. My 5’x10’ balcony – quite an accoutrement to this bachelor’s dream pad – is shaky to the point that I hold my breath when I step out upon it, fearing that the extra weight and motion involved in my inhaling and exhaling a belly full of air might pull the deck from its supports, tumbling me headlong into the Mississippi flora and fauna that, year-round, flourishes 10’ below.

I don’t spend a lot of time at Reflection Pointe, as I mostly travel during the week on business. But the weekends alone at Reflection Pointe are special, spent mostly doing laundry at the Reflection Pointe laundry center, located about 150 yards from my apartment. I save my quarters all week, and plod across the green space, around the pool, and into the laundry room, with my basket of dirty clothes in tow. I’m quick to get my stuff in and out, as young neighbors who might venture into the laundry room while I sort and fold my whitey-tighties might look at me and ask themselves, “Wow, what sort of a retro-throwback thing lives amongst us and actually wears, well, what are those elasticized little white things he’s folding?”

I’m gonna come clean here and admit that I am, by far, the oldest dude that I’ve seen living at Reflection Pointe. The complex is inhabited by 20-30 year-olds who work at the nearby medical facilities, National Guard and USAF bases, and/or kids or newlyweds just out of college who inhabit this place as a short stop-off until they age enough or wage enough to buy themselves a house and get the hell on with their lives. Those that notice me have to ask themselves, “What has this poor bastard done to end up here at this point in his life, toting his laundry basket across the green space at Reflection Pointe? Geez, how can I avoid that happening to me? Maybe I should go talk to him. Nah, I’d rather not know. And he's a little scary.”

Part of me wants to go door to door and explain myself, “No, I’m not a newly paroled sex-offender, divorcée, AA-member; I’ve got a good job, a wife and family, and I’m a minority owner (Lucy being the majority owner) of a 13,000 square-foot hotel, bar & restaurant on the Colorado River!” My guess is, the truth would scare them even more, as upon hearing that truth, it would only confirm their pre-supposed suspicions of me not only being a newly paroled sex-offender, divorcée, AA-member, but a crazy, delusional, lying SOB as well. A grey-haired, not quite so good looking John Edwards comes to mind.

I’ll further come clean and tell you that I hate living at Reflection Pointe, alone, in a place that I would have turned my nose up at shortly out of college and gainfully employed. And the key word here is ‘alone’. Julie and I are getting ready to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary this June. That isn’t an accident; we love each other and have enjoyed living together for 30 years. Living without her, whether it is in Reflection Pointe or the Taj Mahal, sucks!

“Oh woe is me, and woe is my situation!” I've spent a lot of my Reflection Pointe weekend time having this self-pity party. And now, I’ll stumble all over trite and obvious territory and tell it like it is.

Haiti happened, right smack dab in the middle of my 'woe is me' party.

I live in a warm, comfortable one bedroom apartment with running water, a shower and flush toilet, a full kitchen and cable TV. HDTV to boot! I have a sketchy wooden deck with a Weber Little Smoky that I cook on most nights, enjoying the 50+degree Mississippi winter evenings.

The King of Haiti would kill for what I have.

When I look at how the rest of the world lives, what they daily have to deal with, and what constitutes pain and suffering to them, I now understand and appreciate the ‘e’ at the end of my pointe. It is a special place, and I'm fortunate to be able to live at the Pointe. I just wish my wife was here.