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

We would visit The Riverside eight times in total before our seriously fatal pursuit of purchasing the place; the initial summer visit and one other, and six straight visits between Christmas and New Years. Our Colorado/Riverside holiday ritual involved blowing out of KC on Christmas afternoon, driving to Hays, KS, spending the night, and then heading straight the next morning to 7800 feet of Hot Sulphur Springs altitude and 139 pounds of Abner Renta attitude. There we would meet family and more often than not friends from KC who we’d drag to this little jewel in the mountains; The Riverside, an ideal place over the holidays for quality time with family and friends, in the town that progress forgot and the land that Jim Cantore feared.

One irony of our Riverside pre-purchase winter visits to Hot Sulphur and the mountains was that never, ever, did we experience the brutal weather and driving conditions that are commonplace in that neck of the woods. We ignorant flatlanders would head up I-70 out of Denver every December 26th, the sky blue and the frost glistening, and marvel at the beauty of the snow-laden pines and icy peaks on clear roads all the way to our destination. Not once, coming or going, were we treated to the normalcy of a winter blizzard, the kind where we bit our lips to bleeding and wore out our right arms sign-of-the-crossing whilst driving over Berthoud Pass; that is, not until we bought the place and there was no going back: and then, of course, we experienced them with Ex-Lax regularity.

From that first visit in the summer of 1993 to the final visit in the winter of 2000 where we left The Riverside saying “never in hell will we come back here”, Abner steadily transmogrified from a lovable old character’s character to an utterly untenable asshole’s asshole. I contend that many long-time customers continued to visit Abner and The Riverside in his later years only to savor the experience of seeing this miserable ill-humored insulting old fool in his penultimate assholiness glory, much as you watch a NASCAR event for hope of seeing a wreck, or a hockey game a brawl.

Here are some examples of the snappy repartee that I’ve tried to expunge from my memory that would inspire paying guests to consider any other available place on earth than Abner’s Riverside, including most prisons, to eat and sleep while on vacation.

- To friends of ours who visited during one winter trip with their 5-year old…“Your son is very ill-behaved. I'm assuming that he's mentally retarded?”

- To an overweight female guest in the restaurant, loudly enough for all to hear…”If you don’t see anything on the menu that suits you, the Dairy Dine is down the street. Their hamburgers are very good and very fattening, but I don’t suppose that will deter you from eating one.”

- To an innocent walking in off of the street…”What sort of a sty were you raised in where you find it acceptable to enter this room without wiping your feet?” (The prospective customer proffered his middle finger in response and quickly left the premises without describing to Abner the sort of sty in which he was raised.)

- Aloud to no one in particular as a female guest, clad in ski pants, walked through the lobby…”The nice thing about insulated ski pants is that people aren’t sure if they’re looking at your fat ass or insulated ski pants – but then I suppose that all of our asses look fat in ski pants! Bwahaahaahaa!”

These are a few of what I remember; there were plentitudes more that I thankfully succeeded in forgetting.

One of Abner’s trademarks was his dramatic falsetto creepy Tiny Tim freak show of a laugh; it is way beyond verbal description, and whenever you heard it, you’d cock your head like the RCA Jack Russell in aural wonderment. Those of you who visited The Riverside and knew Abner would then and could now attempt to mimic the laugh – it was like Elvis’s “Thank you…thank you very much…”; you heard it and you had to try and ape it yourself.

As the visits to The Riverside mounted up, the laughs lessened and the slyly caustic comments turned to brutal personal assaults. I don’t remember a seminal event on that last visit that made us stomp our foot and say that we were never coming back, rather, it was just a general feeling of ill will that Abner consistently exuded towards us, his paying customers. You knew he needed our money, but you also knew that the last thing on earth he wanted was our company.

I never complained to Abner, never said anything like “Dammit, we’ve come here for six straight years now, brought you a ton of business, spent a ton of money, but you’ve turned into a real shithead and we’re NEVER COMING BACK!” I never did because I knew that he couldn’t care less. At best, berating him and telling him the truth would have gotten me nothing more than one of his “BWAHAAHAAHAAs”.

Six years passed, in which only one of those years we returned to the mountains for our post-Christmas family visit - and not to The Riverside; the rest were spent in Kansas City, blissfully enjoying our home and family, replete with our own private toilets. Not one of us missed our Christmases past at The Riverside.

Then one day, in late February of 2007, as a result of a series of events that were in a domino line that began clickclackclickclackclickclackclicking their way towards the finish line, at which point wrought one of the most infamous phone calls in the universal history of pure dumb-ass foolishness….

“Abner, I don’t know if you remember me, but my name is Richard Paradise, and I’m wondering if you’re interested in selling The Riverside?”

The rotted-teeth grin that Abner displayed upon hearing that question beamed across 700 miles of fiber optics; a smile so profound that possibly the corners of his mouth deftly sliced into each of his earlobes……

To Be Continued…………