Not Fade Away

With a name like Le Chateau, I guess I should have known the place was bound to be a dive, right? I mean, we’re not in the French Alps here. It’s Florence, a nothing little burgh on the Oregon coast, so they were sure to be putting lipstick on a pig. But it was the second cheapest dive in town, which still wouldn’t be an easy sell with the corporate types that were footing the bill. They’d want to know why we weren’t staying in the absolute cheapest possible flophouse, the Villa West. But despite its equally pretentious name, that place was known locally for its bedbugs, and I had to draw the line somewhere.

Ol' Le Chateau

Hard to believe the desk jockeys would squabble over the seven bucks a night difference, but they didn’t see a problem with us making the two and half hour drive every day— instead of staying in a hotel—to begin with. Unpaid travel-time of course, and not subtracted from our workday, but rather tacked on to the end. After a long day of gutting out a burnt building, the last thing you want is a drive through the twisty mountain passes separating you from home. Not that I expected some suit back in the office to give a shit, since we were driving our own vehicles instead of one of their company rigs.

Still, I managed to sell them on the idea that us working four ten-hour days in town would create efficiencies that we’d miss out on by doing five eight-hour shifts with all that set-up, tear-down, and travel, so they decided to put us up. Ronnie and I may have drawn the short straw on doing the out-of-town restoration, but there was no way we were going to add injury to insult by bringing bedbugs home with us, so I lied and said the Villa West was being fumigated. It wasn’t true, but it should’ve been. They didn’t bother to check my story over seven bucks, so we were off to the second worst place we could go. Yay, me.

Hotels, malls, condo complexes, and office buildings all have fires the same as anybody else. And when they do, it’s usually worth Corporate’s expense to send us where the work is. Extended stays in another town for work are always lame. Living on a twenty-buck per-day food per-diem and sharing a double occupancy at some bullshit Davy Crockett Motor Lodge where the bedsheets are made of asbestos doesn’t make life any better. The continental breakfast is always Costco mini-muffins and your choice of three dial-a-cereal dispensers filled with bulk store-brand knockoffs of Cheerios, Raisin Bran, and Fruit Loops. You’d think they might at least make the coffee from today’s dishwater, but you’d be wrong about that. Town to town, these are the things you can rely on. Despite its gussified name, Le Chateau was no exception.

It certainly helped that Ronnie and I had been friends for eleven years by then, having worked together for the previous three years. He's a stocky guy who people often describe as jolly, sporting a knappy head and an epic mustache. He brings a great attitude into every situation, which is the only way to survive when it’s all asses and elbows in a sardine-can motel room. I can count on one hand the number of times I've ever seen him in a bad mood, but have lost count of the times he's saved my bacon. I referred to him as the “work wife” and he and my actual wife have an alarming number of traits in common. They even drive me crazy for the exact same reasons. But he also keeps my coffee cup full when we're on the road, and gets all the 80's movie references I make in my awful jokes, so I guess that’s something.

In a rare stroke of good fortune, it turned out that ol’ Le Chateau was right across the street from the building we were gutting, the Florence Elk’s Lodge. Or was it the Moose’s Lodge? Eagles, maybe? I can’t remember. All those Flintstones-Happy-Days-Grand-Poobah type places seem the same to me. Moldering relics from another time. The Lodge was huge, big enough to fit two grocery stores inside. Instead, they had a bar, a commercial kitchen, a banquet hall, a ballroom complete with stage, a bingo parlor, a second-hand store, and even a sad little gym. Turns out one of the more forgetful members had walked away and left the gym with the treadmill still going. Even at point two-five miles per hour, if you leave one of those running for eighteen hours, it’s gonna catch fire.

All the Grand Poobahs.

The Lodge was always dim inside, the already weak bulbs blunted by jaundiced pebbled-glass sconces, set too high in the vaulted ceilings. The place was mostly wood-paneled or wall-papered and smelled of dust and entropy. Trophy cases showed various awards they’d won back in the heyday of some bygone era. Bowling trophies, blue ribbons for charitable causes and chili cook-offs. The wall of fame displayed black and white portraits of mostly men but a goodly few women that had held various offices from President to Sergeant at Arms going back to the 30’s. Their faces all had the same general look, presumably the best that nutrition, genetics, and a stagnant emigration could do at the time. Or maybe Fraternal Orders of Whatever attracted a certain type, who knows?

Despite the best efforts of their aged custodian, the place was receding. The carpet was a 60s-era industrial shag that they’d absolutely gotten their money’s worth out of. It reminded me of a skating rink, because of similar indelible trails and wear patterns, and because both those institutions were fading for the same reasons. So when the insurance company presented the Elks with a check for the work to be done, they definitely got some dollar signs in their eyes as they contemplated making improvements that couldn’t otherwise be supported by their membership dues.

If the Florence volunteer firefighters responding to the fire at the Elk’s lodge (because I’m just going arbitrarily say it was the Elks and not the Moose, Eagles, or Owls) had known what they were doing, the damage would have been contained in the sad little gym. Which consisted of the treadmill in question, a couple of exercise bikes, some free weights, a weird number of medicine balls for some reason, a couple of jump-ropes, and a long-dry Jacuzzi. Instead, the volunteers ventilated the fire in the wrong direction and blew smoke throughout the entire complex. So although the actual damage from the blaze itself was concentrated in the walls and ceiling of the gym, the acrid smoke billowed throughout the voluminous structure, spreading from space to space until the majority of the building was rendered virtually uninhabitable. Wait, scratch that. It would have been uninhabitable, anywhere else.

The Benevolent Protectorate

When smoke tears through a building, it shellacs everything it touches in soot, ash, and oily resins never intended by nature. Mostly because the fuel for the fire is made up largely of fabrics, plastics, and man-made substances that nature also never intended. Thirty years ago, you had about seventeen minutes to get out of a burning building. Thanks to all those miracle materials, you now have three minutes. Better living through chemistry, I guess. Much of the time, we have to remove all sheetrock to get into the wall cavities, because the particles of the smoke are small enough to penetrate the pores of the gypsum and deposit smelly residues inside the wall, such that the campfire smell can’t be removed without demolition and stain-sealing with specialized paint. Other times, if the smoke is less intense, or the materials less porous, it can be cleaned up with special cleaners called Chem-sponges. Either way, it’s a shit-ton of work.

Fortunately, most of the true demolition was contained to the gym and the second hand store. The rest of it could be cleaned with chem-sponges and billowing fogs of ozone blown throughout, or else given a new surface coat of lacquer, wallpaper, or fresh paint. The lone exception outside the gym and secondhand store were the acoustic tiles in the suspended ceiling grid. The metal track of the grid itself could be cleaned, but the fibrous acoustic tiles were a lost cause, hopelessly permeated with smoke. Unfortunately, the grid ran throughout most of the voluminous space, with almost twenty-thousand square feet in need of replacement. This turned out to be the most tedious portion of the work, not simply because there were over five-thousand tiles that needed to be removed and replaced, but because of the Elks themselves.

The youngest of them were in their late 50s, but the majority were somewhere between 60 and 85. There were about the number of curmudgeons in the group that you’d expect, but otherwise they were nice enough most of the time. They started showing up in the morning around 7:30a for the biscuits and gravy breakfast, then trickled in and out all day, with spikes in the afternoon for the daily Bingo games. As with most construction projects, at first they were happy to see us and abuzz with questions. But as the weeks of chem-sponging, demolition, stain sealing, lacquering, and sheetrock work wore on, they became resentful of our presence and the disruption that our work caused to their various routines. Admittedly, the work is noisy and often smelly, which would certainly put a kink in the Bossanova and Square-dance lessons that were still going on in the ballroom for some reason.

Why they were attempting to conduct their regular activities in a building that had active construction work going on and smelled like the aftermath of soggy campfire ashes was beyond me. But they continued to serve breakfast and dinner, and had a smattering of bar-flies bellied up pretty much all day long as though nothing had happened. Clearly, it was a hub of their daily lives and could not be disrupted for any reason. So we fielded questions and complaints on the regular. “Why can’t you work at night? When are you gonna be done? Are we there yet?” And when it wasn’t coming from them, it was coming from Corporate. “Hey…. So, yeah... we’re getting complaints about the work that we asked you to do, so… if you could just not do it... but also still do it? Maybe work a split shift starting at 5:00a, and then come back at night? But you know, with no shift differential? Yeah... that’d be great. I mean, we are puttin’ ya up in that great hotel and all.”

Meanwhile Ronnie and I were just trying to do our jobs by day and not kill each other by night. Pull into town Monday morning, check into ol’ Le Chateau at lunch, spend the next four days and three nights sharing one vehicle, one hotel room, working a brutal ten-hour shift, and eating every single meal together. Even though we went home Thursday night, and then had a three-day weekend, it’s still a lot to ask of any relationship. By the end of a week filling a shabby motel room with farts, just the sound of the other guy chewing is enough to make you want to kill him. But that’s why God made Jagermeister, which we demolished a bottle of every week we were there. Ronnie still blames me to this day for his borderline alcoholism.

So those old crones in the lodge were lucky they got us instead of any of the other jackasses that worked for our company, who had no couth at all. Or maybe the company was lucky that they could send us instead of the other jackasses. Either way, the Elks were a weird lot to work for. The parking lot was usually half-full of Airstreams and motor-coaches, like an ersatz camp-ground. The Elks were a traveling bunch, and their fraternity, or “Benevolent Protectorate” as they put it, has almost 2,000 lodges across the country. These locations allowed members to camp on the property, pay a flat rate for meals, even cash checks all across the country. I know, because they told us all about it, all the time. Every. Single. One of them. I guess that’s great if you’re retired. Or if you couldn’t just deposit funds electronically? I don’t know, it seemed like a weird bragging point.

Working there wasn’t entirely without its charms. Every day came with little vignettes about the history of the Benevolent Protectorate, or the town of Florence, or the lives of septuagenarians going back to Iwo Jima. Sometimes it was just friendly conversation in passing, other times they held us hostage by their complete inability to read the signals of disinterest, as people often do when they’re longing to be heard and so power through all obstacles like manners and situational awareness.

“I met my wife, Margaret, at a mixer here. Would’ve been back in ’59, I guess. Course she’s been gone now, nigh on eight years. Cancer, don’tcha know?”

“Old Ed Frasier was a member here for years before he passed. You know Ed? No? He was Mayor of Florence for three terms, before they forced him out in ’78. Anyway, he could cut a rug and get you a mean deal on a Chevy. He owned the dealership here in town, don’tcha know?”

“Angie Delvecchio used to run the bingo hall here. My, but we had a time! Didn’t we just? She’d have us all cackling like a bunch of hens, took our minds right off Cuba, the Commies. You know, whatever was bothering us? She and Sal moved to White Plains after Carter got elected, don’tcha know?”

All the while, we just had to power through or we wouldn’t have gotten a lick of work done, which would just mean even more time at Le Chateau, and more hassle from Corporate. Since the ceiling grid was high up in the vaulted spaces, we worked off of a rolling scaffold, with Ronnie removing old tiles, giving me the measurements for the notches and holes needed to accommodate the sprinkler heads, PA speakers, and light fixtures. In turn, I’d collect the old tiles, run them to the dumpster, cut the new tiles, and push him around on the scaffold from space to space in the building. It was musty, dusty work as decades of undisturbed dust-bunnies, vermin droppings, and detritus from the voluminous building’s original construction rained down each time we removed one of the thousands of tiles to be changed out.

When we got to the bar area, the day-drinkers decided not to move and just let us work around them while they sipped Bloody Mary’s and Old Fashioned’s seasoned with asbestos and mouse droppings from our work. Apparently it was worth it to carpet-bomb us with tales about the work they used to do back in their prime. A couple of times we even found evidence of it. One of the old duffers, a short, wiry guy who looked like he struggled to keep his weight up, regaled us with unrelenting tales of his own career in the trades as an electrician back in the 80s. His loyalty to their cult—uh, I mean… Benevolent Protectorate—had lead him to do a good deal of the remodeling on this very bar for free. 

By this point, Ronnie and I had been stopped so many times by Chatty-Kathy types that we barely even pretended to be listening any more. Perfunctory “uh-huh’s”, non-existent eye-contact, listening to music on our headphones, even outright ignoring and talking right over them to each other—none if it was an impediment to the uninterrupted diatribes of pensioners with nothing better to do. Even so, it was impossible not to catch some amount of detail about the electrician’s career in general, and work on the lodge in particular.

In fact, through osmosis, enough of it stuck that when we removed a tile and found the pair of pliers and a flashlight sitting atop it, I knew right away they were the ones our erstwhile electrician had lost up there back in the day. You know, when was I was just nine years old? The pliers were rusted all to shit and the barrel of the flashlight had been deformed by the swelling of the burst D-cell batteries inside. But they were etched with his initials, and the morning drunk still seemed pretty happy to reconnect with a piece of his history. I guess that’s what a place like the Elk’s Lodge is really all about. Connecting to something. History, nostalgia, other people. Anything at all.

They were such an unusual group. At once, they were bragging about how amazing their chef was, and how you had to be a member to get the exclusive—but very reasonably priced—prime-rib dinner that they served on Thursday night. And didn’t we wish we were members? But no, we weren’t, so no prime-rib for us at 4:00p in the afternoon. And then in the very next breath they lamented their dwindling numbers and lack of younger members, and didn’t we want to join because we would have more friends, places to park an RV all over the country, and membership to a terrific gym. To say nothing of the fact that we’d have somewhere to cash checks when we’re out of state? So, to recap, “We’re an exclusive club with many perks, and don’t you wish you were one of us? Oh, gosh, how we wish you wished you were one of us.”

But Ronnie and I didn’t wish that. We wished we were home with our families, not stuck for months on end in some hot-sheet motel drinking ourselves to sleep every night. We wished we could work for a company that valued us instead of cheaping out on the meal per-diem like a bunch of skin-flints. But we did not wish that we were dues-paying members of the Benevolent Protectorate of Obsolescence, or any other Fraternal Order of Fading Ways of Life. Although it is kind of sad to see so many fraternal organizations like social clubs and religious affiliations disappearing, I don’t feel responsible for saving them from irrelevance, so that they can continue for the sake of their own existence.

I’ve been a member of a few organizations like that myself over the years. I helped plant and grow a brand new church (in a skating rink!) over the course of seven years that’s still meeting today, twenty-two years later (although not in a skating rink, anymore). I’m a member of a labor union, SEIU Local 503, and boy do they love having meetings. I’ve even been invited to join a cult or two over the years. I wonder how the fine folks over at the Church Universal and Triumphant are doing these days? I guess the mass arrests for stockpiling illegal weapons back in ’98 was kind of a blow to morale. To say nothing of how many of their prophesied apocalypses never came to pass. Bummer. Oh well, like Groucho said, never belong to any club that would have you as a member.

Still, I guess it could be argued that every time a Temple, VFW, Mosque, or Salsa Dancing club closes its doors, we lose another degree of connection between us. My mom used to grumble every time I put my Walkman headphones on because she said that when music stops being a shared experience, and we all select our own slice of reality, society becomes a little less connected than before. Or some shit like that. I don’t know, I had Huey Lewis cranked up. Some of it must have stuck with me, though, because I thought back to her lament when that Sandra Bullock movie The Net came out, which seemed like such far-fetched sci-fi nonsense at the time. Ordering pizza online? Working from home? Becoming so remote and disconnected that no one actually knows you in real life? Please.

Technology connects us, brings us all together. Who needs a Church pew when we’ve got Zoom? Or an AA meeting when we’ve got… Oh, wait, no, those are actually busting at the seams these days, what with the record numbers of drug overdoses, suicides, and all. No, no, technology brings us all together, that’s what I mean. Otherwise, what are the nineteen billion texts and thirty billion emails a day for, if not that? I mean, look at Google. Every week in America over six thousand people ask Google how to make friends, and ten thousand ask it how to mend a broken heart. The sum total of human knowledge at our fingertips, all so we can ask the Oracle at Silicon Valley these questions?

Left: The day Ronnie told me he was leaving construction and going back to college. Right: The day he graduated with a degree in computer science.

I don’t know. All I do know is that after twenty-two years, you’ll still find me and Ronnie getting beers on Friday night. He’s a network analyst for a healthcare company now, and I’m a construction estimator for a University, and these days we’ve switched out Jager for Bourbon. But beyond that, not much has changed. It’s been eleven years since the Elks—or Moose, or whatever—and I think I finally understand them a little better now that Ronnie and I are both fifty-ish (plus or minus). When you find those people that get your references, let you tell the same goddam war-stories over and over again, and laugh at your lame jokes, you can’t let those connections fade away, and so go gentle into that good night. Hold on like grim death. Which may not be as far off as it used to be.