42) Treasure Hunting…*

“Hey Vaness, I’m going down here to check out some hinges… are you coming?” David called to you from the front of the store. He had been talking with the owner just before.

“I’ll be down in just a bit…”

You had been down into the basement on another trip. Today you browsed, old lamps, chandeliers, costume jewelry, and assorted colored glass. Everything was haphazardly displayed and covered in a fine film of dust. Unlike the stately and well curated antique shop next-door: a family business recently passed down to their newest generation of hip vintage dealing heirs, this one was run by a very elderly man and had more of the energy of a place just barely clawing at relevance. Somehow the same old stuff here felt more aged and ragged than similar items more well displayed and cleaned next door.

You fingered the fabric of silky scarves draped on an aged wooden rack. You ran your fingers over the spines of greasy leather bound books leaving behind a dustless trail between the boundaries of the dirty covers. You inspected an old bag of buttons, feeling the heft of the small zip-locked bag in your hand as you listened to the sound of the contents fall over one another in a sea of plastic clinks… a browned paper tag with a finely inked pen had hastily scribbled “$2-“ onto the paper ages ago.

The last time you were in this little shop you had poked and prodded around the ground floor while the owner, an elderly and frail man coughed and sputtered into a handkerchief at the front of the store pretending to be busy while you rifled through long forgotten wares.

Now he again coughed into an old handkerchief and muttered about “allergies” when David had asked him if he had any hinges.

“Any WHAT?” He managed when he finished coughing.

“Hinges!” David said as he stepped back just out of the range of the man’s cough.

There was another spray of heavy coughing and a wheeze that escaped from somewhere deep in his chest.

“Brooches?” He coughed again.

“No. HINGES. Like for a door…”

“Oh… hinges! Yeah… I’ve got some of them down in the basement…”

He covered his mouth with his old hanky and coughed again.

“Hey Vaness… I’m going down here to check out some hinges… are you coming?”

****************************************************

The basement was exactly as you had remembered it, and that was not surprising at all… the basement had all the aura of a rarely visited place. Overhead dull and yellowed fluorescent lights buzzed with age and neglect. They cast a sleepy ochre light on long rows of old nondescript shelving covered in even more dust than an already dusty upstairs. Except this dust felt even more thick, a deep charcoal slowly dulling out the last remaining bits of shine on mostly rusted and patina door knobs and hinges, skeleton keys in old wooden crates, and a vast array of bottles in various colors and conditions.

Far down the rows, obscured by shelving and early apple baskets filled with rusty lamp fittings and finnials you could hear the very loud fits of the shop owner’s coughing and then David’s muffled voice nearly drowned out by the overhead buzz of antique illumination. You were freezing and you pulled your jacket tighter around your body. Upstairs you had been chilly, down in the basement you were downright uncomfortable. Even your feet were freezing… just the thought of your frigid digits drew your attention to the floor. Last time you were there you had noticed the charcoal brown black dusty floors covered in what you had thought was thick dirt. For some reason you had half expected that the thick layer of grit might have been an overlooked spill, but upon being greeted by the exact same state of flooring debris, you realized that the state was more a feature than faux pas.

There was even more coughing as you slowly walked towards David’s voice and the shop owner’s cough; deeper into the windowless, decaying, dust filled basement with aged overhead fluorescents that albeit yellowed and dim carried on in both an unwavering luminance and a persistent drone. The sound of the lights and the old man’s cough nearly blanketed out the sound of your shoes in the chalky thick dust and dirt on the floor… it was the kind of sound that sent shivers down your neck akin to the way a piece of chalk on a chalkboard might do the same. You found yourself staring at the floor again, this time you paused to really notice the floor and you had the realization that the floor wasn’t so much covered in dirt as it was that the floor actually appeared to be disintegrating into it’s very own kind of dirt. Dirt made up of ground bits in varying granules of chipped and torn pieces of the charcoal brown black, chalky dusty floor covered the sheeting of its own decayed linoleum surface.

You had seen this floor before. Here yes… but somewhere else too. Why did you remember this ugly old disintegrating floor with the very shallow beveled floral pattern (yup… directly under one of the fluorescent lights you could just make out that pattern)? Why would you remember something like that…?

And that’s when you remembered the contractor…

“This here is gonna be an issue…” he had said as he pulled an old linoleum floor tile up on a job site you had been on… the same exact tiles you were looking at now. “These are really common… unfortunately they’re asbestos…” he said as he snapped the brittle tile in half, “they’re harmless until you start drilling or cutting through them… or when they begin to crumble and turn to dust… then they’re a big problem…” he finished as he tossed the broken tile and the piece he had snapped off into the trash, “Big problem…”

The old basement floor wasn’t covered in dirt… it was asbestos linoleum floor tiles broken and ground into varying stages of dust. Your heart dropped… this old man coughing his brains out wasn’t suffering from allergies… you were no doctor for sure but… you weren’t completely aloof to the situation either.

***************************************************************

“They didn’t have the correct sized door hinges I need,” David said back in the car as the two of you buckled your seat belts.

“That’s too bad… I’m sure we’ll find some eventually.”

“Yup… it’s a shame that poor guy was having allergies like that… I know yours get bad and mine too… luckily whatever he’s allergic to, we don’t have that allergy…”

“Because it’s fucking mesothelioma… not allergies… “

“What? Why would you say that?”

“Did you see the basement floor?”

“How dirty it was?”

“Yeah that wasn’t dirt… well maybe some of it… those floor tiles are asbestos tiles and they are all ground down into dust… and either that poor man is allergic to everything year round… or he’s been breathing that shit in the last 50 years and he’s paying the price now…”

“Holy shit… should you say something?”

“Like what? One… I’m not a doctor and hopefully I’m wrong and two… what good would it do now? Damage is done… that would be like me telling a kid that the stove is hot after they’ve already burned their hand… no point.”

“Well maybe other people…”

“So that his store gets shut down? Nah… I’m leaving this shit alone… not my monkey, not my carcinogenic circus tent…”

“That’s fair…”

And so the hunt for door hinges continued… in hopefully less carcinogenic realms…

Some old lamps from the antique store…

Obviously I’m no doctor but I’m going to use logic here and say that poor shop owner has got mesothelioma and not allergies… though my hope is that he’s allergic to everything and I’m actually way off base. Either way… no bueno.

My mother and I were just talking about this after I told her the antique asbestos story… it’s strange how some environmental factors will affect some people and others not so much. Take my father’s father for instance… straight off the boat from Italy… he never drank water because, “water is for the animals…” instead he sipped red wine. I always remember him with a crystal glass of red wine at the dinner table and seeing him outside with a cigarette hanging from his lips. He lived a very healthy life until he died of cancer at almost 90 years old. My other grandfather the same thing… he’d remove an old water boiler and all the asbestos insulation then drive around with it all in his work truck, chain smoking cigarettes until he had enough carcinogenic cargo to make a trip to the dump worth his while. He also lived to nearly 90 years old.

Strange how that works out. Also reminds me of a former neighbor…

This guy was a hoot. Really enjoyed him. He had come to America from Vietnam as a kid back in the 70s and let me tell you, this man was handy and resourceful though I questioned sometimes if his resourcefulness might be to his detriment.

Nam we’ll call him, though that wasn’t his real name… lives in a cute little bungalow on a sleepy St Petersburg street. He was married at one point though I never met his wife, despite her living with him right next door to us. I was told that they divorced after the parrot… the parrot was her proverbial line in the sand and let me tell you, I can see her point.

Nam LOVED animals. He had rabbits, quail, koi, a large german shepherd who continually ran off (Nam refused to neuter the dog so the dog was always looking for a lady friend), chickens and eventually a parrot that went on screaming and squawking whenever he left the house for work. Never bothered Nam because he was at work… his wife… well I guess it bothered her enough that she divorced him. Nam kept the house and the bird.

She honestly may have made out better on that one.

But this has nothing to do with Nam’s resourcefulness… unless of course the parrot was a resourceful way to facilitate a divorce… I don’t know… My husband and I at one point, also attempted to be resourceful and had started doing our own oil changes on the car. One star… would not recommend. Nam had noticed us doing it one time and asked for the oil… I told him it was all in the car, thinking that he wanted some leftover oil to top off his car… but what he really wanted was the old oil.

“I mean sure… you can have it… but why do you want it? It’s bad oil and toxic…”

“Pffffft…” he had said rolling his eyes and waving off the notion of bad oil with his hand… “This the good stuff… it fix your fence really long time.”

“How so?” You were intrigued.

“It keep de bug off and de rot away… real good. Like super perfect. No new fence ever…”

“I don’t know about that Nam…”

“What you mean you don’t know? Look at my fence: it like brand new… look at your fence… it not look new…”

And he had a point because our fence… technically the landlord’s fence, looked like absolute shit while Nam’s fence did in fact look brand new.

A few days later I found Nam outside painting his fence with the old motor oil… In all honesty the luster and sheen it added to his already nice looking fence was pretty impressive… though I questioned the environmental aspect of used motor oil dripping into his large vegetable garden and so whenever he offered vegetables I’d politely decline…

On occasion he’d ask David for help in his yard. His fence was tall and I rarely saw on the other side but David described his backyard as a “little Ho Chi Minh…” city with well built structures made from scrap materials that were accessible to one another only by the tiny little foot path inbetween the little buildings. There were quail cages and a large rabbit hutch and chickens and apparently buckets… so many buckets of water festering with mosquitos. David said that Nam’s nearly hairless legs would be a thick black with mosquitos yet he’d just carry on conversation with David completely unbothered, while David slapped and swatted over and over again at the winged nuisances. Nam told David that he kept the water buckets to collect water for his pond and garden.

Between the fire hazard that was the backyard building situation, the disease carrying mosquitos, and the oily fence that dripped into his garden… I always wondered how Nam managed to stay so fit and healthy. Even now he’s still his jovial, active self… and I’m told that he still bums used motor oil off the neighbors.

Years ago a mutual friend of ours (really like family), our former neighbor and Nam’s current neighbor called me in a fit of hysterical laughter. He said, “you’re not going to believe this one… you remember Nam right?”

Of course I did… and he continued to tell me one of the most unhinged Nam stories I have ever heard… apparently our mutual friend had come home from work to find Nam naked and handcuffed on his front lawn yelling at police… his parrot screaming up a storm, and another man, fully clothed but also handcuffed on Nam’s front lawn. The clothed man was quiet. Nam on the other hand was going on about the police having the wrong guy and the police looked thoroughly confused. When Nam saw our mutual friend he immediately screamed, “PETER! Tell dem dat dis my house! I am house owner!”

So “Peter” (also not his real name), found himself in the situation of Nam’s circus tent blowing into his yard and he got out of his car to help Nam out.

Peter explained to the police (over the screaming bird) as Nam also put up quite a ruckus, thoroughly annoyed by being hand cuffed naked on his front lawn, that the house in question was in fact Nam’s home. That he was in fact Nam’s neighbor, and that the clothed, hand cuffed man was someone that he had never seen before.

“I TOLD YOU! I TOLD YOU! I SAY CHECK MY ID… IN MY WALLET! YOU NOT CHECK ID AND YOU HAND CUFF ME INSTEAD!”

In all fairness Peter had told me… there was nowhere on Nam’s person that he could have had his wallet and ID.

Apparently what had happened was that Nam had been at work and had gotten a terrible headache and came home to try and take a nap. He didn’t want to get into bed with his dirty work clothes on and since he was planning on trying to go back to work, there was no sense in changing so he had just stripped naked as a jay bird and climbed into bed.

At some point Nam was woken by the noise of someone (the clothed hand cuffed man on his front lawn) inside his house. When Nam went to investigate the intruder who expected no one to be home was caught off guard by a very naked Nam. Nam began screaming at the man who pulled a gun and Nam just ran straight at him… full on naked and the man hesitated and dropped the gun… Nam grabbed the man in a full on bear hug and the two of them went down to the ground where they wrestled for who only knows how long, both of them trying to get a hold of the gun that was accidentally knocked under some furniture while the parrot screamed.

Nam eventually managed to wrestle free of the intruder and grab the only weapon he could easily get (again… this guy is resourceful) and began beating the hell out of the intruder with a toilet bowl plunger, smashing the man in the face over and over again with the hard rubber end.

At some point the two men found themselves again wrestling on the front lawn (the intruder had tried to escape and Nam wasn’t having it) and at this point a neighbor must have seen two men wrestling… one totally naked… and called the cops who managed to get there just a few minutes before Peter happened to drive by and help clear up the misunderstanding that the very naked Nam was in fact the homeowner and the clothed man was the intruder.

“You think I go like this to rob house? Bad idea. Very easy ID!” Nam told the police when they finally uncuffed him. Though I guess it still would have been tough to ID him on account of there being no place to put his wallet, but that’s not exactly what he had meant either.

Anyway… Nam had fought off a would be robber with nothing more than his fully exposed cojones and a toilet bowl plunger and for his troubles, Peter and I still get a laugh every now and then thinking about Nam screaming at the cops, naked and cuffed on his front lawn while his parrot screamed at an unbearable decibel.

Now there’s probably a correlation there to my asbestos story and life expectancy that a more astute observer might be able to put into words… but all hopped up on pain meds… I’m not quite sure I can tie it all together… so I’ll leave you with this observation instead: sometimes there is seemingly no rhyme or reason to life… it’s all just one crazy ride… or naked wrestling match on your front lawn… parrot optional.

So carpe diem my friends!