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…

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Some old lamps from the antique store…