Published: 23 Jul 2020
I got my first good look at the building when a new gay bar opened across a small triangular park opposite the old building, the bar taking over the building which used to house a large restaurant and banquet hall, now the newest gay bar with a huge dance floor and a “show room” in the city. I had seen it often, this former hotel, this large imposing grand building almost every day for years as I rode the city bus to work, or on days I drove my car to work, I’d have to drive right by it. I was working for my landlord at his own gay bar a few blocks from this building I had never paid much attention to on my way to work, but lately the building and it’s quite formal elegant entry had caught my attention.
My landlord/boss asked me to deliver a package to the owner of the new bar a few blocks away, which only solidified in my mind the thought that that man and my landlord were somehow silent business partners. I had observed them meeting several times at the second floor apartment that Ray (my boss and landlord) occupied and Ray often left his kitchen door open to the landing that led up to my third floor attic apartment.
Ray said he did this so his two dogs had access to the first floor entry to this back staircase where there was a doggie door out to the backyard of the big three apartment old Victorian in the Forest Park neighborhood we lived in, about a ten minute drive from the downtown area where the bars were located.
I delivered the package of inventory forms and accounting sheets to the other bar owner and just knew that these forms were for a second set of books for the bar owner and my landlord to share. Once they were delivered, I went back outside and decided to sit on the lone bench in the little triangular park across from the old building that had been drawing my attention for the last two weeks. It was once the premier hotel in the city, with a history of housing dignitaries visiting the city in decades past. With the newer hotels just a few blocks away having been built within the past fifteen years, the older grand building had lost its luster and had eventually been turned into condos and apartments. I actually knew of a few guys who either owned or rented some of the units, but they really were just acquaintances from college classes, or guys I had been introduced to at one or the other gay bars in the city.
I had seen pictures of the interiors of the building and knew that the first couple of floors were not converted to dwelling units, and someone had mentioned that a famous local restaurant was negotiating to open a restaurant, banquet rooms, and a pub in those two lower floors. The only sticking point in their obtaining those floors was that the original lobby had to remain structurally intact to retain the historic nature of the building, the restaurant bidding on these spaces was trying to find space there for a grand ballroom, and from what I had heard they had considered turning the third floor of offices into this ballroom, but they wanted to add another staircase that would connect to the huge kitchen area on the ground floor, to make it easier on the servers who would work that big ballroom when functions were held there.
Since it was summertime and I had no afternoon classes to attend, and my work at the bar was finished for the day (supervising the cleaning, restocking the two bars, placing re-orders for booze and beer, and doing the register tallies for the two bars in my landlord’s club) I decided to grab a Subway lunch and eat it at the bench. It wasn’t long after starting to eat my sub that one of the residents of the building approached and sat next to me on the bench. I knew him slightly, he had been in one of my freshman English classes three years ago.
He was a muscular redhead, with a very friendly demeanor. We had chatted a few times in the past, but nothing more than that. You see he really intrigued me, and I became quite tongue tied around him. I, at that time, was what someone had called “terminally shy” and to be honest, I had had only a one month long gay relationship up to that point and that had been two years ago, and that guy had been stationed at the Air Force base in a neighboring city and had been transferred, so our relationship had ended. I was going to enter my senior year of college at the four-year college here in the city in the fall and I knew that Chris, the red headed muscle guy on the bench with me, was also going to enter his senior year this fall.
We had plenty to talk about, and I guess because we were on a bench in this little park out in public, I wasn’t too inhibited and Chris even asked if I’d like to see the inside of the building I had been studying from the bench. It seems he had received some bit of money when he graduated high school from a trust fund he had inherited from his grandparents and he used some of the money to buy a condo in the building. I was led into the building from a side entrance, which opened into a really good-sized lower lobby for this partly below ground level, as the hotel was built into a hillside. To the left was a very large open space and to the right of the lobby was the former bar for the hotel, another large space. These spaces were roped off, but in the center back wall of this lobby was a bank of elevators, the ones used by the owners of the condos and the tenants of the three floors of apartments. There were three floors of condos on the three upper floors and three floors of apartments right below the condos, then the one floor of rented offices, housing doctor’s offices, accountants, two lawyers’ offices and an advertising company and also a chiropractic practice, then the original grand lobby, and then this Lower Lobby level.
Chris had the elevator stop on the floor labeled LOBBY, the floor above the one we had entered at. This was the level that held the impressive entrance I had been staring at while in the park. It was a massive open space with period styled furnishings placed in small seating groups in front of two huge fireplaces on either side of the main street entrance. What looked like real marble pillars soared two stories up to the open trussed ceiling above. The place looked like a huge old cathedral, with upholstered seating groupings. From where we stood we could look halfway up and Chris pointed out the open gallery along the wall opposite the front street level entrance wall. He explained that was one of the corridors on the office level, where the management offices of the original hotel once had been located, one of the corridors used by the aforementioned offices on the next level.
The lobby itself was all we could see on this level, what would have been hallways on either side of the abandoned wide front desk were walled off, the plywood panels painted to sort of blend in with the darkly stained and polished wood paneling used in the formal lobby. Chris told me that there wasn’t even a restroom on this level anymore and although some tenants had requested to rent it out for more formal functions a family might hold, the owners had always flatly refused. We then took the next elevator to his floor, while he explained that the floors of apartments and condos were numbered from the floor above, where all the offices were, not the half below ground lobby we had entered in. He told me as we walked to his condo on the fourth floor, that his was one of the smallest suites, created from three of the original hotel rooms, but the moldings and trim work were all upgraded, giving the units a much more modern look than the rest of the building. The developer had even left the original wood parquet floors in each unit on the condo floors, as the apartment units all had wall to wall carpeting.
He led me into his unit on the fourth floor and I was suitably impressed. The ceilings had to be at least twelve feet high and the living room had to be at least twenty feet deep and thirty feet wide, a row of four by eight-foot windows looking out over the downtown of the city facing us as we entered his small vestibule. Once we had stepped into the living room, I could see off to my left that a very large closet area had been converted to an efficiency kitchen, with all the mod-cons. A small hall past the kitchen held closets on both sides and the hall led to a fifteen foot by fifteen-foot bedroom with an attached oversized bathroom with another large closet, as well as a linen closet in it.
It really was a beautiful living space. And you could see that Chris was proud of it. He really was a good-looking young man and the fact I had a crush on him made just standing around in his own space a little hard on me, but the more time we spent together, it seemed the more comfortable around him I became. When he asked if I had any plans for dinner, I stuttered that no, I had no plans. He suggested that we spend the rest of the day together, maybe hitting the gym here in the building, then sharing dinner and the rest of the evening together. It sure sounded good to me. It was a Friday afternoon in the summer and we both had on sneakers, denim shorts, and lightweight T-shirts.
As we walked the hall outside his unit’s front door, Chris explained that every floor had a laundry room next to the elevators, but down the hall on the left side of the U shaped building, on every other floor, was what the tenants called the gym, or the extra room that hadn’t fit into the architect’s plans for the units on that floor. As we entered this space, I noticed that the management of the building had outfitted it with a couple of exercise bikes and some Widener exercise stations, much like today’s Bowflex machines, and a rack of dumbbells and a couple of rowing machines. I thought that the placement of this space, near the rear exit staircase at that end of the U, suggested that these separate rooms on every other floor were originally stock rooms during the days this had been an upscale hotel. Chris told me that I was right, that the gym rooms had held all the supplies the maids and cleaners who had worked in the hotel needed to do their jobs.
He took me out to the exit staircase/enclosed fire escape and showed me the window there that looked down on the side street below, and then on the other side of the landing was another window which looked down on the rear parking lot. By looking straight across you could see the corresponding other leg of the U-shaped building, and by looking straight down you could see an extension/bump out of the building, sticking out toward the parking lot, and about three stories high. This extension was almost as wide as the entire building was, with the exception of a ten-foot-wide gap on each side of the U, that had enabled deliveries to be made to the old hotel without the delivery men traipsing through the lobbies.
Chris had lent me a tank top and a pair of old gym shorts so we could “work out” together, and he had changed into similar attire as well. The sight of this strawberry blond muscle man in such skimpy attire had me intrigued, and once back in the gym on his floor we began to use the equipment in there. I was trying to look good for him, and I knew he was trying to show himself off for my benefit. We took machines that were opposite from each other and then switched and then moved on to other ones, ending in front of a full length, eight foot wide mirror, using the hand held weights and soon I was standing right behind him, feeling first his biceps as he curled the weights, and then running my hands under his shirt and feeling his pecs as he pumped the weights, slowly moving my hands over his abs and toying with the reddish blond hairs of his happy trail, wiggling my index finger of my right hand down until it encountered his hardening dick. Chris was showing off for me and the entire time he was pumping the hand weights, he was grinding that magnificent ass into my groin. Without dropping the weights, he twisted his torso to meet me in a smoldering kiss, never stopping his butt from grinding into my groin.
Now I’m not a big muscleman like Chris was, I was more of a “swimmer’s bod” kind of guy, with a nicely tapered torso, starting with wide shoulders, tapering down to a 28″ waist, and almost no hips, leading to two strong and defined legs, thick thighs and cut calves. He mumbled something about showing me how his bed worked, and we were out of there and around the corner of the hall and back into his unit in just seconds.
It really was a most enjoyable and enlightening rest of the afternoon, and after we fixed ourselves omelets and toast for a quick dinner, we repeated it all over again. We woke at seven in the morning and Chris and I showered together before I had to go home. I only worked for my landlord weekdays, I needed the weekends for grocery shopping and doing my laundry and pretending to clean house. I’m kind of a neatness freak and kept up with what mess I made in my apartment on a daily basis. Chris asked when we might see each other again, and I asked if Sunday afternoon was too soon, and he said that that sounded perfect to him.
I got all my chores done that Saturday afternoon and even had time to make up a pan of lasagna for dinner at Chris’ on Sunday. Midafternoon on Sunday found me parking in the parking lot of the Kimball, my pan of lasagna and a gym bag packed with another work outfit for me so I could go to work at my landlord’s bar in the morning. I looked at the “bump out” on the back of the building between the arms of the U-shaped building. I looked it over well, before entering the side lower lobby where Chris had shown me the elevators to the apartment and condo floors.
It was while waiting for the elevator that I noticed a couple of men standing by the roped off large empty space to my left. One of the men looked familiar, and I realized it was one of the owners of the Maple Inn, the well-known local restaurant that I had heard was bidding to open a branch of their operation here in the downtown area. I knew this man, as when I first graduated from high school, almost 4 years ago, I worked a summer as a cashier in his restaurant in a suburb before starting my college classes. Mr. Theopolous and his entire family had been very good to me that summer.
He must have recognized me, as I heard my name being called from that direction and then he was right there in front of me by the elevators. I dropped my gym bag to the floor and placed the big pan containing the lasagna on a small table and we shook hands and greeted each other warmly. After our greetings he asked how my college studies were progressing, and I in turn asked how his family was. The upshot of our little reunion was he divulged to me that he and his lawyer had just signed the papers to not only take over the management of the entire building, but he was working on plans to develop this lower lobby area into a new restaurant in the unfinished area on the left and turn the right side old bar into a more “Pub” like experience with occasional live entertainment, and food and drink table service. He said their plan was to have one central cashier, stationed right here in the lower lobby in a large wooden and glass booth, modeled after an old telephone booth, the ancient kind found once in old hotels, large enough for the patron to sit on a chair to make private conversation with the party on the other end of the phone line.
He said it would be about eight feet square with a desk for the register and a work table on one side of that and a small opening for the cashier to handle the bills the waiters and waitresses would be presenting with either the cash, or the credit card the customer had presented them with. He then said that he had hoped to see me before all the renovation on this level of the building started, as he remembered that I had some great ideas when I had last worked for him, and he was wondering if I could begin working for him again. He admitted it would only be three or four days a week during the summer, but once the restaurant and the pub opened in the fall, he would guarantee me five evenings a week, three nights during the week and Saturday and Sunday nights as well. He said that he knew that this would be my senior college year, and he was not asking me to be just a cashier, he was going to make me his cash flow auditor for his business here in the Kimball, all the other auditing for the building under his control would be handled by his regular accountant. He asked me to think about it for a day or two and he then asked me to call him so we could meet and discuss this again, as he saw I was on my way somewhere tonight. When we shook hands again, he handed me one of his business cards and implored me to call him soon. I agreed to, and then pressed the call button for the elevator again.
Well, that was interesting, it was something I had never even thought would happen. If after they were ready to open their business here, and there was an ad in the help wanted section of the paper I might have applied, but to be asked to interview, well that made me feel great, and the greeting I got from Chris when he answered the door made me feel great in a totally different way. He relieved me of the pan of lasagna and suggested I put my gym bag in the bedroom so we wouldn’t forget where it was in the morning.
While the main course reheated in the oven, we both worked the length of his ten-foot-wide kitchen, making a salad and preparing a loaf of garlic bread while a pot with green beans simmered on the stovetop. Our dinner together was fun, as Chris told me how his afternoon shift at the bookstore down the block went and then I told him about running into Mr. Theopolous downstairs, and the news that he was taking over the management of the building, and those two big spaces in the Lower Lobby and what he told me he wanted to create there, and what he proposed my role to be.
Chris asked me if I would leave my job at the gay bar and I told him I would have to, since now I worked from very early in the morning to noon time, and then had three of more classes during the afternoon and sometimes a lab or study group into the evening. For my senior year I wanted a bit of a lighter schedule, being able to sleep a bit later and start my day off with classes, then five hours or so for work on the weekdays, and still have time for some studying when I got home. I knew my landlord would be OK with my decision. Well, I thought he would be.
So, after Chris and I spent a wonderful night together, replaying a lot of bedtime exercises from the other night, we showered together in the morning and I was on my way to work at the bar by 7 AM. By noon that Monday I had called Mr. Theopolous and we agreed to meet the next evening at his restaurant and banquet facility across the river in Agawam at 7 PM, he offered me dinner as we talked and I had to admit that even if my hours were not going to be full time, just over 31 hours, his compensation package more than equaled what I would have hoped for full time employment benefits after my graduation from my senior year as a degreed accountant with a minor in business administration.
The next day I called Chris and we met for dinner again. I explained what had transpired at my meeting the night before, and Chris was happy for me, so happy that he showed me pure excitement at least three times that might!! The next day at work I spoke with my landlord and gave my notice at the bar. Mr. Theopolous wanted me on-board as soon as possible and since I had my own car I could work with him and his planning team at the business in Agawam or at the Kimball when they met there.
My landlord/boss was not pleased with me giving my notice at the bar, but when I told him about my compensation package he admitted it was a very good opportunity for me and he kidded me that he was no longer going to worry about me being able to pay my rent each month.
Two and a half weeks later, I began meeting with Mr. Theopolous and his design crew a couple of times a week and filling in for some of his staff at the Agawam establishment while they took their vacations. By this time the builder and the architect on the project had the space requirements and their plans all drawn up and they were turned loose on those spaces off the lower lobby for the restaurant on one side, and the pub on the other side of the lobby.
I really liked the days that we met in the Kimball to not only access the build out that was being done to create the two spaces Mr. Theopolous needed for his business, but because after those meetings, where we discussed the progress the builder was achieving, but any little things we as a group noticed just wasn’t right, I’d get to see Chris when our group dispersed. Like the day I noticed that the cashier’s booth, which had a paneled lower surround and leaded glass upper panels on all four sides, had the opening for the bills for the patron’s tab a foot too high from the counter under it. Or the day the dining room hostess noticed that the waiter and waitress’s stations, scattered around the perimeter of the big dining room, were erected with the stations facing the walls, not into the room so the wait staff could keep an eye on their customers. Mr. Theopolous was still wishing he had found the space for a grand ballroom, a place he could host weddings and other events in, but he was happy he still was going to also be able to offer the one at his Agawam property, a much more modern facility.
The other nice thing about those meetings at the Kimball was I got to see Chris after the meetings were done for the day. As I mentioned, Chris was working for the local bookstore that summer. He looked forward to those evenings as well, and we both enjoyed our after-dinner activities in his bedroom too. By the end of July, with only about a month before we started our senior year at the local four-year college Chris and I attended, we began to plan out our school year.
We were discussing what books we needed to purchase, what our class schedules would be like, whether or not we would have some of the same classes this coming year, since I was an accounting major with a minor in business administration, and Chris had declared just the opposite. It was the third of August when Chris asked me to move in with him. It was a very emotional evening for the two of us. But the more we talked about it, the more we realized that Chris’s beautiful condo just wasn’t big enough for the two of us to share full time. It was fine how we used it now, during the summer, but when classes started up again, we would both need study space. We both agreed on this and thought that if a two bedroom condo opened up in the building we would go together to look it over and with the sale of Chris’s unit, and some funds my parents had left me we would be able to split the cost of the bigger space and we would each have money left over.
The build out of the two spaces still went on, the builder careful to keep these spaces in line with the rest of the building, stately Victorian in look and feel, nothing glaringly modern, dark wood paneling, coffered ceilings, low lighting. Mr. Theopolous seemed happy with the way the restaurant and the pub were shaping up. He had begun hiring bar and wait staff as well as doubling his kitchen staff at the Agawam facility, so that when the new spaces were finished, he had experienced staff to move into the new spaces. Often after a shift at the Agawam property he had me take with me a packet of paperwork to drop off with the builder the next day. I got to see a lot of the new build out as it was being done and the builder liked showing off to me what his crews had accomplished since my last visit. It was after one of these drop offs that I had arranged to meet Chris at his condo for dinner and the builder suggested I just use the internal staircase from his office on the third floor.
I was about to do so when I asked the builder what was behind the false wall at the end of the hall. He asked what I meant and I told him that from the upper staircase you could look out and see that the floor of the original lobby, and this floor, where the offices were, and also the lower lobby floor all extended out quite a way, that was the bump-out you saw in front of you when you parked in the parking lot. I just wondered if these closed off halls led into that unused portion of the building.
He and I climbed the stairs to the first floor of the apartments and then to one of the side hallways to the staircase at the end and we climbed up two more floors until we could look out a side window down to the parking lot and the bump out to the back of the center part of the U shaped building. He exclaimed that he had never realized that that whole section of the building had never shown up on the floor plans he had been given when Mr. Theopolous had hired him to renovate the spaces on the lower lobby level. He clapped me on the shoulder and told me that if that structure was sound, he would venture to guess that that was where the original ballroom, several banquet and meeting rooms were, as well as the kitchens were to service those spaces. He said to let him know if Mr. Theopolous didn’t give me a bonus, and if he got the contract to renovate those spaces, he would also see to it I got a bonus from him because without my help he wouldn’t have the extra renovation work.
He called Mr. Theopoulos on his cellphone as we made our way back to the floor with all the offices and he did give me credit for pointing out that the floors of the bump out were not in the original floor plan given to them by the previous building manager, the one who had just moved out since Mr. Theopolous was taking over the management of the entire building from, for the out of state owners. I related all this to Chris over dinner and we both went down to the parking lot after and tried to look in the first-floor windows of the bump out but they appeared blocked off from the inside. We did speculate about what those floors might contain, but as of then, it was just speculation.
On Saturday of that week when I reported to work at the big restaurant in Agawam, Mr. Theopolous asked me to join him in his office for a while. In his office was the builder and Mrs. Theopolous, seated at a big conference table and going over a fresh set of blueprints. Mrs. Theopolous rose from the table and gave me a big hug, telling me she was so happy that I had come back to work for them, and that I had brought the unused space in the bump out to their attention. She had me sit in her seat and the builder began to show me the spaces they had discovered when they broke through the closed off hallways the other day. There were dozens of photographs, hand drawn floor plans and the new set of blueprints for the three-floor extension.
There was a complete, but outdated, commercial kitchen and three banquet rooms on the second floor and the third floor had the missing ballroom in it, along with several restrooms, men’s and women’s cloak rooms, and two good sized dressing rooms for when live performances were offered, or dressing areas for, say a bridal party. The ground floor was storage rooms and utility rooms for the heating and cooling units in the upper floors of the bump out. All three of the others in the office were thrilled with the spaces discovered, they were just what Mr. Theopolous had wanted for his new venture and now, after refurbishment and updating of the utilities, he had them and could start booking the spaces as soon as the reno was completed after the first of the year. He then presented me with a check for five thousand dollars as my reward for helping them to find these spaces in the bump out.
As of that day Mr. Theopolous became Ted, his wife became Irma, and the builder became Bill, and Bill matched Ted’s finder fee the next day, thanking me for what I did which was going to earn his business a whole lot more money right through the rest of the year.
A week later our “renovation overlook” group met at the Kimball to see the progress and to look for any changes we thought should be made before the facility was up and running. Ted (Mr. Theopolous) was asking me how my first week of classes had gone and I told him how Chris and I (he knew all about Chris and me), had just about the same classes, except that our lab work was reversed. Not that these were held in a scientific lab, but more like an example of an annual report, based on a company’s intake, expenditures, and the resulting profits. That was the one for the business accounting course, and for the business administration course a similar paper was due at the end that enumerated how a company was doing, as if we were writing reports for an annual stockholders meeting.
He asked if we used fictitious companies for these projects or were real businesses’ data supplied to us. I said we hadn’t gotten to those specifics yet, the papers were not due for another eight or nine months, but we knew from our counselors that either would be acceptable to the professors of those two subjects. I told him about our wanting to share a living space but as of yet no two-bedroom units were available on either the condo floors, or on the apartment floors, and that Chris was willing to sell his condo for us to be able to live together.
Ted asked me to meet him on the eighth floor, the top floor of the building and a condo floor, after our tour through the renovations, and the short tour of the discovered spaces in the bump out, he told me that if Chris was home, or about to be, that he should join us, at least for the small meeting on the 8th floor in about an hour and a half, he had something to show the two of us.
I called Chris and he was available to meet us right away, so I told him to join us in the Lower Lobby for a tour of the current renovations. The tour did not turn up any changes to be made, with the exception of the six chandeliers in the restaurant. They had been hung about a foot too low, and the builder said that was his mistake, he just hung them using the length of chain attached to them, but even he could see that now they hung too low and they obscured the wonderful mahogany paneling his carpenters had hung and stained in the room, he would have them raised in the morning.
We all moved to the original grand Lobby and the builder led us to the right-hand hall and through where the hall had originally been blocked off. He led us through the formerly unused (for the past 40 years) banquet kitchen and we could see that a great deal of cleaning and modernizing of appliances had already taken place. We moved on to the three banquet rooms which were in the beginning stages of renovation, and then via a service elevator at the end of the kitchen we rode up a floor to the ballroom floor, where we saw more cloak rooms, large restrooms, and the magnificent ballroom, all also under renovation and heavy cleaning. Ted was very pleased with the progress so far and we all thought these two floors were going to be great places to hold all kinds of events.
Chris, Ted, and I rode one of the main elevators up to the 8th floor and Ted led us to the corridor that ran along the front of the building, where there were six condos in a row on the side of the hall that faced the front of the building, and unlocked the door to the left hand corner unit, the largest dwelling unit in the whole building. He explained that this was the unit used by the former manager who had moved out last week and Ted had his cleaning crew work their magic on it these last couple of days.
The front door opened into a fifteen foot by fifteen-foot foyer with parquet floor, ten foot ceiling, and two coat closets. Off the foyer in the back was a door into the second bedroom, a room with 12-foot ceilings, wood parquet floor, large windows overlooking the triangular park across the street, and its own bathroom, very similar to the one in Chris’s bedroom. Next to that bedroom door was a powder room, I guess for visitor’s use, and then there was an archway into a huge forty foot long and fifteen foot wide living/dining room with 12 foot ceilings, and there were huge windows along the walls giving a sideways view over the city, even a curved one in the dining area that mimicked the outer curve of the building. I whispered to Chris that I could rollerblade in here.
Off the dining area was the kitchen, which unlike Chris’, was an eat-in sized kitchen, with all appliances. Back out in the foyer was another door that Ted led us to and he told us to go look at the master bedroom. Again, there were 12-foot ceilings, wood parquet flooring, and a space that was at least as big as Chris’s living/dining room down on the fourth floor, about 30 feet long and fifteen feet wide. The closets were both walk-ins, and the master bathroom had a urinal, a toilet booth, two sinks in a marble topped cabinet, a walk-in shower that looked like it was at least six feet by six feet. The room only had one linen closet, but this one was at least twice the size of the two in Chris’s bathroom combined. There were huge windows along the street side of the master bedroom, but this room had no buildings facing it and the closest one we could see that did was at least four blocks away.
I thanked Ted for showing us the unit, but we didn’t think we could afford to buy it right now, maybe after we had post grad jobs for a year or two. Ted chuckled and said that he owned this unit and he was hoping that we would rent it from him, at say five hundred a month and that we’d both work for him about twenty hours a week each. In addition to the businesses he was going to be running here in the building, he now had the duty of managing the apartments and condos here in the building and he could use our help, me in the cashier’s booth, and Chris in the building’s business office on the mezzanine level. He explained that Chris would work with his wife and after our graduations in June, he thought we just might be able to afford this unit after all. He then asked if he could possibly see Chris’s unit, as he knew of someone who needed a one-bedroom unit.
Ted took one look around Chris’ condo and offered full price for it. He said that since his father’s death last year his mother had been going nuts in their big old family house in Forest Park and he thought she would be comfortable here and once the restaurant and the Pub were open Ted and his wife would be here every day to check up on her. Two days later Chris had a written offer on his condo and a closing date was set for the end of the month. We used the weekends until then to move our things into the new condo, Chris and I helping each other and deciding between us what we should move and what would be donated to charity or given to friends.
By Columbus Day (October 12th) we were totally settled into the new living space and our new part-time jobs downstairs. The new pub and the new restaurant were due for their opening nights the last Friday evening of the month and both Chris and I were invited to the pub one night, a week before the grand opening, and to the restaurant the next night so the staff and kitchen would have a “dry run” before the places were open to the public. Among the other invitees were some of the residents of the apartments and condos, some of the off-duty staff of Ted’s Agawam restaurant, and some of the local dignitaries. Both nights were deemed a success and the reviews in the newspaper were excellent ones.
Chris and I were very happy in our combined space. The second bedroom had our two study desks and we were lucky to have our own computers as they were not that prevalent at that time. We were very comfortable in our bedroom which now had a small seating area at one end. Luckily we became friends with just about all the new staff hired to work the pub room and the restaurant as well as the kitchen staff. When the chef and the cooks tried out the new menus, we seemed to become their guinea pigs and they tried out their new recipes out on us, rarely did we have to cook a full meal ourselves, except on their days off.
Of course, this also meant a bit more time “at the gym”. We were lucky that this top floor we had moved into also was one of the floors with a gym room, as well as having a coin operated laundry room right beside the elevators. We got to know quite a few of the other males on that floor, in fact the only women on that whole floor were two ladies in their mid 70’s that we were told were roommates for going on forty years, wink, wink. So, some of the rules were ignored somewhat. Chris and I were the youngest tenants of both the condos and the apartments in the building and we got a lot of attention from both the straights, and the gays alike. There were evenings in the gym that we worked out in just skimpy gym shorts, but that was mostly for each other, to give us some incentive for later in the privacy of our condo. But some of the older guys seemed to like that also, although there were some that we wished would have kept their shirts on. But it was a great group of guys, and we all seemed to get along great.
It was the week between Christmas and New Years and Chris and I had just finished a four hour shift downstairs and we decided to go to the gym for an hour or so before starting our dinner, so we changed into our work out gear (T shirts on, it was the middle of the afternoon and winter time). While we worked out, we had begun a load of laundry and I went to change the load of washing over to one of the dryers when we heard the washer stop. I had just started the dryer with a handful of quarters when I noticed something scurrying from behind one of the machines and if I wasn’t mistaken it went through the wall adjoining the fire escape landing just through the fire doors at the end of the hall.
Of course, my first thought was that I’d just seen a rat, not one of my favorite rodents, and I guess I let out a sort of scream, which brought Chris running and I told him what I just thought I’d seen. Now Chris has even more of a dislike of any rodent than I do, so it took some coercion from me to get him to go out into the back staircase (interior fire escape) with me but in the dim light there I couldn’t make out if the thing had run out here, so I went back into the gym and grabbed the big flashlight kept there in case we had a power outage. Chris spotted a hole in the wall up near the roof, but to be honest it looked like only part of a hole. There was a wooden staircase from the landing to the ceiling and I went up it to try with the flashlight to get a look at the hole and as I neared the top of this staircase to nowhere I bumped my head on the ceiling, but Chris called out that part of the ceiling over my head moved up when I hit it !!! He called up to me that he bet we’d just discovered the roof access portal.
He explained that several years ago he remembered someone telling him that when cable TV lines had been installed on the building the old maintenance man had to remove about 20 old TV antennas from the roof and he had to use the old roof hatch to get up there. Rubbing my head I told him that he certainly hadn’t sealed the hatch when he last closed it, and Chris pointed out that it must be a really heavy hatch because my bumping into it had only partially disturbed a seal of paint made when the ceiling had last been painted, and until just a short time ago the wooden staircase had been roped off, and someone had needed the rope for something, most likely the old manager of the building who had vacated our condo just before we had moved into it. Chris thought no one had been up these stairs in decades, judging by my footprints in the dust on the stairs I had trod on.
To Be Continued
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