A place for nothing, and nothing in its place

My friend’s house is really the tale of two abodes. On the upper level is a proper home, with all of the first-world amenities one would expect. There’s a couch and a television, bedrooms and a dining area, even a space-age refrigerator that serves shaved ice and houses more beer than a German brewery. Walking inside, you think, “My, what a nice little slice of the American dream.” That, and “My, what a lovely little drinking problem you have.”

This friend -- I’ll call him “Hyrum,” because nobody is ever named that anymore, or should be -- has a hidden home. This home is in the basement, appropriately swathed in shadows, and he calls it his “man-cave,” a term that’s popping up with ever-increasing regularity. It’s aptly named, since only a man would ever want to go there. It’s chilly and dark and when you plop down on the shredded dime-store couch you’re never quite certain whether you’re sitting on something gross. Or alive. Or both.

I kinda want one.

A man-cave, I mean. A place where I can wipe my mouth on an old rag and toss it into the corner so it can dry next to a half-empty box of energy efficient lightbulbs. A place where I can blast loud music with explicit lyrics that could melt the buttons off a sweater-vest. A place where I can light up a cigar and play poker using cards illustrated with bikini-clad women washing Oldsmobiles. In other words, a place where I can do all the vile, offensive man-type stuff that would be too seedy and shocking in that nice little world of shaved ice and hops-laden craft brews.

Everyone needs a balance of the dark and the light. I envy Hyrum’s. He and his wife have a nice sunny area in which to greet family at Thanksgiving, and then a creepy little hole to which Hyrum can retreat in order to scratch himself in inappropriate areas. That’s the real American dream.

Not that I’ve got it that bad, mind you. I live alone, which by default makes my entire apartment a man-cave, complete with stray water bottles and a recliner that doubles as a laundry basket. But that’s different than having a specific, dedicated area for debauchery. It’s problematic when company comes; there’s nowhere to hide my pig-like tendencies, so even a friendly palaver with the next-door neighbor requires me to conduct a cleanup operation on the scale of Fukushima. (Too soon?) It also means there’s no place to go when I want to be in an area that’s sparkling and nice, like the lobby of a well-kempt hotel.

The very term “man-cave,” however, implies that it’s a hideaway tucked into a vaster dwelling, and so perhaps my desire to have one merely reflects a need for space. Due to various reasons -- bachelorhood, thrift, fear of commitment -- I’m a renter, not an owner, and while I’m generally fine with this, I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have more sprawling quarters. That a man-cave could be a luxury and not a way of life is, in some strange way, a benchmark to shoot for. It’s one of life’s little ironies: You work to upgrade your living situation so you can have a room in which you revert back to the habits of your former living situation. There’s probably something deep there, but I have no idea what it is.

Follow me along on a flight of fancy for a second. I’m walking to work when I pass a weird convenience store in Monument Square that looks like an old-timey post office and smells like stale pizza and cabbage. Rather than strolling past without a thought, as I’m wont to do, I enter said store, purchase a Powerball ticket, and it hits -- I am now the recipient of $400 million doled out in annual payments from this moment to the time of my death, which should be any minute now since I’ve replaced all water with $200 bottles of Cristal. I finally decide to pick a spot and settle there, finding a nice house that’s big but not too big, lest people think I’m some sort of Willie Wonka-type weirdo recluse (even though I am, in fact, a Willie Wonka-type weirdo recluse).

Great. Time to build my man-cave. But what approach to take? It’s fine if it’s nothing more than a spare bedroom with a hand-me-down TV and the reek of old pickles, but now that I’ve got more money than Cuba Gooding Jr. a bit more should be expected. The ideal man-cave is one in which it’s okay to make a filthy freakin’ mess, yet it should be somehow cool, something that would make Hyrum drop his jaw in abject jealousy.

A British man named Darren Wilson has got the right idea.

As detailed in a February article in the Huffington Post, Wilson is both a professional sculptor and a rabid fan of Batman. Which is why, when designing a computer room in his home, he decided to transform it into a real-life Batcave -- complete with papier-mâché stalactites, rubber bats hanging from the ceiling, and about $21,000 worth of Batman collectibles. This man is clearly a massive dork. But he’s a dork with taste and imagination, and I can respect that.

In my Powerball fantasy I basically just copy Wilson’s Batcave idea, only mine is bigger and I’ve nailed down Adam West’s original Batmobile, which rotates on a circular pedestal in the middle of the room while the members of Metallica play “Fuel” at peak intensity. So nyah, Darren Wilson.

Definitely something to shoot for, but in the meantime I can always drop by Hyrum’s for a belch-happy basement visit. I’ll make sure to keep one eye on the shadows, though. You never know what might be lurking down there, and if I see a pair of glowing eyes I’m history.

Hotel you what

Why does every hotel feel like an adventure?

Look around. There’s a bed -- maybe two, depending on who your traveling companions are. There’s a window, overlooking anything from a hazy mountain vista to a brick wall across from an alleyway. There’s a desk and some rudimentary writing implements, a couple of nightstands, and a painting of doves in flight that for some reason reminds you of your grandmother. All told, it’s nothing you’re not used to from your own daily life. It’s a life in miniature, nothing exotic or unusual. Yet somehow it feels completely different.

Partly, of course, this is because a hotel room is generic and impersonal. You recognized my description of one because every hotel room is like that to some degree: The painting, the desk, the bed with the sheets tucked so tight you could play ’em like banjo strings. Unless you’re a high roller who’s just plunked cash on the two-jacuzzi suite, a hotel room is only so big, so they’ve got to put the necessities in there and little else. Compared to your living room, with the family photos and collection of ceramic elephants on the mantle, a single at the Hilton is a bit clinical. So a lack of personal touch, yes, that’s a part of it.

Possibly a bigger reason why they feel like an adventure is because they’re usually accompanied by -- you guessed it -- an adventure. Unless you’re home’s being fumigated, there aren’t a whole lot of reasons to check into a hotel close to where you live. For the most part, you’re elsewhere, and every time you’re elsewhere there’s a story attached to it. Which means every hotel room in which you’ve ever stayed forms at least a small part of the tapestry of stories that comprise your life. Whenever someone’s talking to you about a trip they’ve taken and they say something like, “Then, back in the hotel room…” you can be reasonably assured of an amusing anecdote involving cleaning staff, noisy neighbors, or a vending machine that exclusively sells Orange Crush.

When it comes to hotels versus motels, that one-letter difference belies a pretty wide gulf in quality. The last time I stayed at a motel was about a month ago in New Hampshire, in the kind of town that would serve as an ideal backdrop for a Stephen King-esque zombie murder. When I checked in at the front desk, I noticed the clerk had a nose that had broken and then healed incorrectly, lending his visage a somewhat buzzard-like quality. A more recent injury -- you could still see the bruise -- left his mouth swollen, which made him sound like he was talking through a wad of paper towels. A face like that conveys one of two things: 1) I am a professional boxer, and a bad one, or 2) You’re in a town where awful things happen, so run like your ass is on fire.

It was late and I was tired, so I didn’t run. But I did second-guess my decision. While hotel stays tend to be reliable, cookie-cutter experiences with varying levels of perks, motels are an act of desperation, the last tree branch for which you can grasp before you smash into the ground. Nobody checks into a backwater motel for the continental breakfast.

As I was using the electronic key to let myself into the room, I noticed some commotion in a shadowy thicket of woods on the motel’s perimeter. Hearing a loud conversation in a forest is rarely a good thing, especially when you’re standing outside a building that looks like a good place to score a gram of cocaine. But curiosity’s a powerful motivator, so I looked over to see what the hubbub was all about.

Luckily, there didn’t seem to be anything nefarious going on. Barely visible due to the wide net cast by the parking lot’s arc-sodium lights, a group of men was sitting around a picnic table playing cards and quaffing copious cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, the swill of choice for chasers of cheap buzzes. Ordinarily this standard display of male bonding would have soothed my nerves -- I’ve done the beer-and-cards scene, and it’s generally fine -- but I checked my watch: nearly midnight. And the voices were growing ever louder. My father was a bar owner, so I know from experience that escalating volume means one of two things. Either the drinkers are peaking and will soon be slinking away to their suds-soaked slumber, or a fight’s about to break out over who’s got the hairiest neck-beard.

As I watched, one of the men, a denim-clad goliath the size of an industrial refrigerator, tore himself away from the bench and lumbered in my direction, lighting something that may or may not have been a cigarette. Jiggling mightily underneath his Guns ‘n’ Roses T-shirt, I decided it might be best if I slunk into my room. A spare bed and basic cable awaited me -- an unexciting end to the evening, but this was preferable to discussing with an imposing stranger the relative merits of Satanic skull tattoos.

The word “seedy” was invented to describe adventures like that one. At the opposite end of the spectrum was the room I enjoyed for four nights in February at the Treasure Island hotel in Las Vegas. The basic setup was more or less the same -- the TV, the generic lamps, the dusty ol’ Bible -- but the floor-to-ceiling window afforded a view of the iconic Strip and the mountains beyond, while the carpet smelled like fresh baby powder on a cartoon bunny. Miles above the motel experience, and yet they both stand out as unique and memorable outings. These hotel and motel rooms neatly encapsulate our travels, serving as succinct reference points when we think back to the places we’ve been. Plus you don’t even have to wash the towels.

I don’t know if my next stop will be at a filthy backwater or a luxurious hotel/resort. But I bet it’ll give me a story to tell.

My friend Joe from Columbia

It’s the smell that hits me first. The beans, the wafting aroma of a fresh early-morning roast -- these things are heavenly, and when I walk into a breakfast diner or the office breakroom, I wish I still drank coffee. A cup o’ Joe, in my estimation, is the third best way for a person to start their day. Scratching off a winning lottery ticket and eating a bacon-laced Pop-Tart come in one and two, respectively.

As things stand, I don’t get to enjoy this treat as often as I’d like. A chronically inconsistent sleeper, I made a decision years ago to forego all forms of caffeine, which was probably a good decision from a health standpoint but still ranks as a major-league bummer. That’s the way life goes sometimes. One by one you give up all of your little pleasures, until eventually your daily routine consists of getting up, doing five squat-thrusts, drinking a bottle of Ensure and then going back to bed with an electric massager and a tube of Ben Gay.

When I was still a broncin’ buck, a day wasn’t a day without at least one bubbling brew. Looking back, my coffee fixation was complete insanity; it would perk me up for precisely three hours before I came crashing down hard, eyelids shuttered like weighted window shades as I stumbled through life in a bovine stupor. By four o’clock I’d have barely enough energy to floss my teeth. Good thing I never flossed my teeth.

The flavor is what kept me hooked. Oh, the flavor. Especially in my teens, coffee tasted grownup somehow, like it contained a secret formula that would make my beard thicker and my voice deeper. Neither one of these things happened; my beard is just barely viable, and my voice vacillates between a normal mid-range and the high-pitched squeals of a prepubescent carnival barker. That didn’t stop me from quaffing it in prodigious amounts, feeling mature and important with my piping hot Tazmanian Devil mug.

My decision to quit coffee was well-timed. Self-proclaimed “high-end” outlets like Starbucks were beginning to take off, heralding a new, magnified era of coffee culture and obsession. You can’t simply enjoy a cup anymore. You’ve got to know your roasts, and your beans, and be particular about your cream-and-sugar dosage, and stay up-to-date on what the trends are in India, and know the secret handshake so you don’t get ridiculed at the counter and pelted with doughnuts. The coffee drinkers are all gone, replaced by “enthusiasts” who follow this stuff like science geeks follow particle physics. Except particle physics are simpler.

Having been removed from the scene for so long, stepping into a high-end coffee shop feels like walking onto the deck of the Starship Enterprise: There are lots of shiny objects, and I don’t know what any of them do. Even the language is foreign. For various reasons I often feel like I was born in the wrong era, and this is exacerbated when I’m assaulted by all this newfangled lingo; can you imagine Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant bellying up the bar in a 1940s whodunnit and ordering an iced mochaccino? They wouldn’t even know what it is. Bogart would toss it in the dumpster after realizing it’s devoid of brandy.

If social media is any indication, we live in a society that loves to proclaim its affinity for the “simple things.” Yet something so simple as coffee is now more complex than the assembly instructions for a Schwinn 12-speed. More and more, the choice to forego this national obsession feels like a wise one, sparing me the need to take intensive graduate courses so I can pass muster ordering a decaf cappuccino. This is a gross generalization, but the bearded coffee-slingers behind the counter seem way too hip for me, patiently enduring my uninformed requests on the few occasions when I break down and enjoy a cup. The whole scene has passed me by. Who knows, if I’d kept up the habit I might now be sporting a man-bun and humming sax lines from John Coltrane jams.

“Habit,” by the way, is definitely the word for it. Caffeine is an addictive drug, and while you won’t find any dark roast connoisseurs squirming through detox at a rehab facility, it can sink its teeth into us nonetheless. I once worked with a woman who’d get withdrawal headaches if she didn’t grab her daily dose of Starbucks. Not a home-brewed beverage brought to work in a thermos; Starbucks, which charges so much per cup you’d think it came with a college education and a subscription to Better Homes and Gardens. Five days a week, 52 weeks a year. You could buy your own golf cart for that kind of money.

As a person who truly does appreciate the simple things, I miss starting each day with a hot mug in my hands. If nothing else, its wafting aroma is a welcome addition to the classic mélange of early-morning smells -- bacon, hot toast, fresh juniper through an open window. Pleasures like that don’t necessarily need a clutch of accessories and a lifestyle to match. They just need to be. Which is why, when I walk into a diner and breathe deeply, I’m transported to a time when the a.m. hours had their own texture and personality, punctuated by our need for physical comforts. Giving it up was hard. Sometimes it still is.

But oddly, there’s comfort in the fact that somewhere people are drinking it, ridiculous obsessions notwithstanding. Cassandra Clare in “City of Ashes” said it best: “As long as there was coffee in the world, how bad could things be?”

Teachers' dirty looks

Everyone’s got their own idea of what truly constitutes the end of summer. There’s an official date, of course, but nobody really goes by that; usually it’s Labor Day that people have in mind, or the day they change out of their palm-tree-speckled Bermuda shorts and into their boring ol’ khakis, ready for a good stiff breeze and the first golden leaf.

For me, it’s the day I get stuck behind a school bus making 12 stops in a four-block stretch. When I see a backpack crossing the street with a tiny person attached to it, I know autumn has arrived.

It’s a bittersweet moment. Fall has become my favorite stretch of the year, but that wasn’t always the case, precisely because I was once that tiny person. School was fine once you got settled in and established a rhythm, but it’s that initial breaking-in period that’s cause for dread in the days leading up to the first bell. You toss and turn at night, wondering things like, “Will my teacher be a monster? Will I know anybody in my class? Is my entire world about to come crashing down around me?”

Three days later you’re gluing spaghetti strands to a piece of posterboard and everything’s fine. By the time you realize school is no big deal, you’re a receptionist for an insurance company and it’s too late.

Lacking that wisdom, you fret. The night before the first day of school is like a person’s last day on death row before being given a lethal injection. Much of the night is spent dreading what’s to come, but you also look back and try to cling to the good times, dragging positive memories into your ambiguous future as a kind of mental talisman. That time on the swings -- what a blast! That big lobster meal on Peak’s Island -- a magical excursion! These memories shall be my shield against homework and responsibility!

Cue the sound of an alarm clock. Poof, summer’s over.

By far, the hardest transition I had to make as a student was graduating from elementary school into middle school. First-day jitters mingled with new-school jitters, and to top it off, I had to get accustomed to seven new teachers instead of one, which for a 13-year-old is the stress equivalent of getting shot down behind enemy lines. My stomach was knotted tighter than a peach pit as I stood outside the building in the early-morning chill, waiting for the bell. It was too much to deal with, and too soon; shouldn’t I be lying in bed, I thought, resting up for a full day of bike riding and comic book reading? Why do I have to be thinking about all of this?

Then I walked into the lobby. The books-and-chalk smell from the classrooms had seeped into it by this point (or maybe it was permanently embedded into the walls), and this provided some measure of relief. Depending on the kind of student you are, this smell can elicit different reactions. If you’re unenthusiastic about school and don’t want to be there, it stinks worse than pig sweat on a fermented turd. If you’re generally a fan, it has a redemptive quality: Sure, your flat feet make gym class perpetually awkward, and sure, the eighth-grade bully doesn’t like the way you hold your pencil with the tips of your fingers -- but at least you get to walk into that smell each day. It conveys order and sanity. And perhaps a touch of future bronchial disease.

Much of the fall’s school-based anxiety is rooted in social uncertainty. Social structure has an importance in school that is completely out of whack with what a person experiences later in life. I’m now at a point where the people who like me are my friends, the people who don’t like me don’t talk to me, and the people who are in between send me impersonal birthday cards with small sums of money in them. I call this last group “Uncle Leonard.”

Seventh graders still live and die by who they’re seen with and how they’re perceived, especially if they’re moving up to a new school. The first few weeks are spent jockeying for position. First you locate your already-established friends so you can find your footing, get a good stable bassline going. Then, if you’re adventurous, you start finding ways to branch out, testing to see who among the unknown kids may be open to a social alliance. Athletes, musicians and participants in various clubs have a built-in mechanism for forging these bonds, but for the shyer, quieter kids -- i.e., me -- a little creativity is necessary. Unfortunately I was never socially creative; my crowning achievement in middle school was getting kids to pay me quarters each time I ate a morsel of food off the cafeteria floor. This probably explains why my closest friends had acne scars that looked like topographical maps of central Europe.

Ultimately it was the learning that really revved my engine. And that’s what school should be about in the first place. A few weeks into the year the initial fear and anxiety were all but forgotten, supplanted by fun facts about Napoleon and “‘i’ before ‘e’” and mitochondrial DNA. Adulthood is never what you imagine it to be, even if you meet with some measure of success, and so mourning summer seems silly in retrospect. It was when the air got brisk that things really started heating up.

So go, miniature sack-wearing people. Go walk into those halls and breathe deeply the scent of books and old wood. It may only seem a treasured time in retrospect. But that’s worth something, too.

Heat, heat, never beat

Memories of the incident are vague. I only recall the broad-brush details: The scorching heat, the sinus-busting humidity, and an above-ground swimming pool lit by a green-ish backyard light that made the water look swamp-like and slimy -- something a many-tentacled creature might have found appealing.

Me? I had precisely zero tentacles (bummer), but felt right at home. It was midnight. The glories of air conditioning had yet to grace my childhood home; the heads of my parents bobbed ethereally above the turtle-hued surface, and as far as I was concerned, I could spend the rest of my life in that humble little pool, bobbing for glow-sticks and trying to heed my mother’s warnings about peeing in the water.

Full disclosure: I may have peed. I was six.

Not everyone realizes there are days like this in our northeastern hideaway. After speaking to dozens of people “from away,” I’ve realized that outsiders perceive Maine as a perpetually blustery tundra, nothing but rosey-cheeked carolers and clusters of moose standing ankle-deep in drifts of snow. Nah, I tell them. That’s a misconception. Truth is, there are usually two or three weeks out of the year when you could close your eyes and envision yourself on a beach in Maui, sipping piña coladas served by spikey-haired bartenders named Tiny. The only difference is that, in Maine, piña coladas are replaced by Pabst Blue Ribbon, and if your bartender’s name is Tiny, chances are he’s done time in the can.

In recent days we’ve gone through a stretch that would shock even the most sun-hardened Bible Belt vacationer. Merely sitting in one place and ruminating on the mating habits of the Australian bobcat was enough to make one sweat like an out-of-shape ditchdigger. Never in my life have I been so envious of Michael Phelps -- not because he’s a decorated Olympian, but because he gets to spend all his time in the pool while I sit there and glaze like a flippin’ turkey.

Not everyone gets to experience the unmitigated joy that is air conditioning. I’m one of the lucky ones; my bedroom is kept so artificially cold you could keep meat frozen even through the heat of a nuclear bomb blast. Not everyone’s so lucky, though. Some people end up in their pool at midnight, trying to pinpoint the exact moment when their lives went horribly awry.

These are the folks who could benefit from a few tips on how to beat the heat. This is where I come in. See, an undiscerning reader might mistake this column for an exercise in narcissistic self-promotion. A vacuous wasteland. The self-indulgent ravings of a nincompoop. Stop me at any time.

On the contrary. I offer this column as a public service. I care very, very deeply -- just roll with it -- and so because I care, here are a few small things you can do to ride out these heat waves in style.

Tip number one: Watch movies with lots of snow in them. I know, it’s summer and you don’t want to be reminded of those endless months when freak blizzards and bleeding knuckles are legitimate concerns. But this is actually the best time of year to fill your brain with visions of sugarplums, because you can revel in the joys of winter without incurring any of the actual responsibilities: the shoveling, the snowblowing, the silent weeping as you drive down the highway at 10 mph. There’s even some preliminary scientific evidence that tweaking our thoughts can change how temperature affects our bodies. The most visible record of this evidence is a blog post from Dr. Oz, though, so maybe it’s best to take this one with a grain or three of salt.

Tip number two: Get a good cross-breeze going. OK, so you don’t have an air conditioner. You’ve got windows, right? Find two windows that are situated more or less across from each other, open them as wide as you can, and then click your heels three times while chanting “There’s no place like Siberia.” If you really want to get the air circulating, think about buying one of those fans that fits into a window, then install it so it sucks the cooler outside air into the room. It’s not the same as artificial, processed air, but it’s something. Oh, and the heel clicking does nothing.

Tip number three: Get used to the basement. If you’ve got one, make the best of it; basements are amazing. They’re perpetually cool, no one cares if you don’t keep them clean, and they’re a great place for monsters and vampires to hang out -- you know, in case you’re looking to arrange a good poker game. A lot of men nowadays use their basements as so-called “man caves,” sanctuaries where they can smoke cigars and watch dirty movies and do other gross man-type stuff. (Think scratching and belching.) But even if the basement has been macho’d up, that doesn’t mean a woman can’t infiltrate this space during periods of extreme heat. As long as she doesn’t mind sitting on a couch half-covered in dirty dish towels and fishing magazines, it’s a great place in which to chill. Literally.

Of course, the best and easiest way to beat the heat is to buy a dang AC unit already. But things happen. Maybe you’re strapped for cash, or your AC broke down just when a late-season rager hit. This is why you should print or cut out this column, paste it to your refrigerator, and think of me lovingly every time you’re not sweating from the nostrils. This is how you avoid those pesky late-night swims. And with that, the public service portion of today’s screed is now complete.

You’re quite welcome.