The Floor
Who would have thought that 75 miles north of the city, amidst the majestic farmland of Ulster County, amidst the rich smell of manure, in the shadow of the glorious Shawangunk Ridge, east of the Wallkill River, that you would find this, that you would find us? The few. The un-proud. The terminally-weird. Who would have thought that we would assemble here?
I would imagine that we would assemble in the alley behind the dive bar in Williamsburg. Next to the ruptured sewer pipe. Yes. I would imagine that we would assemble at the Arby’s. Any Arby’s, but probably one down south where they are taken more seriously. Yes. That I could picture. I would imagine that we would assemble in the psych-ward. The detox. Maybe even a federal prison. But not here in such immaculate nature.
Randy owns the property. I heard one time, awhile back, he kicked everybody out. Came through with a bulldozer and leveled all the platforms. Didn’t care about the apparently marginal income (for him) that having us there generated with respect to the nuisance of us. Not surprising, really. The surprising part is that this is even a thing. That camping on Randy’s property is a thing.
Most of us don’t even know him. He is a mythical creature of lure. He is the Wampus living in a duo decahedron. Naturally, tales of him grow in your head. I didn’t know what to expect should I ever encounter him. I did find him one night. I didn’t know I was even talking to him. But there were clues. He was flying way higher than everyone else. Then nearly anyone else I had ever met. I was already on the wagon. First time. Had been a few months. He mentioned going on a run for H, airborne. Naturally, I thought the guy was full of shit. Until someone told me I had found the Wampus.
Randy does own a helicopter tho. Parks it right out front of his house. Making a run for narcotics is something he could ostensibly do. Actually, I’d be surprised if he hadn’t taken advantage of his airborne status for some depravity of this sort. Well with what he allows to go on at the ranch and all. We call his property the ranch. It is many, many acres.
It was a brief interaction, and he didn’t know me or care who I was when he said what he said - this very sensitive and possibly damning admission - because we were on his property. And on his property his flushed-red-face owned everything and everybody, at least everybody worth owning (as a well paid employee... get your head out of the gutter). So, that was the trick to spotting him. Show up on a night where there are large crowds and bacchanalians and debauchery to be had. Alcohol flowing like wine and wine flowing like water and water flowing like piss out of the urethras of teenage boys and hobos behind an Arby’s down south.
Now. These are the facts. A deck that isn’t connected to a house, one that is free-standing, is called a platform. I had erected a platform on which I placed a 10-person-tent at the ranch. I had erected this platform in the woods at the ranch. South of the runway. West of the sheep farm. Halfway between The Golden Tit and Little Odessa (and, yes, these are real places that many, many people in a certain, specific, circle will know exactly where you are talking about, if you mention the names to them).
Now, on with the facts. There are many platforms on Randy’s property, but this one is mine. I wanted it very high off the ground to be far away from bugs. I wanted it very large so that I could fit a blowup queen-sized mattress with a 10x10 foot wrestling mat underneath. I wanted all this because I am a boogie-ass-bitch and this was closer to glamping than camping.
But I also wanted this platform to be so stylish because after taking up the old oak flooring at my mother’s house, which I bought with my wife and renovated. I took up the entire dormered upstairs worth of oak flooring. That shit runs about 2 to 3 dollars a square. But the was lumber sitting at my house for years. Everywhere I put it it was in the way. Over there it would put one of the kids eyes out. Over here it would block me from accessing my tools. So eventually I brought the lumber up to the ranch with the intention that once I was licensed as a skydiver, I would make a platform from it, like all the rest, and join in the bacchanalians.
But something happened in-between the time I took the lumber up to the ranch and the time I started on the platform. My wife filed for divorce and I lost access to my children. She was very savvy and made recordings. Many, many secret recordings. Finally filed for divorce when she had gotten, on a particular recording, a certain unfavorable reaction out of me. Naturally, I didn’t know I was being recorded. But I did know we were headed for divorce. This was front and center in the discussion, turned argument, which she was recording that ill-fated night.
We owned several properties at the time. We rented them out. We even owned the property next to the marital residence and if you’ll remember the marital residence was my mother’s house which we bought from her, my old lady, when we got engaged; it was the home I grew up in. I promised to build my children a treehouse on a tree in-between the homes. But during this argument, the one that was secretly being recorded, I learned that she would never “let” me keep the promise I made to my kids for a treehouse between the houses. I would never get to build that treehouse. Over her dead body. I did finally become angry, not because of the divorce, that was inevitable, but because she didn’t appear to want to make the divorce as easy as possible for the kids. They loved me. They loved the ideas I had for us to have fun. I got angry because of the kids, the treehouse, and I struck the wall with my fist. And I cried out into the night. Woke up my son.
And that reaction is what her lawyer was waiting for. They filed for divorce and were granted a temporary restraining order the next day. They created a narrative around the punching of the wall with bullshit accusations of me trying to rape her. Also throwing a mirror at her. Naturally, nothing of the sort occurred that night. I hit the wall. My son woke up crying. And we tended to him. I tried to cool down. And I did. Only later, when reading the transcript of the recording did I realize that she was pushing my buttons all night.
How ironic that this woman I’ve just described has a Final Restraining Order (FRO) on me. What started our marital troubles? Well, that, that would take some time to describe. Acutely, what was troubling us around the time we finally attended couples therapy was my wife, or rather, ex-wife I suppose I can reveal now, finding out that I had been unfaithful. After she discovered this she became enraged. Yes, very angry. Angrier than when I hit the wall, no doubt. Runs in the family, no doubt. Her first cousin was so angry at his ex-girlfriend that he pulled a Dexter. He cut her limbs off in a bathtub in Englewood, New Jersey. Drained the blood, put them in a garbage bag, and drove them to the bridge where he threw her off into the Hudson. Stupid fuck did it all while carrying his cell phone. He’s in prison, hopefully, for life.
Before punching the wall, after she discovered my cheating, I was sleeping on the couch to give her space. She would come down and hit me. She’d stick her nails into my flesh and cause my skin to bleed. Bruise my back. Bleed me from my arms and neck. See, I would just take the fetal position. I never laid a finger on her. I thought I deserved it. To be beat. Now, this is the woman who routinely battered me has an FRO… on me. Ironic right? I told the judge about her conduct. He didn’t give a fuck. Said I looked like a liar, effectively.
***
What skydivers lack in overall hygiene they make up for in boundaries and respect. No one will ever pitch their tent on my platform without permission. Ever. I could be gone for years, a decade. It still will be known that Fred marked his place → THERE. Besides, AS I MENTIONED, there are many platforms on Randy’s property. So much so that at the yearly pub crawl (tent crawl, rather), it requires a map to properly find each location hosting food, beverage, or substance.
To participate in the crawl, usually a host has a good, sturdy platform. Not high off the ground like mine. It’s safer that way. It’s not safe for people who are drunk or high on anything from weed to mushrooms to P-C-mothafucking-P to be walking around five feet off the ground without a guardrail. But that is how I built my platform. Five feet off the ground without a guardrail.
The first time I finished it, that is, built the platform, nailed the oak flooring from my childhood home down, and sanded and sealed the oak, the sun light bounced off the wood like a mirror returning brilliance into the woods around it.
Not all platforms at Randy’s are made this well made. No platform at Randy’s is this well-made. As we speak, or rather, you read, some are being reclaimed by nature. Oak flooring is expensive. The labor to finish it is too. But I had nothing else to do that summer. I had nothing to do with the oak. I had nothing to do with my children. My world was upside-down and making this platform as close to immaculate art made sense. Building the floor is all I could do to keep my mind from thinking of dem little ones. Da two boys and da little girl. It’s all I could do from wanting to take a drink - oh - 90-something days into sobriety. It’s all I could do to keep from slitting my writs. Not knowing if and/ or when I’d ever see my kids again. That fucked with me.
Anyway - some people have used pressure treated wood on their platforms - very good construction. Others have covered their non-pressure treated would with tarps to increase longevity. The result is that water gets trapped in-between the wood and the tarp and can’t evaporate, hence speeding up the process of mold, mildew and rot getting into the wood. Some platforms have been there so long that they are close to being reclaimed by the Earth. That is, they have broken down into the biodegradable elements that wood breaks down into on the Earth-side, and on the top-side, one can just barely make out the shape of the platform whose color now matches, exactly, the dirt and leaves around it.
My platform though. The initial idea why I brought up the wood. Before I got sober. Before I actually built it with the flooring (note: there was some construction there, quickly thrown up by me and a few guys one summer, before I got sober, but we used some very cheap plywood and some very expensive pillars that my friend donated because he was rebuilding his deck). Anyway, we erected that first platform so that we could rest or get laid in a tent between bouts of weirdness on nights with rather large parties - like a Burning Man in the forest.
I longed to spend time in my tent with strange women, on strange nights. I erected, or rather, helped to erect that first platform, the one without the oak flooring, so that I could escape my family. But I tell you, I lost my family. I lost them, I say. And I no longer seek strange women or strange nights or anything of the sort. But yet I return. For the floor
***
It’s the late-eighties or early nineties. I’m anywhere from 40 to 45 inches tall. I have golden, curly hair. And an imagination, to rival any imagination. The machinery responsible for the production of fantasy in my mind is a venerable juggernaut. A sacred being unto itself.
In my dreams I can fly. I am always lucid dreaming. When I wake, I have done all the things I wanted to do while I slept. I have met the people I wanted to meet. I have held the girls hand I wanted to hold. This ability was iron-clad until I wanted to kiss them as well and right up until I hit puberty and, well, you know, lay on them at which point, if I got too, lay on the girl I had a crush on that is, well I didn’t know what was happening, but I’d wake up with sticky sauce all in my drawers... the wet dream.
But now, now my dreams are nightmares. In these nightmares my kids are gone, and I can’t find them. In one they were held hostage in the third house we owned that we rented out to my father. This is the one I ended up living in after the restraining order was handed to me. It worked out because he was dying so I got to watch him die and not see my kids all at the same time. Oh yeah, the dream. My father wasn’t there in his wheelchair or hospital bed. There was an intruder though. I knew it somehow. I found him in one of the rooms. There, he had a knife against _________’ neck (my son). That fear was worse than falling. In your sleep. Seeing your son about to be killed. I ran forward to stop it. I woke before I got to him. Like how one wakes right before hitting the ground and dying in their sleep.
When I see my kids. I can’t get to them. It’s a sick and morbid feeling like what Christopher Nolan showed happening to Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception.
People say I should be glad that they are safe with their mother. I don’t think they are safe though. Physiologically. I think she took something from them that they needed. Me. A part of them. It’s like this. Dhose kids loved me. Not many tings I know for certain. Know dat good and well dough. And dat I was a good fader. She took dat away from dem, dat narrative. She tuk deir self-esteem. No dey aren’t safe wit ‘er. She’s a butcher just like her cousin. Cut up dem kids hearts she did. Dey were young. If my father is bad, I am part bad: it’s what I’m told the children will conclude, consciously or not.
Now I wake up and I have never done the things I wanted to do in my dreams. I never know that I was dreaming anymore. Nothing is lucid. I am never excited. I am not excited to rest. Nor am I excited to wake. I lay in bed for hours and think of them. Think of our their whole lil lives, cute wee bastards. Start to present day, I’ll ponder, while I’m frozen der in dat dark room, curtains drawn. Tears streaming down my face.
***
The brilliant sun saturates little areas in random patches on the forest floor. A shirtless man emerges from his tent. From within a cloud of wood-dust, from atop my platform, I see this man. From the corner of my eye.
“Shut! The! Fuck! Up!”
I pay him no mind.
“It’s outside, you know… this is outside.”
There are certain sounds that one is accustomed to hearing at the ranch. For instance, one would not be particularly surprised to hear a woman, or a man, moan in pleasure, from a nearby tent, in the dead of night. Should you happen to hear the shrieking of a fouled creature as it runs bare-ass into the pond at dawn, it would not be the first time. You would know that he, or she, just consumed too many mushrooms and became, all of a sudden, both terrified and overjoyed by the big, round, orange ball starting to emerge at daybreak. And on each summer morning with blue skies (and low wind), the Otters will be taking off in quick succession. Every twenty minutes. One after the other. Again, and again until sunset. Plenty of people can sleep through the innocuous drone of a Twin Otter as it taxis down the runway on Randy’s property. The distant rise and fall of the twin-turboprop engine can be soothing.
This brings us to the sound that has bothered our shirtless friend across the way. One would not expect to wake to the sound of a thirty-five-hundred-Watt-gasoline-powered generator, 40 feet from their pillow. Nothing but a thin piece of polyester, or nylon, between themselves and the engine’s combustion required to power my tools.
The man eyes me down for a bit before retreating. Before brushing his teeth in front of the mirror he’s hung on the tree beside his tent. Before rinsing his mouth with water from a plastic water bottle.
Fuck ‘im, I say. Before long he’ll be careening from an Otter. Falling from thirteen-thousand feet above the Earth. That fall will help him. Maybe he will feel more alive. Maybe he’ll forget his troubles, for a while. That’s what he needs.
I need the surface of my platform to be more level. I need to fill the cracks between the boards with wood-filler. If the cracks aren’t filled, the poly will fail to unify and protect the wood underneath. Then, the wood will fill with water. And eventually, the platform will buckle. Collapse under its own weight.
I wouldn’t be able to handle a sight like that. The once shiny floorboards, reclaimed by nature. Beset by rot. Eaten by insects. Turned to dirt.
No, I pay him no mind at all. There is too much to get done.
This isn’t the first time I’ve done this. Refinish the floor. The polyurethane I first used failed. So certain areas of the wood have been water damaged. Dare I say, have begun to rot. So I need to start over. I need to start from scratch.
The only way to keep the rot from spreading is to expose good, clean wood. Get one of those heavy-duty drum sanders. One of those walk-behind deals. Rent it from Home Depot, haul it up to the ranch with the generator. Crack the bitch up and have at it. That’s the only way. Then, only then, I can apply a coating that will be impenetrable.
I have decided to varnish my platform with a Marine-grade lacquer. The floor will be like the deck of a mother-fucking ship. It will last forever. But the surface must be prepared properly. I must work, within my cloud of dust, while the others play.
Fuck ‘im, I say.
***
The boards of the floor are not just any boards. I did not buy them. They were laid in a house in Bergenfield before I was even born. Some of them were laid in the room that was a sort of nursery to me, if you could consider it that. I really didn’t have my own room until, well, I don’t remember. I think I slept with my parents most of the time when I was a toddler. That is, when my father was around. Usually I guess I just slept with my mom.
But this is besides the point. Eventually, the room became mine, and eventually I bought the house with my ex’s money for the down payment, and eventually I renovated the shit out of that place and took up these boards.
That was the only house I had known. In the military you don’t stay in one location for very long. Especially as an enlisted grunt post 911 in the Marine Corps. I spent a few years in Myrtle Beach after that, after Camp Lejeune and the USS WASP and the hald a dozen other locations they sent me, and this is were I learned to build. Starting on a beachfront hotel as a construction laborer. Once again. Besides the point. Except that to say I renovated this house I was banned from, that I grew up in, with blood, sweat, and tears.
This house, I was raised there. I raised my kids there. Taught them all to swim. All to ride bikes. Young. All of them when they learned these things. What bad father? Doesn’t get time. She gave me no time. I taught them to ski and snowboard. Two and three and four years old these kids were doing these activities. The wife didn’t help. She worked too much. Now I can’t even go to this house. The only house I had ever known. The one I took from my mother, a single mom of five, as a shambles and restored to a past glory.
Is that why I work so fervently? Because it is the only part of a house that means so much to me that I will ever likely get to touch again?
There is no way I can keep this platform standing in perpetuity. I have to know that. I have to. Still, I pour myself into it. I pour money. I pour time. I forgo hours and hours of jumping out of de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otters with my mates. I forgo fun and opt for misery. As if restoring the floor would restore my family.
But the floor isn’t my family. My family is the present. The floor represents my past. The house I grew up in. That family. Every part of it, stepped on. Now it’s the broken window. Now it’s the crumbling steps. The people laughing as they wait for the light to turn. As they wait to pass us by. Now it’s the garbage piled knee high in the basement. My little sister and I, wading through it, as if it were a ball pit. I’ve long since left that house but I can still feel the dirt of it on me. I can still see my mother’s tears. They’ve become my own. I don’t even know which broken family I cry for anymore. I don’t know why I polish. I don’t know why I sand. This hardwood floor in the woods, completely out of place, without a chance in the world to survive. Destined to degrade. Destined to rot and return to the earth. Just like me.
