Okanogan Part One

What I’m about to tell you is true… every single word.

When I was in college, I had the pleasure of playing in a country and rock band called Longshot. You may have heard of that band. It wasn’t us though, as there are close to 300 other country/rock bands named Longshot actively gigging at one time in the United States alone. We preferred to keep a low profile and play only bars that had what we called, “local character.” We could play any song you requested as long as it was nationally known… and on our list of about 75 songs that we had practiced.

We played several nights a month at local joints and made enough money to keep us in school supplies. It was a pretty great band too. We played well together and weren’t afraid to stretch a little and improvise in the songs. We weren’t spit polished like the other band in town, Full Ride. Full Ride had special outfits and high end sound gear. They played the songs the exact same way every time. When the songs ended, all the band members stopped playing at the same time. That was not how Longshot conducted business. But we had fun and the customers that watched and danced could feel the energy coming off of us. Some of that was actual energy as a few of our amplifiers had an electrical grounding issue.

Toby, who was our lead guitar player, singer and undisputed band leader, called all of us one December to tell us that Full Ride had contacted him with a gig they were unable to do out of town. They said they had played it before and the money was good. Our food would be paid for and because it was a two night gig, over 100 miles away in Okanogan, our hotel rooms would be paid for too. Needless to say, we took the gig.

It was a cold winter in Eastern Washington. We piled all of our gear into the van that I borrowed from my parents and carpooled up to save on gas, which back then was under a buck a gallon. We were going to make out like bandits and play a pretty big show.

When we arrived at the destination in Okanogan Washington, we started to get the feeling that something wasn’t right. If I were to tell you that you were going to stay at a place called the Caribou Inn, what would you picture? Would it be a large log cabin type resort out of a postcard, with a large porch, welcoming fire with a roof and grounds enveloped in snow? Because that is what the Caribou Inn isn’t. What the Caribou Inn IS could be described as a two story building made of brick and asbestos which may have been a halfway house for criminals before it was shut down in the 1950’s for safety reasons and code violations.

We pulled in about an hour before our sound check. We started bringing our gear in to the ballroom, which was bigger than what we were familiar to playing and hastily set up. After we set up, we checked in to the hotel part of the Caribou Inn (If you think I’m being odd for saying “Caribou Inn” so often in this story, it is only because you NEED to remember my words.) What follows is as accurate description as I can make it. I will not embellish what we saw, smelled and probably touched.

First of all, we were to be put in the suites, the biggest, nicest rooms in the hotel. We weren’t given key cards for entry but instead an actual brass key with a tiny placard containing the room number to guide us. It was apparent that the hotel was once a grand structure and the staircase was wide and welcoming. However, as one ascended, the décor of the Caribou Inn began to deteriorate right before the eyes. The tight paisley carpet pattern, first swirled in vibrant, if not aging colors into a filthier and grimier state. Paint, as you rose in elevation on the staircase, changed gently, like a rainbow going bad, from a light pastel pink to nicotine yellow, … where there was paint. You could see patches where, your first guess would be, the wall died of lung cancer.

The air was crisp and clean in the lobby as it was cycled through the opening and closing door to the early January below freezing climate outside. The second floor was another matter. It smelled like an elks club bar in 1958. I called for a Sherpa to bring me my oxygen mask. I found neither available to me.

As my spider sense began to tingle about what we were getting into, the band was pushed aside by a young woman fleeing from a giggling toothless middle-aged man in short shorts, a tight, tank style undershirt, and flip flops (January). He was chasing the woman down the hall carrying two open cans of domestic beer, from which he was drinking one and attempting to not spill the other (he failed at both tasks). They slipped into the room at the end of the hall with a paper sign that read, “bridal suite”.

By that time, we made it to our doors whose numbers matched our placards. The placards being the essential part of this match up as the doors had no knobs, locks or knobs. No knobs, the doors to our hotel “suites” had no knobs to turn and enter. The keys dangling from the bottom of the placards, were apparently ornamental only. Where the knobs had been, for your convenience, were holes that made it handy to open and shut the door. Or, if you’re the type of person who prefers to bring your own doorknobs from home (not judging), you would find the doors handy to install them. I immediately wondered if anyone had been shot through them.

After a gentle push, we entered to find a large connecting double room with four total “beds”. The beds were made and the bed spread was a dirty orange. It was not originally purchased from the store in this color in 1973. Then, I’m sure the color was more of a maroon, or deep red. But after twenty or so years of cigarettes, beer, and who knows what else… dirty orange. One of us foolishly dropped a duffle bag on a bed. A small cloud of dust, ash and human skin cells burst into the air and the duffle bag sank several inches into the middle. I immediately made the decision to sleep, standing up in the corner, in the sleeping bag I had thought to bring. I would have slept in the now empty van parked outside had the temperature not been hovering around zero at night. I was already sick and taking antibiotics for my throat and I would not have survived. Chicken bones. Chicken bones were arranged under the bed. Could have been dinner, pagan sacrifice, or just the skeleton of a down-on-his-luck rooster that drank himself to death under the bed in the only hotel room a chicken could afford.

The floor had yellow wall-to-wall carpeting that had patches as small as a drink coaster and as large as a section of newspaper, which had been either burned away, or cut and removed (crime scene evidence), to expose bare wood. Not parkuet, not bamboo slats or polished oak hardwoods, it was rough laid, uneven, Abraham Lincoln’s birth home fashioned tree wood. For our safety and awareness, some thoughtful member of the hotel staff had impaled a piece of white paper on a nail sticking out of the floor, about a foot from the bottom of the bed (where anyone using the room would be guaranteed to step), with the word, “NAIL” written on it in easy-to-read Bic ink. A foot farther away from the “NAIL” was a perfectly round hole the size of a pop can that we could see directly down into the kitchen of the restaurant. This, I called the Concierge Hole. It was easy to shout our order down at the startled kitchen help, and order a burger. This, I did not see as a particularly negative part of the room. It was entertainment to look down the hole.

There was, at one time, a kitchenette in the room. There’s a kitchen sink joke in here but it’s too easy for me to write about, but I will say the counter in the room was less effective with the large round hole missing from the middle.

The Bathroom had a shower, which may not have been used for several years. We did the clichéd action of looking at it and turning the handle to activate it. When we did, the water hit the back shower tile and kicked up a layer of dust bunnies and asbestos that whirled around in the air behind the curtain like an awful winter snow storm. Awful. We decided then and there that although the water was “clean,” it would be more sanitary for us to not shower for three days.

Plusses:

Well, there was a little color TV that got the Cartoon Network.

Minuses:

Beds you cannot sleep in or on. Doors with empty knob holes that locked (yes, they had a hook and eye latch that you would find on ornamental garden gates or birdcage doors. They would not protect you from an aggressive toddler). Poultry skeleton. Nails sticking out of the floor. Potato field curtains (curtains buried in a fallow potato field for one season and then rehung in a room. That dirty). A reverse Silkwood shower (a shower that GIVES you cancer, instead of cleaning off radiation). A counter top with no surface option. Swiss Cheese inspired carpet. Water that tasted like it was used to wash all the nickels at Wal-Mart.

Neutral:

Hole in the floor that looked down into the kitchen.

Now I come from a town that is, to put it nicely, humble. Not a great deal of wealth running through the city’s veins. A country club in our hometown was any club formed there. I would not have classified ANY of us in the band as stuck-up snobs from some liberal, tree-hugging metropolis. No. But the sight of this room and what we were expected to stay in was very much below standard. Any self-respecting stray mutt off the street would have put Kleenex boxes on its paws before wandering in to one of these rooms looking for, and finding, animal bones. I wanted to hang, above the bed, a commemorative plaque that would read: On this spot, in 1891 Syphilis and Anthrax met for the first time.

What to do indeed? It was the only place in town. Outside was a temperature suitable for only penguins and Santa Claus. We could not ask to change rooms. We wouldn’t want to insult the place that was cutting our paycheck before we even played. And what kind of people would we be to displace the newlyweds from their bridal chamber? Would their room even be nicer? No, our only hope was to keep our mouth shut and try to find enough newspapers to cover the beds that we slept on, but something told me this wasn’t a big “reading” town.

We were in it up to our necks and we hadn’t even completed the sound check for our first night. Mostly, we just looked at each other and shrugged. It was time to get to the stage and face the first of the craziest two nights any of us have ever played.

More Damm Truth to follow in: Okanogan Part 2