Deserted Village

February 23, 2009

"Where do you want to go?" I said.

I'd been complaining of burnout and dreaming of getting away from New York for weeks. Deborah suggested we take off and spend the night at a cheap hotel somewhere — anywhere.

"I don't know," said Deborah. "Let's just drive."

"But where? We have four choices: north, south, east or west?"

East to Montauk was one idea. Find a sun bleached flea-bag hotel near the beach — if we could find one that was open in the off season. Deborah found a couple of places online and called, but they were all booked. In February? Maybe we could just drive there and find a place, we thought, but since Montauk is on the very tip of Long Island and once you're there, there's nowhere to go but where you came from, we decided not to take the chance.

We frittered away the morning talking about where to go rather than just going and before we knew it, it was nearly noon. "I'm getting hungry," said Deborah. "Why don't we drive to that old diner in New Jersey, near where you grew up."

It was start.

I thought she meant the Summit Diner , a quintessential New Jersey mid-century diner near my hometown, but it turned out she meant someplace else — an easy mistake since New Jersey is littered with "quintessential" diners. No matter, we wound up in Summit and ate our breakfast there.

The booths were all taken by old ladies, soccer moms, corporate CEOs and their football-star sons, local doctors, and community board busy bodies so we sat at the counter. A woman in the booth behind us was explaining to the others in her group about how her company was managing to survive the recession very well thank-you-very-much. "We function a lot like a non-profit," she said, which, unless the company is, in fact, a non-profit, didn't sound like a good thing to me. She was wearing a red power suit, and it appeared as though she efficiently time-managed her beauty regimen by combining her hair spray with her hair color. (i.e. lacquering her black cotton-candy hair with spray enamel.) Her face was as smooth and shiny as one of the pearls that hung in a string around her chicken gizzard neck.

Two men wearing matching suits walked in and squeezed their way to the cash register. They looked like twins, except that one guys plastered hair was slightly darker than the other guy's plastered hair. Their faces were both puffy and orange. They talked to the man behind the register — the owner? — for a minute, laughed a little, then left.

A weekend warrior middle-aged mountain biker, decked out in fresh-from-the-store mountain biking gear and Oakley's on his forehead — apologized for repeatedly elbowing Deborah as he ate. "I'm a lefty," he said. Deborah is a lefty, too, so it didn’t explain much.

After lunch, we headed to Watching Reservation, a nearby county park, for a little nature walk. There's a "Deserted Village" in the park — an old mill town called Feltville. A couple of the houses are occupied and marked with signs "Private Residence", but most are crumbling, rotting. We fantasized about fixing one of them up, converting the top floor into a studio. "You could open up a little gift shop on the first floor," I said, "and sell your jewelry to the suckers like us that drive here on the weekends from Brooklyn."

"Ugh," she said.

"What could I do?" I wondered. "I guess I could sell T-shirts. ‘I survived a visit to Feltville ghost town’."

"It's not a ghost town," said Deborah. "It's a Deserted Village ."

"Look, do you want this marketing scheme to be successful, or don't you? Leave it to me."

When Deborah got cold, we hopped in the car again. "Now what?"

"I dunno."

Go west young man — and woman.

We meandered west until we were close to the Pennsylvania border and Deborah spied a hotel. I pulled into the lot and we cased the joint — drove a circle around the building to see if they had a pool or not.

"Is that a pool?"

"No, that's the restaurant."

"Oh wait, there it is." Chlorinated reflections danced on the steamed windows. "And there's no one in it!"

We booked a room next to the pool — which also happened to be next to the conference room that was hosting a corporate training session of some kind. We stood outside the conference room in our bathing suits, eavesdropping as the meeting's host explained the rules of a "getting-to-know-you game”. It involved putting stickers on everyone's backs.

We checked the placard outside the room. "Passaic Chapter Training Session," was all it said.

"Training session? Sounds more like a first-grade birthday party to me."

Although we managed to have the pool and the hot tub to ourselves for about fifteen minutes, a real first-grade birthday party soon followed and we found ourselves surrounded by four screaming girls and a sour-puss guardian complaining into her cell phone in a thick New Jersey accent. "But ma—"

"Oh well," I said. "The pool's open 'till eleven. We can come back for an adult swim later. In the meantime, what do you say we hit the early bird special?”

Wild times.