The home where I grew up had two outbuildings, very similar in size and layout to each other. It seems like, at some point, someone in the family said that they were guest houses or cottages or motel-style lodging buildings; since my childhood home is on a highway, the idea that it may have been, at one time, a lodging-establishment of some kind didn’t seem too far fetched to my childlike mind. The buildings, next to each other on the eastern-most acre of my family’s two-acre property, were even accessible via a side-driveway of some kind, extending from the highway and back to those two outbuildings.

They weren’t large, these two buildings, probably twenty feet wide by twelve feet deep, made out of cinder-blocks, with simple roofs and windows. They were white-washed, inside and out, and were about as simple as a building could be. 

My earliest memories of either of those outbuildings comes with chickens attached, lots of chickens, for you see, when I was very little, we raised chickens. One of the two outbuildings was a chicken coop. The chickens lived inside of that outbuilding, and they had a nice yard in front, for getting their exercise and whatnot. My brother and I would go out to the chicken coop to feed the chickens, or to gather eggs. The other outbuilding of the two was a utility shed; my father kept the riding lawn mower in there –and still does, to this day– along with other implements of destruction. My brother and I had fewer reasons to ever be in the other shed.

Then, in later years, when the chicken-raising had become a thing of the past, the chicken coop stood empty. Well, not entirely empty, since it had the nesting structure inside of it that the hens used, and a significant amount of chicken poop. I don’t know what motivated my parents to raise chickens –and peacocks, we raised peacocks too, for a while– but the motivation went away, and so did the barnyard fowl. But, the detritus remained.

At one point, whether it was my father’s intention to put his sons to work at a task that would teach them things like hard work and determination and ownership, or whether it was my brother and I who shared some vision for what the outbuilding could be used for, we set out to reclaim the space for some sort of use. It was disgusting, sweaty, mostly mindless work; scraping away at the layers upon layers of chicken poop that had formed a thick veneer over most of the flooring in the building, tearing apart the simple wooden structure that the hens had been using for nesting, trying to clean what had gone, for a long time, without having been cleaned. I’m sure that we tackled this during a summer, because my memories of that restoration are still dripping with the sweat of the task.

The shed became a clubhouse of sorts, for my brother and I and our friends during those years; we got a number of boy/young men-type things to fill the space with. I remember a punching bag and a cheap Foosball table and a weight-lifting bench. There were a couple of discarded tables and some chairs, and some discarded living room furniture –a sofa and a loveseat– that we lounged on while in the clubhouse. I also took my electronics talents and wired a sophisticated stereo system (sophisticated for the late-1980s) into the structure of the building, so we could listen to our music while hanging out.

During the part of this project that involved the finer details, like choosing where the punching bag should hang from and whether or not we would require people to know the password if they wanted to come in, we decided to name the shed, The Hotel California. We even used a small animal skull that my brother had found in the woods across the highway from our home, and we hung the skull from a nail on the front door, spray-painting ‘Hotel’ above the skull, and ‘California’ below it, to try to approximate the album cover of an Eagles album we’d seen somewhere.

This morning, when I woke up, the song Hotel California by the Eagles was the song that was in my head. That song launched this remembrance.

We had some good times, and some not good times in the Hotel California. My brother worked through a bit of teenage rage on that punching bag. I remember a couple of times, when a couple of different girls had caused him to need to assign some of his rage to an inanimate object, and he wore his bare knuckles raw on that punching bag. I remember a time when a girl caused me enough rage to put my fist through one of the windows of the Hotel California. To this day, I believe, that particular pane of the window is boarded up.

I used to build things out of Legos in the Hotel California and then, because I could, I would melt the pieces together with a disposable lighter. I did this because my brother and I ‘shared’ Legos, which is to say that I would build things out of Legos and then he would destroy those things to gain access to  the ‘special’ Legos that I’d used. Then, because I wanted the ‘special’ Legos back, I would destroy his creations and take them back. This “War of the Legos” ended in the Hotel California.

I had a friend, someone who is a regular reader of this blog as a matter of fact, who thought it would be a good idea to use notebook paper, and probably the same lighter that I used to melt Legos together, and some stolen ‘herbs and spices’ from my mother’s kitchen, to roll a home-made cigarette in the Hotel California. If memory serves correctly, we were never even able to get it to stay on fire for long enough to smoke it.

I built a rope-ladder in the Hotel California so we could climb up into the rafters and hide out. On at least a couple of occasions, I remember being in the rafters when my father would peer into the windows of the shed, looking for my brother and I. It got to the point where I would take books to read, out to the Hotel California, and I would sit up in the rafters and read, as if I were on a deserted island.

Then, just as it had changed from ‘chicken coop’ to ‘clubhouse’, it changed to ‘storage facility’. My brother and I both grew up and stopped spending time in that shed, stopped hanging out. I don’t even know what my parents use that space for, anymore, but back in the day, it was a special place.

Livin’ it up at the Hotel California.