As an employee for the food industry, we were the first ones to get laid off when the Covid quarantine hit. I was eventually rehired about a year later, but the uncertainty of not knowing what would happen next made that the most nerve-racking year of my life.
For the first six months, I happily collected unemployment. Then I realized it was bad enough losing my apartment and having to move back to my parents’ house in my mid-thirties. Now I was just sitting around with nothing to do but play XBOX for the millionth time.
So I went out and got a job doing installations for a flooring company. The job really wasn’t that bad, and I would have given it more of a chance if my food distributor job didn’t call to rehire me with better pay.
Though my flooring career was short, it did leave me with a few memorable moments. One of them occurred at The Essex and Sussex in Spring Lake.
The Essex and Sussex was a popular beachfront hotel throughout the twentieth century before it was converted into a 55+ community. My boss and I did a job there for a 55+ resident, but prior to that I read an article about the place in a Weird NJ magazine.
It was written by a guy who also did a flooring job there in the early 1980’s. Back then it was a seasonal hotel that closed for nine months out of the year, providing lots of space for renovation work.
At the time of this article, there were only three people in the entire building: the floorman, his assistant, and the hotel’s caretaker. The assistant was the one who wrote it. We’ll call him Larry.
So Larry and his boss Barry were probably putting a new floor into one of these former hotel rooms, which could have easily been the same 55+ room that I put a floor into. But Larry was entitled to a half hour lunch break, and it only took ten minutes to eat the sandwich he packed. He decided to explore the vacant hotel with his remaining twenty minutes.
Larry took the stairs to the top floor, which was shaped like an L. If you stood at the center of the L, you could see all the rooms from both directions. Larry did this and saw a woman in a black dress standing outside of a far room. Luckily it wasn’t the hallway to the stairs.
He probably thought who is that? and he probably glanced over at the stairs out of instinct. Then he looked back down the other hallway and the woman was now standing two or three doors closer. Larry understandably thought screw this and booked it for the stairs.
When he returned to the work site, presumably out of breath, he told Barry about what happened. Barry said, “Let’s just finish this job and get out of here.”
Fast-forward to forty years later. Now I’m about to do a flooring job at this place with my boss, his Barry to my Larry. When my lunch break came around, I saw that as a fitting chance to bring up the Weird NJ article.
My boss said, “Well, you do have some time to kill. Why don’t you go check out the upstairs?”
I said, “No way.” Then he started calling me a wimp so I said, “How about this? I’ll go upstairs if you come with me.”
He said “no way” faster than I did. So we quietly finished the job and quietly got out of there just like our predecessors.
A part of me does regret not checking it out when I had the chance. But after reading that article, I was not going up there alone.