“Thanks for a great breakfast. Sorry I didn’t eat more.”
The man was an entrepreneur, the first I’d ever met. I might never have such an opportunity again.
“What suggestions do you have for me, John?” I babbled, all but clutching at his shirt front. “I’m just starting out, and I really need feed back.”
He paused at the bottom of the stairs. “You’re doing great. You’re going to be a big success at this B&B thing. The house is just eccentric enough, and so are you.”
Me, eccentric? I opened my mouth to say a dubious thank you, but he was on a roll.
“You have a knack for making people feel at home, you obviously like to cook, and the bed is really comfortable. And you’re an excellent listener. Play up the romance writer thing, folks are fascinated by that. There are a couple things you could do to improve business, though.”
“What?” I’d asked for it. I steeled myself for painful criticism.
“How many bedrooms do you have for guests?”
“Three.”
“At the price you’re charging, that’s not enough to make a hefty profit on the venture.” He jabbed a thumb in a westerly direction. “There was an old gent walking around your garden at two this morning calling for somebody named Sammy.”
My neighbor. I should have guessed. John was going to suggest muzzling the old man. I’d grown so used to Louie wandering around in my garden searching for his tomcat I never heard him anymore and hadn’t thought to warn my guest about his nocturnal wanderings.
“Sorry, that’s Louie Price. He’s seventy six, mentally challenged, and his only companion is his ginger cat, Sammy. He has a caregiver, but he’s alone at night. Louie gets nervous when Sammy stays out late.”
“Well, not to sound ghoulish, but Louie is a certain age. When and if his house comes up for sale, I’d buy it the moment it hits the market. You don’t have enough bedrooms here to really make serious money, and you could turn the one next door into rooms with ensuites. Knock the fence down and run the two places together with a covered walkway.”
He was on a roll. “Get your gardener to marry up the two areas. In the meantime, I’d knock out that wall—“ he gestured at the one that separated my bedroom from the dining room. “Expand the dining room, incorporate the deck by adding one of those Plexiglas enclosures. Charge extra for serving breakfast in the tree house.” With another one of those engaging grins, he headed up the stairs, leaving me to tackle the mess in the kitchen and mull on the vast chasm between genius—John--and mediocrity--me.
The space in between had everything to do with the size of one’s dreams. So, B&B entrepreneur, dream big!
BLUE COLLAR CREATIVE MUFFINS
(John liked these)
Preheat oven to 350
Mix together:
2 eggs
½ cup vegetable oil
¾ cup brown sugar
½ teaspoon vanilla
In a separate bowl, sift together:
2 cups unbleached flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
Choose any one of the following to add to your wet stuff, and keep in mind the basic ingredients do not make edible muffins without some of this stuff added.
2 cups grated apples and 1 teaspoon lemon peel
or
1 ½ cups mashed bananas plus ½ cup chocolate chips
or
1 ½ cups blueberries, blackberries or whatever you have, fresh, frozen or dried, plus 1 tbsp. good old grated lemon peel
or
1 ½ cups dried cranberries plus (you guessed it) lemon peel
Stir dry into wet until just combined. You can add ½ cup chopped nuts to any of the above.
Spoon into muffin cups (12 large) and bake for 25 minutes.
CHAPTER TWO
He seemed like such a nice man.
By the time two weeks had passed, I figured I was really catching on to this B&B thing. I’d had four guests after the Mayor, young couples in Vancouver to attend the Folk Music Festival. They loved the massive breakfasts and by the rhythmic thumping of the beds overhead and the tell tale stains on my sheets, they’d enjoyed their stay.
How does one get semen stains out of flannelette, anyway? I checked out Google. Rub with liquid soap, scrub with a toothbrush, discard brush afterwards. Tip number one on how to run a successful B&B.
The Seattle couple arrived the following day.
“I’m Carol,” she said, “And this is my companion, Lionel.” They were somewhere in their late forties, laden down with three overnight bags each when they arrived at my door.
Carol was beautiful, masses of messy auburn curls swept carelessly into an updo, the first eyes I’d ever seen that were honestly violet and lashed to the max. She had a lush Renoirish body that telegraphed sexuality, and a powerful magnet of a smile.
Lionel was five ten, large boned bordering on fat. He had a huge square head, too much straight brown hair and a vague expression. Close together washed out blue eyes didn’t quite meet mine, and his handshake was tepid and damp. Not your Type A kind of hero, I assessed. His first words were, “Anywhere I can plug in my laptop?”
I showed them up to their bedroom, pointed out the outlets, and gave them a house key and my now familiar speech about tea downstairs whenever they were settled, with a few words about harmless Louie wandering the premises in the middle of the nigh calling for his cat.
Carol came down after an hour. She tucked her bare feet under her on the sofa and accepted the green tea and oatmeal cookies I offered.
I asked the usual questions, who, what, when, where and how.
Carol was a florist. Lionel—big surprise—did something obscure with computers and worked from home.
“He’s really reclusive, doesn’t relate well to people, but he’s great when you get to know him,” Carol volunteered.
They’d met through an on line dating service. They’d been together two years and things were going well. Carol had been married, Lionel not.
“My first husband left me when I had to have an ileostomy for Crohn’s disease. He said it made him sick to his stomach. It was a blessing, because he was abusive. Physically and mentally.”
“Well, good riddance to him.” I told her I’d had a husband like that. Well, two of them, actually.
As for the ileostomy, I’d written eight medical romances, and some of the research actually stuck to my slippery brain. Ileostomy—surgical creation of an opening called a stoma from the small intestine to the abdominal wall. The colon and rectum are either removed or bypassed. Digestive wastes are expelled via the stoma into a bag. Not what every little girl dreams of having when she grows up. I studiously avoided glancing at the affected area.
“That must have been so hard for you, that operation.” I felt such compassion for her. It was hard enough growing more mature, without nasty holes where they weren’t intended.
She nodded and nibbled at an oatmeal cookie. “After I got out of the hospital, I made detailed plans on how to kill myself,” she admitted. “I stockpiled pills and bought old fashioned straight razors at garage sales and learned about cutting lengthwise rather than across. But then I decided to go out on one more date before I did it. Just to confirm that I was now going to totally disgust every single man alive.”
“And what happened?”
She giggled. “This guy I knew took me out to dinner, and I waited until we’d had dessert to explain in great detail about the stoma and the bag, and he listened and than all he said was, Is it catching? When I said no, he came on to me.”
I laughed with delight. There was hope for the male species.
She went on, “Almost the same thing happened with three other guys over the next six months, and it finally dawned on me that all they cared about was the fact there was still a nice warm place to put it, and they couldn’t catch whatever I had.”
We giggled at the beguiling simplicity of men.
“So you gave up on suici
de and decided to be promiscuous instead,” I summed up.
“You got it.” She wrinkled her pretty nose. “Its way more fun that suicide. And besides, I figured my life was spared once already, so I had an obligation.”
“The operation. Yeah, that must have been so scary.”
“Well, that too, but I meant one other time. See, when I was in college, I dated a serial killer.”
“Ohmigod. Who?”
“Gerard Schaefer. I met him in college in Fort Lauderdale. I dated him for about two months, but there was something not right about him, so I dumped him.”
“Good instincts.” I added that I hadn’t heard of him.
“He went to church. He became a cop, of all things. He was convicted of torturing and killing two young girls, but it’s pretty certain he killed as many as thirty, some right about the time I knew him. And like everyone says about Jeffrey Dahmer, Gerard seemed like such a nice guy, fairly good looking. He was a good kisser, I remember that.”
We both shuddered.
“Do you have nightmares over it?”
“I used to, while he was still alive. But he was stabbed to death in prison in 1995. It made me doubt my taste in men, that’s for sure.”
“But now you have a good one?” I tried to sound positive. Lionel hadn’t struck me as a romantic hero.
“Oh, I really do. Lionel is a super guy. He’s a bit eccentric, all he reads are murder mysteries and he’s really antisocial, but I make up for it.”
I wanted to ask her if Lionel had ever wet the bed, killed small animals and lit fires, but I held my tongue.
That night, however, I slid a heavy chest in front of my bedroom door and slept with scissors under my pillow. Sometimes that damned theory about energy, and like attracting like was no comfort at all.
The lesson here for the discerning, discreet B&B hostess is to install a really good lock on the bedroom door, just in case. There’s that famous line about trusting in God and tying up one’s camel.
BLUE COLLAR OATMEAL-CHOCOLATE CHIP SERIAL COOKIES
(because you can’t stop at only one)
Cream together:
1 cup soft butter
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar Add:
2 tsp’s. vanilla
2 tbsp. milk
2 eggs
Beat well
In a separate bowl, sift:
2 cups flour
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
Stir into creamed mixture.
Add:
2 ½ cups oats
I ½ cups chocolate chips
Walnuts or pecans
Roll into golf ball size balls, flatten with fork, bake at 350 for about 14 minutes.
CHAPTER THREE
Would you for a quarter?
Would you for a million?
It was shortly after my encounter with the serial murderer’s girlfriend that I learned an important lesson about economics.
Cameron, a handsome gentleman of a certain age, came to stay for three days. He was a businessman, semi retired, but in demand as a mentor. He was the key note speaker at a conference being held at a downtown hotel.
We were contemporaries, and over breakfast that first morning I learned that he read widely. We discussed Cormack McCarthy and Oliver Sacks, and I totally forgot to serve the pan fried potatoes.
Most of the men I’d met recently flipped through news magazines and pored over trade publications, so Cameron was a novelty. He actually asked if he could borrow one of my romances. I gave him one and signed it.
He had a wicked sense of humor, his own teeth and quite a lot of hair, no comb over. He wasn’t even a recovering alcoholic.
He had a wife in eastern Canada. He said they were living apart, a trial separation.
The second morning he asked if I’d go to dinner with him that evening. I did, wearing a slippery, sexy black sundress, my rose pashmina shawl, and new Italian high heeled sandals—he was three inches taller than my five ten, and wearing heels without towering over a man was a luxury for me.
We dined at a seafood restaurant on Granville Island, talking non stop over salmon, sipping exquisite wine, admiring a red and orange sunset reflected in the high rise windows across the water. We walked the pier, laughing at the cheeky gulls. There were three street musicians playing on the wharf, and he waltzed me up and down, oblivious to the horrified giggles of teens grouped at a wooden table outside a pub. We dropped into Death By Chocolate and he insisted on buying me a huge assorted box of the best dark.
We went home. Inside the door, he took me in his arms and kissed me. He was a great kisser, and he didn’t remind me at all of Jeffrey Dahmer.
“Do you enjoy sex?” he asked in a husky whisper.
Of course I did. What’s not to enjoy?
“Would you consider spending the night with me?”
I thought about it for three seconds and agreed. I figure once a single woman passes fifty, the number of sexual propositions diminish. For the first forty years or so, there’s an overabundance of choice. After that, whenever opportunity presents itself, go for it, I say. Love the one you’re with, as the song suggests. How do we ever know when it’s the last time we have the chance to be made love to by anyone besides ourselves? And I had that box of condoms. Did condoms have a best before date?
But the following morning, I really hoped I’d get another shot at copulation before I died because it had been more than a little disappointing with Cameron. In spite of my using every trick I’d ever heard of and a few I made up on my own, Cameron couldn’t go the distance. He had a terminal case of premature ejaculation, which he really didn’t want to talk about. He ignored the whole fiasco, murmuring (incredibly) how wonderful it had been for him, all fourteen seconds of it.
I did ask him what his sex life was like with his wife, and he said it was pretty much non existent, she’d never liked it.
I believed him. I mean, what was in it for her? He was a lovely man, but he needed intensive therapy.
Cameron left the next morning, and I gave him back the money he paid me for accommodation. How could I charge him? I thought of billing him for only one night, but that seemed tawdry. For about five minutes, I considered charging him triple for the second night. But I reluctantly came to my senses. A quarter or a million, if you accept money it’s still a business transaction.
He sent me two dozen long stemmed red roses.
I have the worst damned luck with roses. For the first day, these were glorious, and I did everything anyone ever suggested to get them to open, cutting off stems at an angle, soaking in warm water in the bathtub, adding plant fertilizer and aspirin. As usual, however, they started to droop that first night, and after the third day when petals were dropping everywhere, I threw them out.
Even I could see the analogy.
Alas, the discerning hostess should resist any and all overtures re seduction. Don’t sleep with the clients. It’s economic suicide. And if you absolutely can’t resist, remember that there’s no way of telling beforehand whether or not the roses are going to go the distance.
Rose Hip Tea
You can wait till fall, pick the rose hips, ruining your manicure, and dry them and then soak them and make tea, but I’d just go out and buy a box of Celestial Seasonings.
CHAPTER FOUR
Never look a gift horse
“So,” said Eric, red biking helmet and wide white smile firmly in place. Eric is my dear friend. He’s a dental mechanic, the best in the city. His teeth are always spotless, although the rest of him isn’t usually.
He rides his bike everywhere, and wears his helmet ninety percent of the time he’s not riding his bike. Don’t ask, I don’t know. It’s not because he’s bald; he has a thick head of straight black oriental hair molded permanently to the shape of his helmet.
And right now he was in full throttle, fairly vibrating with excitement. “So, sooooo, this guy who stayed
here was a documentary film maker?”
I’ve already told him five times that yes, Josh Gilbert stayed at the B&B, and yes, he was making a documentary film about Tommy Chong, the dubiously famous comedian, marijuana activist and former half of the comedy team, Cheech and Chong. And yes, yes, yes, Josh and I hit it off. We got each other, in some obscure retro reincarnational fashion.
When something catches his interest, Eric extracts detail after minute detail. I’ve told him he’d make a perfect dentist. It’s also crossed my mind that Eric and Louie have this trait in common, this single minded insistence on repetition.
Eric interrupts any attempt at changing the subject, asking the same question fourteen thousand different ways just in case I’ve forgotten to include something. After a while I’d say anything just to get him to stop the inquisition. Louie doesn’t do the fourteen thousand different ways. He sticks to simple, endless repetition of the same statement.
“So what’s he like? Josh Gilbert?”
I know Eric is fascinated because he, too, is a photographer and would love to make documentaries. But we’ve also gone this route seventeen times already. I sigh and try for new adjectives.
“Intense, good looking, off the charts smart. About your age.”
Eric was forty eight.
“Shy, attractive, sexy, doesn’t eat, lives on caffeine. Compulsive, driven, I’d guess mega talented. Chakras amazingly open, still excited by everything. He’s writing, directing and filming the whole thing about Tommy Chong by himself, which is so brave. He’s polite, humble in a sort of brashly endearing New York way.”
How Not To Run A B&B: A Woman's True Memoir Page 2