300 Buckets (The Rocketstar)

I’ve seen some shit.

The building could only be described as fetid. The mephitic atmosphere punched you in the face when you walked in the door. Years of sweat, stale cigarette smoke, and an overtone of patchouli oil from thousands of college kids with questionable hygiene and an exuberance for body spray had left their stench. It had more funk than James Brown and the assault on the nose was as much a part of the local legend of the place as the music that shook it to its foundations every weekend. Welcome to the famous, and now former, Rocketstar Cafe.

It was the summer of 2008, and I was still living in Kalamazoo, Michigan at the time. Kalamazoo is a town that people just end up in. You just wake up one morning, and there you are. Nobody sets out to live there, and the majority of new people are college students just passing through. But it’s a fun town if you do it right, with hot and cold running pussy and a much more chill vibe than the neighboring cities. It’s way more laid back than Grand Rapids, which has more churches than gas stations and a population of people that put bible verses on their business cards. The only other option was Battle Creek, the eastern anchor of the rust belt. An industrial shithole with a beautiful, but miniscule downtown that looks like a hickey on a hemorrhoid. K’zoo wasn’t great, but it was bearable for a while.

We were working on what was originally the Rocketstar Cafe and what was now the empty shithole at the corner of West Michigan and Sprague. It was owned by a raging alcoholic piece of shit absentee slumlord. Our job was to clean it up and turn it into a new cafe and computer shop. 

Two weeks before, I was standing on the sidewalk outside the Rocketstar on a beautiful summer night as they gasped their last bong hit before going out of business. True to form, it was packed. The entire front room was shoulder to shoulder and the whole crowd moved as one, entranced by the sounds of shoegazer music from the overdriven amps of a locally famous college band. I watched the entire crowd gain and lose six inches of altitude every few seconds as the entire floor structure did a “hold my beer” and all I could do was hold my breath. 

Miraculously, the night ended without any more incident than someone getting smacked around for picking on BoomBox Ronnie. BoomBox Ronnie was a local trustee of modern chemistry and gangsta rap that was shooting for the high-score in the chromosome game. He’s a walking freakshow but a genuinely sweet kid with real heart. Say what you like about K’zoo, but that whole town will line up to kick your ass if you fuck with BoomBox Ronnie. I quietly hope he runs for mayor someday, he’d win, and that would be tremendously poetic. He’s the hero that Kalamazoo deserves.

As anyone who ever hung out at the Rocketstar knows, the old hardwood floors were bouncy and mushy just about everywhere in the entire front room.. Every week there would be a band up front by the windows towards the street, and a packed crowd of sweaty students stomping, bouncing, and swaying all the way to the back. The music was good, the weed was cheap, and getting a blowjob in the back room of the Rocketstar was a right of passage for half the freshman class of any given year.

But now, that was all closed down. We had a summer to clean the fuck out of this place - fix the plumbing, the electrical, the HVAC,  the floors - and build a new business that was scheduled to be open come September. We worked twelve-hour days through the summer heat; it was a job I’d never forget.

The floors, we soon discovered, weren’t just soggy and bouncy... they were rotting to shreds.

We went down into the dirt-floor basement and looked up overhead with a flashlight. The entire underside of the floor was white, green, black, grey, and tan. It was everything BUT wood. In fact, you could barely see any wood at all. It was completely covered in mold. In most places it was over a quarter-inch-thick. I’d never seen anything like it. Without a moment of hesitation or reservation I said “this goes, right now, all of it” and we all shifted from that easy introductory phase of any new jobsite into action.

One team went low with masks, gloves, putty knives, and buckets. They started scraping off the mold. The other team went high with crowbars and rage, and started ripping off floorboards. We all filled dumpsters. It was disgusting, but in two days we had the flooring stripped off down to the open joists and could really see what the situation was.

The situation was…we needed a hell of a lot of new floor joists, these were sponge. The only thing holding this floor up was habit. We spent a week replacing joists and airing out the building. The air was thick, musty, and smelled like a peat bog. One by one we ripped out the stubbed ends of the rotten old joists, half of the center spans of which had just crumbled away. One by one we replaced all of them with fresh new pieces of lumber. 

The entire process took us a week and a half in the blistering summer heat. For the first few days there was so much humidity from the basement as it dried out, that the windows on the front of the building would be covered in condensation if we left the doors closed too long.

And then, something miraculous happened. Something none of us expected. The basement floor did something quite remarkable...

It sprouted.

The entire basement floor was just a generic, boring, “Michigan Basement” with a dirt floor. We never thought anything of it. The previous tenants never went down there, and until the day we discovered the mold, neither did we. But now, that dingy, dirt floor had turned  green. Hundreds of tiny little green shoots had appeared, because for the first time in forever, (since we’d ripped out the floor) there was sunlight down there, and lots of it. 

We had to go explore this. So we all went down and checked it out. While we were down there I noticed an old furnace boiler sitting, half sunken into the floor off to the side of the stairs. It was a rusted hulk and someone was going to tear open a leg on it if we left it there, so I asked a couple guys to haul it off to the dumpster.

It was while they were removing it that they discovered it was sitting on a concrete base, about two feet down under the furnace. They asked me what to do about it and I went to get a look. I grabbed a shovel and hopped into the hole. I was standing on the concrete base with the dirt around me coming up mid-thigh, and I started digging around the edges. I wanted to see how big the base was, so we could determine if we should remove it or not. I couldn’t find an edge in the five minutes I was prepared to fuck with it, so I asked the guys to just dig until they hit the edge and then let me know. I told them to put the dirt in a five-gallon bucket or two and just empty it out in the dumpster. No big deal.

I went back to working on the floor joists and didn’t think anything of it. 

A couple hours later, one of them walked past me carrying a bucket and my mental clock gave me a “what the hell?” so I followed him down.

The concrete pad was now about ten feet square.

What….the fuck.

The basement boys were very happy when we mobilised the entire crew. We all teamed up and everyone started filling or hauling buckets of dirt out to the dumpster. Everywhere we dug, there was smooth concrete underneath. Eventually we got to the walls and confirmed our suspicion. It turns out the basement didn’t have a dirt floor, he basement had a complete concrete floor! Some stupid fuck had filled the entire basement with dirt.

But…why?

Our first thought was that someone had done it to grow weed. It would make sense, and explain a lot of things. We thought we had discovered the remnants of a gigantic grow operation where they were growing a whole room full of pot and selling it right upstairs to thousands of eager, happy customers.

That was our first thought. Sadly, reality was so much worse.

The building had been a cafe of some sort for years and years. Well, restaurants are required to have a special type of drain with an air-gap. The upstream pipe just stops for a couple inches and drains into a larger diameter piece of pipe below. You’ll see air-gap drains all over the place in restaurants because…………... The vast majority of the time they work just fine.

This one, however, did not. The downstream line had clogged at some point, and the upstream never got the message. Nobody ever went down into the basement, the landlord never came to inspect anything, the management changed with the seasons and nobody ever really gave a shit. So for years, it just quietly went on draining raw sewage onto the floor. 

We hadn’t been shoveling dirt, we were shoveling composted human shit and restaurant waste! Together we had hauled well over three-hundred buckets of human shit out of the basement of the Rocketstar. I had never felt like I needed a shower more than the day we figured that out. 

Our cafe never opened, and we got out of there as fast as we could. The absentee drunk landlord sold the place to an even more evil cunt, a shady parasite with a mean-streak and a Jimmy Durante nose who runs a “Cash For Books” gig scamming broke college kids. We got out of there and never looked back.

So, next time I say I’ve seen some shit - believe it.