30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Thirty Five: The Juice Bar

Jay's interest in making raw juices continued, and apparently he had made an impression with Tony, the owner of Sundance Natural Foods where he worked. Tony owned the small strip mall where the grocery was located in southeast Eugene, and the unit immediately next door to the market was coming vacant soon. Jay pitched him on the idea of opening a "juice bar" where market patrons could order organic carrot, wheatgrass, apple or other juice blends and sit at tables to enjoy them while eating sandwiches and other small snacks.

Jay was casting about for a name for the establishment, and decided to bound it off the Schoolhouse crew. I suggested "Fountian of Jouth", which appealed to him and everyone else, as it gave the impression that fresh, raw juices were healthy and promoted youthful vigor. After consulting with Tony, the name got corrected to "Fountain of Juice", which was only partially disappointing to me, but understandable, as the average consumer isn't nearly as cerebral as me, and the name was likely to go over their heads.

Once the location was found, the name decided upon and all that, it was time to find a construction crew to actually build the juice bar. Woodley, Paul, and I jumped in with the understanding that Jay would be paying us something for our labors. Woodley quickly lined up some lumber and hardwoods to build the actual bar itself, and Paul began getting quotes on cedar lumber to build some eating booths. I was to be the head electrician and plumber on the job.

The day that the lease expired on the retail space beside the store, Tony has some of his more energetic employees removed the previous tennants equipment, so when we three builders came to the store, there were pinball machines all along the exterior walls and in the parking lot. Tony had never been very happy with the tenants, they were late with rent, catered to teenage boys from the nearby high school, who were a behavior problem, and the noise of the pinball machines came though the walls and drove everyone who worked in the store nuts. That the tenants hadn't paid their rent in a month or two, and their failure to negotiate a new contract, made eviction on the spot attractive to Tony.

Woodley and Paul and I sized up the space, made drawings with accurate measurements, scouted the walls to determine where the pass-through area to the store would be cut, and prepared for the job. Since we were trying to sp[end as little of Jay's money as possible, we reused as much of the existing facilities as possible. At one time, this had been a barber shop, and the far wall was already plumbed for three sinks. Health regulation required a large restaurant-style stainless steel sink, and a separate hand-washing sink. The existing plumbing meant that we didn't have to apply for a plumbing permit to install the new fixtures.

In order to make the lighting in the storefront more pleasing, new wiring was needed, but we didn't want to apply for a permit for that, either. One weekend, I put up all the new wiring required to put hanging fixtures over the bar and each booth, and before the end of Sunday, got back up on the ladder, and painted all of the conduit and junction boxes to match the ceiling. When asked by the inspector, we told him that we were going to reuse all that "existing" wiring that the previous tenants left behind. It worked.

Since I was spending so much time in the city working on the juice bar, I decided to move my Housetruck into town and stay there until the job was finished. It just made sense to use my portable house to save having to drive back and forth every day. For a while I parked on side streets around the neighborhood, but since my truck was large, it kind of stuck out like a sore thumb. I can remember waking up one morning and opening the living room drapes just as a school bus doing it's morning rounds drove by. The driver looked startled and not at all happy. After breakfast, I drove the truck to the job and parked it in the side of the lot. Woodley come in shortly afterwards and said that there were cops driving around the neighborhood, as they had received a complaint from someone about vagrants on the street. Hmmm.

It was time to arrange for more permanent parking from the truck. I tried to back into the rear yard of the house Jay was renting (by now he was spending a lot of time in town too), but quickly lost traction and sank almost to the axle. Attempting to use a jack to raise the truck resulted in several chunks of 2x4 lumber and a partial sheet of plywood disappearing into the muddy ground. Once I got the truck back on solid ground, I tried pulling into the same area frontward, with the same results, my front bumper was nearly touching the ground. Woodley brought his step van and using a stout chain, we pulled the truck out backwards. Woodley didn't stop once I was back on the dry ground and continued pulling. I ended up scraping the roof eaves of the neighbor's house, putting a big scrape in the sheet metal of the van body on my truck.

After that, I simply left the Housetruck parked in the lot of the health food store. Tony didn't mind, and although it made it a bit tight for customers to pull in and out of the parking spaces in front fo the store, only one old guy in a VW microbus backed into the trcuk, doing no damage.

While nobody around the store cared about the truck being parked there, the city code comliance officer was beside himself with fear. Every day, he would stop by the storefront and read us the riot act about not allowing a vehicle to be used for habitation. Every time he showed up, no matter who he happend to be complaining at, he got the same reply: the Housetruck wasn't a dwelling, it was a job shack, it was where we stored our tools and materials after hours. This went on for a week or more, and finally, he told us to please put cardboard in the "job shack" windows so that the uptight neighbors couldn't see any light from inside and so he wouldn't get any more complaints. We told him "sure thing", but never did anything of the sort. I guess the neighbors must have gotten over it at some point and so did he.

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Thirty Six: Karma Yoga

The Juice Bar project was nearing completion. Woodley had pretty much finished the solid walnut and redwood bar, Paul was putting the finishing touches on the cedar seating booths, and I had shifted over to installing a wainscoting in the bathroom to comply with sanitation requirements.

Jay called us all to a meeting, where he announced that due to the unexpectedly high cost of fixtures, appliances, furnishings and such, he had no money with which to pay us for the labor that we had put in on the project. While this wasn't really what we wanted to hear, we decided that we would complete the building of the business as an act of Karma Yoga, which was to say that in deference to payment with currency, we would trust that our efforts would be repaid in another manner. Besides, we weren't just going to bail out on Jay, and all of us wanted to see the Juice Bar open.

Not more than two or three days later, Paul and I were sitting in the nearly completed space having a lunch break when a hip-looking guy came in. We tried to shoo him out, telling him that we weren't open yet, but he said that he had noticed the Housetruck parked in front, and thought that this would be a good place to find some workers for a project that he needed help with. We told him that we were already busy with this job that didn't pay, and so didn't really have time for anything else. His response was to say that "This job pays $4.00 an hour". Paul and I simultaneously replied "We'll take it, what do we have to do?"

The job, it turned out, was to do finish-up work on a house that his mother had purchased and remodeled in the posh Hendricks Park area of town. The regular carpenters and tradesmen had finished the heavy work and moved along to the next project on their schedules, leaving small projects such as painting trim uncompleted. This fellow's mother wanted a couple of reliable and skilled workers to complete the jobs, help hang artwork on the walls, do minor carpentry, etc.

Paul and I got the directions to the house and met the guy there. We were introduced to JoAnne, his mother, and showed the first bit of work, which was to refinish the redwood framing in the floor of the sun room in the house. We scheduled a day and time to be there, and went back to the Juice Bar to complete our tasks and get it ready to open.

The day we showed up to begin the floor, we were introduced to Grandma Zim, JoAnne's mother, who also lived in the house. Paul and I worked part time for a few days sanding and preparing the floor for a finishing coat of varnish. The sun room adjoined the kitchen, and when we began varnishing, we worked from the far corner, painting the varnish on with brushes until we passed the sliding glass door to the kitchen. We put large masking tape "X"s on the glass of the door, to remind Grandma to not enter the sun room, then painted past the door and out another door that led into the storage room, which had an outside door. Just to be sure, we locked the door between the sun room and the shop behind us.

As we were cleaning up our brushes, we could hear Grandma in the kitchen walk over to the glass door and slide it open. We both held our breath, but we had instructed her to not enter the room due to the wet paint. Just as we began to relax, we heard Shana, the family's Keishound dog running through the kitchen, and Grandma Zim shouting NO! NO! Of course, the dog ran past her, though the open door and onto the freshly painted floor. All we could do was listen though the locked shop door. Shana realized that something was wrong, slammed on the brakes, slid to a fast stop with claws digging in, and ripped back into the kitchen with varnish-covered paws.

Paul and I got paid twice for doing that particular job.

Here's a photo of the sun room after the second application of varnish had dried and the furniture moved back in. The white flooring is painted concrete, with redwood 4x4 inset framing.

Projects on this house were many, and we continued to make ourselves useful several times every week. The Juice Bar was soon finished and opened for business. We had trusted that helping Jay open the Bar would lead us to some manner of reward, and the great Karmic wheel had turned in our favor, and more quickly that either of us had imagined possible.

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Thirty Seven: Back at the Schoolhouse

Meanwhile, back at the Schoolhouse, we had some new roommates, Gerri and Mary, a young couple from the east coast. Rosalie and Jonah had moved in with Chuck, who lived several miles further down the road at a cooperative piece of land owned by Russell. For a long time, I thought Russ' last name was "Overthehill", because every time Rosalie had ever mentioned him, she said Russ over-the-hill, indicating that he lived past the end of the road in the first folds of the Coast Range of mountains.

Since Rosalie had taken Rachel the goat with her, someone suggested that we get some chickens, we already had a coop, and we could use the eggs in the kitchen. Our first two layers were named "Cluck and Rosa-lay" in honor of our former roommate and her beau.

Although I had put up a supply of firewood in the previous fall, there wasn't much of a stash for the house itself. The kitchen stove got stoked from a quickly dwindling assortment of scraps and cut-off ends from various woodshop projects and the odd mill-end that someone brought home. Mostly that winter, we stayed warm during the day by burning great piles of scrap wood in the driveway, most of it splintered and rotted, but stored dry in the shed beside Rosalie's old cabin (now occupied by Mary and Gerri).

One day early in the year, we had been out keeping warm by a big bonfire of this wood when we heard the Creswell Fire Department pumper truck coming down the road from town. The truck was distinctive enough to recognize as it had no muffler, and made a lot of racket, even when it was just poking along. This time, it sounded like it was being really pushed hard, and they were running the siren at full blast too. The truck ripped past our place, and continued down the road until it was out of earshot. We were relieved that they weren't coming to put out our fire, and forgot about it.

At some point in Spring the firewood situation became serious enough that Paul and Jay went into Eugene and bought a firewood permit from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and we made plans to go out into the woods and cut some house wood. Paul had a small chain saw, and one sunny day, Paul, Jay and I set out in my old Rambler station wagon to cut us some wood. We followed the directions to the sale area, somewhere west of Cottage Grove, off Loraine Highway, left the pavement, climbed up a gravel logging road to the location. There we filled the back of my car with bolts and rounds of Douglas Fir, packing it full enough that jay had to squeeze in the back with the wood to ride home.

Coming down the logging road was more adventure than I really wanted. We had probably only managed to get a half cord of wood into the car, but that was still probably 750 - 900 pounds of extra weight. It didn't take long for the old manual drum brakes on the car to get hot and fade. I mashed the pedal down as hard as I could, which was enough to prevent us from gaining speed, but not enough to actually stop the car if we had needed to.

Back on the pavement, we hadn't more than gotten up to speed before a cop car pulled in behind us, and then turned on the lights and pulled us over. The first thing the cop wanted to see was our permit for cutting wood on BLM property, which we happily produced. The officer seemed a little disappointed that we were in compliance, and let us go after making me show him that the turn signals and horn on the car were operational.

Back at the Schoolhouse, we had a new problem. The driveway going up off the road had been getting pretty muddy and rutted, and with that large load of wood, my car couldn't get enough traction to get up it. We ended up parking the car alongside the road and carrying the rounds of wood up the bank by hand.

We see Paul standing at the back of the car, while Gerri prepares to grab another handful.
Jay is already trooping back towards the house with a round under each arm.

The state of the driveway would soon cause me to have problems returning my Housetruck to it's place beside the Schoolhouse, and I ended up spending some time living down at the dead-end of Sher Kahn Road until it had dried out enough to allow me to back up to my parking space again.

Later, we learned that the urgent mission of the fire truck was because an A-frame cabin at one of the other communes down the road had caught fire and burned to the ground.

30 Years in a Housetruck

Page Thirty Eight: Rent Revolt

It didn't take much longer to get something done about the driveway. I had spent enough time in Eugene, living on the street so that I could build the Juice Bar, I had rationalized staying there so that I could be close to school and drive the truck to classes, I had even stayed at the end of the road nearby until I could get the truck back up the driveway, but something needed to be done. Mostly, everyone at the house had been parking alongside the neighbor's driveway, and although the old folks were pretty casual about allowing us to do so, we wanted to be able to park in our own yard again.

Here's what it looked like towards the end of our patience. Note the tracks on the right side, where we attempted to skirt the worst of the ruts. Also note that aside from the old 5-window Chevy pickup, which didn't run, there are no other vehicles in front of the house, they're all parked over at the Napper's place...

The very next month, Brian, the landlord came to collect the rent. Since I usually completed the transaction, I told him to forget it, until the driveway was repaired, no rent money from us. Of course, this made him mad, then he tried pleading, switched to threatening, and eventually gave in and promised to get it fixed. After a whole winter of pestering him, we finally would get it repaired!.

In the end, all we ended up getting was a dump truck load of gravel, dumped in a pile at the bottom that we had to spread out ourselves by hand, but it did make the driveway usable again, although the ruts were still awful on the suspension.

During the winter and early spring, Woodley had been telling us about this girl he had met at the University. I think most of us just rolled our eyes and gave him a knowing "uh-huh", as Woodley had proven himself popular with the ladies. He kept insisting that this one was different. They had met in his art painting class, and they had decided to take a ski class together. He referred to Julie as his "Snow Bunny". Uh-huh.

At some point in the spring, he announced that Julie was coming to visit at the schoolhouse, so we probably swept out the living room and maybe collected some of the wine bottles that seemed to always accumulate in the corners of the kitchen. When the Big Day came, they arrived in Julie's Dad's car, a 1976 Mercedes 450SL convertible. I'm sure that they had the top down.

Julie seemed bright and pleasant, if a bit young, and I couldn't help but wonder what all she was thinking about the surroundings and people she was meeting, but since she knew of and apparently approved of Woodley's step van, I guess we passed the test, as she visited often enough afterwards.

Since moving to the Schoolhouse some months before, I hadn't seen much of Sarge. In fact, the one time I went to visit him, he was rather rude and somewhat threatening, so I had stayed away. He did contact me eventually and asked if I was interested in buying the old Forney "buzz-box" welder that I had brought up to Oregon for him. Since I had now become experienced in stick welding, I agreed, and paid him $75 for the old AC welder, which came with heavy cables, a carbon-arc heating electrode setup, and some other small accessories. My intent was to perhaps start taking in some welding projects for pay.

Another electrical device that I purchased was a small, battery-powered Alpha brain wave biofeedback monitor. I had been interested in biofeedback for a number of years, and this device was being offered by a student at the university. It was a very basic monitor, but it did work, and I spent some time training myself to maintain an alpha brain wave pattern during meditation. It was also sensitive to the electrical signals of a beating heart, if the electrodes were placed on your chest, the device would sound out the pattern of heartbeats.

In the early 1970's, biofeedback was touted to be "a step beyond drugs", but I found it mostly useful for grabbing a little bit of inner peace that could be switched on and off without keeping you up all night.