Rainbow bridge
I was in the habit of rising at 5 and going directly to the work site, the future location of the Rainbow Bridge Cafe. It was formerly a devastated old farm house, 80 meters from the beach, on the edge of what would soon be the Taitung Beach Park.
I should start at the beginning. It occurred to me that teaching English in a classroom is an exercise in futility as a classroom is a sterile environment. I kept an eye out for some place that make a live English setting, something with low cost western food and drink and space for various activities, part indoors, part outdoors. I envisioned a place that would accommodate the three basic foreigner demographics; missionary, teacher, business, as well as the local people. I wanted a social center.
I looked at several places which were all too expensive, to small, too closed, too remote.... On one of my regular runs to the recycler at the garbage dump on the town beach I spied beneath a large pile of rubbish and rubble, the remains of an old farm house. The roof and walls were intact. The whole place was desolate for years and had become the neighborhood refuse pile.
I poked and probed around on the property trying to get into the house. With a cane knife and gloves it took 15 minutes to get in through the vines, weeds, tangle of lumber, steel, broken glass.
I was convinced that with a lot of hard work and some cooperation from others I could make it into an indoor outdoor cafe restaurant with a nice family atmosphere.
I knocked on the house next door, a wood cottage with lattice windows and a portico. The owner was a middle aged stately Taiwanese woman with features that told a story of years past of glamor and wealth. Behind her was a man in a wheel chair. She invited me in and We agreed in principle on a 4 year lease at 10,000 NT, I get the first 6 months rent free in exchange for cleaning up. I went home to write the contract. I had learned long ago that off the shelf contracts are a rip off. If you want a good deal, you can get one. You just have to write your own contract.
People think about the choices which are presented to them. So, I rewrote the contract introducing terms which I wanted the landlord to think about and excluding conditions which I didn't want her to think about. For example, I was making consider able improvements and investment in her property which there was no way I could uninstall should she decide to terminate the contract early. Now, most contracts stated that the tenant must return the property in the same condition as when they took possession. IN this case, that was ridiculous . I replaced it with a clause that stated that the landlord would have to reimburse me my invest of 150,000 NT if she terminated the contract early.
Before signing the contract I visited the neighbors to see how they felt about my plan. It would not do to start a project in a neighborhood that is not receptive to the idea. Most of the neighbors were very excited ad eager to help. “ Well, you can start by not throwing your rubbish here anymore. “
Some were lukewarm. They don't want to upset the status quo.” don't kill that plant. I use it for herbal medicine,” one neighbor demanded officiously.
So, I dug it up , potted it, and left It at her front door.
Started collecting flotsam and jetsam from the beach and the recycling centers. I asked all of my friends for plants, furniture, wall décor, beams, posts, ideas.
I acquired acetylene torches, hose and tanks to cut the vast amounts f steel beams that were scattered and mounted on the property. I hired a backhoe to dig a large hole and bury the organic rubbish.
One corner of the property adjacent the back door of the old Hai Bao Wang restaurant was knee deep n kitchen debris. I thought as I surveyed the mess, wouldn't it have been easier to just take out the garbage everyday rather than tossing it out the back door? With a rake and shovel I had to scoop it out and bury it. I plunged in not realizing that it was a haven for the biggest nastiest looking cockroaches I had ever seen in my life. After the initial shock, I realized that the only way to get 'er done was to ignore the things. So, for 3 hours, I wallowed in this filth driven only by a vision of a fine clean and green lawn and a garden pathway leading up to the cafe.
The land also had tons of steel trusses left over from a construction project nearby. Th e landlord insisted that I keep it all. I had sky hook stack it into a tunnel so that the neighbors could pass through under it and I could use the top as a deck.
It was right about this point that I took on a partner, Texas Dave. He showed me small sum of money to buy in as a partner. He was intelligent, aesthetic, and a very hard worker. His sheer persistence alone was worth the engagement. But he aggravated a lot of people with his single minded ultraconservative view and his Classic Texas 'frugality'.
One day I asked him to stop at the hardware store to buy a 50 NT box of nails to hammer down a couple dozen floor boards.
Picking up some rusty bent ones we had just removed he asked,” Why can't we just straighten them out and use them?”
He had an insatiable determination to be aesthetic. And more often than not he was. I was out of town one day and before going, we had a sit down to discuss what had to be done, a list of 23 items that were essential to the opening. We had already been on this project 6 months. That was 5 months too long. When I had returned and asked him what he had accomplished he replied, “Well you see that stone,” pointing to a stone about 1 ½ meters tall, “It was over there. I rolled it to the other end of the yard. I didn't like it there so I rolled it back.”
“Well, that was a Sisyphean labor,” trying to hide my dismay.
We were getting dangerously close to the opening date and we were no where near ready. Besides a long list of bureaucratic details, and a shopping spree to stock the shelves, I had a lot of wiring projects to do.
“ Is there anything I can help you with?” my partner asked.
“ Well, can you strip those wires and join them?”
“ Sure, no problem.”
I had measured and cut all the wires to length and needed only to connect them at their various junctions for lights, switches and outlets.
“Gimme a shout when you're done. “
Twenty minutes later, no shout, I went around the back to find my partner had stripped off about 18 inches of coating from the wires where a mere ½ would have been sufficient.
Never assume. Never assume that someone knows what their doing just because they say they do. “ You've never done this sort of thing before, have you.”
“Well, not really.”
Dave was a good one to give a muscle task. Give him a shovel and a tree root. He was also good at putting the finish on what I had started. I used an overhead projector to put an image of the world map, 3 meters tall and 6 meters across. It took a bit of marker work in the middle of the night. When I came back the next morning, he had feathered in all of the edges, the seas, so that it looked like a 200 year old parchment. It was nothing short of brilliant.
One of the biggest problems on this job site was that things made of metal kept disappearing. Soon I caught up with the local vagabond who collects scrap for recycling. I had to tell her 5 times that she was no longer welcome to come here to collect. I set up a bin and told her, “This for you. You take what we put in here, OK?”
We filled it with cans, bottles, paper. She was happy.
I enlisted the aid of the local drunks to move rubbish.
Opening day finally came around. I had to teach classes at my school , but rearranged my schedule with my partner there, my wife. So, at 8 pm, I was surprised to see her walking up the entrance way to the cafe. She pivoted left and right, saw only that there were 10 tables all of which were occupied with only women, between the ages of 17 and 35. Her mouth puckered like the south end of a north bound mule.
I knew there and then that I was going to have to get out of the cafe business.
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