The Salt Palace is a cavernous building of steel and concrete, where clans and clubs and conventioneers collect themselves to swap and spit and shake each other’s hands once or twice each year. It’s typical of the convention centers from the 20th century, big glass, large aspiring ceilings, cold and uncomfortable concrete floors with doors as high as 40 feet on intervals of some significance with open access to the storage of booths and boxes temporarily kept outdoors and brought in by burley laborers who have their own unions and conventions, one would guess, at other locations of similarity. The building itself, located on one of the main intersections of down town Salt Lake occupied a couple of city blocks and with parking lots and handling facilities makes itself large and oblivious to the rest of the architecture that surrounds it.
At the beginning of each event, fork lifts and hand trucks appear from nowhere, or somewhere, outside the confines of the building and bring crates and boxes in, lay down flooring, light up the ceiling, erect and install all the elements of a small city, including the flags, they build in a couple of days with nothing in the space the day before and nothing in the same space the day after. A day in the life, a life in a day. And the day after, not even trash, overnight, the minions and unions of various purpose have moved it all, prepared for the next convention of clowns, or cowboys, or republicans, or pharmacists, and so on. The beat goes on.
The transformation takes place nearly every week and like clocks work, no one really knows how, but they watch the hands circle and change the space from what it was, with nothing, to carpeted streets and plywood malls and nylon walls and banners and falderal of every color, sort, shape and size. A mesmerizing metamorphosis until the Salt Palace is filled to the brim, so full that it spills out into the parking lot where giant tents are rapidly raised to accommodate the overflowing and the viral-like growing collection of conventioneers.
Three long, wide, but not very high tents with ventilation tubes like the ones used to bring air into mines snaked their way through the enclosures like bright yellow tunnels hung from steel threads. Like vinyl arteries of oxygen, and every few feet a two inch flap whistled and whipped as the internal combustion of air inside worked its way out of each aperture bringing breath to the behemoth. It was a living thing with movement along every bit of its longitudinal and latitudinal dimensions and it made a low, but very noticeable respiratory growl that shattered the otherwise sterile atmosphere of the pop-ups, which were each, nearly 500 feet long. The day was exceptionally hot, nearly 100 degrees and inside, the tents were about 70 degrees, except near the entries where the cold mixed with the hot and blurred the comfort zone for those poor bastards near the doors. At least Jesse’s booth was dead center of the big tent, far from the doors and the hot air, but also the furthest from the fork lift fellas.
Set Up
From 30,000 feet, the operation looked seamless and smooth, with progress appearing at every station and people busily moving about with hands full of gear, or product, or brochures or something that gave them purpose. At floor level, there was a lot more noise and motion and chaos lurked every where, playing to the background of the growling ventilation system.
The union guys were salty, this was their turf and money talked so if you listened closely, you could ‘smell’ the bribes, a petty corruption, but none-the-less the grease that made the wheels turn in your favor, or not. What were the odds? Every one was competing for their favorite fork lift driver and the union guys loved to watch the grovel. It was a small window, about 12 hours, and everyone had to jump through it at the same time so everyone lived by fork lift guy’s (FLG) rules.
The show would start the next day, and Jesse had driven all night with his van filled beyond the recommended weight limitation, and all 8 hours of I-80, he quietly curse-prayed to himself that the booth made for this specific show would be there. And not just one crate, but all three crates, in the location they had paid for, at a time that allowed him to sleep a little before the show started, and with all the parts and pieces ready for him to set up. It was a brand new booth, and with a limited budget as a startup company, they had gambled $20,000 to present themselves as one of the ‘players in their field’ to attract business. At the time, it seemed like a lot of money and he had that to think about. But he had arrived relatively whole, and as he walked through the layers of crates in the aisles that were flooded with construction and removal and delivery and show-goers who had lists of things to do, he could feel the energy growing, many like minded people in a relatively small space generated its own electrical field.
It was a big job and he was alone so he had to do everything, beginning with paper work first, then he would have to find an FLG driver who he could cajole, then make a determination about whether a bribe would be optional, or mandatory, and so it went. It was fair to say that all the other attendees in the building were doing the same, so you could cut the tension with a saw and still have only dust to show for your efforts.
Back home, his partner, his wife, Lynn, and the mother of their two, year-old twin children, was manning the shop and answering phones and doing all that one does to keep the boat afloat when there weren’t enough sailors. A nanny helped, but only while the sun was up and it never seemed like it was enough. Those summer days were all too short, and the nights were all too long. And the weather was about to get rough.
Their employees were ‘the opposite of help’, as a friend of theirs had said, often times creating more problems than solutions so she was overwhelmed everywhere she was, and wasn’t. ‘She needed a good cry’, she told Jesse, while he balanced the phone between his shoulder and ear and kept bringing the gear in from the van. Jesse was working on fumes as well. He’d had no sleep the day before, he was double parked in the loading zone, he’d “borrowed” a hand truck from a booth near the front entrance, and the window kept closing, inexorably. Ahead of him, there was at least a full day’s work to set up the booth, the show would start the next day, and that was if there were no hiccups. Just as he thought that, he began to hiccup.
When he had emptied the van and parked a mile away, running back to the Salt Palace, he could see that all three crates had arrived and he could start putting it together. He was sweating profusely. It was only 10 in the morning but with the van unloaded he relaxed a little and began to look around. He noticed a middle aged woman, struggling with a ladder as he walked by. He stopped to offer his help and she said without hesitation, “absolutely”. She was bubbly and busy with the booth, and she was humming something catchy the whole time. Jesse climbed the ladder as she directed him to hang lights from the cross beams of the false ceiling above them. Her name was June, “like the month”, and she’d been doing these shows for nearly 20 years. She was a sales rep from the mid-west and she had a family, “three girls, all in high school”, and all with the same accent as hers, Jesse assumed, and she spoke non-stop for nearly 20 minutes before Jesse was able to get off the ladder and backed down the aisle. June was not one to surrender a good listener easily as she followed and talked and talked and followed him towards his booth. He took a wrong turn, intentionally, to disrupt the line of vision and waved to her as she continued to ramble. “Good egg”, Jesse thought, “but the timer is buzzing”, he said to himself.
As he hustled toward his designated space, he noticed one of his competitors who was just around the corner from Jesse’s location, maybe 20 feet away as the crow flies, if they allowed crows to fly in such places. They waved and Jesse walked over and asked how he was. His name was Jim Holmes, an entrepreneur like Jesse and both with similar products and fair to say, the same business. They viewed each other suspiciously, although neither felt any real contempt for the other, there was a palpable edge to both men’s guarded remarks. Trade secrets, perhaps, but perhaps more accurately just a couple of fish in a small bowl, jockeying for some misperceived advantage over the other. From that same 30,000 feet perspective, both were small fry full of small talk, any fool could see. As Jesse walked away, he thought to himself, “jesus, it’s not like it’s life or death here. we can at least be collegial”.
The Booth
Jesse opened the crates and removed all of the contents looking for the directions on assembly. He worked steadily as the aisles began to clear and the show began to take shape. As people finished, they headed out and the crowd began to thin. The carpet was laid, and many booths were finished and ready, chaos was losing to order and Jesse was making progress as well. He had about half of the booth completed and he needed a ladder so he remembered his mid-west friend, who seemed like she knew everyone, and if she didn’t, she soon would. So he walked over to find June, ‘like the month’. She was bending the ear of another aisle stroller, where she had applied the locked arm maneuver to this particular traveler who didn’t seem to mind in the least, and Jesse watched as they laughed easily. As Jesse walked up she let her other prey slip away, she turned quickly to Jesse and captured him, like a bug, a June bug, she hugged him, and he awkwardly asked, while his arms were pinned to his side, “may I use your ladder, June?”.
“Of course, hon”, she said (Jesse thought she must call everybody ‘hon’) and she offered to bring him a beer to his booth, since she was done with hers. “Absolutely” he said without hesitation. “See you soon, hon”, she said and sailed off to assail, captivate, enjoin, and charm other show-goers. He could hear her laughter from aisles away, exploding like grenades of guffaws and bahahas over the din of fork lifts backing up. She seemed like everybody’s mom, making a family where ever she went. She smelled like cookies. She was a round mound with a mid-west sound. Jesse laughed just thinking about her.
What The Hell……?
Jesse had nearly finished building the booth. June had dropped off a beer in a red solo cup and it sat on the dais, untouched. He was waiting to finish the job before indulging. With a single bolt left to install, he heard his phone ring and he stopped to answer it. He put the bolt in his pocket and just as he sat down a group of about 20 people, holding hands and running in a long line snaked their way through the aisle, each of them looking more panicked than the person in front of them, as if being chased by something monstrous. No one spoke, or made a sound as they ran past Jesse. It was very odd.
At nearly 4 in the afternoon, the show floors were emptying, except for the few late finishers and early beer drinkers. A sudden silence sucked all the background noises out of existence, like a seedless hull. The ventilating tubes shut down and immediately went flaccid, a vacuum of silence replaced the dull thrumming background noise of the HVAC and for a long three seconds of confusion, it was still, nothing moved. And then, the big yellow vinyl airducts hyper-inflated, like balloons before they pop, and blasted a concussion of air and noise onto the floor where Jesse watched with his hand on the plastic cup and a phone in the other, still unable to recognize what was about to happen. It felt surreal, intense, and like something was about to break.
Without any other warning the roof of the big tent was gone, revealing a black and angry sky filled with furniture, branches, leaves and logs and sticks and bricks, and debris and the temperature dropped instantly. Jesse looked up at the metal girders that had held the tent material in place and watched them sway back and forth. He moved with them, trying to guess where they might fall and hoping that he would be able to avoid the collision. He thought of Tyrell Davis, bobbing and weaving, mentally making a path through the windfall, watching the movement of the tent and it’s superstructure, wondering if this was it.
“Funny, I didn’t think this is how it would be, that it would end like this”, he said to himself. He thought it should be more profound, as he waited for an epiphany, or maybe something celestial. The blackened sky looked down on him with a yawn of indifference, only the voice in his head spoke. “Jump to the left”, it said. “Now jump to the right”. He did not have a moment of inspiration, or clarity, rather he was struck by the banality of it. “Really, this is it?” he mumbled as he moved, eyes aloft and looking for intervention by someone, or something bigger than himself, but nothing came to mind. Or to his side. He was alone. Shifting from one foot to the other, like Mr. Bojangles.
The View from Below
In the next few moments, time and sound and his other senses bent and stretched, the deceleration of everything around him gave Jesse the opportunity to watch, in a detached sort of way, as the nearly completed booth he’d spent the day building lifted off the ground and vanished in a flash. Nearby, other booths began to tumble into his view and while moving back and forth to avoid the rafters above he was knocked hard to the ground by something from behind. He felt the weight of something solid and heavy hit his head as he fell forward. He thought he heard a train and lightning spit at the back of the building, he saw the flash.
Floating chairs, temporary walls, curtain poles, branch and tree debris, paper, crate tops, vacuum cleaners, swirled and collided in the air and then fell all around him. He was on all fours and somehow underneath a desk that had turned on its side for him to crawl into. Darkness embraced him, he lay on the ground and began to hallucinate the images of his infant children, he reached out to touch their faces and he smelled perfume, the kind Lynn wore. He felt her there while he laid beneath the desk, searched with a stretched out arm, reaching into the darkness, but couldn’t find her. Then the rain fell hard and cold, drenching him, and the sudden change in temperature seemed to bring him back from his trance. Everything raced forward to catch up the time he’d spent under the desk.
The cyclone had passed and within that minute and a half, had turned the almost finished show space of order and shiny new shit, into a lackluster landfill, wet with filth. Chaos, about 12 feet high in some places, and oddly, undisturbed in other spaces. But there was no path through the debris, so he stood in place and shook his head, which felt heavy with rain. A large air compressor lay on its back about 25 feet from where Jesse had fallen, it weighed about 2200 lbs, and it seemed odd to Jesse that it had flown at least a couple hundred feet from where he had seen it the first time, near the rear entry to the tent. It’s wheels were at the top, and the letters on the side, “feather-light”, were upside down, the wheels still spinning.
A woman called out and he followed her voice, he found her on the ground with a temporary wall on top of her. As he bent down to help her out, rain falling and soaking them both, he saw blood on her face. He reached down and took her hand, he said “let’s get you some help, I think you’re bleeding” and she looked up at him, blinking in the rain, and said, “it’s not me, it’s you”.
At the time it didn’t register to Jesse and he pulled her up to help her toward the building, which stood like a pedestrian after a traffic accident, staring into the pile-up. Hundreds of people from within the Salt Palace had gathered on the sidewalk as the wet and dazed made their way toward the building. Within minutes a triage had been set up and people shuffled inside. Jesse helped another attendee through the large glass doors. As they walked in, someone said “this way, man”, with a purposeful look upon his face and he was directed down a hallway. Jesse was shivering now, with his wet clothes and one of his shoes missing, he teetered towards a group of people who were carrying a man on a stretcher. It was his colleague Jim, and he’d broken his neck, even Jesse could see that though his dazed gaze. He reached over to him and grabbed his hand, Jim gave him a thumbs up but didn’t speak. Pretty god damn collegial after all.
Someone took Jesse’s elbow and led him to a nurse, or someone who looked like a nurse. She told him to sit, staring into his eyes, “Are you dizzy, or sleepy?” she asked.
“No, should I be?”, Jesse responded. The nurse took his head in her hands and asked him to lean forward, she dislodged a large blob of coagulated blood which fell to the floor, followed by a diluted stream of crimson. Jesse finally realized he was injured, but the nurse told him it was probably surficial and while she thought it might need stitches, she said she thought he would be ok. She asked him to sit for awhile so she could check on him in a little bit. “Don’t leave”, she said. But she was busy immediately with someone else and Jesse was so cold that he stood up and started walking toward the bed and breakfast where he was staying. The sun had come out and except for the violent rearrangement of cars and trees and tents and contents thereof, it was a beautiful day again.
Jesse started walking toward the B&B, which was about 3 miles away, through the downtown area as people parted for him like leaves on water at the bow of a boat, until he saw a hotel. He walked through the doors. He sat down on a couch in the lobby and except for the show badge around his neck, looked for all the world to be a homeless bum, in his bloody t shirt and plastered hair. He shivered violently, put his head into his hands and quietly shook. Someone from behind the reception desk came over and put a blanket on him, she said she would call an ambulance, but he insisted he didn’t need one. What he needed was to talk to his wife and family. He wasn’t thinking clearly but he dialed the number to his home and his wife picked up the phone.
“Hello”. she said.
“I’m alright”. He blurted. She was confused as well. The news of the tornado hadn’t reached her and his comment took her off guard. For a moment they shared the same thought, which was what would life be without the other, but neither spoke it. Like the cyclone, it passed and left each with whisperings of what was and what ifs and what the hell.
The Show Goes On
Lynn took remote control and a big yellow taxi took Jesse back to the B&B where he slept and dreamt of the gods of wind and weather and the thin line between fate and luck. Jesse woke up to the news of a single death. Her picture started back at him, “hi, hon” from the great beyond. His friend June, like the month, had been hit by the feather-light air compressor and it took his breath away. Jesse had just met her, but he felt like he had lost a very close friend, a family member. He cried as he left the B&B.
He walked to the Salt Palace later that morning and a maelstrom brewed, a debate was raging on whether to show or not-to-show, that was the question. At the end of the day, it was decided that the show must go on. There was a resolution to simply ad lib, innovate, accommodate, and just keep going, but Jesse’s conviction, his booth, the reason for being there in the first place were a swirl of questions for him and the next few days were spent indoors and invisible, in a make-shift corner of a large Chinese based contract manufacturing company who’s space inside the palace had been subdivided to accommodate Jesse, and other refugees. Tent city, without the tent.
The following days were a slow, nearly motionless daze, and Jesse mostly walked and talked amongst the tradesman, recanting the story of the cyclone, but in the afternoon, at the time the twister tore the tent apart, at precisely 4 oh 1, he went to the parking lot which was a beehive of activity and placed a red solo cup, filled with beer in the space where June, like the month, had loaned him her ladder. He stood still for a minute and a half as the bull dozers and fork lifts worked around him, and imagined her family. Three days, three beers. The last one he left in the empty parking lot, dead center. He turned and went back inside and starting pulling up the stakes he had left.
Jesse drove home later that day and when he pulled into the drive way he didn’t bother to close the door or turn the car off as he ran through the door of his home and into the arms of his wife and children, soaking himself in their warm embrace. He stopped shivering. It was 4 oh 1 in the morning.
