MILTON, W.Va. (AP) - Move over, she shed.
There’s a swanky new man cave in town that raises the bar when it comes to design, comfort, functionality - just about any scoring system there is.
“This is living out your childhood dreams on an adult income,” said Allan Hathaway, owner of Capitol Market’s The Purple Onion and the WV Marketplace, and part-owner of a Kanawha County man cave he didn’t know he wanted.
Ownership is a little murky, though.
“We don’t even know whose is whose anymore. It’s all just ours,” said Tom Garton, Hathaway’s cul-de-sac neighbor and the cave instigator.
Garton waves his hand around a room filled with bar stools and recliners, beer taps, a big screen television and thousands of pop culture collectibles, carefully curated and displayed on every available square inch - including the ceiling.
There are football helmets, statues, movie posters, figurines, bobbleheads, comic books and more - so much more. Many of them signed, numbered and limited edition pieces.
“We decided, if this was like a restaurant, or a bar, or a shop … you gotta appeal to everybody. So, people like sports and football, they like rock ‘n’ roll, we got rock ‘n’ roll posters, they like Star Wars,” Garton said.
“We even got Christmas, see, here’s Santa Claus drinking a margarita. That’s Santa Claus after the holidays,” he added, pointing to a jolly round guy with drink in hand.
Which is not to say that you should fill your man cave with random stuff.
Quite the contrary.
“Put something in that’s gonna make you have a memory, because that’s what really matters,” Garton said.
“If I look at it and it gives me a memory of my childhood, then I did the job the way I wanted to,” added Hathaway.
The cave itself is as unexpected as their unlikely friendship, which began in the midst of a divorce for Hathaway, and following a skiing accident that led him to Garton, a physical therapist by trade.
“I met him at one of the worst times of my life. I tore my hip and my ACL - and if I hadn’t, I would’ve never had a chance to meet him. We ended up talking about beer at our first PT session. We ended up getting to be good friends. He was there to get me out of the house. I’d come to their house and stay - a lot - until I could get back on my feet,” Hathaway said.
“And so because of that, I think there is some rough times but you usually get a silver lining. He and his wife have been by my side from day one.”
When the house across the street from the Gartons was rumored to be for sale, Hathaway snatched it up before it ever got to market.
At first, the new place felt empty. Bare.
He told Garton in passing, “If you wanna bring some stuff over to my house, I’ve got this big, empty space.”
As it turned out, Garton had the remnants of a bachelor’s pad from a different life that got squeezed out after he was married and his son, now 10, was born. He was especially fond of an old statue of Conan the Barbarian.
“Conan was one of my favorite characters growing up, but my mom wouldn’t really let me read it that much because there was a lot of scantily clad women, and they were drinking and killing people. But I liked Conan,” he said.
It was the first piece he bought as a young adult when he landed his first real job and finally had a little cash to spend back in 2001. It was a whopping $200.
“When my wife and I got married, I thought, ‘I’m just gonna put that out,’” said Garton, who quickly realized his wife didn’t seem to be as fond of the piece.
“Every time she would dust,” he paused, grinning, his voice trailing off as he pointed to one barely visible crack, then another.
“There’s a break here. And there. She’s broke the sword a few times. She keeps saying, like, ‘I’m sorry, babe, I was just dusting.’ And finally I was like, ‘If you don’t like it, I can take it down.’ And she was like, ‘No, no, I like it.’”
Rachel Garton laughs at the story, and promises the breaks were not intentional.
But eventually, Conan and a handful of other choice pieces were relegated to a closet, then the garage and finally to a storage space. So his new neighbor’s offer struck a chord - and Tom Garton got to work.
“I was still just moving into the house and I come home and he comes out in the driveway and he’s like, ‘No, dude, you cannot come in.’ I was like, ‘Why?’ And Rachel, that’s his wife, was like, ‘You’re gonna be sorry,’” Hathaway said.
Until that moment, Hathaway said, he had scarcely noticed the rarely used, barely finished, unpainted garage or the adjoining room on the ground floor of his new place.
“He had brought over his Conan, his wolverine sculptures. I mean, these are statues that are very valuable. And comic book characters. These are signed and numbered pieces. And he starts putting them in these cabinets. And I walked in and I’m like, ‘Holy cow, dude, this is awesome. What I’ve always dreamed of,’” Hathaway said.
That was the humble beginning of the man cave evolution.
Since then, a large amount of their free time - vacations, concerts, football games, weekends and evenings - has been dedicated to adding to the cave and displaying each item perfectly.
Items are color coordinated, displayed in black frames and on carefully anchored shelves.
There’s a dart board on a whiskey barrel background. A Chewbacca beanbag chair. A Lego set with a tiny Jaws eating a doomed Quint. A Batman leg lamp from Purple Earth Comics in Huntington. An Incredible Hulk. A poster featuring Tom Cruise and Elisabeth Shue from the movie “Cocktail.”
“That was my first movie I ever went to on a date,” Hathaway said.
There are scores of comic books, covered in plastic and carefully stored in protective binders. Some are worth hundreds of dollars, while some are worth next to nothing.
“It’s kind of our version of ‘Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,’” Garton said.
Somehow, in building the cave together, they built a friendship.
Maybe some day this place will lead them to another dream - a combo bar, pub and grill they call Garthaways.
For now, it’s full of the kind of eclectic ensemble that needed to go somewhere, but didn’t really fit anywhere.
It’s a place where thousands of memories have their own special place. And the two friends who built it together both feel they belong.
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