But I Digress

by Jim Washburn

If you’re old enough, which means too old, you’ll remember the days when Shakey’s pizza parlors had house pianists who wore straw hats. Shakey’s also had wooden plaques on the walls throughout, with clever sayings painted upon them such as “Shakey’s made a deal with the bank: The bank doesn’t make pizza and Shakey’s doesn’t take checks.”

They were saying cash, no checks, and nobody took your credit card then, unless you were John F. Kennedy, in which case they also gave Green Stamps.

The more I think about it, Shakey’s was a weird place, part German beer hall oom-pah haus, part Italian pizza parlor, part Dixieland jazz prison and part Robin Hood’s Sherwood pub, with lots of it signs beginning “Ye olde ...,” like “Ye olde Cigarette Machine.”

There was a Shakey’s near us when I was growing up in Buena Park, where its Euro pretensions looked all the more wrong, with the parking lot tar bubbling in the summer heat, beside a field of sun-throttled weeds. Sometimes there was a clown at Shakey’s. Sometimes you’d hear Roy Orbison singing “Pretty Woman” on the jukebox, which went down great with a chilled mug of root beer. A kid got the feeling that anything could happen at Shakey’s, though usually “anything” meant a stomachache.

I lived in the Highland Greens condo community, on Ginniss Green, one block from Glengarry Green, as all the streets had names from the Scottish Highlands. What were they thinking? It was right off Beach Boulevard, across the street from the Big T Golf Course, flanked to the south by a field where everyone dumped their garbage and to the north by cliffs strewn with Standard Oil derricks. Greyfriar’s Bobby wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes on Beach Boulevard, where the green Asbury Co. dirt-hauling trucks were notorious for their mean drivers who would swerve toward kids walking along the dirt curb.

I had to walk that way to the Mayfair Market and Johnny’s Speed and Chrome. Johnny had all the stuff to trick out your hot rod or dune buggy, or, if you were ten, all the cool Weird-O and Rat Fink T-shirts. A lot of shop owners ignored their young, cash-poor customers, but not Johnny: “Hey, kid, you got any money?”

“No.”

“Then get the hell out of my shop.”

There was always something going on up there worth risking the Asbury trucks. One day I hit the parking lot just in time to see a guy ram his Impala into a phone pole outside the Tastee Freez. People gathered around and tried to pry his accordioned door open, while blood streamed from his forehead and he mewled, “She doesn’t love me anymore! I don’t wanna live! Let me die!” Confused the hell out of me, wondering what about a girlfriend could ever make a guy want to do that, though time certainly answered that one for me.

note: vehicle not Wienermobile

Another occasion, Little Oscar’s Wienermobile was parked outside Johnny’s. Again, unless you’re too old, you might not know that the Oscar Meyer company once thought you’d eat more hot dogs if a midget in a chef’s hat told you to. They sent Little Oscar to appearances in the Wienermobile, a hot dog bun on wheels from which a wiener jutted at a very optimistic angle. I like to think that, late at night, Little Oscar drove that wiener back and forth into the holes of the giant donuts that graced Southland donut shops.

I pulled up on my Huffy Stingray to find that Oscar wasn’t making a personal appearance. He’d just come from one at the La Mirada Unimart, and he was definitely off the clock, a stogie wagging from his five o’clock shadow as he complained, “Johnny, these fuckin’ kids, I tell ya ...”

Rounding this mini-center out were a barbershop where the drunk owner would watch cartoons while nicking your ear, and a little Italian spaghetti and meatballs joint. I was friends with the owner’s son, whom I envied no end because his family was so broke they lived in the restaurant. My friend had to curl up in a leatherette booth every night, which I thought was the coolest thing ever, because right above it was a backlit Hamm’s beer sign that looked like water flowing down a stream.

Just up Rosecrans from this idyllic abode lay Bellehurst, among the most elegant communities in the north county, or it would have been if the construction financing hadn’t fallen though. You’d have a beautiful, huge finished home next to a stick frame with maybe one room suggested by the drywall, next to a muddy foundation. It was like an upscale ghost town.

I never saw the Bellehurst werewolf, but my future brother-in-law did: a stringy, bearded tramp in tatters who’d scamper after kids on all fours. I don’t know what my sister saw in the guy. No, sorry, I was talking about the werewolf. Some thought he was a genuine werewolf, and you had better wear a silver St. Christopher medal to ward him off. Others said he was Old Man Bellehurst, who’d gone crazy when his money ran out. Most likely it was just some homeless guy who’d found good pickings in the trashcans of Bellehurst’s few residents.

No one called them homeless then. They were hobos, up from the railroad tracks just south of Malvern. They congregated in a mini-canyon right near Beach Boulevard, where they’d conduct their Sterno-based endeavors beside a small stream that was probably Highland Greens’ runoff.

Our neighborhood Good Humor man had no teeth, but these guys were a whole other stratum of decrepitude. I’d like to say I learned some profound life lesson from them, but the only thing I learned was to give them a wide berth.

I’d mainly see them in the nearby field where people dumped their trash. Buena Park had curbside trash service, but a lot of folks in town had moved from the Deep South, and old habits die hard. At the dump, to me the hobos were competition. We were all scrounging for the same unexhausted hairspray cans: me to use them as flamethrowers or to explode in one of the dump’s eternal trash fires; while the hobos wanted the cans to maintain their crazy-guy hair or something.

But I digress.

I meant to write about the election. Did you vote? I did, for Hillary, much to the consternation of my wife, several friends and me six months ago. Far too mainstream, corporate and conciliatory, too much the slick candidate. But I changed my mind for several reasons. One is that I feel sorry for her. If she wins the White House, I’m pretty sure she’ll finally shake that rictus of a smile that’s been frozen on her face for the past year, the one that makes her look uncomfortably like Jiminy Glick.

Whoever’s president isn’t going to be smiling long. Remember, when George W. Bush’s crew moved into the White House and complained that the outgoing Clintonites had trashed the place, fouling computers and such? Turned out that was largely fiction.

But now, whoever gains the big house isn’t just inheriting a littered work station, but a thoroughly trashed nation, where our infrastructure, emergency response capability, financial footing, military readiness, social services, national character, international reputation and everything else has been pushed down the toilet. Whoever becomes President isn’t gonna have much reason or time to smile.

Whatever Clinton’s faults, she comes from a team that excelled at making government work. When there was an emergency, they were Johnny-on-the-Spot, and they were also great at working the tedious, wonky stuff. Consider the U.S.’s coal-fueled power plants that kept finding ways to skirt retrofitting modern pollution devices to their stacks, because it would have dipped into profits to stop poisoning people so much. The Clinton EPA and Justice Department spent years building an exhaustive case against these polluters, and with the likely fines waved as a stick, it was pretty much a done deal that the polluters would acquiesce to the retrofits. Then, of course, the Supreme Court dubbed Dubya President; he promptly scuttled the legal action and the polluting has continued unabated since.

Contrast that with Obama, who on the stump has touted the legislation he proposed after a nuclear power plant in Illinois was discovered to have been leaking radiation into neighboring communities without bothering to tell anyone. His law would have required all such leaks to be reported. Hooray, but as the New York Times recently reported, Obama caved in to pressure from Senate Republicans and the owners of the nuclear plant in question—who are also among his biggest contributors—to gut the language of the law, making disclosure voluntary, and Obama was never even able to get that bill taken up on the Senate floor.

Noble intentions count, and I’d be delighted to have Obama as President, but even more so once he’s had some seasoning, like maybe as Vice President. Like a lot of folks, I watched the pre-primary Hillary/Obama debate hoping that these two are both on November’s ticket. Of the two, Obama’s got the most to gain from accepting the VP slot if the other wins the nomination, so I voted to facilitate that.

Along with their qualifications and the twofer of getting the first woman and the first black in such high offices, their superstar combo should outshine the stellar double-bill of McCain and Huckabee that I foresee forming on the right. Both are likable guys who are great at seeming folksy, off-the-cuff and immediate, a real asset in a contest where most candidates end up uptight and robotic. I know people who’ve hung out with John Kerry, and say he’s the funniest Irishman in the bar, but on the stump he had the animation of a tree trunk.

With Romney out and McCain’s primary wins, Huckabee sure isn’t going to be the Republican candidate—too bad: I was waiting for the newspaper headline over the photo of the White House reading, “BASS SOLO STARTS.” So he might as well be VP, just a heartbeat away from being able to wrap the Constitution around a big Jesus sandwich.

And while none of these guys wants to get within 1,500 miles of Bush’s toxic legacy, what’s with this universal deification of Ronald Reagan, who owes Bush a big nod of thanks for knocking him out of the worst-President-ever slot? I could go on for days about what a lousy president he was. (I did go on for days once. You can read it here.

I don’t want to go back to the ’80s. I don’t even want to go back to the ’60s, much as I’m nostalgic for the Beatles, Shakey’s root beer and the Bellehurst werewolf. I just want a future that looks more like the Carousel of Progress and less like Blade Runner. I like this hope and change stuff that Obama’s selling, though I wouldn’t mind if Hillary was the delivery girl.

When Obama says “change,” maybe it strikes the too old among us as just one more empty political word, the same word used by everyone from Mussolini to Mitt Crybaby Romney. (One more reason why I’m feeling sympathetic toward Hillary: When Romney quit his race—for the good of the country in light of the terrorist threat, of course: he’s no quitter, except for the quitting part—the L.A. Times dryly reported, “‘This is not an easy decision for me,’ said Romney, whose eyes welled with tears. ‘I hate to lose.’” And that was all anybody said about the matter. Meanwhile, Clinton gets a little misty and all you hear for two weeks is how she’s either a calculating machine crying for votes or a hysterical woman who should never be allowed behind the wheel.)

A friend who works and sometimes sleeps with 20-somethings says “change” has a whole other resonance for them. To them change is a palpable thing, and they can’t get enough of it. Maybe to them change is the new stability, since, rather than hunkering down in one job and climbing the ladder, it’s expected now that they’ll spend their lives skipping from one job to another, maybe having 50 jobs over their careers. According to my friend, this also makes them more agreeable to hopping into bed with you, since if it doesn’t work out, you’re just job No. 19 out of 50, and moving on is no great shakes. One more reason why I hate all single people.

But I digress. What I’d really like to tell you about is the Sierra Leone’s Refugee All-Stars appearance at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. If February 13 hasn’t already passed when you’re reading this, take your sweetie to the Barclay, and enjoy a band of guys and gals who’ve seen a far harder life than we’re ever likely to—all rendered homeless and some limb-less by a blood diamond-fueled civil war, making an exodus to a tent encampment in a strange country, for starts—and yet have conspired to make some of the most hopeful, joyful Afro-rap-reggae around.

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