My City Was Gone

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

All of a sudden the schmoozers for Calabasas’ “indie” film fest are gone, and the slick environs of Chapter 8, the Agoura Hills club that held the after-party, are populated exclusively with 21-and-a-half-year-olds listening to the foulest hip-hop. I don’t mean foul-mouthed hip-hop, or hip-hop that would somehow assail my myriad sensitivities. I just mean sludgy tracks without wit or interest, the kind you might hear, I’m guessing, on Power 106. I don’t know. I haven’t been in high school in a really long time.

I have come to Calabasas to meet up with a couple of my favorite people, and to drink their tea and wine. And that’s exactly what I have done, and therefore, I am sozzled. Kelly and I are giggling and dancing with our boobs and taking pictures of ourselves snarling and eating baguettes, and we think we are hilarious. We are probably as hilarious as your average 15-year-old, the kind who’s discovered that loudly yipping with her friends at the outdoor tables at coffee shops garners her the attention of others, and thinks the dirty looks she’s collecting are because all the oldsters are really jealous of her youthful vitality.

Basically, we’re acting like assholes, and we like us very much.

But that fun must end, because it is no longer fun, and I tell my friends that since we are in Agoura, and Agoura, except for Chapter 8, has rolled up its sidewalks, I will take them to Thousand Oaks, the city I left 17 years ago.

If nothing else, there will be Denny’s.

There is nothing else, and there is not Denny’s.

Now, granted, I left Thousand Oaks three weeks after my 18th birthday, but it’s not like I haven’t been back. I visited my mom several times before she followed me to Hermosa Beach in ’95 or ’96, and ... well, I’ve certainly stopped into the Denny’s on my way to Santa Barbara or San Francisco. I certainly know my way to the bars. Except they are not there, even the stupid ones. The dance place I wasn’t sure we should go to, because even at 12:30 am they might try to charge us a cover; the little dive full of men with dirty fingernails who would say charming things about my face and where to park it; hell, the one place in the strip mall across from the Janss Mall (you remember, the place, with the thing?)—all were gone, empty, done. Surely even people in what used to be horse country but had, even before I was out of elementary school, become a small Encino—surely even they needed a place to get drunk and fucked?

Right?

Maybe not.

I knew there was a reason I swore never to return.

My Denny’s—corner of Moorpark and T.O. Boulevard—was once the toast of the chain, and people would make the hajj to sit among us, the clove smoke curling around their interesting facial hair. Sometimes, one of the largish waiters would tango with me through the aisles, but mostly, I cuddled—sheltered by his high black coiffure—into Dave Grave’s lap, the lap of choice for all 17-year-old hoods, when he sat, every night, at the counter.

Dave would sit and receive his homage—no one came through the doors without coming over to pay their respects—and he must have been terribly old, mid-30s even, even then.

Something terrible has happened to my Denny’s, the neutral ground where my parents would meet me when I’d run away from home, the place I would visit every night for years and years—and then, after I’d gotten home by the prescribed 1 or 2 am, where I would sneak out my window and return until dawn.

This Denny’s—their Denny’s—sucks.

It is dingy, and ill-lit. The backs of the booths are gone, as is anything higher than the tops of the tables; it looks like they’re preparing to scrape it, and Dave Grave is not at the counter. I can not sit on his lap and have him call me a silly girl and compliment me on the recent rounding of my ass, which used to be so sad and flat and bony.

I ask the manager for Dave; she says she has not seen him in a week, but calls another waitress over to direct us to some bars. “There’s a lot of bars here,” the heavyset, harried waitress says in a country-fried accent. “There’s a TGI Friday’s right up the street!”

There’s also, she says, a country-and-western bar, right up the hill. “Where the Bob’s Big Boy is?” I ask her. “No,” she says. “There’s a Hungry Howie’s Pizza Parlor on the corner.” A whowhatnow? It sounds like what they would call the local stupid chain in a dark comedy decrying the death that’s the suburb. This is an actual thing? What kind of pod place have you become? I mean, that you weren’t already, before.

We are directed to Borderline’s, a cavernous lovely of a place, all huge and like I remember Mickey Gilley’s country bar in that episode of Fantasy Island, minus only the mechanical bull. From the high roof, in place of the disco ball, hangs a marvelous mirrored saddle.

Kelly is bitching and kvetching, because Kelly is a snob, but we are very popular, with the band at least, from the moment we hit the front door. Everyone else studiously ignores us, probably because we are cackling and giggling and dancing with our boobs, and Kelly is wearing a ballgown—as one does—and I am trying to fix my sandal by sticking my foot up on the barstool to give a fine view of my ass, but I can’t get my foot up there on either the first or the second try, and have to lift my leg up with my hands to reach it.

“That wasn’t glamorous,” Kelly’s husband, Chris, informs me—cackling a goodly bit his own fine self—the next day. Baby, like I didn’t already know!

The band accuses Chris of being our limo driver, and so Kelly, in wifely solidarity, makes out with him. Then during their intro to one of their last songs—we are barely there before last call—the singer lets out with a smarmy “I wanna know what kind of car he drives!” and then launches into “Pink Cadillac.” He looks a lot like Mystery, the vagina-faced man who teaches other men how to insult your way to a lifetime of pussy, on the VH1.

“Dude,” Chris smirks as we cackle on our way out the door. “I drive a fucking minivan. I drive a Chevy Venture.”

And so ends our evening in the place that I once knew. There’s crap left, and really nice malls. Unless Dave Grave hops back on his barstool, there won’t be much reason to return, which is a good thing; I swore not to 17 years back.

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