Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

(An archive post from another blog, written originally a very long time ago, as internet time is considered.)

When JP and Pip and Sander and I were all growing up, the contiguous suburb of Sunland and Tujunga, untouched by the 210 Freeway was a terribly blue-collar, gloriously low-rent sort of rural suburb. It was if anything, an extension of the San Fernando Valley, and not the wealthier part of it either. It was particularly unscathed by any sort of higher cultural offerings, and the main drag of Foothill Boulevard was attended on either side by a straggle of small storefront businesses, a drive-in theater, discouraged local grocery store, a used car lot, the usual fast food burger or pizza places, a place with an enormous concrete chicken in front which advertised something called “broast” chicken, Laundromats, and a great variety of very drab little bars. There were no bookstores, unless you counted the little Christian bookstore across from the library and fire station.

The local phone book used to include the profession in each personal listing; lots of clerks, truck drivers, construction workers, mechanics, and police officers, leavened with welfare recipients, transients and others with no visible means of support. In the late 1960ies, the city fathers discovered to their great horror that the average per capita income for Sunland and Tujunga was equal to that of Watts. (The editor of the local newspaper at the time, a reactionary and repellant little toad whom my mother loathed with especial ferocity, nearly died of chagrin at that. Several years later a local resident with deep pockets and a particularly satiric bent created a parody of the newspaper, pitch perfect in every respect, down to the logo, called the “Wrecker-Ledger” and had a copy of the parody delivered to every house in town. The whole town roared with laughter, while the editor breathed fire and threatened lawsuits.)

Mom preferred going to Pasadena for serious shopping, and to the Valley for groceries and the occasional restaurant meal. The one notable big restaurant had once been very well thought of, when it was a family-run steak house on Fenwick, established in an old converted bungalow under pepper trees. Then they ripped down the old house and the pepper trees, and put up an ugly big building with banqueting rooms, and descended into a culinary hell of buffet tables laden with square pans of mystery meat in sludgy brown gravy, vats of O.D. green beans, and fruit cocktail emptied out of industrial sized cans. No, Sunland-Tujunga was not the place you thought about when you heard the words “gastronomic adventure”… but there were three little places in town which did seriously good food, although you wouldn’t think it to look at any of them at all.

Mom found the Mexican place first: Los Amigos, which used to be in a tiny sliver of storefront on Commerce, before moving to and embellishing a larger premise on Foothill with sombreros and serapes, painted plaster sculpture, fountains, painted tile and exuberantly excessive quantities of elaborate ironwork. It was owned and run by a three generations and extensions of a local family: Grandma was from Mexico City and cooked with a delicate touch; this was not the brash, greasy border Tex-Mex. We loved the chili rellanos at Los Amigos; they were a delicately eggy soufflé, folded around a cheese-stuffed chili pepper, not the battered and deep-fried version so popular everywhere else. The wait-staff and busboys were always country cousins, just up from Mexico on a green card and polishing their English before moving on.

The second gastronomic bright spot was, believe it or not, an authentic Rumanian restaurant called “Bucharesti”, a tiny place run by an energetic gentleman from Rumania who cooked and waited tables himself during the day. How he contrived to get out from behind the Iron Curtain and finish up in Tujunga, I have no idea. His specialty was authentic home-made sausage, and lovely soups; a pristine clear broth in which floated perfectly cooked slips of vegetable and meat.

I regret to say we put off even setting foot in the third place for years, even though we were very well aware of it: a tiny, ramshackle building on Foothill, next to the Jack-In-The-Box, seemingly on the verge of falling down entirely. The roof sagged ominously, the batten-boards of the exterior walls were split from age, and the paint was faded where it hadn’t flaked off entirely. It honestly looked like the sort of place where you could get ptomaine poisoning just from drinking out of the water glasses. We had lived at Hilltop House for a couple of years before we ever ventured in. A number of Mom’s friends insisted that it was the best, simply the very best Chinese restaurant around, and finally the rapturous chorus drove us to set aside our considerable misgivings and venture inside.

The inside was immaculately clean: Spartan, with worn old industrial linoleum and old dinette tables and chairs, very plain, but scoured clean. The only ornaments were the posted menu and some small mementos and pictures associated with General Chennault and the Flying Tigers over the cash register. An elderly Chinese couple ran this restaurant; they were the only ones we ever saw staffing the place. I used to see the wife on the bus from downtown, lugging two huge grocery bags full of vegetables and comestibles back from Chinatown. (This was before exotic groceries were commonly available.) I think most patrons took the generous take-out meals, and if you remembered to bring a covered jug or Thermos, you could have soup as well. It was all delicious— all Mom’s friends were correct on that— and it met the highest criteria for take-out Chinese in that it was excellent when warmed over on the next day. The old couple were quite taken with my little brother, who radiated cute and looked like Adam Rich on “8 is Enough” . They always slipped in extra almond cookies for him in our take-out order, and the portions were so generous we almost always had enough for dinner the next day. I often wondered what the Flying Tiger connection was, but they had so little English it would have been hard to get an answer.

Chinese, Rumanian and Mexican food, all within a couple of miles on Foothill Boulevard— not bad, for a blue-collar sort of town. I wish, though, that I could have gotten the recipe for Los Amigos chili rellanos… and that clear beef and vegetable soup… and those Chinese almond cookies.

My daughter has been following a thread on one of her mom’s groups, to do with the military life; a discussion on what happens when the dependent spouse doesn’t really want to move on to the next assignment with the active military member. That, we agreed, likely spells doom for the relationship, either right away or somewhere down the road. My daughter and I both knew families – well, spouses, mostly, who basically confined themselves to the base, base housing, a tight circle of adjacent friends, and simmered for months or years with resentment over being separated from family and the community which they had come from. I remember a fellow servicewoman in Greenland, who had her mother mail her cake mixes, because she was too apprehensive to go and shop for simple ingredients at the little general store on the Danish side of the base. She was afraid the staff would be laughing at her.

Stationed next in Greece, I ran into many families who were mildly terrified by the rampant anti-Americanism in the local media, and among some local nationals there; they went from their local apartments to the base, to the BX and the club and back again, and never went anywhere else or saw anything interesting, and lived for the day they could pack out and leave Greece behind. Frankly, I never encountered anything of the sort personally, and I diddy-bopped all over Athens and the Attic Peninsula, small blond daughter in tow and driving an obviously foreign car with base license plates. I came back one day from an excursion to several fabric shops in the Plaka – that is, the old town in Athens, centered around the narrow streets at the foot of the Acropolis heights and went to the BX annex to buy matching thread and notions. Another woman there admired the bag full of pretty fabrics and asked where I had bought them, since there was nothing like them in the BX. When I told her how I left my car on base and took a regular Athens city bus downtown to the Zappeion Gardens and walked to the various little shops … holy moly, from her expression of horror and revulsion, you would have thought I went hitchhiking naked down Vouliagmeni and paid for rides with blow-jobs.

Later on, when I transferred from Greece to Spain, I took all the leave that I hadn’t taken during the tour in Greece and drove my own car to Spain. The car ferry from Patras to Brindisi, up the length of Italy, over the Brenner Pass into Austria, across Germany and France and into Spain, guided mostly by the Hallweg Road guide open on the passenger seat next to me. I only ever met one other military family, during that long eccentric journey, although I did meet a handful of other adventurous Americans. Over the six years we spent in Spain, several summers worth of leave were spent in long road trips, staying in the many campgrounds in Spain, to facilitate sight-seeing on the economy plan. I know that other military families did this, but again, I never met any of them in the campgrounds.

Shortly before we departed from Spain, I took the wife of a neighbor in San Lamberto firmly in hand and frog-marched her through the little grocery store on the ground floor of the apartment building that she and her husband and children lived in. I had met her by chance that afternoon, when she lamented that she had missed calling her husband at work to tell him to bring home a packet of frozen peas from the commissary. That’s when I lost it – I told her to collect up the peseta coins and notes that she had in the apartment; I would show here where she could buy a packet of frozen peas! And other stuff: ‘This is where they have the fresh bread, daily – pan, which is white bread, and pan integral, which is whole wheat. In here is the fresh milk – it comes in bladders, but the shelf-stable stuff is in cartons. The chocolate flavor is good and my daughter will drink it, but the regular long-life milk has an off-taste that we don’t like. This is the meat counter – just point to what you like the look of and say, ‘Media, or una kilo, por favor.’ Up there are bags of little lemons – just ask for ‘una bolsa limon.’ The case of frozen stuff is over here – this is ‘guisantes’ or peas. There’s a picture of peas on the front of the package – most grocery items do have a picture on the front! This is sugar – called ‘azucar’ – and ‘harina’, which is flour, and ‘queso’ – which is cheese. Yoghurt is over here. They spell it ‘yogur’ which is enough alike that you should recognize it…”  I think she was good with shopping at the little grocery store, after that tour. I just thought it was a pity that she would so limit herself, when most things that she might want were available in the little grocery downstairs.

It purely amazed me how well one could get along with a limited vocabulary of necessary words: ‘Yes, no, please, thank you, excuse me, how much? Numbers from one to twenty Do you accept credit cards/traveler’s checks, half a kilo, please, left, right, stop here, take me to/the American base/railway station/youth hostel/museum,’ and the names for local food items or dishes. I used to know all this in about six languages, and got along very well, considering that I was an absolute dullard at languages otherwise. Needs must, though. And you need a sense of adventure, and a willingness to go out and try things. Otherwise, you’re just sitting in a room, wishing that you were somewhere else, and that’s no way to live a fulfilling life.

The other night, I dreamt of a guy that I hadn’t seen or talked to in decades, an extremely vivid and detailed dream. We went to the beach together on a kind of surreal road-trip, embraced affectionately, spoke frankly about our various careers after we parted … and reconciled. He apologized for his ungentlemanly abandonment, and I leaned against his shoulder, the one which he once laughingly and specifically dedicated to me to cry upon … and it was all very good, although for some reason, I was babysitting Wee Jamie through this. I woke up after one segment of the dream, and when I went back to sleep, picked up the dream where I had left off. It was all very curious. I had been deeply and stupidly in love with him, over the space of three years, and wondered the next morning if this was some kind of premonition – that he had died. We are the same age, but he smoked like a factory chimney stack from the time that I first knew him, and not to put too fine a point on it; he was overweight, and to all appearances, not maintaining a healthy weight and lifestyle. Also divorced at least once, possibly twice.

Yes, he is on FB, and I occasionally check in on his page, just to keep tabs, although there is not much personal on it, mostly military and veteran memes, and odd bits of this and that politically. Turns out that he has become a rabid anti-Republican and Trump-hater, which is curious for a military veteran, which would have probably necessitated a breakup eventually, even if the ferocious smoking habit hadn’t done it earlier. Back in early 1980s, when the breakup between us was still fresh and raw and agonizing; this was the song that summed it all up.