Goodbye, Hacienda, you weird old restaurant

I heard you were a swank dinner and dance place in the 1960s. A neon martini glass and lit-up sign with your name emblazoned across in that quirky mid-century font, those tall palm trees swaying, big cars lining your parking lot, men and women dressed up for a night out. A landmark.

During my childhood in the ’70s and ’80s, you were tired around the edges, just like all of the places on San Pablo Avenue. Some people still wanted to have dinner within your walls, but there was nothing special about you any longer. I remember going there as a kid and liking your indoor fountain and the pretty ironwork over your bar.

By the time I moved back to the Bay Area in 2002, you had visibly fallen on hard times. One of the letters in the sign on the side of the building was falling down, the arches looked water-stained and rusted. You served watered down drinks and terrible food. You smelled musty. Your bleached-blonde, mid-life waitresses (still wearing those ridiculous peasant blouses) vocally complained about the management. Only one or two cars could be seen in that big lonely parking lot at any given time.

Oh, but your building. Your glorious, monolithic, Mad Men-esque building. With your imposing stone facade and hacienda-style arches, you were still the perfect monument to mid-century kitsch and “Mexican-American” dining. You had such wonderful potential. H. and I had dreams of buying you and fixing you up, opening a retro dinner-dance club with live music and great food. 

As you slowly crumbled down each year, huge and abandoned, we couldn’t understand how you stayed open. Then one day you did finally close your doors for good. Your owner, Antonio Carrico, had died. And then the bulldozers came.

And now you are gone. All except your sign which still stands over what is now a Grocery Outlet parking lot.  It will be gone soon, too, I imagine. I hope, at least, the palm trees stay.

Unexpected, in Safeway parking lot

Photo by astrophotographer John Green

"Ma'am. Ma'am! Excuse me!"

I hesitated to look over. It was night in a dark parking lot.

"Look! Just look at the sky for a minute." He was pointing up at the moon.

I stopped and glanced over at him. A big, young guy in a baseball cap, over-sized t-shirt. My alert rat-like mind immediately thought, "Danger, danger! He's trying to stall and distract so someone else can run up behind and rob you! Kidnap you! Rape you! Kill you!"

"Do you see the moon and those two planets lined up to its side?" His face was eager.

"Um, yeah," I said, looking behind me.

"No, no. Look up."

(When have I last looked up at the night sky?)

"That's Jupiter and Venus. They're lined up. I bet you thought those were stars, huh?"

"Yeah, yeah. I guess I did."

The sky was its usual underwhelming city version, light pollution erasing everything but the brightest markers. The crescent moon was there and the two bright planets lined up to its side. Hardly a star to be seen around them.

"This only happens once every, like, 8 or 9 years. Go tell your kids, tell your family. Look at the sky."

"Wow, that's really awesome. Thank you," I said as I opened the trunk and put my groceries in.

"Hey! Look at the planets lined up!"

The young guy was now yelling this to an old man with graying dreads who was walking toward us. He stopped and looked at the sky.

"Well, I'll be," he said. Then looked at me and smiled. I smiled back.

The young guy was still leaning against his car, staring up at the sky, as I drove away.

I like to think that he eventually got into his car and picked up his girlfriend and drove for a couple of hours until they were out in the desert, where the multitudes of stars overwhelm the night. I like to think they parked at some rest stop and lay on the hood of his car. I like to think that he pointed to the sky and she smiled.

Read about it! Go outside! Look up!

Obsession

We had just arrived at my grandparents’ big house in Pueblo, Colorado. It was a hot July day that made the tall elms outside the open front door buzz with the electric sounds of insects. The grown ups were busy talking in the living room, their ice clinking in glasses. My older brother jumped up and down because he wanted someone to go outside with him.

I slipped away. Nobody noticed.

At four, I felt very small in that house. I ran up the grand living room staircase that curved into a long green hallway, up two more staircases and through a door that I knew led to the attic playroom with its grooved dark-wood floor. The room’s warm air had the familiar smell of wool and mothballs. I opened the white toy chest against the wall and there they were, the three of them, tangled together with doll clothes and doll shoes and stray toys. I carefully took them out, one by one. I hadn’t seen them for a whole year. I touched their chipped lids that clicked open and shut on blue doll eyes; I put my pinky in their pudgy porcelain hands. I kissed their tiny rose-puckered lips.

www.dollstringing.com

These dolls weren’t like the squishy, baby-clothes-wearing rubbery ones I had at home that came in pink, plastic cellophane boxes. These were grown-up girls dressed like no one I had ever seen, with important lives and big thoughts. In the worn paint and porcelain of their limbs, in their clothes’ age-stained fabrics and velvet cow-licked from years of touch, in the mechanical iris stripes of their eyes, these three dolls were real, and alive. When I hugged them, the wrinkled organdy that pressed against my neck felt like breath.

I rearranged their velvet hats, combed my fingers through their tangles of mohair floss and studied their gold-slippered feet. I laid all their outfits on the floor: mended petticoats over yellowed puffs of tulle, sealskin capes with real fur collars, gingham dresses, seersucker high-waisted sun shorts with blue anchor buttons, lace aprons, plaid picnic dresses, wool riding suits. My favorite took the center spot: a tiny blue taffeta gown, as delicate as a pressed flower.

Three flights below I heard a screen door slam and my mother’s voice in a strange, high pitch. I heard footsteps across floors, which matched the beat of the faint tick-tock of the attic’s old clock. I heard my name again and again, muffled by the dust that floated down from above.

“Do you love me?” I asked the silent orbit of dolls around me.

They smiled with outstretched arms and answered yes from quiet lips.

From an unintentionally creepy 1960s children's book called "Amy's Doll"

Intentionally creepy, Second Life