Santa
Barbara, she is always present in this Taxi Romance series, though looming
backstage. I have left her a few times but have always returned since I first
fell in love with her while hitchhiking in 1971 at the stop lights on
One-O-One. I was just passing through with my thumb out after two years,
dodging imagined demons of my own creation, and the culture shock of returning
to the States I’d left to join the Navy in 1965.
The
love affair began when I found an Australian Digger's Hat in the bushes that
lined the grass between the lights at Chapala and State Street. In the lining
of the hat was a five-dollar bill. I crossed over the highway to the Sambos
where the Spearmint Rhino Men's Club is today and bought a bottomless cup of
coffee, a hamburger and fries, and a seat. A man came in and saw me sitting
there alone at a booth and introduced himself asking if I was a Vet. When I
said I was, he told me I could have a job if I showed up where he was the
foreman. It was a door manufacturing shop and while we worked, he encouraged me
to use the GI Bill at SBCC where I transferred to, and graduated from, UCSB.
The
Lower State Street of my stories was once a grittier part of town, lined with
low-rent thrift stores, dive bars, greasy-spoons, delis, auto-parts and liquor
stores that have been moved out in order to step-up and meet the demand with
higher-end clubs and gourmet restaurants. Though it never had the veneer of
blight and desperation of major cities, it had a seedier side of life that
wasn’t on the tourist maps and never seen unless circumstances provoked us to
take a closer look.
This
was the Santa Barbara of transvestite hookers that hung out at pay phones on
the corner of State and Gutierrez Streets, of the Virginia Hotel, the Ofice[1]
Bar, and Mel’s, where there were all-night coffee shops like Carrow’s and Jolly
Tiger, and bars where people talked, closed deals, and made plans face to face,
and only a few had anything like cell phones. Pagers and payphones were all
escort services had to send girls to clients, to contact dope dealers or to
dispatch unofficial off-radio business to graveyard cabbies like David
Kraszhinski, Douglass Perry, and Max (Mickey)McGee.
Our
Anna Bonnaire started out from there at an early age but graduated off the
streets to hustle an exclusive clientele in the affluent hills and arroyos of
Hope Ranch and Montecito.
These
are real people in a real place that once existed where Detective Ryan did his
best to protect the people he worked with. And the people he worked with knew
the streets better than any officer because they lived within the confines of
what was going on below eye-level of the petty corruption that ran rampant
during the transition of a unique town into just another Southern California
coastal city.
The
flea-bag hotels, where dying souls held on to what was left of their lives, are
gone or have been renovated to accommodate another renewal and another
face-lift for the increasing attraction of international tourism. The student
population of Isla Vista, UCSB’s day-care center for the more affluent class
than the bank burners of the sixties, could afford taxi fare by the late
nineties to ride all the way downtown to trendy Lower State Street.
My
City, my home, is like an older but glamourous screen siren to me. I see
through her several face-lifts like the Spanish Revival movement of the
twenties, and whose streets echoed the fiesta hoof-beats of horse-drawn
carriages proudly towing through the town signs of her decaying past that never
was but an image. I love her as a fan loves an aging movie star that has
survived disasters like the earthquake of ’25 and the oil spill of ‘68, and neighboring
Montecito’s recent debris flow tragedy. Now only a trace of Santa Barbara
remains of what she was by the closing years of the nineteen eighties. But she’s
still here and is sure to survive another decay and revival. I can only provide
a scant slice what is under the make-up what was once the Santa Barbara I fell
in love with years ago and hope my readers will respect, if not love, her too.
[1] Ofice isn’t a
misspelling of office. I’m told it’s a Greek word meaning Snake Pit. It was
more of a Snake Pit than any office I’ve ever been in but a double meaning can
be useful when calling home and needing an excuse, “Honey, I’ll be home late
tonight, I’m tied-up at the office.”
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