"Do you know how to get to South-Central, dude?"
rooftop koreans and mexican looters
On the afternoon of April 29, 1992, I picked my buddy Joe up from his house. It was Wednesday and we planned to grab some food and drinks, and maybe hit up a few bars in Pasadena.
I had been unemployed since October 1991, when I was fired from a job I was severely unprepared and unqualified for. It was a testament to my ability to bullshit my way through things that I was even hired. Also, I was not very assiduous and was at a point in my life where I didn’t care enough to prioritize a work/life balance, meaning that I inevitably leaned in the direction of life in that zero-sum equation. I met Joe when we worked in a bank mailroom, at another job that ended in 1988 when I was fired under dramatic circumstances.
We didn’t let that little snafu impede our friendship and now that I was unemployed, we enjoyed more than enough time to seek trouble out. Since I collected unemployment, California required proof I was looking for work which I readily did, but no one was biting. I couldn’t understand this as I was such a promising prospective employee with much to offer, but life is hard sometimes.
Out of desperation, I attended one of those “bartending schools” you saw advertised to aimless fuck ups like me. It was in downtown and the class was a bunch of people like me. Similar in age, similar in temperament, similar in habits. One morning a female classmate smelled like regurgitated garlic and wine which I might have been able to ignore if I didn’t have to work next to her. She moaned about a horrible hangover all day. The class lasted about a week or two and I proudly received a certificate of completion on my last day. I paraded out of there with a Masters in Mixology. The cheap piece of paper recognized my ability to mix an Old Fashioned from memory. I had never heard of an Old Fashioned, and I never would have occasion to mix one again. It was like learning esoteric crap in college that had zero bearing on your successful trajectory in life.
I hadn’t found a job by April, in bartending or anything. I was using my hard-earned unemployment earnings to play handball at the outdoor courts during the day while drinking Kern’s Nectar drinks from cans and alcoholic drinks at night, and sometimes pizza and Mojo’s from Shakeys with Joe.
I had not attained peak dignity yet. That wouldn’t happen for many years. I was a degenerate and on that sunny Wednesday afternoon in April, I picked him up and drove south toward San Gabriel for no apparent reason because Jack In The Box was everywhere, but it’s this one we chose. It was very close to where I lived so maybe we stopped at my apartment on the way.
Like people typically unencumbered by silly things like jobs or responsibilities, we entered the Jack In The Box during that lull immediately after the lunch break when restaurants have that ringing empty vibe having just been vacated by the lunch crowd. We ordered our food and sat at a table to wait. Joe and I sat in that externally focused gawking silence that men of our demographic do. We checked out the street through the window since there was nothing to look at inside because the employees were dudes and hags. Joe faced the front door and I faced the counter. Suddenly, Joe’s face contorted into a smile and he waved unsurely. I turned to see what had triggered this and outside the front door stood an elderly lady holding a big bag. She waved back and had a strange bezerk look on her face and Joe continued to wave at her. She made strange movements with her hands and was mouthing words while pointing back and I assumed she was just a nutty old bag lady.
Suddenly Joe, who put a lot of thought into this, stumbled upon the truth.
“Oh dude!” he got up and ran to the door and opened it for her. She smiled and thanked him effusively. Joe was her savior as she did not have the strength to open the door with one free hand. She might given him a big wet kiss at the point so strong was her craving for Jack In The Box’s fine cuisine.
“The poor lady couldn’t get in, that’s what she was trying to tell us,” Joe said sadly when he returned. I felt bad about the old lady for a brief moment, but my mind returned to immediate concerns, like our food which seemed to be taking forever.
With his obligatory Boy Scout gesture behind him, Joe ate his lunch in good spirits and I devoured mine in anticipation of the wanton outing we had on tap even though we were so disordered and spontaneous that we had no idea what it would entail. Before we left, or as we left, we decided to head up to Old Town Pasadena.
Old Town Pasadena was our dependable go-to social circus as it was a very happening neighborhood and was close enough that not much time was spent driving to or from. In 1992, Old Town was a very popular dining and shopping district that had begun a slow inexorable descent into an upscale scene bursting with expensive and trendy businesses frequented by hip customers and those who thought they were hip, or unhip people who just wanted to rub shoulders with hip people. Joe and I were assuredly in the latter category.
The classic national highway of pop cultural antiquity, Route 66, saw an iteration that ran along Colorado Boulevard, Old Town’s Ground Zero, and the location of the annual Rose Parade. Here, the emerging upscale was prepped to collide with the rugged Western open highway mentality and many bars and restaurants harked back to an era before yuppies and day-glow fashion. One such bar, Freddies 35er, had been around since the early 60s and sat near the corner of Fair Oaks and Colorado. A fashionably divey bar with a surprising amount of pool table surface area thanks to its rectangular dimensions of great depth and minuscule width, it boasted a fantastic drinking atmosphere with a crowd eclectic enough to welcome casual glitter while retaining the grimy vibe many people flocked here for.
The 35er was exactly where we decided to land that Wednesday afternoon, our tummies satisfied with 99-cent tacos and fries. By the time we sat down to our first beer, it was near dinnertime. Instead of sports, the televisions behind the bar showed scenes of scattered chaos and police activity on the streets south of downtown and someone at the bar said that the Rodney King trial verdicts had been announced earlier and the cops were all found not guilty. There were reports of people marching and demonstrating throughout the city in reaction, and sporadic pockets of violence were springing up. I watched the trial faithfully since I had so much free time and now I watched intently while we drank, as was most of the bar. The local stations showed police cars racing through ghetto neighborhoods and even though the streets were mostly empty of cars, massive groups of people ran around, rushing storefronts and setting small fires. The television studio’s newspeople cut in occasionally before panning out to another location where the same burgeoning unrest was playing out in the same fashion. The bar’s normal small talk and billiard banter dissipated as we all watched the developing news break out all over the city. In the midst of the chaos and fires, the news station flashed back a few hours earlier when the jury in Simi Valley handed the judge their not-guilty verdict.
Time flew while we watched events unfold on the screen.
As darkness began to fall, some people, acting like the town criers, ran into the bar announcing that the Pasadena police were closing down businesses on Colorado Boulevard and that we would need to leave soon. A slow-motion chaos simmered and it did not help that I had guzzled heavily during the last hour’s real-time entertainment. Everything was frantic now and police dressed in riot gear appeared in the doorway with bullhorns ordering customers to leave the area immediately. Businesses emptied as people ran along the sidewalk as if the world was ending. There was an electric sensation of pure lunacy in the air and the televised updates grew intensely chaotic as well, fires were springing up all over the city, an apocalyptic scene that seemed more dramatic as the day grew dimmer. We ran onto Colorado buried in a large crowd that fled Old Town at the risk of arrest. Joe and I made our way to my car and while walking briskly, we discussed and made a plan by attrition, meaning that…
We had no plan and in such a vacuum, we made horrible choices.
“Do you know how to get to South Central, dude?”
The night was just beginning.
**
I will not paywall this newsletter any time soon, if ever, but I am offering a tip jar for any expressions of appreciation.