Where cars and Costco rule the day
By Dell Franklin
I took the Amtrak train from San Luis Obiso south to visit old friends who live in Orange County and it’s taken me almost one week to digest the horror of it. I was too dazed to be overwhelmed at first as I transitioned from small-town America to a flat endless horizon of surging traffic, a snarled madhouse of giant shopping centers, one residential neighborhood after another, intertwined with high-end condo retirement complexes the size of most towns.
And strip malls.
I felt so small and insignificant, like an invasive germ.
My friend Angus picked me up at the Anaheim train station adjacent to the stadium where the California Angels call home. Angus lives in a Huntington beach grid among many grids of homes that have no front porches and are walled in so that the only time people see each other and have little visits with dogs and so on is when they are out and about, which is seldom. There are no lawns. The streets are idle and inert. Like a ghost town.
Angus and his wife Dot have lived here for 47 years. They are retired school teachers. Angus also coached baseball and football and was once an All League athlete. They have a pleasant home with modern fixtures and appliances and furniture and a swimming pool and jacuzzi that neither use.
They know when I make one of my generational visits that it can be an ordeal absorbing my comments and picking on Angus, whom I consider a person 100 times more virtuous and valuable than I am; which is why I make it a point to pick on him constantly.
He took me to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He drove me to Huntington Beach’s main drag that was studded with Miami Beach-like luxury hotels that go for a grand a night and are always booked full. Where does the money come from? We parked and walked. I splurged and bought my first T-shirt not from a thrift store in possibly 40 years just for the hell of it—50 percent off and beachy.
Later, Angus, who is 82 and has two knee replacements, two shoulder replacements, one hip replacement, and spent a year of chemo fighting off cancer, forced me to go to Costco with him to purchase some medicine for Dot and for a few odds and ends. It was hot out, and we had to park a long way away. He commandeered a shopping cart and began pushing it around.
“Why do you need a cart for a few items?” I asked.
“Be quiet.”
“I’ve never been in a place this big with so many people buying a bunch of shit,” I said.
“Stop it.”
“It’s obscene.”
He refused to react. I made fun of his painful, shuffling walk. He ignored me. He needed help in the cavernous immensity of this particular Costco, and a little cheerful Asian lady pointed him in the right direction. More than half the people pushing carts appeared to be Vietnamese American women. They pushed their big carts with grim, get-out-of-my-way determination. I took over Angus’s cart in a move I felt would relieve his being miffed at my condemning Costco and making fun of his walk. I suddenly became pleased as I picked up the pace and played chicken with aggressive and tiny Vietnamese grandmas. I know how to adapt.
I did not see one even slightly portly Asian but a lot of overstuffed white people stacking their carts to the brim as they waddled about.
Angus was looking for plain white T-shirts like the ones we wore in the 1960s but they didn’t have those, although Costco is supposed to have everything. The T-shirts they had were not white and were too small.
Angus needed raspberries, and as we passed the salmon he bragged about how delicious and easy it was to prepare. He does a lot of cooking since Dot would rather read. When we came to the vodka, I urged him to buy a half gallon of Gray Goose since he could not spend all the money he had, but he did not like Gray Goose and preferred Absolut. I told him that although I was poor I insisted on luxury vodka and he should too since, like me, he was a lifetime boozer.
I informed him that he was institutionalized to inferior vodka due to growing up poor, and needed to break out. He stuck with the Absolut.
We came to the wine section. I asked him what he knew about wine and he said not much and that most wines tasted the same and he and Dot liked a certain white which I pooh-poohed. I explained I did know a little about wine because my brother-in-law and nephew spent hours on their computers studying wine and various vineyards and were experts, and when they visited me up in Cayucos they spent whole days wine tasting in Paso Robles and bought crates of top-shelf wine.
When I spotted a Dou Chardonnay from Paso Robles that my nephew bragged about, I informed Angus this was an excellent wine for the price and to buy it, and insisted that Dot would like it, and though I could see he was as usual leery of my opinions and exclamations, he gave in and accepted two bottles I dropped in the cart.
After that I felt rejuvenated and became more aggressive with the cart, feeling like a teenager in a bumper car at a county fair. When we finished finding raspberries and other crap, I sprinted my cart to an open checkout station and cut off a Vietnamese woman with a packed cart. She sped to another check out station without reaction, cutting off another woman.
Later, the three of us sat out in the coolness of Angus and Dot’s little sheltered patio after I shoved the chard in the freezer. Angus opened it. Poured out three glasses. He and Dot sat across from each other and sipped. Dot nodded. “This is really good, Angus,” she said.
Angus took a sip, nodded. “It is good,” he agreed.
“Is it better than what you usually get at Costco?” I asked Dot.
“Yes. Definitely.”
I turned to Angus.“What’d I tell you, huh? Aren’t you glad I made you buy two bottles?”
“I said it’s good.”
“For the price, it’s better than good.”
He wasn’t biting.
“You should stock up on it. That’s what people do at Costco, right? Stock up. Because there’s never enough of everything and anything in Orange County. They all gotta have it all or there’s no life.”
His phone rang. It was Stacey Warde. My old partner with the Rogue Voice literary journal I once published in SLO County. Stacey once wrote for the local Tribune and was managing editor of New Times, where we first met. He now lives in Tustin and was to show up at Angus’s around 4:30 p.m. Another friend from around Mission Viejo named Sean was also to join us and then we’d retreat to a bar.
After Angus hung up, he said Stacey was on his way. Tustin was only half-an-hour away.
“You don’t know Stacey,” I said. “We ran that paper together for four years, and my guess is he won’t get here for at least two hours. He’ll get lost—even in his own backyard. He’ll call again. You’ll have to talk him here. Trust me.”
It took him two-and-a-half hours, although he grew up in the OC. He called several times for directions and stayed on the line. He dealt with horrendous road rage. When he finally arrived one could see how the OC takes its toll.
(To be continued…).
Dell Franklin writes from his home in the lovely quiet beach town of Cayucos, Calif. This column first appeared on Cal Coast News, an online publication. He’s the author of The Ballplayer’s Son, a memoir about his father’s years as a pro when baseball was still a working man’s game.
