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February 18, 2003

"Oh, we don't have that, sir..."

And now, from the “Life Imitating Art” department:

Last Sunday, I drove up to San Luis Obispo with my girlfriend to get out of Southern California for a few days. We were on the Los Angeles-to-Santa Barbara leg of our journey, figuring that that would be as good a place as any to get some lunch and switch drivers. While still about 30 or 45 minutes south of Santa Barbara, folks started pulling up alongside us and waving over at us. When I rolled down my window, a guy told me that my rear driver’s side tire was almost flat.

I thanked the guy and had my girlfriend pull the car off the freeway, all the while fuming and muttering darkly to myself. After a trouble-free five years with my previous four tires, I saw fit about three weeks ago to buy a new set. I do a fair amount of driving out to Los Angeles, and I’d rather not suffer a blowout on the 60 or the 405. Not only was this flat tire the second such flat I had endured since replacing the tires last month, it was the second time the rear driver’s side tire had gone flat. Its first deflation took place a mere week after I bought it. The folks at the local America’s Tire Co. swore up and down that it was repaired and that everything looked A-OK. Obviously, that wasn’t the case.

But back to the story. My girlfriend and I pulled off the freeway into the sleepy hamlet of Camarillo and onto the town’s main drag (I don’t recall the name). We limped our way into the parking lot of a tire store. They were closed. Seeing as how we didn’t have much of a choice, we decided to make lemonade of our lemons and have lunch.

We walked down the street, encountering an inordinate number of Mom-and-Pop diners, barbershops, and antique stores—all of which lead me to believe that the townsfolk of Camarillo are the hairiest people in California, and that they own the oldest furniture. Everything was closed. Finally, we found a diner with an open door, people eating inside, and folks working behind the counter.

“Sorry,” they said when we were about to walk inside. “We’re closed.”

People eating? Cooks cooking? Waitresses serving? And they’re closed? Pardon my skepticism.

We walked down the town’s main street (probably named Main Street), desperate for some sign of life at the late hour of one in the afternoon. In the distance, we saw folks eating at outside tables in front of a small storefront cafe. Bingo! We trudged down there.

“We’re closed for the day,” we were told. Again, this news was relayed over the hustle and bustle of people eating and cooking.

By now, I was reading for some kid with a pitchfork to jump out and start yelling, “Outsider! Outsiderrrrrrrrrrrr!” Hell, man, I’ve seen “The Children of the Corn”. I know what sort of madness and badness happens to couples stranded in small towns when their car dies on them. The only restaurant in town that was open was the Chinese restaurant, and I was so embittered towards the town as a whole that I didn’t feel like rewarding the immigrant family whose work ethic had out-Protestanted the Protestants.

And how, you might wonder, if this a case of life imitating art? The theater company my girlfriend co-founded will be putting on an evening of David Ives one-acts in March as their inaugural event. One of the plays, called “The Philadelphia,” deals with a poor schmuck who wakes up one day and can’t manage to get anything wants, no matter how basic of a request (e.g. aspirin at a drug store, or a newspaper at a news kiosk). It turns out that he’s in a Philadelphia, a metaphysical state of being where your every request and desire is thwarted. His friend who explains his plight, on the other hand, is in a Los Angeles—where everything is hunky-dory, no matter how dire the news. As luck would have it, we had held call-backs for the one-acts only the day prior to all this madness going down.

A tire place with no tires? Seemingly open restaurants which can’t seem to cough up any food for the out-of-towners? You call it Camarillo. I call it Philadelphia.

Posted by patrick at February 18, 2003 10:14 PM

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