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if these people dressed nicer
Tuesday, June 22 1999
Kim picked me up at work at 5:30 pm so we could go to southeastern Pacific Beach to scope out a bar called Tio Leo's Lounge. The reasons for this mission are kind of complex, so let me back up a little and explain this in full. Back some months ago, Kim picked up a three-song demo CD from a band named Cyclefly. She and I liked the music (a sort of late-90s post-grunge retro-glam bastard grandchild of Led Zeppelin and Freddy Mercury - or, as they call themselves, the bastard child of Scary Spice and Iggy Pop), so on April 14th we drove up to see them in West Hollywood. Subsequently, Kim has been in contact with Cyclefly's promotional director, who took Kim's comments seriously enough to publish them on Cyclefly's glossy tour flyers, a stack of which they sent Kim by Overnight Air Express. So now Kim is one of Cyclefly's marketing foot soldiers, telling all her friends to be sure to attend Cyclefly's big show at Brick By Brick in Pacific Beach on July 1st, the day after her 29th birthday. She's even arranging a before-the-show get-together, and that's where today's expedition comes in. We were trying to find a nearby bar with a good happy hour and a suitable early-evening atmosphere. Tio Leo's Lounge had come highly recommended for just this sort of thing.
This part of Pacific Beach is a low-rent warehouse district sitting at the base of the north lip of Mission Valley, in close proximity to Old Town. I'd never considered the possibility that Pacific Beach might be a neighbor of Old Town, but it is, and this is where the two markedly different neighborhoods interfinger. Tio Leo's Lounge is a big dimly-lit place with superfluous air conditioning and generous vinyl-covered booths. At this time of day, it had a typical after-work group of happy hour regulars, mostly depressed middle aged men, functioning alcoholics all of them. The free food wasn't particularly diverse and at quarter till six it was already cold and neglected. But it was good, especially the chicken burritos and chicken nuggets, the best thing you can possibly dip into a bowl of salsa.
The waitress was a bit of a hardass, actually quizzing me about the wording of my Virginia driver's license. But for some reason I left her an incredibly large 25% tip of six dollars. Kim was impressed, saying if she'd got a tip that big back when she was a waitress she'd have been cruising on easy street for the rest of the evening. But it wasn't anything for me.
The bartender woman looked like a somewhat harder-faced version of Peggy, complete with a little red-haired baby about the same age the unnamed Babboose was when last I saw him. She entrusted the baby to her husband, who hung out near the bar for about an hour after they all arrived. There was also a loud-mouthed magician going table-to-table doing card tricks and generally being annoying. I was very happy he didn't come to our booth.
Kim wasn't entirely happy with this place, so we headed into Old Town to scope out some other place to host the pre-Cyclefly get together. Old Town is the biggest tourist trap in the entire San Diego region and parking is always a pain, but somehow we found rockstar parking in the middle of everything, adjacent to a construction site. Revelling in our good luck, we used a piece of rusty wire to unclog the faux-cigarette one-hitter and proceeded to smoke a fairly large amount of that schwaggy Mexican pot we always smoke when the kind buds run out. Smoke was billowing out of the car when I noticed a cop standing just on the other side of the fence, inside the construction site. He'd snuck up on us, but the bush behind which he was standing was not sufficient to properly conceal him. He was dressed in an olive grey uniform and had a wide-brimmed hat that reminded me of the Canadian Mounted Patrol. I didn't know what to do and didn't even have time to become paranoid. He was like a cardboard cutout that someone had placed in the corner of my field of view. Kim suggested I hide the drugs under the seat and that we get out cool and casual and disappear into the touristy throng. As we emerged from the Volvo, we were the very picture of the late-90s power couple, protected by our whiteness and our refined, educated poise. Touching up this image, Kim loudly asked me something about my corporate workplace. Yes, we got away. Had we been a couple of baggy-pants-wearing homies, I'm sure the tale would have ended somewhat differently.
Even on a Tuesday night, Old Town was alive with humanity. These people weren't exactly my people, but they were out and about with the full force of their all-too-predictable buying habits. All the shops were still open, eager to cater to their insipid tastes.
Just off the teaming streets, in a little bucolic courtyard, we encountered a fat, fluffy, perfectly-brushed cat who looked a raccoon. Despite the backdrop, she was a city cat, a little too coy to pet. In the adjacent folk art store, I marveled at the incredibly detailed depictions of a bygone era, when boys in overalls waved frogs at horrified little girls in their unsullied dresses while back in the undiminishing, perspectiveless hayfields, men got down on their knees to praise the Lord. In one of the paintings I saw the same fluffy cat I'd just seen out in the courtyard, transported into a flattened perspectiveless 19th Century living room with several flat little kittens suckling at her belly. The artist, a woman in her late thirties, looked like she had taken on three dimensions and emerged from one of her works. Her voice was childlike, high and ethereal, like Charlottesville's Lydia Conder's. Kim overheard her telling someone that she owed everything she had to the good will of the Lord. Yes, the religion in her paintings wasn't just decorative, it was completely for real. I wondered about the temptations faced by this woman of faith living here in an anomalous slice of farmland in the midst of a big city.
Kim and I went into Casa de Bandini, the place where I'd once scored a free Margarita. It was a madhouse of activity. I had no idea that it had such a big half-acre courtyard in the back. On this Tuesday night, the courtyard was jam-packed with diners. Unwilling to join this mob, we looked down on them in stoned fascination from a balcony. There was something definitely wrong with this place. It was just too Disneyland for us. At first I couldn't put my finger on exactly what the problem, but then, loathe though I was to admit it, I realized what it was. "You know, if these people dressed nicer, this wouldn't seem like such a crappy restaurant."
Other spectacles in Old Town included the enormous forty-foot-tall Century Trees, (they would be perfect on the set of a modern remake of Jack in the Beanstalk) and two youngish women who I could tell were sisters by the identical shape of their asses.
After all was said and done, we decided to have the pre-Cyclefly gathering at Tio Leo's. Parking is much easier in that part of town, there aren't as many boring people in the way, and it's within easy walking distance of Brick By Brick.
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