Route Teen

I took my first big date to dinner at Johnny Rockets. For dessert, we got Blizzards from Dairy Queen. I hadn’t planned either spot in advance, but the fact that the mall we had come to had both chain eateries felt like a pretty huge score. I was a freshman in college and had mapped out an evening where we would take two buses across the wide span of Los Angeles over to a mall in Redondo Beach. It was the only movie theater in southern California that was still playing The Rugrats Movie.

My high school gang back home in New York was very specific about the destinations we sought out. Once guys got their driver’s licenses, we started taking long trips to the luxuries that were denied to us growing up in the Bronx: Dairy Queen and Ben and Jerry’s. We paid a six-dollar toll to go across the George Washington Bridge to the DQ in Fort Lee, New Jersey and drove over forty-five minutes to get to a Ben and Jerry’s we had heard about all the way in Connecticut.

Even when the gang headed downtown on monthly excursions into the city, we tended to keep things pretty simple. We took the 1 train on an hour-long trip from the Bronx, always getting off at the Christopher Street Station. Once we got out, we made a direct run for the border of the West Village, straight to the Taco Bell on Sixth Avenue and Third Street. I rarely veered from my standard order, a Mexican Pizza.

If we really made a day of it, shopping along the identical Greenwich Village loop trekked across each time, we might stop for dinner at the Johnny Rockets that had just opened on Eighth Street above Washington Square Park. We liked the little jukeboxes and the milk shakes. The only other restaurant I remember seeing downtown was a placed called The Slaughtered Lamb that we walked by as we marched down Christopher Street to the Taco Bell. Each time we passed it, my friend Sean would yell, “Oh you got Greek food in there?…Well, you can KEEP IT IN THERE!” Sean had stomach problems, but that pretty much summed up how we all felt about ethnic cuisine.

When I came upon the Johnny Rockets at the Redondo mall, my date didn’t seem to mind eating there, nor did she frown upon my excitement at discovering it. Over dinner, she told me that she had once auditioned to be a singing waitress at the 50’s café that Johnny may have even modeled his Rocket after, The Stardust Diner in Times Square. She had also come out to college in Los Angeles after growing up in the outer boroughs of New York, so maybe she understood the novelty of having a suburban mall accessible by city transportation. She wasn’t exactly sure why we absolutely had to get our dessert at a second location while we were already eating at a restaurant that featured ice cream offerings as two of the five items listed on its main sign. But ultimately no one can resist getting swept away in a Blizzard.

A Man Without a Title

My friend Dominic would have been a great cop. Everyone we know has seen it in him for years. Dom was the go-to guy in college when it came to needing an actor in a student film once all of our friends studying to be moviemakers started making movies all the time. The first one he got cast in was the lead in a short film called “Hero in Panties.” Dom played one of those hard-boiled detectives—driving around LA in his unmarked Chevy, smoking cigarettes, checking in with the riff-raff who respected him, saying a little and standing there long enough to get folks to reveal a lot. He had the perfect presence for it. The kid was nineteen.

Nowadays Dom makes a living doing the interrogations where he gets people to divulge more than might be best for them. But his interviews didn’t wind up being the kind that are conducted in the back of a precinct house; they’re done on sets where people spill their guts in between contests to show that they’re the best amateur chef or fashion designer that nobody knows about. It’s too bad he doesn’t have the right to handcuff these people. Maybe then I’d start watching the shows.

There used to be a time when you were a kid and would play the game of Life—heck, you could be a winner at it—and it genuinely seemed realistic that when you grew up, most of yr friends would have ended up wearing one of the hats the game offered you—doctor, lawyer, cop, teacher…was priest in there? I hear Dom was a priest for Halloween. He kept telling people beforehand that he was going to be a sexy priest. And because the rest of the world is bad at jokes, people assumed that meant that he was going to have giant tits or something. But then Dom would explain that he just meant he was going to wear a nice sweater and maybe smoke cigarettes. He assumed they knew that the sexy part was just going to be a given if he played it close to home.

I suppose Dom could have been a good priest as well, if we still lived in an era where the guys on the altar had a real whiff of sex on them. Nowadays you go to church and the priests are all old dudes who have been around forever and an immigrant they convinced to unlock the doors and say the 7:30 in exchange for a scholarship at St. John’s. I flip through my mom’s photo albums of her parish in the seventies and there were some real heartthrobs. You tag on a name like “Father Ciccodicola” and forget about it. The line for confession would have gone all the way up to the funeral home.

One of my favorite books is called “True Confessions” by John Gregory Dunne. I’ve been trying to get Dom to read it for years. The story is about these two brothers, Tom and Des Spellacy, who live in Los Angeles. One of them is a priest, who serves as the right hand man for the Archbishop of LA. The other is a bit of a rogue cop who’s a thorn in the side of the LAPD police chief. The cop drinks on the job a little bit and is having an affair with a pretty blond he bailed out of a domestic dispute call one night. But you can tell that his brother is cut from the same cloth, that it wouldn’t have been hard to imagine either of them ending up with the other’s life instead. I always thought Dom would like it cause it’s the best book I’ve read about Catholics in LA. But maybe I also read it and thought: these guys could have been us.

My Uncle Jack was an NYPD detective for twenty years. He’s the kind of guy who knows everybody and always has a spot around town. When I wanted to start getting my own haircuts as a teenager, Uncle Jack set me up with Nick, his go-to guy for years. Nick lived in New Jersey, but owned a barbershop in the West Village. Uncle Jack had been retired from the force at this point, but would come into the city from his house in Long Beach just to be there when I sat in Nick’s chair. When I started going there at fourteen, I was sort of in awe of the fact that I was getting my haircut from a guy who had just been on “The Jon Stewart Show,” giving the wacky sidekick a trendy new cut involving a flame.

More mesmerizing than that was watching the way that Nick and Uncle Jack would network with each other. When Nick wanted to take his wife to see a taping of Saturday Night Live, Uncle Jack was able to hook that up for him, no problem. And when Uncle Jack mentioned that he had wanted to take Aunt Liz to see the insanely sold out new production of “The Producers,” Nick was able to call in some favors to get tickets for them. These sorts of exchanges weren’t exactly new to me—I had been watching old guys conduct business like that around Riverdale since I was a little kid. But there was something all the more impressive about watching these two come into the coolest neighborhood in Manhattan from their suburban homes and play the game on that much bigger of a scale. I have no idea how Uncle Jack and Nick hooked up, but I’m certain that it didn’t take long to see in each other that they used their hats as barber and ex-cop to take on the more important role of “people who knew people.”

Dom got cast as a cop as much for his presence as he did simply for being a guy who everyone knew on campus. He didn’t draw attention to himself in any high profile sort of way. You’d know him as the guy with the broken arm who worked at the Jamba Juice inside Café ’84 or the guy someone pointed out as the one quoted in the Daily Trojan as a witness to the armed robbery that went down in the campus coffee shop, Common Grounds. You’d sit with him at one of his favorite spots, inside the EVK cafeteria, and it seemed like no matter who came over to the table, they already knew Dom, and no two from the same place. This was only four months into school, when everyone was still meeting. But Dom was the one with a car, the one who knew where the nearest bowling alley was and also the one that someone sought out when they were thinking about coming out of the closet and didn’t know who else to talk to. He was a pillar of the community before the community had really taken on its shape.

Maybe Dom is of an era where a man doesn’t have to wear a uniform to forge an identity within a city. Maybe sticking a badge on him or slapping on a priest’s collar would be too limiting for the way he likes to lead his life. But I wonder how people will know that this is a guy they can turn to when they need something. It’s very easy for Dom to blend in sometimes and I worry that people who could use someone won’t know where to find him. Still, he seems to find a way to bridge the gaps. Nothing would shock me about playing Life with my kids someday and watching them land on a space that earns them a life of being an Uncle Dom.