Broken Basketball Hoops
August has been hot and humid around here. After a few hazy days of smoky heat, I was happy to head out for an early morning haircut–which inevitably always ends up with me looking a little more like Rod Stewart than I care to admit.
On the way back, I stopped to buy a loaf in downtown Campbell and was surprised to see how busy it was. I still think of a funky, mismatched place with a fruit cocktail museum. I guess my history with this small town stretched back further than I had remembered.
Back in the nineties, property values were plummeting when my recently-divorced mother bought a house in Campbell. My smart-assed siblings and I teased her about it being the sleepy stoner suburb of broken basketball hoops. A dull grid of streets where cops lurked to write tickets for California rolling stops but studiously ignored packs of kids aimlessly milling around outside the liquor store–hoping someone would buy them something for tap on the shoulder.
Truth be told, I already knew the little place pretty well. Beyond a infinitely-prolonged mug of Denny’s coffee, there was not much to get up to of a summer evening in the south SF Bay Area in the 1980s. Campbell had a few good options for moody teens longing for group ennui. Though I never bought more than one sweet syrupy Cafe Borgia in the Upstart Crow Cafe Bookstore, it certainly entitled al of us to several clove-shrouded hours of patio occupation. With Taco Bravo and Tower Records just across the street, $20 could take you far. Later on, a weird nightspot sprung up called the Poser Cafe which obligingly served us drinks. I naturally felt I owed it to them to stop by on my 21st birthday.
The Darling-Fischer funeral parlor is still there. I always read their signage as Fischer Price and imagined cheerful round-headed wooden mourners snugly inserted in bright yellow plastic pews. Who knew I would ever come to lead a memorial service inside that building–doing my celebrant thing right next to a dead body?
The success of the street shouldn’t surprise me. I have been lucky enough to get inside the back rooms of these little shops to interview the chefs and dreamers who started up new boutiques and bistros. If the rents don’t climb much higher, I hope that they can keep turning over tables and shaking up cocktails for years to come.
But today I am buying my middle-aged bread and only looking a little too longingly at a pair of scooters parked outside the recycled bookshop. Maybe I should make myself a Borgia…