" ...one Jewish guy has to get another Jewish guy a Christmas present..."
Malinda and the Hill, Dec 14, 1999
At that place which most people would call my job but I refer to as a temporary solution to rent while waiting for my ship to dock into Big Time Harbor, we are having a Christmas party. Gennady, who has also continued to work at that place, is a Jew, albeit an athiest one, and has picked Mo, another Jew, albeit a practicing one, as his Secret Santa. So at this company I collect money from every other week, one Jewish guy has to get another Jewish guy a Christmas present.
Pleasant Hill is just down the road from Walnut Creek. I grew up in Walnut Creek, and when the government, exorcising eminent domain, turned my childhood home into high rise condos, my parents, (and I, as I was living with them), moved one freeway exit down to Pleasant Hill, which was, just a decade ago, even smaller than it sounds. In the '80's, Walnut Creek turned its Main Street into a yuppie shopping supercenter, with Baby Gaps, Nordstrums, Starbucks and Speedos lining its tiny, two lane thoroughfare.
But Pleasant Hill, without the money and cache of the Creek, remained a bit dusty. It still has a Montgomery Wards and an old dome movie theatre, and the crafts fare inside that mall every Christmas is awash with personalized leather belts and oil paintings. My parents new house was up the street from the Praise Chapel, home to a tiny pentecostal community, which was connected, in an aged mini-mall, to a "VCR Repare!" shop. The liquor store scandalously stayed open until 11 pm, and I always recognized one guy, my age but who had attended the local cocaine ridden public school, standing outside the store, sipping his hooch.
All gone.
Pleasant Hill has built a brand new beige maxi-mall. Bed, Bath and Beyond and Borders are the anchor stores, and they sit across the street from last year's new beige mall, which hosts a Blockbusters, a Starbucks and a Boston Market. I wandered into Borders just in time to celebrate their Grand Opening.
A 22 year old assistant manager type escorted a man to the cafe counter on Saturday. "This is local radio personality T-Rex. Get him anything he wants." T-Rex, an AM radio host appropriately named after a dinosaur, ordered a coffee drink and began conversing with a trapped assistant. Borders was cool, the Rex proclaimed, and the live broadcast would go well: we'll talk to people while their browsing. Patrons could not help hearing T-Rex's plans for the afternoon, and the cafe emptied out but fast. Greg Kihn, who once had a top-ten hit but now can't even get on VH-1's Where Are They Now, also celebrated Borders arrival- his band played there on Saturday night.
In fourth grade, one of my best friends was Malinda Hartley. She was smarter than me and I would've hated her but she was extremely nice and we smart kids needed to stick together, seeing as how the fifth grade was run by Jackie Snyder and her white trash band of 11 year old hos: Vicki, Shelby and Mary Jo. Malinda probably grew up to be beautiful- like one of those models who says she was ugly and scrawny as a kid. She wore dorky dresses; like me, she was clothed by a mother who sewed. She had black eyes, and her hair was long and black and kinky. She may have been bi-racial; I remember thinking she looked like Cher.
During the summer before fifth grade, Malinda made some decisions about her life, without consulting me. She decided to be popular. When school started again, she wore tight jeans. She smoked at recess and she swore alot. She hung out with Jackie, became best freinds with Shelby and finally, she became Bill Reeves' girlfriend. Bill was the dumbest kid I can ever remember having to collaborate with on a science project, and that includes Peter Johnson, a big ox who everyone new was adopted and once volunteered to kill a rat. Unless a conversation detailed the finer points of baseball, Bill Reeves preferred to style his hair with the comb that stuck out of his back pocket. When he was in fourth grade, he went steady with Minet Roach, a sixth grader, (they reportedly kept in touch after she went to intermediate school). But he was a guy without a girl when Malinda cast off her mother's Vogue patterns and pulled a pair of size 0 Dittos onto her size 2 body.
I was mortified. I could barely respond when she threw her arm around me and said, "How was your fucking summer? Mine was fucking awesome!"
Malinda stayed smart; she even made it cool by giving all the answers to Jackie. Through my disgust, I understood. Unpopularity sucks. I never told her off or accused her of selling out. She morphed and she got to be popular; even in fifth grade, you have rent to pay. But I have been suspicious of makeovers ever since. Most people, I believe, are still the same assholes today that they were the summer before they decided they wanted a different place in the caste system. I think it's possible to grow into a personality, if you fake it long enough, but that's a hell of alot of work and even then, there's a gnawing feeling inside, when your real voice says, this isn't me.
Pleasant Hill isn't itself anymore, but the change is still awkward and laughable because everyone here remembers that Pleasant Hill didn't always smoke and swear and wear tight clothes. Walnut Creek, which lost its walnut farms and local butchers long ago, has convinced itself that its downtown always had gourmet coffee and a fountain and parking garages full to the top.
