During the summer of 1971, I worked as a dishwasher at Art’s Restaurant in Goleta, California. Art’s was a typical little Mexican restaurant on a side street off of Hollister Avenue, the main drag. I was working there because I had decided to leave college and hit the road, and I needed to earn enough money to go.
Goleta is a small town north of Santa Barbara, and just south of the University of California at Santa Barbara, where I was a student. It is just a short bus ride from Isla Vista, where I lived.
Isla Vista was, and is, primarily a student housing area for UCSB. In those days, tho, it was a sort of student hippie mecca. Coffee houses, bookstores, head shops, herb stores, a couple of bar and grills, etc., filled The Loop. Free live music in the park, sometimes.
Nowadays, IV is a massively-developed student housing complex, but back then it was different, partly sleepy little beach town, partly counter-culture circus. IV sits on a cliff above the ocean and miles of beaches, and we would all go out in the evening to smoke a joint and watch the sun set into the ocean. Beautiful long-haired boys and girls, tanned and fit. Blond braless girls and surfer boys, at a world-renowned party school.
Local legend held that Aldous Huxley lived there during his early experiments with LSD. There was a lot of that going around, too.
So, why would any party-loving, free-living hippie boy want to leave such a paradise, when all he had to do was maintain a B average to keep his full-ride scholarship?
Why, indeed?
Well, I was restless, longing to see the world. My plan was simply to go On The Road, hitch-hike around and see the country, meet people, visit friends, and get a taste of the broader world. Restless, and ready to be done with sitting in classrooms.
Still, I had it made. Why was I so impatient? Sometimes I think my brain must have been drug-addled, but that cannot be the whole truth, as I managed to keep up a pretty respectable grade point average. Maybe it had something to do with the anti-Vietnam War riots the year before. A number of my friends had left for other schools, especially UC Berkeley. There was a lot of discontent around, and I had my share.
Really, though, I think I was just young and restless, eager to try my wings. Whatever the case, I found a part-time job washing dishes.
After spring quarter, IV empties out, or at least it did back then. The students all went home for the summer, and rents fell to practically nothing. My friend, Ron, and I shared a one-bedroom apartment. We hung a Madras print across the bedroom and didn’t worry too much about privacy. Party on.
Art’s Restaurant was just a short bus ride from IV. Art- Arturo- was a pretty good boss. He mostly left the kitchen alone. The cooks ran the kitchen. There were three of them, middle-aged Mexican women, and they had it down. There was an assistant cook, a tall thin white girl named Carol. We went to Disneyland together in her MG, once. She was pretty quiet. The cooks were not quiet. They were boisterous, fat, hard-working and efficient.
Spanish was the language of the kitchen. Carol’s Spanish was pretty good. I spoke a little bit of it; high school Spanish class. Muy poquito, but I was eager to learn, and the cooks were very glad to teach me.
The cooks loved me. For one thing, I have always been a hard worker. It’s just my nature to jump in and bust ass. A lot of athletic young men are like that. Need a heavy garbage can hauled out and dumped? Out of the way, ladies, Strong Guy is here! Need tables bussed or supplies hauled in? I’m the guy.
So they loved me, and they noticed how lean I was and decided to get serious about feeding me. In those days I could eat about three times as much as most people, literally, but I could not eat more than they could feed me. I was getting one good meal a day, and making the most of it.
One day, Art walked by, got a good look at the platter of food I was wolfing down, and did a double-take. Now, Art was a businessman, always calculating costs, but he didn’t say a word. For one thing, he could see how much work he was getting out of me, at minimum wage. For another, he was an intelligent man. He was not about to mess with those cooks!
There was one more person who worked in the kitchen, an old Mexican woman named Gracie. She was 64, by far the oldest person back there. Ancient, but still working. She and I were the dish-washing team.
We washed dishes by hand. The setup was this: we had a huge stainless steel double sink, and a lot of good tools; scrapers, brushes of various types, spray nozzles and huge racks. Gracie worked in the right-hand sink, and I worked on the left side. Gracie was 4′ 8″ tall, or claimed to be, and I am 5′ 11″, so we truly worked on different levels. After a short time, we developed a system; she would work across under me, and I would just reach right over her. Pretty quickly, we did it automatically, no words spoken, a seamless unit.
Gracie spoke no English, at all, not even the smattering the cooks could use when they needed to explain something to me. Actually, Gracie did not speak much at all. When she did, it was simple, and I would usually understand, or one of the cooks would translate, and teach me the words.
We were a team, and worked together happily. I would banter with the cooks, and she would plug away quietly. We helped each other any way we could, and got the dishes washed. We said, “buenas dias” when we started, and “buenas tardes” when we left, and not much in between, but still we were good friends. Smiles say a lot.
Finally, the time came for me to go. The students were back, the rent went up, and I was no longer part of the academic bustle, so I turned in my notice.
A couple of days before I left, Gracie came up to me, looked up at me with a tear in her eyes and said, “When d’jou go, I will miss you.”
No one has ever said a nicer thing to me.
