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It was only now, early morning, when the parking lot wasn’t jammed with cars of people who came, drank copious amounts of the ridiculously good Guatemalan, Ethiopian or Columbian blends Tito sourced from mysterious suppliers, and tapped on their keyboards for hours, sucking up Tito’s electricity. Or folks who drank Jessie’s, our mixologist, riotously inventive cocktails with lunch or dinner from Lucia’s ever-changing menu of fusion food.
And Lucia didn’t discriminate with her fusions. It could be Asian-Italian. It could be traditional fish and chips with a chipotle tartar sauce. It could be French-Mexican. You never knew with Lucia. You just knew it’d be good.
Also, around the corner from the bar, just in from the front door, for those who wanted to drink and dash, there was a strictly coffee cubby that had our second espresso machine, shelves filled with bags of the coffee we brewed that you could buy and take home, and a display of muffins, cookies, brownies, Danish and macarons we got from Willow’s Good Stuff. Willow being a talented baker who didn’t have a storefront, she just supplied us and had pop-ups at farmer’s markets around the Valley on weekends.
Our fare was amazing, but the place was weird and eclectic, personified by who was in the back corner on the bench seat right then, and nearly all the time.
Tito.
His name wasn’t actually Tito. No one knew his real name. Luna and I guessed he called himself Tito since he drank so much of that brand of vodka (including tipping it in his coffee in the mornings).
He had lots of white hair, a white beard, and a pudgy body that rose, at best, to five foot four. Thus, he looked like a demented Santa Claus who’d gone astray in his efforts to go incognito on vacation.
In other words, he was always in Hawaiian shirts, and even inside, he wore sunglasses.
But that, and the fact he silently sat in the back corner booth most of the time (no one but Tito sat there—ever—partly because his butt was usually in that seat, partly because his stuff was jammed all around, making it look like an open office, but mostly because everyone knew that was Tito’s space).
If you came to SC, you’d see Tito ensconced in his nook, surrounded by books, tapping on his iPad, or writing in copious journals.
But that was the only thing (visually) with Tito you could count on.
He had flip-flop days. Then red Keds days. There were checkerboard Vans days. There were slides with tube socks days.
There were also Panama hat days. And bandana days. Not to mention fedora days. Also Life is Good baseball hat days. Though, always, his long, fluffy white hair poofed out at the sides of whatever he put on his head.
There were days when his sunglasses had bright red frames, then the next day he’d switch to white, or yellow, or Wayfarers, or aviators. Honest to God, I didn’t know the color of the man’s eyes, since I’d never seen them. I also couldn’t count the number of sunglasses he owned, there were so many of them.
He was always in shorts, but these could be Madras (and those clashed with the Hawaiian shirts, big time), or cargo shorts, Bermudas, sometimes even boardshorts.
And his extreme tan that veritably screamed impending melanoma was a constant, even if I had no idea how he maintained it when he was inside most of the time.
Tips were decent at The Surf Club, but it didn’t matter. Tito paid well above minimum wage, offered insurance, even to part-timers, and gave five percent to the 401(k)s he also offered. We all had regular schedules so we could live our lives not at the mercy of when The Man decided to put us to work. And every year, he gave epic Christmas bonuses, along with a bottle of Dom, doing this at the Christmas party he closed the Club down to throw.
The weird part about this was, he might look like Santa, and be just as generous, but he didn’t show at the party he threw. Never.
However, I knew he’d bail me out of jail (eventually, once he meandered there) or knock himself out to find a specialist doctor to deal with a rare disease if I contracted it. And I knew this in a way that thought was iron tight and unshakeable.
But I’d been working here for four years, and I knew practically nothing about him, except he fostered long-term employees by hiring well and paying well and providing zero management.
You were hired, everyone there taught you the way of things until you knew what to do, so you just did it, and he let us alone to get on with it.
I had no idea how it worked, I just knew it did.
I also knew I loved it here.
Luna worked at SC for a year before she coaxed me from my job in retail to join her.
It had been the best decision I’d made in my life, and both Luna and I knew, as long as there was a Surf Club, we’d be working here.
Yep, you guessed it. This meant I had no ambitions outside maybe one day owning my own little house somewhere in the Valley and the separate bank account I had that I added to every payday without fail would get me there (maybe in another hundred years).
Any ambitions I might have started to foster had been irrevocably quashed one horrible day when I was eight, and they’d been thus in a way no kernel could ever take root and grow in the time since.
As for Luna, she had her own reasons to have a job that had zero stress, meant you had cash in your wallet at all times, and no one got up in your face if you were late to work.
Which that morning, she wasn’t.
She was behind the bar polishing the high shine to a higher shine while I heard Otis, the man who ran the coffee cubby on weekdays, steaming milk for a patron around the corner.
