It Happened One Night at Pepe's

In the year of America’s bicentennial, President Gerald Ford was receding to newly elected Jimmy Carter, Steve Jobs gave birth to Apple, and the two-dollar bill was circulating for the first time with far out results, and a gunshot that ended in homicide was the catalyst that echoed a yearlong state of terror in New York City. One night, in Southern California, two brothers left their post at their family-owned Mexican restaurant in a Sunbelt of the retired citrus lands. The brothers found their success in the sixties and good fortune returned their nephews safely from Vietnam, but the year of 1976 could not secure their good fortune much longer. One night at Pepe’s Mexican Restaurant, the misfit staff of cooks and register jockeys found out what a keg of beer and a parking lot in summertime truly meant in the nineteen-seventies. It is an unexpected love story of carefree serendipity that became a word-of-mouth sensation for the rest of the year. The cover photo for this column has a date of several years later, but no one would ever need to know that. The palms and the building stand exactly as they did that one night -- a silent landmark commemorating a time in a generation that lived by its own infamy. As far as anyone there was concerned, the whole world was there that one night at Pepe’s. That dorky fat kid, who used to live down the street with his mom and dad, wore his favorite jeans and t-shirt and barely got his used Dodge out of the garage, but he made it all the way with The Bay City Rollers blaring on his speakers. In the parking lot, the kid let the music declare his spirit until his car battery died, and he discovered that everyone had finally seen him for the cool person he really was -- and he talked to just about every girl in his class that one night at Pepe’s. Long-distance friends in their thirties found the kid’s music to be the perfect backdrop to their reunion -- the reason for their summer. They were finally together, and they were both childishly eager to teach the fun-bratty youths of fast food the way you properly tap a keg. The couples’ misdemeanor behavior resulted in their dinning on stoner genius created by the kitchen that would never be on the menu again, and they were finally able to let go of their breath after holding it for far too long. Being ensconced in the high school atmosphere took them back to a time when they knew each other exactly as they did that one night at Pepe’s. A decision to take the band from prom up the coast to Seattle came to five best friends that night. The kind of decision you can only make over a keg of beer after your senior year with a crappy job in a burger shack. The boys took their vans back to their folks’ house and returned with all their instruments, using two parking spaces to remind everyone why they are soon to be gone -- and taking the summer with them. Unless you were using the lone battered payphone to inform others of the happenings, you were not making any calls. It was imperative that those missing or close to leaving work for the day knew of the potential in the night. The night held everyone to an unspoken obligation to keep the good times legendary and the right characters involved without attracting any outside elements that may ruin the most amazing, spontaneous and secret night of the year. The warm pink and peach sunset of an endless California summer gave way to the scraps of gusto held back by anyone -- a night forged without a concept of calendars. The overhead lights of the parking lot made a dim stage of the middle of the avenue and an eclectic ensemble performed for a night without status, league, or practicality. New friends made, troubles shelved, exciting decisions formed, and anyone who forgot about the possibility of realizing dreams found their memories again that one night at Pepe’s. The marvel of a cobwebbed accident that is by no means a calamity happens for no reason, other than to inspire the hopefulness that things can be different and beautiful at the same time. Only the greatest of changes and the biggest steps forward seem to be born on the most memorable of nights. Lives entangled in a social supernova that, without catastrophic incident, glowed with vivid life and burned out naturally of its own accord -- a social oddity as rare, and astonishing as a celestial one. There was not a single cop or firefighter or square figure of authority in sight that one night at Pepe’s. The brothers returned to a multitude of rumors and hearsay -- mostly exaggeration from the stuffy citizens of the neighborhood. The brothers found the cash register packed more than it had been in months and everything was surprisingly more orderly -- and nothing was going to shift interest away from that. Not a single thing, on photo or paper, can account for my stories or hold up in court, but I heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend that the summer of seventy-six was the stuff of summer legend. It was the all-too-real principle of what happens when yearning spirits accidentally come together in a cosmic force of carefree togetherness. I heard it all happened that one night at Pepe’s…