Clinton's American Saloon/ Will He Ever Return?
Norden, Edward
Summerland, California yeah," the Native Son allowed. "Some people got all excited." He was sitting at the bar of the Nugget polishing off an espresso and sucking an unfiltered Lucky Strike, and...
...Doug never tires of showing off his scrapbook, frankly and happily recounting for the nth time how he bought the sax and had the napkins printed up as soon as he heard that the Clintons' good friends were having them over, how the president-elect and his wife showed up, how the sax was offered but not played, how after the visit the Dom Perignon was broken out...
...Antique shops are thick on the ground...
...If the man from Dallas could make and keep so much loot for himself, perhaps he could straighten out the nation's messed-up economy, above all by giving small businessmen like Tim a break...
...Anybody the Republicans nominate, they'll vote for...
...The man for whom the instrument was bought had, on the eve of this holiday weekend, sent Tomahawk missiles into Baghdad, and his own chief of staff had declared that Harry Thomason's involvement in what the press was calling Travelgate was improper...
...The owner of Padaro Floral shop typicallylunches at the Nugget and then drives home to his wife and two kids in Ventura County...
...But they're not dogmatic...
...The fact is that over Thanksgiving, he had felt like a prisoner in his own home, what with the mobs of Secret Service, Highway Patrol, media, tourists, gawking locals, and so on...
...They admit taking flak from other Republicans due to all this hyping of a single enemy visit...
...N of the sort of scene that attracts Tim Moxley...
...Yet an actual presidential party seemed, business-wise, unnecessary...
...Summerland in this respect is like a bit of Northern California, or Oregon, transplanted to the heart of Reagan Country, for the great man's ranch is just over the mountains, and neighboring Santa Barbara and Montecito went for Ron in landslides...
...In their own defense, they say a president is a president, and business is business...
...Smoking is permitted in the main room, where ceiling fans spin and a truly noble moosehead does an impersonation of Charles de Gaulle between a photo of Willie Nelson with the owners and the displayed and still-virgin saxophone...
...UNOFFICIAL WESTERN WHITE HOUSE RETREAT"—such is the language on the cocktail napkins that Nugget owners Doug and Sally Taylor had run off without delay and continue to use...
...Thirty-three years he's been driving this route, and in that time he's seen his birthplace and hometown change, and not for the better...
...The current president, not a bad guy youunderstand, hadn't gotten his vote...
...The place was full tonight and a queue had formed outside...
...The historic visit was over Thanksgiving...
...They would otherwise not have been able to hang, in the so-called "presidential booth," next to a photo of themselves with the Clintons, an autographed photo of Ron and Nancy taking it easy with Mikhail and Raisa up on the ranch...
...Second, Doug sure acted quick and smart—"those shirts are all over the world...
...B eth, the assistant manager tending bar, was wearing one...
...Drive inland from the coast, with its greenhouses and fruit orchards where undocumented Mexicans earn many times what they'd get at home, and you can still turn up a few graying hippies in trailers...
...Espresso, it should be pointed out, is not the Native Son's beverage of choice, nor is the Nugget a coffeehouse...
...New Hampshire is where she is from originally, and indeed the clapboard houses of Summerland are enough to make a New Englander nostalgic...
...It's just that it has something for everyone and that he had a load of cucumbers to haul to L.A...
...Yet no one at the Nugget, or anywhere in the vicinity, suggested that the reason Bill Clinton wasn't showing up to unwind at Thomason's rented home on Padaro Lane again was that David Gergen might have advised him to keep daylight between himself and his culturally elite friends...
...Long before 1980, however, Sally was friends with the previous owners of Rancho del Cielo, so that when she and Doug were invited to it by their Secret Service chums, she knew her way around...
...He'd be delighted if Clinton really made the Thomason/Bloodworth-Thomason home the Western White House, for this would give all the businesses in the area a shot in the arm, his own included...
...Unlike the Native Son, he readily states for whom he voted—Perot...
...But Tim isn't a bitter type—would a bitter type send his daughter to Bible Camp...
...If the host of "Death Valley Days" is up on the ranch he bought with his earnings thirty years ago, current Hollywood sluggers like Kevin Costner drove up land values when Reagan was president by grabbing homes on the beach side of Highway 101 and have been known to feed with the masses...
...First, he wouldn't be unhappy if Bill and Hillary never came back...
...This is because Doug and Sally's red meat and booze are consumed by, among others, the haves and retirees of Montecito, and because Summerland itself was, as the Native Son complains, gentrified to a degree in the eighties...
...Part two of the Taylor defense plays well—there's no arguing with a 20 percent increase in profits since Thanksgiving, when CNN flashed the news around the planet...
...They too are hardly ever at the Nugget, their gold mine, after dark, preferring to come in, go over the receipts, and trouble-shoot at midday...
...For the happy Taylors have never voted anything but Republican and confess to having intimate ties to a certain ex-president's entourage...
...The power of the media...
...Now Bill Clinton's first Independence Day as commander-in-chief was looming, and no one was really expecting him to keep his promise to return and kick back...
...Owners Doug and Sally, unrepentant Reaganites, thus felt and still feel at home...
...There are two busy rooms here, the smaller of which used to be a pool hall for bikers when Doug and Sally bought it in 1978 and which now features an open kitchen where the young Anglo and Latino employees function in what seems to be harmony...
...Only the Anglos, however, wear the T-shirts in question and wait on tables, weaving like running backs with armloads of Coors, burgers, T-bone steaks, or, if such is your pleasure, Calistoga and pasta...
...Their occasional presence wouldn't have been enough to put Summerland and the Nugget on the cosmic map, however...
...But he heard about it, and under the circumstances it tickled him...
...Doug and Sally like Dole in '96...
...He was sitting at the bar of the Nugget polishing off an espresso and sucking an unfiltered Lucky Strike, and his reference was to the visit that made this hang-out and the village it is in renowned...
...It was there, at a barbecue, that the Taylors met their real hero, whose motorcades in retirement pass the front door but who has yet to set foot in their restaurant-cum-saloon...
...As for who he did vote for, we'll just let that ride, okay...
...Williams founded the village as a spiritualist colony in 1889...
...Why, there was a time when people treated each other like family...
...No, Doug didn't happen to be tuned in when Limbaugh referred to "some guy in California who bought a sax and lured him in...
...Just as frankly, if not so happily, he worries that if the First Lady's health reform package goes through, small businessmen like himself will have to buy coverage for all their employees, young and not-so-young, citizens and aliens...
...Now that Clinton seemed to have okayed it, and if and when NAFTA became a fact of life, Tim expected to be pressed even harder by growers south of the border, who pay their labor virtually nothing...
...Indeed, no one in Summerland appears to be nursing a furious sense of betrayal about Clinton, and no one who doesn't stand to profit from his return is impatient for it...
...B ringing us to the enterprising cou- ple, to Doug -and Sally...
...Youngsters on dates must show IDs to drink...
...And he admires how the Nugget's owners are still riding the wave created by that one single visit...
...The portions are liberal, the prices conservative...
...A cheeseburger-loving trio of local Bubbas at a table under one of the fans were swapping loud and unprintable jokes about the president's wife, whom a framed photo at the door showed entering the Nugget laughing...
...It's with the Reagans' security detail that the Taylors have long been on close terms, the normally expressionless men in the dark glasses favoring the Nugget for relaxation...
...On the radio of which he likes to catch Rush Limbaugh's show...
...in his 18-wheeler, for which trip he needed a clear head...
...Which was all right with the Native Son, because for him this vacation White House business was just a pain...
...THE NUGGET FOR GOOD SAX AND BURGERS" it said...
...Particularly sensible in Tim's eyes was Perot's opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement...
...Her husband, meanwhile, still drives an '87 GMC van...
...Like the Native Son, Tim has to hand it to Doug and Sally...
...Success does not seem to have spoiled them at all...
...Now with these newcomers coming in with their attitude and good taste, well, the Native Son could only shake his head...
...On any given evening, in addition to the tourist cars, you can see both old American pick-ups and new Mercedes parked in front of their place...
...The Native Son had two things to say before hitting the road...
...Told that to have bought a new red Corvette was shameless of her, Sally laughed and said that she deserved it, having put up for so many years with the humiliation ofdriving an old Porsche...
...Of course there are also the for-sale T-shirts, the autographed photos on the wall, the unused saxophone...
...He believes a president, any president, deserves a chance...
Vol. 26 • September 1993 • No. 9
