Devil House(9)
But anyone who owns property in California knows it’s a winning proposition, whatever your motivations; and however he chanced across the Milpitas listing, Gates knew a bargain when he saw one.
* * *
NO ONE KNOWS HOW LONG Valley News sold books and newspapers and comic books; no one remembers who ran the place, or what the inside of it looked like before it settled on a winning business plan; no one’s sure when it changed hands and began stocking Playboy and Penthouse behind the counter, or when it introduced harder fare to the racks.
But by the late 1970s it’s not really a newsstand anymore. It’s a porn store. The Mercury News didn’t run an article about its opening, but on Flickr you can find a few scanned pictures of a picket line some locals formed shortly afterward. Comments on the pictures remember the scandal of it; by the time anybody noticed it had changed, people say, it had already been plying its new trade for a month or two. Comparing the exteriors to the ones in old stories about the Sunliner Grill, you can see that not everything’s changed; the bricks are the same, the old awning’s still there and wants replacing. But the front windows, through which you could once see the bustling lunch counter, have been blacked out, and now there’s an OVER 21 ONLY sign nailed to the front door. A VALLEY NEWS sandwich board, in oddly cheery mock-Gothic lettering, still stands out front, but it strikes a discordant note within the scene that surrounds. The initial V and the terminal S are faded almost to invisibility, leaving only faint traces of themselves in the accumulating grime.
In a town so small, a place like Valley News operates on borrowed time. The picket line would eventually have gotten its way if other considerations hadn’t gone out ahead of it. It’s hard to believe, thinking about Valley News in Milpitas, that it ever existed at all, but photographs don’t lie.
* * *
ANTHONY HAWLEY WAS FROM OREGON; he had family all around the Pacific Northwest, and his childhood home on the northeast side of Portland looks, today, just like it did when he lived there. When the sailors came home in 1945, Anthony, then a child, would have seen firsthand inklings of the rapid growth that lay just ahead—new car lots, new factories, and new people moving west. Daniel, his brother, remembers Anthony in his teenage years as preferring late working hours to local nightlife. In town, there were ample supplies of both.
He’d taken a few adult education classes after high school; a few friends who were doing it had told him it was a good place to meet girls. They’d been right. You could work a day shift, get dinner, go take a class in business machines, and be out in time to make the rounds downtown with any friends you’d made in class. It seemed like an easy life, with plenty of prospects down the line.
But Anthony Hawley was twenty-two when the draft was conducted for the Vietnam War, and those same friends who’d told him to take night classes now pointed out that British Columbia wasn’t even a half day’s drive away. He didn’t have to be told twice. Returning to Portland from Vancouver a few years later, he found himself adrift: either the time away had unmoored him, or the move north had made him restless. Whatever the case, he didn’t stay in Portland long after returning. He went to Eugene for a summer, and he tried Colorado in the winter once; he worked easy jobs, keeping his expenses low.
At some point in his early thirties, after a few seasons in San Francisco, he found work on the second shift at the new Ford factory in Milpitas. The pay was decent enough, and he supplemented it with occasional afternoon shifts at Valley News, whose red HELP WANTED sign in a blacked-out window had faded to sun-washed pink. He saved money; it’s easy to save money in a small town. By 1981, he had enough of it in the bank to ask his boss, one David Hodge, who never used his first name except in correspondence, if he’d be interested in selling the place outright.
“Shit,” said Hodge when Anthony made the proposition shortly after the store’s noon opening one slow weekday. “I’ll absolutely take your money, but I can only sell you what you see from the walls in. Miss Evelyn Gates owns this building. You’ll have to get on the lease with her.”
It had been Vernon’s before it was Evelyn’s. She’d inherited it from her father after his house caught fire one night in 1978 with him still in it. Most people assumed the fire was no accident; he had few friends. Half his holdings were shuttered buildings, pitiable relics of their earlier selves in San Jose and Fremont drawing reliable monthly tithes from the people who lived in them and couldn’t afford to move. There was a sense, among his former tenants, that justice, however extreme, had been served. (This feeling was short-lived; Evelyn Gates didn’t overlook a payment on her father’s former holdings, and the same bill collectors he’d engaged to knock on doors no later than the fifth of the month, every month, continued their errands without interruption.)
And so Anthony Hawley, a nomadic bachelor with few ambitions beyond his immediate needs, became the nominal owner of Valley News: of the stock inside, and the furniture, and the machines. To his budding entrepreneurial ear, the name lacked bite; the prospective customer needed a better idea of which way the business was headed. By this point, there was only one rack of comics left; pornography and inhalants were what kept the store afloat. So he hired a neighborhood kid named Derrick Hall and asked him to paint a new sign, something truck drivers would be able to see from the highway at night; and he gave the store a new name, something big and gaudy and mildly menacing: MONSTER ADULT X. He dug through business how-to books at the library, setting everything up to the letter of the law, incorporating MAB Enterprises as a limited liability corporation and writing out monthly payments to Evelyn Gates on legal-sized checks that came three to a page in a black binder. He retained the canceled checks in his records, which he kept in a safe, and they show his elegant handwriting, large looping letters suggesting pride of ownership. He hoped to try to buy the building at some point, not knowing, as longer denizens of the region did, that Evelyn Gates seldom sold an inch of land for a penny below list. But the store was his.