The Mad Greek

Posted on June 9, 2003 in Book of Days Cafes Travels - Past

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Rising early to begin the journey.

For me, waking doesn’t begin at daybreak but at eyebreak. My whole schedule turns to the tick-tock of a different meat clock, one set by my habit of writing late into the night. The hour most people set to rise for a long trip — chosen by Californians who wish to avoid the heat of the August desert — is my bedtime.

I have no clients to meet. Most days, the only person I talk to by voice is my wife Lynn with her pink Greek nose and pale brown English hair. So my schedule is entirely my own. Where others go out to watch the sunset at the end of a long day, I step out to observe the first bluings of light along the cracked and broken backs of the Santa Ana Mountains. East, due east of me, are the headwaters of Trabuco Creek where the last California Grizzly died; above those is the saddle over which the Ortega Highway — Rattlesnake Route 74 — winds and slithers before the big fall to Lake Elsinore.

I’ve learned that it is impossible to rouse Lynn at this hour without a lot of groaning on her part; so I schedule our long trips across the desert for the autumn and winter months when we can leave as late as nine and not be seared by the sun’s unblunted rays while we cross the sage flats of the East Mojave.

There’s a town we like to stop at along the way, called Baker. Baker’s a place set in the empty quarter of California, an hour from Barstow — which isn’t much of a city — and an hour from Las Vegas which is false to the very marrow of the Sunset Strip. People come to Baker only because they are going other places like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Death Valley, or the sudden exclamation of casinos and amusement parks at the Nevada state line.

It has a restaurant called The Mad Greek where we breakfast on baklava. The place possesses an ecletic decor: White walls and blue stripes around the window (or is it the other way around?). Movie star pictures smirk at the customers and name the owner as the beneficiary of their graces. It’s the only civilized place to eat at between Barstow and Nevada.

The nice thing about being a Greek American is that you can make friends in places such as Baker as long as there is one Hellenic in residence. Once we met the owner, a massive man who would deny that he was fat: ‘Well fed’ is how one professor of mine who shared the Mad Greek’s physique euphemized it. He mistook me for Greek because I look the part better with my coffee-colored Italian hair and my peppered Swiss beard than Lynn who despite her pinkish Greek nose has pale brown hair and blanched skin. She set him straight by speaking to him in shy, labored, but complete sentences in the Greek language. The meeting melted a place in our suspicious hearts and ever after we stop in Baker to eat at the place called The Mad Greek.

It’s a good reason to rise early before the sun slaps us around on our journey across the East Mojave, whether or not the owner appears. We like to tease the Latino help by ordering in Greek and teaching them phrases to startle the boss with. And as I go away, I wonder where they find these people in this town of maybe twenty trailers and a dozen houses, on a long stretch of sage flat and briny-bottomed dry lake, where the only reason to stop is baklava, pictures of movie stars, and maybe a chance to practice the language of Lynn’s father.

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about a compromise.