.A Trip to the Past on the 27 Line

Only in Los Gatos would Whole Foods move half a mile up the road to replace an abandoned car lot that was supposed to be a Longs Drugs that never actually happened.

These days, Gatos is not just the land of a thousand hair salons. It’s also the musical chairs of grocery store locations. The entire history of Nob Hill, Food Villa, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Lunardi’s and Thrifty—with 5-cent scoops of Daiquiri Ice—would fill an entire book.

But I’m getting ahead of myself already. Everyone, just take a deep breath.

The celebrated crossroad in question—Los Gatos Boulevard and Los Gatos Almaden Road—remains steeped in multiple dimensions of history. Since VTA stopped running the 27 down this stretch of Los Gatos Almaden, a travesty of justice if you ask me, it is here that I shall contemplate this week’s mystical fusion of past and present.

I can’t tell you how many times, as a teenager, I took the 27 to this intersection, where I’d then transfer to the 62 that went up Los Gatos Boulevard and eventually to Tower Records. I’d say a zillion people of my generation remember the 27 bus stop on the south side of Los Gatos Almaden, right in front of the shopping center that now includes Los Gatos Café, formerly the Iron Skillet. Hundreds of others took the bus to this intersection to hit up Gremic Skateboards right next to the Jiffy Market on the opposite corner. Hundreds. An entire generation of miscreants will probably still identify this sacred junction with Gremic Skateboards. Those kinds of memories don’t go away. I never even skated, but I still know these things.

I can’t imagine that corner without that 27 bus stop sitting there. It’s like a piece of my youth has been ripped away. Again.

Later, when I started driving, I inherited my parents’ Datsun 510 hatchback, which they bought used from a car lot along this strip of Los Gatos Boulevard. It was someone else’s trade-in and we picked it up. My dad argued with the crooked salesman over and over until the man in the office with the red pen finally signed off on the deal. I eventually crashed it, not once but twice, before I was even 19.

Along the same stretch of Los Gatos Boulevard, what’s now Pet Food Express was Wherehouse, the record store with a BASS Tickets outlet, where 100 of us waited in line all night for Pink Floyd tickets in 1987. I may have been the youngest one. That night, as teenagers, we split a case of Miller Genuine Draft while camping on the sidewalk until morning. I remember buying the tickets completely still drunk.

Teenagers these days don’t even know. Their priorities are all messed up.

So what’s still left from those sordid days?—I hear you cry. Well, I’ll tell you. The dreaded McDonald’s.

I say dreaded for a reason. I worked at that McDonald’s for two hours.

At the age of 16, I went through the initial 120-minute orientation and then when I showed up for my first shift, I was not allowed to work because my hair was too long. At that McDonald’s. I remember it clearly. Behind the counter, near the grill, the manager, in hideous polyester slacks, told me to come back when I got a haircut. So I left and never went back.

For 20 years I considered this a great story, that I was fired from my very first job before I even started. Such became my outlook on life: I never had a chance.

My outlook is much better these days, thankfully, even if I still can’t separate the memories from that neighborhood, where the old chump with the red pen sold us the Datsun 510.

But this screed was supposed to be about grocery stores. Don’t worry. It still is. In a way.

Ultimately, Buddha, Heraclitus and Herb Caen all understood that nothing in the city landscape is permanent. Gone is Countryman Oldsmobile. Gone is Radio Shack and Gremic Skateboards. Everything changes. That’s life, as Sinatra sang.

The intersection of Los Gatos Boulevard and Los Gatos Almaden Road just isn’t what it used to be. And it never was.