THIS WEEK, another fond memory of San Jose politics, porn and pile drivers. Basically, stories exist underneath every rock and pebble of this place, so when a friend offhandedly brought up the defunct adult novelty store, the L’Amour Shoppe, I decided to summon the Muses, the Nine Daughters of Memory.
A few of those adult shops still exist throughout California, but the San Jose store, which sat at 477 S. First St., remains intertwined with the memories of many a San Jose scenester from the old SoFA days.
During the late ’80s and early ’90s, when an alternative-music renaissance was cementing a Bohemian substratum along South First Street and providing a long-overdue alternative to bastions of blandness like Tapestry ‘n’ Talent, the L’Amour Shoppe was the last remaining vestige of adult-oriented retail left from the previous decades’ worth of seedy porn underbelly. Everyone who went to the music clubs on South First stumbled into the L’Amour Shoppe at one time or another, in various states of sobriety.
It was a unique-to–San Jose sort of scenario. In the building now housing Liquid Agency, the L’Amour Shoppe occupied the street level, while a constantly rotating crew of colorful characters lived in the dump upstairs and threw notorious drunken rooftop parties.
Many local bands played gigs up there, with hundreds of people attending over the years. The entire building was named “Dinuba,” and a few of the characters upstairs also worked in the L’Amour Shoppe downstairs. It was porn, booze and rock & roll, the likes of which San Jose will never see again. Unfortunately.
During that time, the city of San Jose was engaged in the first of many failed attempts at convincing the comfortable classes to move back downtown in search of inner-city recolonization. The City Council, drunk with rezoning power, was smashing all the porn. The L’Amour Shoppe was the last piece left and thus met its eventual fate in 1994. Like a lone soldier on the battlefield, the shop stuck it out until the very end.
It reminds me of the French World War II resistance tune “The Partisan,” famously covered by Leonard Cohen. In the song, the narrator is a lone French soldier trying to remain free when the Germans invade: “When they poured across the border/ I was cautioned to surrender/ This I could not do.” The Germans arrive at his door, and he disappears into the night.
To this day, the L’Amour business carries on, including stores in Salinas, Fremont and Sacramento. The Salinas store was and still is the headquarters of the entire company.
Nito Gomez, the former bodybuilder and professional wrestler, began working at the Salinas store in 1986, moving up from clerk to assistant manager and then to manager. After that, he managed the San Jose store until the Hammer of Susan came off the top rope with a forearm smash and took him out.
“Believe it or not, [the L’Amour owners were] actually a very good group of people,” Gomez told me. “[They] had families, raised kids, worked hard and created a relaxed, fun environment that made a lot of people stay there for many years. Plus the owners paid well. Most managers received at least $2,000 per month salary, and the ones that were there for many years got upwards of 3 grand per month. And this was back in the late ’80s and throughout the ’90s. The clerks made at least $9 per hour to start, which was good for back then, at a relaxed type of job.”
Just like the French resistance, the legends live on. One former L’Amour Shoppe employee, speaking under condition of anonymity, said the place attracted an entire ensemble cast of characters: “A group of guys would wait around for the new smut to roll in on Mondays and Thursday mornings. They would hang outside of the shop. …The truck would arrive, they would go out, unload it, open the boxes and check the invoice for us and then discuss amongst themselves who gets to rent the new smut first. We labeled them as ‘The Sharks.'”
In downtown San Jose, L’Amour is the Tenth Muse of Memory. It will never go away.
