Tuttle’s Corner Exterior, Photograph ©2003 John Margolies

Welcome to Tuttle’s Corner

Long story short, I won the place in a bet. It really wasn’t such a long-shot, but at the time it felt like winning the lottery in the sense that things turned out exactly how I used to think I’d want them to if I ever came into a nice chunk of money with no strings attached—although the moral of the story turns out to be that having to sink or swim after being given everything I once dreamt I’d buy if I had the opportunity or the choice isn’t the same as winning (or even earning) real money and being able to decide how to save or spend it when it was in my hand.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the place, maybe more so because I know that what I have going here won’t last forever. And I don’t want it to last forever. I want it to be a memory sooner than later. Of course, you can’t do much about market forces in this business, and it’s probably true to say that I’ve sacrificed much more than I anticipated by not having expanded into all of the bigger and better markets I was offered (frozen entrées, bottled mixers, cookbooks, kitchen-wear/ware lines, other bars, restaurants, a hotel—in Vegas!) when I had the chance, but very few people are as happy in their lives as I am from day to day, so in the end, worst case scenario, it all comes out in the wash for me.

Fuck it. Whatever happens in this economy, and barring a chem bio- or nuclear strike around here anytime soon, I’m pretty much set for life now, anyway; so, I figure about five more years of this and I’m done. It’s done. My money’ll be made, my book’ll be written, my notes will’ve been burned, and we will all kiss all of this good-bye. I’ll keep the place, if I’m lucky. I’ll shut it down for a few months, take all this crap down off the walls, seal up the basement for good then reopen as the neighborhood beanery it should have been, and was. ¹

Anyway, that’s where I am on this at the moment.

The Bet…

As for how all this came to be, it’s enough to say that in the early summer of 1994 I was at a fairly low point when McIlvane first approached me about it inside my wikiup (a wikiup is something like a wigwam but is covered with plant matter rather than animal hides) which at the time was hidden among some Pacific wax myrtle (Myrica californica) and Holly leafed cherry (Prunus ilicifolia) under a 101 overpass near Franklin Avenue in Hollywood. I’d been squatting with my back to the street, eating an orange and rolling a cigarette from a half-dozen butts I’d been holding onto when I heard him. When I looked ’round, the first thing I saw was his shoes. I could smell them, too. Nice shoes …

… It’s also enough to say that even though we never went to school together, McIlvane and I had been best friends on and off since seventh grade, and even though we hadn’t seen each other face to face in a couple of years, and only a couple of times over a couple of years before that, I recognized his wincey smile peeking through the Van Dyke drapes hung under the round shades and trilby pretty quickly. Sure that he still kept a skateboard in his car trunk, I invited him in and offered him a piece of my orange, which he declined.

So I asked,

“How’d you find me, Ian?”

“People talk, Tuttle. You may not like that, but they do.”

“Which people talk, Ian?”

“At this point, I’d say it’s everyone.”

“And what? You’ve all gotten together for an intervention?”

“Not everyone.”

How we laughed.

“Look, let me get to the point because I really can’t stand looking at you like this, my man. I’ve known you your whole life. You’ve known me my whole life. I call you ‘Tuttle’ now like everyone else, but I know who you are and I know how you got here, and you know that I do. Other people have other ideas about you, and by the sound of their ideas I think it’s safe to say that some people like you and some people don’t, but you need to realize that even the people who love you stopped giving a shit about you and your Gordon Comstock joint a long time ago.”

He looked me over for a second. Looked at my camp. Looked at my stuff. Looked under the tarp at the four shopping carts I used to transport my four categories of stuff around town, all wired up together like a little hobo train.

“I guess you realize that, though.”

And then—and there was a lot of crazy shit going around about this which I’ve never responded to, but McIlvane’s dead now, so let me put some things to rest—this is what happened, no matter what you may have heard. This is the way it was put to me, and it’s pretty much exactly what he said. He said,

“You’ve never really accomplished anything on your own, have you, Tuttle? Even your famous book. You wrote it, but you wrote it on our backs, so I’m not sure that famously writing your famous book was quite the accomplishment we all banked on it being in the end. But, no hard feelings, right?

“Your people love you, dude. We love you even though you fucked our girlfriends and our ex-girlfriends, or we thought you did, and I’ll tell you the truth, there were a couple of people who sort of resented you when you left their girlfriends alone. Maybe it was just the fact that you outlasted all of those girlfriends that balanced out a lot of things for a bunch of dudes who you knew were going to end up all alone, anyway.

“So, in a certain way of looking at it, you’re as good at taking care of your friends as they are at taking care of you. And when everyone is taking care of each other, when everyone knows their place, you do pretty well for yourself, don’t you, Tuttle? You land on your feet. You earn your keep, so to speak. What you’ve not shown yourself to be too good at is taking care of yourself, which is what you need to learn how to do pretty fucking quickly or you’re going to die, and we don’t want you to die, so we’re going to try to motivate you to live a nice long life with a bargain, or as some people see it, a bet, that we’re willing to make with you.”

And so he laid out the terms, which I’m able to tell you were agreed to, and which I have kept to; it’s just that if the terms are disclosed while either of us live, I forfeit everything. Everything. And now McIlvane’s dead, and he never said a word about any of this, so our bargain and our bet are a little more ongoing than the lion’s share of the paperwork would seem to indicate. In the simplest terms possible, until the day I die, whatever happens is on me.

“Does it have to be here? L.A.? Or can I go back to New York if I want?”

“Either way.”

That’s what happened. Pretty much everything that led up to this conversation with McIlvane is in the process of being laid out elsewhere, so it’s enough to say that 3-4-5 months later, I made it back to New York. Not too long after that, we were in business….


Next:  How we scored the Harbor Diner… (Working Draft)

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