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.
Subsequent developments within the walls that once housed Lonnie Roberts’s luncheonette make up the story that has occupied my days since I left San Francisco, the story I came here to tell. California has a way of erasing its own history; I’m told that the place where Walt Disney first drew Mickey Mouse is a law office now. But among possessions retrieved from Devil House after the killings were some Polaroids of the edifice and interior of Valley News. In them, you can still make out the walls that once belonged to the Sunliner Grill, and the front counter where the cash register once stood. It’s the same counter; the eye immediately classified it as an antique, even if its surroundings are now decidedly modern: the oversized VHS boxes, the lurid magazines, the enormous glass display case filled with dildos and inhalants. There’s a rack of comic books near the door, certainly Derrick’s doing, completely out of place. His hand is also evident in exterior shots: the stylized horror-poster lettering of the sign jutting out from atop the flat-roofed building shows great care and attention to detail, red rounded block letters with clean, brush-free black outlines. It sits at an awkward angle, trying to split the difference between facing the freeway and the street.