the New Pantagruel

Justice: A Semi-autobiographical Fiction

by James Rovira

owntown Dairy Valley, California, 1968: the intersection of two lane Gridley Road and Artesia Boulevard. On one corner the Tastee Freeze stood like a fortress of pleasure fortified against the summer heat; in spite of its outdoor seating it still cooled us off with ice cream cones dipped in chocolate, hot fudge Sundaes, and ice cold Cokes. A Texaco and a Mobil station occupied two other corners. Locked in a gas war to the death, they volleyed lower prices and various goodies from fully loaded painted windows. A family owned drive-through convenience store stood on the fourth corner sheltering a pony ride immediately behind it. Dairy Valley surrounded Artesia like a horseshoe; Artesia was the hub of a rural wheel encircling the neighborhoods, the older library, Holy Family Catholic Church, the elementary school, and Faye Ross Junior High, while Dairy Valley itself consisted of farm after farm after farm.

“Madonna and Child” (oil on gessoed wood board)
by Kay Darling

Until 1968, the year Dairy Valley began its transformation into Cerritos, California, home of one of the country’s first indoor malls and its first solar powered city hall. My family moved into one of the first subdivisions built over a cow pasture. The day the Cerritos Chamber of Commerce erected an ornate, wooden sign marking the entrance into our newly renamed city, a sign resembling a Cub Scouts wood burning project, my father and I with several other families planted trees around the sign. My own house overlooked the railroad tracks that ran awkwardly through our city. The last dairy farm in the area lay across the tracks from my house. Eventually one of the two gas stations closed and the other was refurbished, developers plowed down the family owned convenience store to make room for a 7-11, the empty lot next to it became a Bally Health spa, and a small community of closely huddled duplexes meant the end of the pony rides. Both Gridley and Artesia were widened to four lanes. Eventually the subdivisions took over the entire block, their roughened yellow masonry walls marching down the street like an unassailable army.

My neighborhood grew fat with young families and their small children, and like the Star Trek utopia we admired on television our neighborhood was a model of racial diversity. Mexican, Vietnamese, Scottish, Irish, Chinese, Puerto Rican, African American, Filipino, and Korean families all lived on the same block, shopped at the same grocery store, met at the same PTA and Cub Scout meetings, and saw their children through the same elementary, junior high, and high schools. We got into fights and played on the same little league teams and attended the same Catholic Church, our one real common denominator. We had to work through the accents of our friend’s parents and learn each other’s food when we visited for dinner. Our front doors were thresholds between an outer Southern Californian suburbia and the more intimate world of our family lives, a world dominated by what was foreign furniture, language, art, foods, and smells to everyone else. Everyone I knew was comfortably well off, and most of the people I knew from the neighborhood lived there for years. We grew up together.

I wasted hours looking out my window over that last cow pasture. I’d study the cows whenever I got too bored and wondered about the people who lived in the house across the railroad tracks dividing the farm from my subdivision. The farm family seemed alien to me, not Jon, my Chinese best friend down the street. The cows were a grotesquely familiar study in tedium. They sat. They stood. They slept. They ate. Then they defecated, feeding the grass that fed them in an endless cycle, seldom approaching the boundaries of their world. They seemed to see no sense in wandering, staying happy so long as the grass was green and they were left alone, living to produce milk until slaughtered for their meat. In the middle of the cow pasture the ranchers built a structure to keep the rain off the hay – probably three stories tall with no walls, just a frame supporting a roof stacked to the top with hay. Shortly after the cows left I watched it burn. Someone set fire to it. Dairy Valley was gone forever, a sick tribute to its last farm being the Black Angus built over the site.

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