The Great Carta Blanca Heist of 1976
Teen-age hijinks and white privilege in the Santa Clara Valley
In an essay titled “The Hard Crowd” in the 1/18/21 issue of the New Yorker, the author Rachel Kushner recounts her youth in San Francisco, in the Sunset district where she lived and in Haight-Ashbury and the Tenderloin, where she had brushes with prostitutes, addicts, and punks. Her ruminations about running with this hard crowd while retaining her own inner softness resonated with me:
When Sandy and I wandered Haight Street as kids, the vibe was not good feelings and free love. It was sleazier, darker. We hung out at a head shop called the White Rabbit. People huffed ether in the back. I first heard “White Room” by Cream there, a song that ripples like a stone thrown into cold, still water. “At the party she was kindness in the hard crowd.” … The White Rabbit was the hard crowd. The kids who went there. The kids I knew. Was I hard? Not compared with the world around me. I tell myself that it isn’t a moral failing to be the soft one, but I’m actually not sure.
The Hard Crowd
Ten years earlier and 60 miles away in the South Bay, I had had my own brushes with a hard crowd, and my own disturbed inner softness. My crowd was not nearly as hard, I readily admit, as the one portrayed in Kushner’s essay, but her writing reminded me of one of our more wayward undertakings.
Around 1975, a friend of mine landed me a job as a busboy at El Burro, a Mexican restaurant in Campbell that was, at the time, the crème de la crème of the South Bay Mexican dining scene. Soon after this, the friend who landed me the job would, at the age of 17, get kicked out of his parents’ house by his bullying father. This was a time when kids like us — particularly those from large Catholic families like we both were — were desperate to achieve as much independence as we could as soon as we could. So this friend, forced to support himself even as he was finishing high school, became something of a hero, taking an apartment in a building near El Burro, furnishing it with just the bare necessities from the local Goodwill, and inviting us over on the regular to break out the bongs.
The us, at the time, was a crew of typically entitled, white California high school boys who had taken jobs as El Burro busboys alongside Mexican counterparts, many of whom were undocumented. The scuttlebutt in the bussing stations was that the El Burro kitchen was a revolving door: Las Migras would roll in every two weeks and send the entire kitchen crew back to Mexico, at which point the owner would call in a whole new shift, who would work until the next two-week purge, at which point the previous crew would be back, and around and around they would go. I’m not sure any of that was true, my white privilege shielding me from such things, but it was good conversation for the those of us who rolled in three or four afternoons and/or nights a week and left with our pockets full of cash tips, most of which was dropped at the Tower Records across the street on $3.66 record albums and Zig-Zag rolling papers.
White Boy Grievance
Like most white kids of our generation, we had no idea how good we had it, and we somehow managed to dream up something to bitch about. The head busboy, Federico, was always on our shit about moving faster to reset the tables or refill the salsa containers in the bus stations, or to empty the trash boxes. Each bus station had a huge bin of tortilla chips in it for replenishing the tables, but get caught munching a single chip, and the owner would fire you on the spot — oppression a white high school athlete could easily elevate to the level of child abuse, slavery, Auschwitz!
And so, as management slowly added under-aged Mexican kids to the busboy ranks, and our white-boy grievances got more and more amplified over late-night doobies and bong hits, we became disgruntled. We weren’t going to take it anymore. Inspired by a steady TV diet of “Hogan’s Heroes reruns,” we dreamt up a caper that would quietly teach our oppressors a lesson while delivering to us a 24-bottle case of Carta Blanca, our favorite Mexican beer.
The Caper
The El Burro layout was a rectangle consisting of a customer-visible side and a kitchen that was separated from the diners by soundproof walls and swinging doors. In the center of it all was, on the customer-visible side, the bar, and on the invisible side, the walk-in cooler. The entrance to the cooler was in the kitchen, a bustling, loud place where Mexican cooks and dishwashers went about the work of preparing new meals and cleaning up after old ones. We busboys had two tasks that would regularly take us through that noisy, frenetic kitchen: emptying trash boxes, and refilling the square, stainless steel vats of salsa that sat in the six bussing stations. That second task, the salsa, would take us into the walk-in cooler itself, which also happened to be where cases of bottled beer were stored.
Because, we reasoned, the El Burro owners were such a bunch of misers, the trash boxes in the bus stations were nothing more than empty beer cases. To empty them, you simply took the cardboard beer case full of trash out and tossed into a dumpster, then grabbed an empty one from a stack that sat next to the back exit. This was something you did three or four times per shift, and to make things more efficient, our oppressors insisted that when time came to empty the trash box, the busboy doing so should tour all six of the bus stations and grab their boxes as well. This was the key to our plot.
At roughly 9:00, at the height of the evening, I took my salsa vat into the walk-in cooler for a refill. This was the signal for Jeff, one of my co-conspirators, to go around emptying trash boxes while two more of our co-conspirators moved to the kitchen to take up positions to stand watch. En route to the back exit, Jeff, now carrying a stack of four beer cases stuffed with trash, paused at the walk-in cooler and knocked on the door. I, from the inside, opened the door just wide enough to slide a full case of Carta Blanca out on the floor. Jeff dropped his trash-box beer cases onto the full one, lifted the whole stack, and proceeded to the dumpster out back. There, he threw the lot of them in, then grabbed the empty boxes he needed to complete his rounds.
We completed our shift, left the restaurant, hung out nearby for an hour, then returned to retrieve our full case of Carta Blanca from the dumpster.
Epilogue
Unlike the capers you see in the best caper movies, ours went off without a hitch. That night, the four of us chased bong hits with our contraband Carta Blanca beers, and when we returned to work the next day, we had delicious moments of apprehension, and the even more delicious moments of sweet relief and conquest when it became clear we would not be found out. And while I can clearly remember those moments and those feelings, I really don’t recall much of what happened next. At some point, we all drifted away from this menial labor and into other, higher-paying pursuits — in my case, warehouse jobs at nearby furniture stores. We then went off to community colleges and state universities, all reasonably priced at the time, and the professional careers we never doubted would be available to us. We knew and liked our Mexican counterparts at the restaurant, but never thought much about their life trajectories, and certainly never hung out with them outside the work context.
Years later, my tech career well underway and my first mortgage secured, I got a hankering for the delectable spiced beef of El Burro’s trademark Enchiladas California. I dragged my wife down to Campbell for dinner and found to my amazement that things at the restaurant were exactly as they had been 20 years before: the same rickety wicker chairs, the same simple salads of iceberg lettuce with a red beet perched on top, and the same irresistible Enchiladas California. The one difference: not a single non-Mexican among the staff. The managers, the hostesses, the servers — and, of course, the busboys — Mexican-Americans one and all. And I thought to myself, who could blame the owners for that? How could it be anything but sound business to dispense with a generation of entitled late boomers and instead embrace one’s own community, a community both loyal to the cause and in greater need of a leg up.
And then, as these thoughts receded, I looked across the restaurant into the darkness of the bar, and I saw the unmistakable figure of Federico, our head busboy from 20 years before. His hair was graying now, but he possessed the same handsome eyes and purposeful gait that I remembered, and I could only hope that, if he were to glance over and see me, he would betray no recognition at all.
