Going Back to Malibu Jack's

 

One of Malibu Jack's matchbooks. Source: Reddit. 

The reader's willing suspension of disbelief depends on believable detail, driven by plot and characterization. I have the perfect locus of nostalgia and a watershed moment when a happy time and place crashed, burned and ended.

First, the location. I and my dear friend, artist, Chris Dorosz, keep talking about Malibu Jack's, a California-style restaurant which opened in 1985 in the ByWard Market in Ottawa, Canada.

Picture this: Lost Boys and Less than Zero were in cinemas; Miami Vice was on the television. Everything was covered with neon and palm trees. Malibu Jack's tapped into the fad and Ottawa's teenagers converged there for crab croissant sandwiches, cheeseburgers, homemade potato chips and tacos. People remember the restaurant on Reddit; and some of its recipes are still circulating online.

One of the busboys, Stephen Beckta, was so impressed by his experience there that he is now a celebrated restaurateur in the Market. Malibu Jack's was an ebullient, friendly place, a jubilant hub where its customers could rest before a long trek home back to the suburbs. 

 

"1986 - Day off at Malibu Jacks in the Market Flea, Kevin, Jeff, Phil, Jason, Tracey and Glen." Source: Flickr. 

 

Source. 

Cool Sunset © by Eric Demarcq via Flickr.

 Good Morning L.A. Image Source: World 66. 

So. In 1992, I took a difficult boyfriend back home to Ottawa to meet my friends. I chose Malibu Jack's to meet because it was such a positive place. But by that point, Malibu Jack's was on its last legs. Neon and palm trees were no longer hot. The teens were long gone. Worse - we were the teenagers who were long gone. The decor was tired. The restaurant's trademark big plastic red glasses felt slimy. I remember a sinking sense of displacement and uncertainty. The Market's grubby grittiness had once been part of the fun. Now, the weeping greasy red plastic was weird and distasteful.

My ex, a non-local, didn't get our nostalgia. He thought Malibu Jack's was a dump. I won't elaborate on how the meal and conversation unfolded, but two of my friends who were there have separately said that their encounter with him was one of the worst days of their lives.

What I remember was the breaking point in time and place. We had returned to the familiar, but everything had become unfamiliar. The setting repeated: the place, the old friends, the conversation, the food - all standbys that had worked hundreds of times before. But this time, with the arrival of this judgmental, unhinged, and hostile interloper, fate recalibrated the machine. The day didn't just go wrong, it got frightening. From there, it got very dark, harsh, and hideously nasty.

I could write a whole novel starting with that day, for us as former teenagers, initiated into adulthood at this landmark turning point. It sounds melodramatic, but it felt like one of the worst days in the history of bad days, because I realized everything that had been good about Malibu Jack's was lost and gone. It was not just about growing up, or bad boyfriends, or the arrival of a new decade. It wasn't that simple. That day was an appetizer, a taste of what was to come. We'd entered into a new world, whose main course we are now enjoying.

I never went back to Malibu Jack's again. The restaurant closed in 1995. It only lasted a decade - but what a decade it was.