Starting Off a New Day the Chicken Lips’ Way

Six thirty rolls around and the guys are usually waiting outside the front door, even these mornings when it’s too damn cold to be waiting outside for long.

They’ll probably talk about the cold some once they get inside, where it’s warm, where there’s coffee and smokes, where their day really begins.

Gary tries to be on time. He knows a lot of people are counting on him to show. They’ve got things to buy before work and school--gum and Coke and beer and chocolate-covered mini-doughnuts--and gossip to chew. It’s Gary’s store, except he says that it’s his wife who runs the show.

It’s the General Store, Emory’s General Store (Emory being Gary) to be precise, in Trabuco Canyon. The place has been here since 1946.

But this morning, Gary’s late. We’re waiting to get in, too, Split and me. Split’s purring already, rubbing against my leg.

Split’s never seen me before in her life. Doesn’t matter. Split’s a good cat, a calico, a charter member herself. Of the Chicken Lips Coffee Club, I mean.

Which is why I’m here.

Gary pulls up--15 minutes late, but who’s counting?--in a hot red Porsche. He’s wearing a T-shirt, navy blue, with some sort of racer lingo written across the front of it. Gary’s into racing, cars and motorcycles.

There are all sorts of racer photographs tacked up on the walls inside the store, along with a stuffed elk head (wearing a black leather Harley motorcycle cap on its antlers) and the cowboy pictures--Gene Autry, Big Wally Gibson, Hopalong Cassidy and John Wayne.

“God Bless John Wayne” says the bumper sticker under the Duke’s picture.

“Hey, sorry I’m late,” Gary says as he climbs out of the hot red Porsche, but the guys, who seem to have appeared en masse at the same moment, just sort of grunt. But Gary’s probably not talking to them anyway.

Then he unlocks the front door, and the Chicken Lips, silent without their first cup of coffee, start to work. They lift a heavy black trunk that’s blocking the doorway and put it outside. Then they fill up their coffee cups. Their work is done.

Now for the rest.

“We solve the problems of the world, basically,” says John Heath, 59 years old, otherwise known as “Whacker John.”

It was Little Richie who came up with that name. Little Richie’s the one they call “the Mayor,” the little guy with the beard. Whacker explains:

“He says, ‘You know when you were a kid and you’re all standing around a cow patty in the field? Well, there’s always one kid who grabs a stick and takes a whack at it.’ ”

Little Richie’s also the one who invoked the name Chicken Lips for the first time. That was around five years ago. He says 11 guys, two cats and an ersatz wooden Indian sitting around every morning drinking coffee and smoking up a storm sounds like a bunch of chicken lips to him.

The Lips liked it. They got themselves a wooden plaque, thereby immortalizing the name, and hung it above the bench off on the side of the General Store. The plaque’s got pictures of the club’s charter members, including two who have passed on.

Curt Hadyen, one hell of a guy, was the last to go. There’s a big color photograph of him, in a Santa Claus cap, on the wall. The white beard was his own. Curt died the day before Fourth of July last year. He was going to be the grand marshal of the annual parade.

“We sure miss him,” says Kirk Leavitt, another of the original crew. He shakes his head, real slow.

“We still have people who won’t come in the store because they can’t stand to think that he’s gone,” says Gary. “We have women come in, they look over in the corner and they start crying. They can’t stand it because that’s where Curt used to sit.”

The Lips say Curt took something with him when he left, even though they still have a great time.

Like when Frank Monnig brought his girl. Frankie tells how it went:

“I got her down here on a Sunday, for inspection. See, before anyone can get married, there has to be an inspection. I went into town to get her, and she was real nervous. She was sweating all the way, but when she got here, she was fine. Except I didn’t expect all of them to be wearing T-shirts and ties.”

This morning, of course, no such dress code applies. It’s just the usual stuff. Jeans, sweat shirts, Windbreakers and the odd tie. That would be on Tom Bonds, who lives in Rancho Santa Margarita but likes to stop off here on his way to work.

Tom’s the one they call “Camel Tom,” because he works for R.J. Reynolds Co. He’s about the only one who doesn’t smoke.

The Chicken Lips come and go, but by 8 o’clock, most of them are off to someplace else.

The talk these days can get people pretty worked up. It’s about war, mostly, about blowing those you-know-whats to hell and back. Forget all that bull about less being more. Make those suckers bleed!

Not that all the talk gets them to pounding at their chests. Sometimes it’s just good clean fun.

“Whoever’s not here, we rip apart,” says Pablo, just Pablo, who says he’s three years younger than God.

Consequently, on some mornings, so many Lips show up that an outsider can hardly get through the store aisles.

Still, no one stays an outsider for too long in Trabuco Canyon. This place is Mayberry after a hard day’s night.

“Yeah, around here is a lot better than in town,” says Richard Simpson, the one they call “El Toro Dick.”

In town, of course, means everywhere else--the places where people don’t take the time to sit down for coffee and, while they’re at it, solve the problems of the world.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.