Champions of Lost Causes

THEY’VE BEEN COMING TO CHRIS Blunda for 21 years, turning off Beach Boulevard at Slater Avenue and pulling up to the pumps at Jarrett’s Mobil station in Huntington Beach.

“I can tell what they want before they get out of the car, before they even say a word,” scoffs Blunda, 38, through a hard smile and a thick mustache. “They don’t always want gas. I can tell if they’re buying a pack of cigarettes or if they’re coming in to get a drink. It’s easy to see if they have car trouble. And I can always tell when they want directions.”

Blunda likes to see them all coming. His occasional abrasiveness notwithstanding, this is a man who loves his job, especially the part about giving directions.

“I’m the best,” Blunda says, raising his eyebrows and snapping his gum and running his hand over his slicked-back hair as though daring you to disagree. “I know everything about getting anywhere from here.”

He pauses, then chuckles.

“I ought to, don’t you think?” says the station manager, inspecting his pressed short-sleeved shirt and wide, striped tie for lint or wrinkles. “After so long in this business?”

Lots of service stations aren’t what they used to be, not for motorists on a self-serve budget. Most of the amenities--from air and water to window-washing and dip-sticking--aren’t free anymore. Restrooms are a gamble. And everybody charges for maps, which used to be complimentary.

Nonetheless, a gas station is still the first place most drivers go when they don’t know where they are.

All day, every day, motorists are pulling into the approximately 800 service stations across Orange County with frustration on their faces and directions--bad directions--scribbled on scraps of paper. No matter that it often makes about as much sense to ask for directions at a gas station as it would at a coffeehouse, a mini-market or a fast-food franchise, which are among the multiple personalities that gas stations now exude.

“In consumers’ minds, gas stations and service stations are still synonymous,” observes Jan Speelman, spokeswoman for the Automotive Trade Organizations of California. The Irvine-based lobbying group used to be called the Southern California Service Station Assn. before so many of them remodeled their mechanics’ bays for other uses.

“Getting directions at a gas station is still part of that environment,” says Speelman. “It’s not part of the job, but most attendants still do it willingly.”

In fact, most attendants surveyed for this story still assume that giving directions is among their responsibilities.

“It’s been that way since my first day on the job,” Blunda says, sighing with boiled authority, leaning on the counter and looking out the window at the eight-lane, strip-malled thoroughfare that passes his station.

“Back then, in the mid-’70s, Beach Boulevard was only a two-lane highway. There were strawberry fields around here,” he says. “But people still came to a gas station for directions. They probably always have.”

Actually, the stereotypical service station emerged in Southern California in the 1920s, according to historian Ashleigh Brilliant in his book “The Great Car Craze” (Woodbridge Press, 1989). In the early days of motoring, most drivers procured fuel, lubricants and mechanical service from the hardware store or the smithy.

“As motoring became a mass activity . . . great chains of gasoline stations were established,” Brilliant writes. “Because of the intense competition and the many new needs which mass motoring produced, these stations had to appeal to the public in a variety of ways.”

Thus was born the ideal of the gas station as a roadside oasis, a place staffed with crisply outfitted and peppy attendants, a place providing respite and replenishment to both automobile and passengers.

These days it’s more common for customers to place gasoline orders like gamblers at a racetrack--”Gimme $10 on No. 7”--with clerks who are often little more than computer data processors.

Still, anybody who works in a gas station is expected to know the local terrain like an urban forest ranger. None of the attendants interviewed for this story are surprised anymore at the places they are asked to locate.

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“You get everything here, homie, everything,” says Richard Castro, 24, who works the pumps at Anaheim Unocal on Katella Avenue and Lewis Street. “There must be 20 or 30 people a day who come in here looking for something.”

Anaheim Unocal is just off the Santa Ana Freeway and just close enough to Anaheim Stadium, the Pond, Disneyland and a striptease bar to attract all sorts of lost souls.

Castro regales them with a nonstop monologue as he directs them to appropriate pumps, makes change and comes up with one-liners. Born and raised in Anaheim, he is enthused about getting people safely around his hometown.

“But, homes, I’m tellin’ you, man, the questions I get you wouldn’t believe,” Castro says, shaking his head.

“Where’s Disneyland? Right over the bridge. Where’s the stadium? Right up Katella. Where’s the Santa Ana Freeway? Right there, where all the cars are going fast. Where’s Katella? Right here! You’re standing on it!”

Summer increases the requests for directions, especially near tourist destinations such as amusement parks and the beach. But shopping trips multiply the number of confused drivers too, according to Gabriella Escodero, who works the afternoon shift at Sunshine Gas & Food Store in Costa Mesa, which is adjacent to the Costa Mesa Freeway, just before it empties into Newport Boulevard.

“People come in looking for South Coast Plaza, the Lab and Nike Town,” says Escodero. “Oh, and lots of them are looking for Kmart too.”

Service stations near freeways tend to attract the drivers who have wandered farthest from their paths.

“We get people in here thinking they are in San Diego, Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Bernardino, even Palm Springs,” chuckles Mike Sanchez, 29, as he waits to relieve Escodero and work the night shift at Sunshine Gas & Food Store. “But the ones I feel sorry for are the people looking for the airport. They can see the planes landing but they can’t find the place--and they are usually late for their flights.”

Most of the people who seek the guidance of Louis Frutos at Yorba Linda Shell & Tire on Yorba Linda Boulevard are looking for the same place, the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace.

“That’s a good thing, because I’m new to working in a gas station,” admits Frutos, 31, “and I’m new to the city too.”

Frutos was caught off guard by this aspect of his job, which otherwise boils down to taking orders.

“Nobody warned me at all,” he says. ‘Then on the first day I’ve got people coming in asking where they are and which way they should go. When I said, ‘I don’t know,’ they looked pretty surprised. I guess people just assume the guy at the gas station should know.”