The Accent’s on the Positive

The morning after the Yankees humiliated the San Diego Padres in the World Series--What? This was a surprise to somebody?--the emigres ate breakfast together, as they do every Thursday.

Outside Coco’s restaurant, the sun was struggling to light up the day through a morose morning fog. The breakfasters, meanwhile, were trying to illuminate their emotional ties to where they come from, a place that defines them so completely to themselves that it might as well be an ancient ancestral homeland instead of a place where their families lived for only a generation or two:

Noo Yawk.

(You thought we were twalkin’ Philadelphia maybe?)

The breakfasters are members of the Big Apple Networking Group (BANG), a small organization of middle-aged business owners who hail from New York City. The club is a forum for exchanging business-related wisdoms. It also seems to function as a kind of support group for people bred on New York’s grit and horn-honking edginess, who, to their continuing amusement and bemusement, wound up living in the sunny playland of Southern California.

BANG’s meetings are occasions for much shoulder-shrugging, hand-churning, contentious hilarity. Free wag is given by the members to their native tongue as they sip their “cwoffee” and pass the “toyme” in wisecracks about the New York of “yestidee.”

Club President Jacqueline Campbell, the owner of a Sherman Oaks janitorial service, does her best to run the gatherings in an organized way. Robert’s Rules of Order, however, must have been written by someone from outside the city’s five boroughs.

“As formal as we want to be, you just can’t do it,” Campbell said. “We’re New Yorkers. We’re always interrupting . . . “

“It’s not that we interrupt,” interrupted Van Nuys computer consultant Jay Bennett. “It’s that we all talk continuously.”

Habits of speech--the tendency, for example, to utter statements in the form of questions--are not all that mark native New Yorkers as distinctive among the suntans and stucco of L.A.

“New Yorkers have a different attitude toward business than the people in California,” said Al Spaet, who runs a high-pressure steam-cleaning business in West Hills.

“They’re loyal,” added West Hills glasswork artisan Dinah Schindler. “They’re honest.”

“What? You haven’t met a lot of New York crooks?” demanded Northridge florist Marcia Moradi. “Give me a break!”

“We have this no-nonsense attitude toward business,” Spaet continued. “What you see is what you get. We don’t see that attitude in California business people. I mean, New Yorkers don’t do lunch. A New Yorker is someone who stands in front of the microwave and says, ‘Hurry up!’ That’s why we don’t make an effort to hide our accent, because it shows who we are.”

“Besides,” said Bennett, “New Yorkers don’t have accents. Californians have accents.”

Of the seven members at breakfast, all but one had been in California for 25 to 30 years. Insurance agent Neil Sinoway of Calabasas is junior man in this regard: He’s been here 19 years.

For all their tenure, BANG members retain vivid initial impressions of how different this place seemed from their birthplace.

“One of the first things I noticed when I came out here was the lack of potholes,” said Bennett.

“And of horns,” added Spaet.

“Right,” said Bennett. “Why do they even have horns on cars here, since nobody ever uses them or knows how to use them?”

“And what about the first time you went to a supermarket here, and the cashier said, ‘Have a good day’?” Campbell added.

“Yeah,” said Spaet, “or the first time the bag boy asked, ‘Can I put your groceries in your car for you?’ In New York, he’d want to put them in his car.”

Being New Yorkers, BANG members have no choice but to be realists. The New York that they emotionally hark back to is, they know, long gone. Visiting sadly deteriorated neighborhoods of their youth leaves them aching for what was. It also confirms them in the fact that, for all their rhetorical attachment to that other city, they are now Californians by dint of the sheer number of years they’ve spent here.

Like other emigres, they’ve become repositories of especially vivid memories of their native place, a place that now exists mostly in those memories. They didn’t stay to watch it evolve into something different. They dropped in only occasionally to mourn the changes, sometimes unmindful of what was not so good about the past.

“The fact is, we left for a good reason,” admitted Moradi. “If we love it so much, we’d still be there. We don’t love it that much.”

“We all love going back,” offered Campbell.

“Excuse me. Excuse me,” objected Woodland Hills accountant David Newman. “I don’t like going back.”

“I love going back,” retorted Campbell. “Every time I see a good bialy in a bakery window my eyes tear up.”

“Oh, they do not,” said Moradi. “Look. I hated it there, yet over time, all the bad things seem to fade. At our age, a lot of us don’t have living parents, and the memories come to seem so sweet, and when you come to these meetings or meet another New Yorker on an elevator somewhere, you get a piece of that sweetness, the emotional sweetness of childhood.”

Sinoway agreed. “My daughter goes to grade school in Calabasas. You should see the place. It’s beautiful. Me, I went to P.S. 103, and even the schools in the Valley, which everyone is always criticizing, are heaven compared to where we went to school.

“The thing about growing up in New York is that you become a survivor. Then you come here--and it’s so easy.”