Moorpark, a rural place, is building, and in building, dying. : Requiem for an Inside Straight

The first view of Moorpark off the western end of the Simi Valley Freeway is one of rolling hills wearing the early colors of new growth. The landscape is toned in gentle shades of pastel, pale greens almost imperceptibly blending with wildflower hues of saffron and lavender, a soft, perfect vista on a day sweet with the advent of spring.

Then there are the housing tracts.

They intrude upon the pastels like slashes of red house paint across a watercolor canvas, a calamity of boxes that jar the eye away from the slopes and curves to the harsh geometry of construction eating into the hillsides, plowing away the wildflowers, gouging into the pliant soil.

And one realizes with sadness and certainty that Moorpark, a rural place, is building, and in building, dying.

The contradiction lies in the nature of the town, where form has for so long triumphed over function. Change is in the wind. Condos march like invading armies toward the heart of a slow-living byway tucked into a corner of Ventura County, and with it come the condo people, a breed without history who have never drawn to an inside straight.

A poker club was their first victim.

I’m sure you’ve never heard of the Rendezvous Card Room. Neither had most of those living in the Campus Park and Peach Hill tracts up until a few weeks ago.

The Rendezvous was housed in a nondescript, single-story building at the corner of High Street and Moorpark Avenue, a part of the town for 30 years. Only a sign on its side door that said “Low Ball” gave any indication that the windowless structure had anything to do with poker.

Two years after the club opened, Ventura County passed a law prohibiting new card rooms in unincorporated areas but allowed existing facilities to remain open as long as the original owner was alive. When Moorpark incorporated in 1983, it adopted a similar law.

The original owner was Bob Bonta, a well-loved man who died in December. A son and daughter asked the city to amend the ordinance and allow them to reopen the Rendezvous. The place was a part of the town’s history, a low-key, low-stakes social club where the old boys gathered at two tables with room for eight players each. Not exactly the casino at Caesars Palace.

The new owners agreed to keep it at two tables, to continue the policy of not serving liquor and to raise the age limit of its patrons from 18 to 21. Everyone seemed amenable to the reopening. Until the condo people heard about it.

They marched on the City Council waving petitions, full of dire warnings and grim assertions. The council, with the swift Pavlovian response that has come to characterize municipal politicians, knuckled under without a whimper and closed the Rendezvous forever.

The old-timers were bewildered. Down at Chuck and Stella’s Donuts, Stella Silverest shook her head and blamed the “new people.” Pat Kilmartin, who used to deliver papers to the club, said he was sad. Barbara Withers mourned for “an old friend.”

“I used to play cards there once in a while,” John Henkel said. He owns the J.J. Feed Store. “Most times only one table was going with about seven players. No booze, no music and no trouble. The new people seem to think it was one of those adult sex shops or something. I’ll miss the old Rendezvous.”

“It was always kept decent,” Stella said.

The term “poker club” has an emotional impact equivalent to shouting sex on a crowded beach. Women hide their children and men arm themselves to defend against whatever evil might be hiding among the green felt tables.

There are poker clubs and there are poker clubs. Some, on the one hand, invite the participation of card sharks who delight in seeing widows lose their homes in the turn of a single card, but others are places where old men gather to ease loneliness with a deck of cards.

It’s the difference between no-limit seven card stud and spit in the ocean played with match sticks. The Rendezvous was more of the latter than the former.

The condo people living in those boxes arranged in endless patterns of tedium assumed that to allow two tables to operate in an inconspicuous corner of town was an invitation to open a whorehouse in the Baptist Church. Extrapolation is a gift of the moral extremist who hasn’t stopped to wonder why the whores aren’t there already.

I know that everyone needs a place to live. I also know that we need the differences among us to blend, like pastels on the hillside, into a more appealing oneness. The old must exist to add dimension to the new, and the poker club across from Chuck and Stella’s Donuts was an element of the old, and now it’s gone.

Away from the tracts, Moorpark remains a gentle scattering of homes and stores. But soon, by the simple expediency of mass housing, it will personify an age that glorifies conformity with the same enthusiasm that elevates pepperoni pizza to the status of food.

I never set foot in the old Rendezvous Card Room. But I miss it already. Stella said it best. It was always kept decent.