Chanchanit Martorell has been on the front lines of nearly every major crisis in Los Angeles over the last three decades. Her nonprofit, the Thai Community Development Center, grew out of the relief and redevelopment services she provided in the aftermath of two events that reshaped the city: the 1992 Uprising and the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

In 1995, she helped rescue more than 70 garment workers who had been trafficked from Thailand and forced to work up to 22 hours a day in an El Monte sweatshop patrolled by armed guards. The raid became known as a landmark human trafficking case, leading to sweeping federal reforms including new protections for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States against their will.

Rotchana Sussman, now a chef and restaurant owner, was one of them. “We were threatened by the owner of the compound to never open the door to anyone you don’t know, there might be consequences. So we didn’t open the door. We were terrified,” she recalled. “I heard one voice, speaking Thai, and that was Chancee.”

But of all the suffering and unrest Martorell — better known as Chancee — has responded to throughout her career, nothing could have prepared her for the years of agony that came with undertaking a city-funded development project of her own design. “It’s just the most complicated and torturous and painfully excruciating process and I would not want anyone to have to go through that,” Martorell recalled. She remembered becoming so overcome with despair at one point during the finance negotiations that she says she warned her staff, “If you see on the news a story about an Asian woman below that bridge, that was me that jumped off.”

Martorell, who is warm and soft-spoken, was sitting on the couch at the Thai CDC’s office, which is nestled in the basement of an affordable housing complex the nonprofit owns and operates in central Hollywood. It was March 2019 and she’d hoped to unveil the Thai Town Marketplace, a food hall intended to kickstart low-income chefs and first-time entrepreneurs, that summer. It had become her great white whale, the elusive culmination of decades of work advocating for immigrants in Los Angeles. “Once it’s open, I can finally retire from the Thai CDC,” she said.

A month later, the Thai CDC convened a meeting for vendors who had signed up to participate in the market. To some participants, the update came as a surprise. “When [Thai CDC] told us they were having a meeting for it, I was like, ‘Oh is this happening?’” Genrich Criste said one afternoon at Fairfax Trading Post, where his family operated the food stall GC Crepes. “To be honest, I gave up on it a long time ago.”

Martorell had hoped to debut the Thai Town Marketplace at Songkran, the popular Thai New Year festival her organization holds every April on Hollywood Boulevard. But when it rolled around that year, the Tyvek-wrapped construction site was still a long way from resembling anything like a food hall. The 52-year-old nonprofit director, who has the patience of a preschool teacher and the perseverance of an activist who has successfully lobbied City Hall, was exhausted but unfazed.

Speaking in Thai and then repeating herself in English — her speech is often peppered with the academic jargon of political science and urban planning — Martorell encouraged vendors to set up booths on the street instead, pitching it as a marketing opportunity all the same. “With this marketplace, I’ve had 1,000 contingency plans. Either way, we will have a preview,” Martorell, who wears her silver-streaked dark hair parted to one side, told the group. “We are not going to miss out on this opportunity of attracting 400,000 people and publicizing the Thai Town Marketplace. Whether by hook or by crook, we are going to have something.” Then she paused as though contemplating the uphill battle both behind and undoubtedly still ahead of her, and said with a laugh, “I deserve to be committed to an insane asylum.”

More than a year after the Songkran Thai New Year festival — which was canceled this year due to Covid-19 — the Thai Town Marketplace has yet to open. The ambitious dining hall was intended to offer disadvantaged business owners the experience, funding, and education to branch out and start their own brick-and-mortar restaurants. Instead, it has become a logistical and legal logjam, leaving its participants in a perpetual state of limbo and Martorell herself at one point suicidal.

Now, four years after breaking ground and 14 years after it was conceived, the Thai Town Marketplace is finally nearing completion. But with a global pandemic eviscerating the restaurant industry, the timing couldn’t be worse. How did a charitable public project become a Kafkaesque nightmare for one of the city’s most visionary activists?

To fully appreciate the Byzantine saga of the Thai Town Marketplace, you’d have to go back to 2006, just a few years after the designation of Thai Town and the opening of the Metro Red Line station there. The Thai CDC had been offering small business workshops, but to many of the low-income entrepreneurs it served, applying for loans and accessing credit was still a massive long shot. That’s when Martorell came up with an idea: If the Thai CDC took care of all the costly overhead associated with starting a business — property leasing, permitting and licensing, operational costs — then entrepreneurs only needed to worry about creating and selling their own products after paying a subsidized rent.

Martorell sensed that food would be the ideal format for the experiment, but the UCLA-trained urban planner wasn’t going to rely on her hunch alone. After all, this was a full year before Jonathan Gold transformed Jitlada into a celebrity hot spot with his LA Weekly review, and several years before Grand Central Market began courting small-batch bakeries and farm-to-table butchers. So Martorell commissioned her staff to conduct research, just as she’d done in the aftermath of the L.A. Uprising (the resulting surveys laid the groundwork for her successful campaign for City Council to designate a portion of East Hollywood as Thai Town in 1999). The research showed that Martorell’s instincts were right: public food markets all around the country were economic drivers, especially for immigrants.

In 2007, a federal grant lavished the Thai CDC with nearly half a million dollars for pre-development. That was the easy part. Collaborating with the city turned out to be far more arduous. The following year, the non-profit scouted what it thought was the perfect location: a former Out of the Closet thrift shop on the ground floor of an affordable housing complex just above the Metro Red Line at Hollywood and Western. Thai CDC conducted a feasibility study, bid the project out to architects, and applied for a change-of-use permit. But the property may as well have been a booby trap, laced with corrosive, borderline-comical setbacks at every turn.

READ MORE: TheLAnd Interview: Roy Choi

For starters, it was owned by Metro, the county transit agency, and leased to a private developer, McCormack Baron Salazar, which required a sublease agreement so complicated that it took three years to negotiate. “This one was probably more unique than most because it involved land that was outside of our original ground lease area, so we had to circle back with Metro and deal with all their requirements,” says Dan Falcon, the managing director of West Coast operations for McCormack Baron Salazar. “If we had control originally it wouldn’t have been as big of an issue because we would have been able to deal with Thai CDC directly instead of having to involve Metro.” (Metro spokesperson Brian Haas confirmed via email that “this was a unique and complicated situation and it requires a little bit of history.”)

The deal finally closed in 2016, but the Thai CDC wasn’t happy with the terms of the sublease — five years with an option for another five — which left little time for it to fully enact its big economic experiment. The short span of the lease also discouraged investors from financing the increasingly costly project, which at that point had been ten years in the making. “I searched for all kinds of financing. They’re like, ‘No collateral, you don’t own a thing. A lease agreement for five years with an option for another five? No way,’” Martorell recalled of the responses she got from investors. “So I went to all the banks. I went to everyone and got declined left and right.”

Meanwhile, the Thai CDC had begun recruiting food vendors by posting fliers around town and placing newspaper ads targeting L.A.’s Latinx, Armenian, Black, Filipino, and Thai communities. Applicants had to be low-income, not already have an existing brick-and-mortar restaurant, and agree to enroll in the Thai CDC’s free entrepreneurship training program, which required the development of a business plan. After a taste test, 18 applicants were narrowed down to a dozen. In 2016, they put down a deposit and signed three-year leases for stalls at the Thai Town Marketplace. By the time the contracts expired, the thinking went, the vendors would have enough experience and capital to open their own restaurants, freeing up space for the next crop of entrepreneurs. (Of course, those leases are still being amended, as the opening date remains in flux.)

The Thai CDC broke ground in 2016, but construction costs had already ballooned to over $4 million, more than double what the feasibility study had estimated in 2008, at the height of the Great Recession. Desperate to raise additional funds, Martorell turned to her City Councilmember, Mitch O’Farrell. He connected her with the city’s Economic & Workforce Development Department, which located three different pots of money amounting to some $2 million. The Los Angeles Development Fund, a separate city-affiliated agency, pledged to come up with the remaining $2 million through federal tax credits aimed at incentivizing investment in low-income communities.

With the city’s backing, the Thai CDC was finally able to secure an equity investor. But even that turned out to be exasperating: Financial negotiations between multiple sets of lawyers, including from the city’s Economic & Workforce Development Department, dragged on for months. “It usually takes two years to close such a complicated deal,” Martorell said of the financing process. “I took it on myself; it was grueling, agonizing, and suicidal.”

Ultimately, the Thai CDC leveraged its newfound funding to secure a 50-year lease, a far cry from the initial five-year lease it was offered. (Technically, it’s a sub-sub-lease, because the Thai CDC was required to form a new nonprofit for the Thai Town Marketplace in order to harness the federal tax credits, which means the nonprofit is actually subleasing the property to itself.) But the victory came at the cost of Martorell’s mental and physical health. By the time the deal finally closed, on January 3, 2018, she was just getting released from the emergency room. She’d checked in on New Year’s Eve with a case of bronchitis that had turned into pneumonia.

Construction began anew that month, with completion set for fall 2018. But that timeline hardly accounted for the bureaucratic nightmares that soon followed. The reasons for the delays are in dispute: To the Thai CDC, the various city agencies controlling its money pot have failed to distribute the funds in a timely manner — or sometimes at all — creating work stoppages that have halted construction for long stretches of time. To the city agencies, the Thai CDC has failed to properly fill out the maze of paperwork required before it can disburse the funds. “We all have oversight behind us. The federal government is like, ‘Did you do this the way you’re supposed to?’” says Sandra Rahimi, a manager at L.A. Development Fund. “We can’t just say, ‘Oh I like Chancee, I’ll just do this.’”

The project, it seems, has suffered from a toxic mix of bureaucracy and bad luck — the latter of which is something all parties can agree on. Rahimi points to a litany of other factors that have caused dire delays, from construction near an adjacent childcare center that required a sign-off from the state of California, to parking issues, to literal rainfall — that rare Southern California weather phenomenon known to wreak havoc anytime it drops from the sky. “It’s not typical,” says Rahimi, who insists that in her decade-plus working on nearly two dozen projects at L.A. Development Fund, the Thai Town Marketplace has been by far the most delayed. “I would say this is a worst-case example of a project where everything that can go wrong, [does] go wrong.”

Then, this spring, just when Martorell thought the Thai Town Marketplace was almost ready to open, the coronavirus pandemic hit. Electrical and plumbing work has been delayed as construction workers stagger their shifts to socially distance. (This is, of course, after an obscure city ordinance required them to wait a full year from the time the street was paved, in April 2019, before they could drill into it to locate the water, gas, and sewer lines.) “We’ve dealt with all these unforeseen circumstances and external factors that caused a delay, but now with Covid, goodness gracious,” Martorell said on a phone call in May. “Our vendors are really scared. This is not the way for them to open and it’s not going to do as well [as] if it had been normal circumstances where people can actually come.”

Meanwhile, some vendors have taken their businesses into their own hands. Sussman, who met Martorell that fateful day in El Monte, opened White Springs Café, a vegan Thai takeout restaurant in Arcadia, in May. “I won’t let anything stop me,” she said of the cafe’s opening, adding that she always finds “a desperate situation to be the best opportunity.” And Gina Criste, who ran GC Crepes out of the Fairfax Trading Post and Calabasas farmers market before the coronavirus hit, is working on plans to partner with an existing Echo Park restaurant this summer. “If we don’t keep innovating or adapting or making changes then we’re not gonna be successful, we’re not gonna be in this business for the long haul,” Criste said on a phone call recently. “We just have to be open.”

In the second week of March, Martorell flew to San Francisco to attend a conference aimed at making Asian Pacific Islander communities more visible across the country. Advocates and nonprofit leaders discussed strategies for reviving regional Chinatowns and other culturally significant enclaves at a time when many of them are struggling to survive. Then, a day before the convention was scheduled to end, the World Health Organization announced that Covid-19 had become a pandemic. Everyone flew home to their respective cities and tried to figure out what this meant for them.

In hindsight, Martorell, naturally inclined toward dark humor, found the whole thing ironic. Here they were, talking about ways to make neighborhoods like Thai Town stronger economically, and now, small businesses were being forced to shutter indefinitely. Not only that, but Asian people had become targets of harassment and discrimination — scapegoats for a disease President Trump called the “Chinese virus.”

The Thai CDC has historically relied on tourism — which draws crowds to restaurants, spas, and street festivals — as a means of providing economic opportunities for its community. But the pandemic forced them to reimagine new ways for businesses to endure. To Martorell, their survival is an economic issue, but it’s also existential: If there are no Thai businesses left in Thai Town, is it even Thai Town at all?

“Our fear is that 30 or 40-year-old businesses may not be here anymore by the time we go back to some semblance of pre-pandemic life,” she said on a phone call recently. “If you don’t have Thai restaurants, [spas, markets, and other shops,] then what’s going to be there to attract the local tourism and tourism from abroad?” With a tinge of melancholy, she answered her own question with a worst case scenario. “It may have to be more of a historic Thai Town rather than a living, breathing Thai Town — so we could celebrate the culture that continues, the heritage, where there was once this Thai Town.”

But lately, Martorell, who is so busy that she only sleeps two or three hours a night, has been consumed by more immediate concerns. She and her staff worked around the clock to set up a phone and email service where Angelenos can get help with everything from filing for unemployment to applying for small business loans to fending off eviction and deportation. They’ve also been distributing $100,000 in aid to undocumented immigrants; the goal is to give $1,000 to 100 people through a grant from the California Immigrant Resilience Fund. There’s also another $35,000 grant from the California Community Foundation that they’ll parcel out to needy Angelenos. They’ve additionally partnered with a new nonprofit, Asian Americans for Housing, to purchase meals from struggling Thai restaurants and deliver them to low-income seniors.

But there’s only so much nonprofits and other organizations can do without government intervention. Martorell worries that if the city doesn’t act quickly to rescue small business owners, “There’s gonna be nothing left for people to come to and to enjoy.” She warned of a bleak future where Thai restaurants and Korean barbecue joints — the latter of which rely on diners gathering indoors around charcoal grills — are replaced by Walmarts and Targets. “It will basically mean we’re all gonna have to start over from scratch, but where are we gonna get the capital?” she said. “Folks will still be recovering from all the losses, and I don’t know if they can come back if they can’t fully recover.”

For now, Martorell is doing what she does best: Collecting data and harnessing public funds for her community. After the 1992 Uprising and the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, she and her team canvassed door-to-door, passing out surveys to assess the needs of people who weren’t otherwise being acknowledged by the city. On foot, they surveyed homes and businesses that had been red-tagged after the earthquake and held town halls to devise strategies for reinvesting in neglected parts of the city.

This time, social distancing means that the Thai CDC’s process is slightly different, and much more challenging. They’ve relied on Facebook, Zoom, and a messaging app called Line, which launched in the aftermath of a catastrophic Japanese earthquake, to spread the word about their services. “It’s really frustrating that the need is out there and you can’t go out there to do anything,” Martorell said. “You’re just hoping people will come to you.”

She hasn’t forgotten about the Thai Town Marketplace. It still keeps her up at night, all these years later. Accounting for the most recent set of delays, she’s hopeful that construction and inspections will wrap up in time for an official opening by the end of this year. That is, of course, unless another unforeseen disaster strikes. If and when it does, Martorell will be ready.

Correction: A previous version of this story, also appearing in print, misattributed a quote about karaoke bars to Martorell; there are in fact no karaoke bars in Thai Town, as Thai CDC opposes them.

This article appears in Vol. 2, Issue 2 of The LAnd. Click here to pre-order your copy.

The post Mission Impossible appeared first on theLAnd.

By the time the gunman fired his second round of shots at Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, 25-year-old Dani Merrill was already in flight mode, sprinting with her roommate toward the kitchen. She knew how to find it because one of her best friends, Megan Hickernell, used to bartend there. It helped that Merrill had been going to the 18-and-over spot, sometimes multiple times a week, for the entirety of her adult life.

The kitchen of Borderline Bar & Grill leads to the loading dock, where just before midnight on November 7, 2018, Merrill collided with another person fleeing the bar. She injured her knee, but kept running. She knows it could have been worse. She and her roommate never parked on that side of the bar, but for whatever reason, they had that night. It’s a detail that still sticks out as odd in Merrill’s mind. After picking up another survivor who was stranded outside Borderline without a car, Merrill and her roommate gassed it toward a maze of red-tile roofed parking lots on the other side of the Ventura Freeway and waited with the woman at a gas station until her ride came. Sirens cut through the quiet of the suburban night. Merrill never got the woman’s name. Until she got home that night, she never dropped her guard.

“If anything starts moving, we need to move,” she remembers thinking. “You don’t know if there’s one [shooter], you don’t know what they’re doing, because there’s multiple bars in that area.”

Merrill had begun to think like a military strategist. Or more aptly, like someone who had been through a mass shooting before. Thirteen months earlier, she’d fled from round after round of rapid gunfire during Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada. The massacre claimed 58 lives and injured hundreds more, making it modern America’s deadliest mass shooting.

Merrill is not the only country music fan to have survived both mass murders, each carried out by lone white men who then turned the gun on themselves, and whose motives are still unclear. One gunman was a 64-year-old gambler and real estate investor who lived just outside Las Vegas; the other, a 28-year-old U.S. Marine Corps veteran who reportedly posted messages on Facebook and Instagram mid-massacre. (The FBI closed its investigation of the Las Vegas shooting in January; its investigation into the Thousand Oaks shooting is ongoing.)

While Borderline Bar & Grill remains closed indefinitely, its regulars, some of whom have survived two mass shootings in less than two years, are working to rebuild their community. Other venues, like The Canyon Club, have picked up the slack, hosting Borderline Country Nights—led by Borderline’s former DJs and dance instructors—at both its Agoura Hills and Santa Clarita locations. But as Borderline’s regulars attempt to find normalcy again, few in these conservative-leaning pockets of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties are calling for tighter gun control. Unlike survivors of the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, who used their grief and anger to kickstart a national movement for gun control last year, many of those who were affected by the Thousand Oaks shooting prefer not to engage in politics at all.

On the first Saturday in December, Harley’s Valley Bowl, the anchor of a Simi Valley shopping center that looks unchanged since the 1980s, is packed with the same crowd that once packed nearby Borderline Bar & Grill. It’s a deceivingly sunny 60-degree-day that calls for a coat, but most people here wear T-shirts: T-shirts bearing the names of barely-21-year-old friends who died in the shooting; T-shirts covered with heart-shaped American flag patterns; T-shirts printed with the words “Borderline Strong,” a riff on the #Route91Strong and #CountryStrong hashtags that emerged the previous fall. Some people wear flannel or camouflage. Nearly everyone wears cowboy boots.

Neon lights bounce around the lanes of the bowling alley like lasers while Faith Hill and Tim McGraw sing a ballad on flat screens. A football game plays on the TV inside the bar, where a dozen foam-core-mounted posters adorn a long wooden table in the middle of the room. Mounted on each poster is a photo of one of the shooting victims. Friends and family have scrawled notes in Sharpie on the margins. “Hope you’re enjoying a Shirley Temple,” former Borderline bartender Hickernell wrote on the poster for Noel Sparks, a 21-year-old Moorpark College student who died in the shooting. Hickernell drew the outline of a cherry. “You will be missed on the dance floor.”

The note is a tribute to Sparks’ drink of choice. “She just always got a Shirley Temple and I always made sure there was a cherry because who doesn’t want a Shirley Temple with a cherry?” says Hickernell, 25, who wears her long blonde hair draped down her back. “Sometimes us dancers don’t always drink because it messes up our footwork.”

“Noel, may you dance with the ‘redneck angels’ above,” wrote Cody Seybold, a 25-year-old Borderline DJ and concert promoter who lives in Santa Clarita. It’s a reference to a line dance that Sparks used to request. “That’s the biggest memory of her I have because she’d always come up and ask for that dance,” Seybold says, wearing a gray baseball t-shirt with the logo of Borderline Bar & Grill. “Some of the dances we do are the name of a song. That one, I don’t know how it got that name.” Above Sparks’ photo is a note scrawled in swirly green letters. It reads, simply: “I love you Noel. Dad.”

Michael Steinhauser, a Borderline regular and Route 91 survivor, organized today’s event to raise money for the families of the 12 people killed in the shooting. There’s a raffle offering a bowling pin signed by rock star turned reality star Eddie Money, a pair of tickets to see country musician Dwight Yoakam at the Ventura Theater, various signed sports memorabilia from the L.A. Kings and L.A. Dodgers, and Borderline Bar & Grill-branded t-shirts and stickers for sale. This isn’t the first time Harley’s has hosted a fundraiser in the wake of a mass shooting: Last year, Steinhauser held a similar event here that raised more than $4,000 for the families of victims of the Route 91 shooting.

“I hate that we’ve done this twice now,” says Steinhauser, 29, who sports a moustache and dark hair combed to one side. “It really feels good to see so many people.”

Steinhauser still wears the admission wristband he got at Route 91 Harvest—he’s never taken it off. “It’s a constant reminder to just enjoy your life, you know, go out and do things that make you happy,” he says. “You never know what’s gonna happen. You never know when tragedy could strike.”

He wasn’t at Borderline with Merrill, his girlfriend, that Wednesday—he works the night shift at a company that builds aerospace parts for the military—but says the shooting at Borderline is even more personal to him than the one he survived, in Las Vegas. “Because these are our friends. These are people that I’ve seen their faces before, sometimes once a week,” he says of the victims, four of whom were people he knew personally. “It’s more than just a bar to us, it’s a home. There were years when I would drive out there by myself. I didn’t need friends to go with me because I knew I would walk in and I would meet people there.”

In fact, Steinhauser and Merrill met at Borderline seven years ago. It’s where at least three of Steinhauser’s friends either met their spouses, got engaged, held a wedding reception or some combination of the three.  

“When we got back from Route, that’s where we went. Everyone picked each other up, everyone had each other’s back,” Merrill says of Borderline. “A lot of us knew what everyone else was going through. And it’s really hard sometimes with people who don’t understand. You can’t explain it sometimes.”

I’ve never been to Borderline or spent much time in Simi Valley, but I grew up not too far away, in Santa Clarita, a city with similarly conservative politics and an abundance of young people with little to do (Simi Valley and Santa Clarita are the only cities in their respective counties to have voted to support President Trump’s lawsuit against California’s sanctuary law). I’m not much older than many of the people who considered Borderline their regular hangout, and when I found the bowling alley fundraiser listed on a public calendar on Borderline’s website, I knew I wanted to meet the people who went there, to hear their stories, long after the national news crews had come and gone.

At the bar of Simi Valley Bowl, almost everyone I speak with describes Borderline as a “family,” to the point where I begin to wonder if they’re repeating the same feel-good phrases they’ve rehearsed for the media. Among them is Stephen Cook. When I ask him what earlier news reports may have misunderstood about the country music outpost, he says he takes issue with its description as a bar—despite that it was, by way of name and business, a bar and grill. “It’s not a bar. It’s a family,” he insists.

Or as one regular, Austin Dougherty, puts it: “The bullshit from outside didn’t really get inside because I think the main rule there was just don’t be a dick.”

Borderline first opened along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu in the late 1980s and moved to Thousand Oaks, a wealthy suburban enclave straddling L.A. and Ventura Counties, in 1993. Cradled by the 101 Freeway, Borderline found its niche as a hangout for students of at least seven different colleges, including those as close as Cal Lutheran, a four-mile drive east, and as far as University of California Santa Barbara, some 60 miles north. Though it felt as intimate as a dive, Borderline billed itself as “Ventura County’s largest country dance hall & live music venue,” with a barn-like stage and 2,500-square-feet wooden dance floor. Twenty-somethings often showed up alone, knowing they’d run into friends once they got there, like in a TV sitcom in the days before cell phones required endless text-based coordination and anxiety.

“It’s like a giant high school party every week,” says Seybold, the Borderline DJ. (He went to a high school that was a rival to my own and says he knows some of the same friends as me.)  “It’s got a lot of drama inside… who’s dating who, who’s interested in whom… and that’s totally fine because it makes it funny sometimes.”

Bo Cooper, a former pro wrestler who hosted and promoted an event he calls “midget wrestling”—he claims it was Borderline’s top-selling event—started going to Borderline in 1997. He’d drive from his home in Palmdale, more than 70 miles northeast. “I was like 18 years old and I would just go there to party and chill with chicks,” says Cooper, who is bald with a white beard and tattoos inked across his arms and neck—a switchblade with the words “trust no one” on the left side and two bullet holes on the right.

When he admits he’s “not such a huge fan of country,” I ask him what compelled him to make this commute. “Country girls, man. There was a lot of ratios. Cute girls,” he says. “Sunday night was family night back then, so we could get into a bar and not drink alcohol and still hang out.”

Besides, he continues, “It’s not one of those club scenes where, you know, you could get into a fight and all that bullshit. It’s one of those situations where you could actually go there and let loose and that’s what the tragedy about this whole thing was is that people felt so comfortable being at Borderline because it was like a family there and no one could imagine that this would ever happen.”

Cooper is eager to compare notes with me about the places we used to hang out in Santa Clarita, but not everyone at Harley’s welcomes my presence. Shortly after I show up and start talking to people, two women who look to be about my age shout at me from across the bar and ask me which outlet I’m with.

I tell them about theLAnd, a new kind of publication that’s less interested in parachuting into national events and more interested in covering less obvious local stories—which sometimes means showing up to a bowling alley just outside L.A. County and starting uncomfortable conversations with people in mourning. They begin to loosen up to me. They tell me they’re sick of reporters showing up to their friends’ funerals, of live-streaming them on Facebook. And they don’t want to talk about politics. A lot of reporters, they say, want to politicize the shooting, to use it as an excuse to talk about gun control. I guess I am one of them.

There’s no eloquent way to ask a mass shooting survivor why he believes mass shootings keep happening, what can be done to stop them and how it is we’ve managed to become so shamefully numb to them, but here we are, and so I do it anyway. Steinhauser knows these question are coming, and he knows that “a lot of people will disagree with me and that’s okay.” It’s tricky, he says. “I own guns. I used to shoot competitively, and unfortunately being affected by these situations twice now, it really hasn’t changed my opinion. Because, you know, I know that my guns are never going to harm anybody.”

“Anytime there’s a tragedy and somebody’s upset, they want a fix. They want an answer, they want a solution to, ‘this will never happen again,’” says Steinhauser. “The first thing we can think is, you know, ‘let’s get rid of guns.’”

We’re sitting at a counter behind the bowling lanes and people are starting to trickle out behind us, carrying bow-wrapped raffle prizes out the door. The staff is setting up folding tables for the next event, a children’s Christmas party. The impossibly upbeat tune of “Turning Japanese” plays over the loudspeaker while I strain to understand what seems like a jarring disconnect between Steinhauser’s support for guns and the horror he’s seen them inflict.

“My big problem is, even if we snap our fingers and get rid of every single thing, that only takes guns away from people that we know that have them,” Steinhauser says. “If people are getting guns illegally, if people are getting guns from across the border or something like that, we have no control over that.”  

This is one of the arguments President Trump has frequently made in an attempt to justify his border wall proposal. But an FBI survey released last year found that a vast majority of the guns used to commit mass shootings in America were either obtained legally and specifically for the purpose of the shooting or were already in the shooter’s possession. (A 2013 University of California San Diego study found that nearly half of American firearm dealers were financially sustained by business from Mexico, not the other way around.)

Merrill walks over to the counter where we’re sitting and I tell her I’m struggling to wrap my head around her experience of having survived two mass shootings. I tell her I’m scared that mass shootings will become a routine part of American life, if they haven’t already. “It’s not going to stop anything that I do. You can’t live like that,” she says. “It happened once, it sucked, obviously. Then the second time, unfortunately, I knew how to react. Which is probably the scariest part to me, I guess, is that my initial reaction was like, I didn’t even think twice.”

I’m curious, does she think calls for tighter gun control are productive? “We have gun control,” she says. “The fact is, I think, mental illness needs to be approached and some sort of mental evaluation or something, I don’t know how we would do it, but something needs to be [done].”  (Ventura County Sheriffs were called to Thousand Oaks gunman Ian David Long’s home in April 2018 after reports of a disturbance. They decided not to detain him on a temporary psychiatric hold.)

While Seybold and many others in the Borderline community tell me that they have no strong feelings about gun control, at least one woman does: Susan Orfanos. A clip of the grieving mother, whose 27-year-old son, Telemachus, was killed at Borderline Bar & Grill, went viral after news cameras captured her seething with rage. “My son was in Las Vegas with a lot of his friends and he came home. He didn’t come home last night,” she said the morning after the shooting, her voice quivering as if she weren’t entirely sure she could still speak words at all. “And I don’t want prayers. I don’t want thoughts. I want gun control and I hope to God nobody else sends me any more prayers. I want gun control.”

Merrill has no doubt that the two mass shootings have changed her life, sometimes in ways that are hard to put into words to people who haven’t gone through it. Now, when she walks into a bar, the first thing she thinks about is how she’s going to get out of it if something terrible were to happen. She always scans a room for exits. She even changed her desk at work, a talent payroll company, so that her back no longer faces the walkway. “I just don’t like my back to anything anymore and I like to know what’s going on and being aware,” she says. “I didn’t think it would ever happen once to me, let alone twice. It’s just now I’m really aware of where I am. Even after Route I was really aware.”

“It was hard,” Hickernell chimes in, recalling that she and another friend went with Merrill to see country singer Eric Church at the California Mid-State Fair last summer. “We just kept Dani in the middle and were making her comfortable, and we left a little early.”

Merrill starts crying and Hickernell wraps her arms around her. “Don’t do that, don’t do that,” she says, then reconsiders. “We haven’t had our moment like this… We’re all like, ‘Don’t let the mascara run!’” Before today, the two friends had only seen each other briefly since the shooting, including at a memorial service for Telemachus Orfanos — or as they knew him, Tel — at the Infiniti dealer where he worked.

The fundraiser, which raised roughly $13,000 for families of the victims, is winding down, but nobody wants to be alone just yet. Some friends go to Merrill’s house to hang out. Others go to a Christmas-themed Borderline vigil at Simi Valley Town Center, where they line dance for hours in cowboy hats and cowboy boots.

On a rainy Wednesday in mid-January, I show up to Borderline country night at the Canyon Club in Agoura Hills, a venue that shares a shopping center with an antique mart, a perfumery and an upscale Mexican cantina. There’s a metal detector at the door, and inside a mechanical bull never seems to get a rest. It’s cold and miserable outside—not the type of weather anyone conjures when they think of Southern California—but you’d never know it given the number of women wearing short denim cut-offs, cowboy boots and crop tops (Among them, one that reads “Bad and Boozy”). Flannel is practically a uniform here.

At the bar, I run into Cook, the guy who took offense to Borderline’s description as a bar. I ask him how tonight compares to a typical Wednesday in Thousand Oaks. “It’s like Borderline but it’s not,” he says. “It’s nice of them to open their house for our family.”

DJ Josh Kelly, who used to play music at Borderline, pumps out techno remixes of country ballads like Rascal Flatts’ “Fast Cars and Freedom” (“You don’t look a day over fast cars and freedom / That sunset river bank first time feeling) and all the denim-clad people on the dance floor somehow synchronize their bodies together in a series of highly choreographed moves. Not everyone looks like someone who listens to country music. There are boys who look like high school jocks (some have X’s Sharpied on their hands to indicate they’re under of 21), a college-age woman who wears a Sex Pistols t-shirt and a group of guys who seem like they’d fit in better at a Weezer concert. But all of them, against all stereotypes, know how to line dance.

Their ease with twirling and two-stepping would suggest they didn’t just learn these moves, during one of three line dance lessons offered throughout the evening. Rather, most people here have been perfecting these routines for years. These are not dance routines you will find on YouTube or Instagram. Many of them were created by Borderline instructors and taught specifically to Borderline regulars. Their footwork is a badge of belonging, a testament to the countless hours stomping on the dance floor on Wednesday nights in Thousand Oaks. Some songs, like “Redneck Angel” have inextricable titles; others, like “Shape of You” (yes, like the Ed Sheeran jam) and “Fake ID Dance” (a nod to the less notable Big & Rich featuring Gretchen Wilson track) are named after the song in which the moves are set.

Line dancing, I discover during the 10 p.m. lesson, is far more difficult than it looks. “Rock, recover, shuffle, pivot,” the instructor commands, as if I know how to translate any of these words into physical movements. Line dancing, it also occurs to me, is not the wholesome family activity I somehow always imagined it to be. Sure, it’s dorky, but it can also be raunchy. Especially when it’s set to Salt N Pepa’s “Push It” remixed with Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing.” There is pelvic thrusting, followed by several sets of synchronized hand claps, creating a sound and motion that exudes confidence no matter who is creating it. Some dancers count off the numbers to the routine as they go. The steps are calculated, but everyone adds their own twist.

Near the opposite end of the venue, I spot Cooper, the former pro wrestler with the neck tattoos, and ask him to describe the night. “It feels revived,” he says. “You went from a family at Borderline to an even bigger family here.”

At Harley’s, these kinds of quotes sounded at first to me like rehearsed sound bites intended to appease a reporter. But the more I watch completely disparate-looking people line dance and clap and thrust in unison to dubstep remixes of “Blurred Lines,” the more I am convinced of their authenticity.

Seybold tells me that tonight feels like a typical Wednesday night at Borderline, but that things haven’t gotten back to normal just yet. There’s a memorial set up outside of Borderline, rows of white crosses on the street corner, and he and his friends still go visit regularly. “A lot of people will go out, have a six pack. take a shot,” he says. “Commemoration goes on everywhere.”

The opening notes of a remixed Tom Petty song, “I Won’t Back Down,” pipe in over the loud speaker and everyone starts in again on the dance floor.

Rock, recover, shuffle, pivot. Rock, recover, shuffle, pivot.

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