‘Gimme a Break!’ : Taco Stand’s Din Drives Couple Up Wall, Into Court

The way Glenda and Leanzie Taylor tell it, most of their nights during the last two years have been spent lying in the tense darkness of their apartment, waiting anxiously for the dreaded sound:

Gimme two tacos! Four Cokes! Extra hot sauce!

In October, 1984, a 10-year-old Taco Bell restaurant next door to the Taylors decided to boost sales by installing a speaker hookup for drive-through customers.

It was a good idea. Substantial numbers of hungry motorists on busy Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, a couple miles from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, began cruising in and calling out their orders.

Unfortunately, because the lot was unusually small, the speaker wound up only 41 feet away from the Taylors’ first-floor bedroom window.

Conversation from the speaker traveled over a low brick wall, and with it came other noise--from the engines and radios of cars that pulled up next to the speaker, and from the irritated voices of patrons who had to place their orders more forcefully when the noise of engines and radios grew too loud.

It was in this way that the Taylors and their young daughter became the unwilling beneficiaries of a 20-month course in Taco Bell’s menu.

“With a pencil and a price list I could tell you exactly how much money they make,” Leanzie Taylor, 46, said in a tone of weary disgust.

The couple, both of whom take medication for high blood pressure, said they found themselves falling asleep on their jobs and quarreling over whether to move. Many nights, they said, they flipped coins to see who would get to sleep on the sofa in the living room, farther away from the noise.

“We used to be lovebirds. They almost made us hate each other,” said Glenda Taylor, 46. “You lie there waiting for the next car. The next taco order.”

“There were times,” her husband added, “when you’d come awake from it--the hollering on the speaker, the engines revving, the radios blasting--and you’re like this.” He held up his hands and shook them with rigid tension. “It just scares you.”

Last month, the Taylors ended their nightmare by moving out of the La Salle Avenue apartment building, which they had owned for seven years, into a house on nearby West 42nd Place that they had purchased strictly to fix up and resell.

The noise problem was inherited by one of their tenants, 63-year-old Ferma Dawson, who had been living in an upstairs unit (where the sound was less bothersome) but wanted to move to the ground-level unit because she could no longer carry her great-grandson, a cerebral palsy victim, up and down the stairs.

“Ooooh, it’s awful,” Dawson said last week. “You just can’t sleep, particularly on the weekend,” when the restaurant is open until 2 a.m.

Such disputes between drive-through restaurants and residents are routine, according to police officers who specialize in such squabbles. The difference here, they said, has been the length of the argument, the inability of the Taylors and Taco Bell to compromise and the fact that the Taylors have gone to court on several occasions in an unsuccessful effort to force the restaurant to turn down the volume of the speaker and to limit its hours of use.

Still pending is a $2-million suit in which the Taylors accuse Taco Bell’s franchisee, C. R. Padot, of creating a nuisance and inflicting “emotional distress.”

In court documents, Padot has denied that the speaker represents a nuisance. His attorney, John Conkle, said Padot “tries to be a good neighbor” and had modified the speaker to reduce the volume. He noted that the Los Angeles Police Department’s Noise Task Force declined to refer the case to the city attorney’s office after making several inspections, and he accused the Taylors of having an “unrealistic” approach to compromise.

Vital to Business

(Economically, the speaker is vital to Padot. More than 40% of his restaurant’s sales come from drive-though patrons, according to a declaration by a Padot employee filed in court.)

The Taylors, in turn, criticized the Police Department for failing to measure the noise at the most intense hours. They also noted that Padot did not install a device to automatically limit the speaker’s volume until December, 1985, 14 months after their complaints began and three months after they went to court. While the speaker made less noise, the drive-through service attracted just as many noisy customers, the couple said.

In the early months of their ordeal, they complained, they were rudely treated by employees of Padot’s restaurant when they asked that the speaker volume be turned down.

“One of the things that would do me in,” her husband said, “was when I’d call up and ask if they could turn it down and they’d say, ‘We’ll turn it over to the day manager. . . .’ When you need rest--tonight--you can’t wait for somebody to do something tomorrow. During the day, I’d find myself falling asleep. Being an electrician, it gets kind of dangerous. Your mind isn’t telling you fast enough what you should be doing.”

‘Crying and Yelling’

One early entry in a handwritten chronology of complaints that Glenda Taylor kept for her attorney read: “Speaker so loud at 8:30 p.m. it overrode TV in our bedroom.” Another told how she and her husband “fought because I sat at my desk crying and yelling at midnight.”

The fatigue and bitterness built until one evening Glenda Taylor said she found herself telling a police officer on the phone, “If I didn’t have a little girl, and if she didn’t need a mother, I’d take a sledgehammer and slam that damn thing into the ground.”

Glenda Taylor said her anger is as much over the fact that Padot gave her no advance notice of the speaker as with the headaches it has caused.

“That bothered me,” she said. “I come from a little town in New Hampshire where you don’t do things without having some kind of meeting.”

Forming Task Force

According to Los Angeles city planners, there are no ordinances requiring merchants such as Padot to notify next-door neighbors. However, on Friday, the City Council voted to form a task force to investigate problems caused by fast-food restaurant speakers. The task force proposal was made by Councilman Robert Farrell, who once attempted to negotiate a settlement between the Taylors and Padot.

The study will include consideration of establishing minimum distances between speakers and residential properly lines and limiting hours of use.

The Taylors are still repairing their new home on West 42nd Place but say that the silence more than makes up for the clutter.

“I’ve gotten tired out over the last two years,” Glenda Taylor said. “We’re remembering what a good night’s sleep feels like.”

If her husband had had his way, they would have moved out of the La Salle Avenue apartment sooner.

“I didn’t want to,” Glenda Taylor said. “I was angry. I almost would have dealt with dying there to get that speaker out of there.”