unless otherwise stated.
Guns and apple pie
“He’s a gun-toting redneck cowboy and I came from pot-smoking, surfing hippies,” Serena laughed, patting Jimmy on the knee. “In a good way, I love you,” she said. “One of the things that was so, I think, appealing to me about Jimmy, was how very different we were.”
I was sitting with Jimmy and Serena Wiley on a patio at the Trujillo Ranch, a piece of Topanga history that rests on the slopes leading up towards Saddle Peak above the junction of Topanga Canyon Boulevard and Old Topanga. Jimmy’s mother, Rose Trujillo Wiley, was the granddaughter of Francisco Trujillo, who homesteaded the land in 1886. We talked in the shade of a 650-square-foot cabin made from railroad ties, where Jimmy and his five siblings were raised by Bob and Rose Wiley.
Rose passed away earlier this year but you could still feel her presence in the home and the beautiful nature that surrounded us. Rose used to read on the same patio where we had our conversation. While she would read, a female bobcat would bask in the sun, sharing the space with her.
Serena remembered when Jimmy first invited her over to the cabin to meet his family. His parents had just brought back a bushel of apples from Apple Valley, so Serena and Rose began to make apple pies together. They ended up making nine of them. While they were baking in the kitchen, Jimmy and one of his brothers started shooting guns outside.
“It scared the crap out of me,” Serena remembered. It was a “complete culture shock for me, because I didn’t know anything about that whole gun cowboy thing.” Rose, who was used to it, laughed at Serena’s reaction in the kitchen.
Jimmy and Stoney Joe
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a different color than most people around here,” Jimmy remembered being discriminated against for being a Latino when he attended Topanga schools in the early ’70’s. “It’s not that I couldn’t take care of myself. I was always in trouble,” he chuckled, referring to the fights. “I knew my way down to the principal’s office.”
Jimmy wore blue jeans, a white shirt and cowboy boots to school every day. “I was a loner growing up. I really didn’t know how to socialize well with the kids,” he reflected. “I didn’t worry about being hip, you know, I was just myself.”
At the age of six, Jimmy found a best friend who would be in his life for the next three decades, his horse Stoney Joe. “When you have a good relationship with an animal, they don’t judge you, they don’t discriminate.”
Jimmy’s older brothers first put him on a horse when he was two years old. When Stoney Joe, who shared Jimmy’s same birthday, came into his life, it was a match made in heaven. “You just couldn’t tell where Jimmy ended and the horse started,” Serena remembered. “It was a beautiful thing to see the way Jimmy rode horses. They were cut from the same cloth.”
Jimmy would wake up at the crack of dawn and be out on his horse all day, riding the fire roads, exploring the summits and crossing meadows. He described a different Topanga, a canyon with no fences and electric gates, connected by trails and dirt roads, a place where trespassing wasn’t an issue. He and Stoney Joe would watch the sunrise from Henry Ridge. The hilltops were islands breaking through a sea of white clouds. “That was my church,” Jimmy said.
“I had to put him down. He was thirty-one years old,” Jimmy said solemnly.
“Was he buried here?” I asked.
“Right behind that tree, with a multitude of other horses and dogs and cats,” Serena answered. The unplanned pet cemetery was on the same hillside where Francisco Trujillo planted a vineyard over a century ago. “There’s still grapes,” Serena said. “Yeah, there are still some rogue vines. The grapes are sweet,” Jimmy added.
“We were all just feral,” Serena said, remembering her childhood on Robinson Road. “My mom would tell a story about me coming back in the house with a king snake around my neck.”
“We just went wherever, did whatever we needed to do, and had freedom and fun. Now, if I think about my children, anything like that, I’m like, that is absolute insanity. Just crazytown.”
She recalled the historic flood of 1980 when the roads were washed out, nobody had power or water and Topanga creek turned into a raging brown river. Serena was almost thirteen when she and a friend tried to cross the creek.
“We were in it,” Serena emphasized, holding her flattened hand up to her neck. They had a raft and pool floaties and completely immersed themselves in the current.
Serena was three years old when her parents moved the family from a five-bedroom house with an indoor swimming pool in Malibu, to a two-bedroom house in Topanga that they shared with another family. She had five older brothers. A total of twelve people moved into the house in Topanga.
She attributes the decision to uproot her family in such a dramatic fashion to her father’s mental illness. “He was charming and charismatic and funny and handsome and all of the great things. And then he would start to go into a manic state and you could see it coming and he would lose his mind.”
Serena looks back fondly at her early youth in Topanga. “I think elementary school was great. I mean, you can’t get a better elementary school than that.”
She remembers a teacher named Mr. Russo, who took the kids into Topanga State Park to play “capture the flag” on Fridays. Serena’s mom would come to the school and teach ceramics. Other moms taught the kids tie-dying.
Serena believes the kids of Topanga have a unique life-long bond. “It’s nice when you can just sit down and have a real conversation with people you grew up around. You know, people I haven’t seen for a year, two years or whatever. Nothing’s changed. We just pick up where we left off.”
“It was a gift to be able to be free and do whatever, you know, but it came with a pretty heavy price for me,” Serena said. She described her sixteenth birthday party at her house as a rager, with live music and a keg of beer. As the guests arrived, they would hand her bottles of champagne. She lined up thirty-six bottles on the floor of her room.
“There was no parenting, no responsibility, none whatsoever,” she reflects. “I definitely suffered with abandonment issues because I felt like when nobody cares about what you do, then it just translates to them not caring about you.”
From Candy Bowls to House Clouds
Jimmy and Serena, now sixty-one and fifty-eight, first met at the Topanga Dry Cleaners, when Serena was four. It was run by a woman named Teddie Michand, who would drive the clothes down to the valley to be cleaned. Both Jimmy and Serena vividly remember the large glass bowl filled with candy that sat on Teddie’s countertop.
Jimmy and Serena’s paths crossed again at Topanga School. “Well, I remember being on School Road and telling you that you needed to leave me alone because I had five big brothers that would beat you up,” Serena said.
Jimmy busted out laughing as Serena told the story. “You didn’t leave me alone,” she finished. Her brothers hated Jimmy, and they would often fight. Serena compared their two families to the Hatfields and McCoys. “I just thought Jimmy was horrible. I thought he was a big bully. I thought he was mean. He was scary.”
Her opinion of Jimmy shifted later in life when they worked together for Topanga contractor Dick Sherman. They became friends and she realized he wasn’t a “big mean bully,” and was actually quite attractive. One fateful night, Jimmy had too much to drink at the local restaurant and watering hole, the Shemrun, later known as Froggy’s. The weather was terrible, and Jimmy was asking for a fight. Serena took his keys and drove him to her mom’s house, where he crashed on the couch. He was gone in the morning when she awoke.
“So after that, he felt beholden to me to take me out to dinner to thank me for taking his keys away,” Serena explained. That was August 1988, Serena was 21.
“Yeah, I really appreciated it. She was awesome,” Jimmy chimed in.
“We went out to dinner and then the next night I made dinner for him, and then I just never left,” Serena said.
Serena moved up to Jimmy’s studio apartment on Saddle Peak where they would watch the fog roll in like Jimmy did as a boy. “It was super cool because clouds would come through it, like they would literally come through the house because we were so high up,” she reminisced.
Our House
In the Spring of 1993, Serena and Jimmy tied the knot at the Topanga Community House. It “ended up meaning a lot more to everybody, because that was our house. We all grew up there,” Jimmy said.
The couple reminisced about Topanga Days at the community center. They remembered dancing in the “dirt bowl” to live music, wrestling and fighting with friends in the mud, and most importantly the half oranges filled with sorbet. It used to cost five dollars to get in. “We were canyon kids; we weren’t going to pay to get into it,” they laughed. The parade was total anarchy, with epic water fights and naked people directing traffic. “It just was completely crazy free. Just go and take to the street,” Serena remembers. Jimmy has a photo of himself on his dresser from those days, up on Stoney Joe in front of Froggy’s.
The wedding had to match the fun and excitement of those great Topanga Days memories, and it did. Everyone came together to make it happen. A family on Entrada told Serena she could use all the long-stemmed roses from their garden. Rocco’s Pizza connected them with a deli on Sherman Way that took care of all the food for three dollars a person. Serena’s brothers showed up to build a lattice backing for the ceremony with material provided by Ernie Demontreux at Topanga Lumber. Friends and family set up chairs and tables, blew up balloons and built a structure outside to help to accommodate over 300 guests that would attend.
“Everybody we grew up with, it was everybody, that’s a community,” Serena confirmed. The band “rocked the doors off” the community house, everyone was having a blast. “That wedding was talked about for years because it was so much fun. They’re still talking about it.”
“It’s not our home anymore. Yeah. It belongs to the newbies who need to write their own story,” Jimmy said. The couple lives in West Hills now. “When we moved up here, nobody wanted to be here, it was way too far removed,” Serena said. “We don’t live here because we can’t afford it. That’s just simple math, you know?” Jimmy added that Topanga is the “latest flavor” of the “fashion of real estate.”
“I think that people romanticize the idea of Topanga, and they try to make it be a little hippie enclave,” Serena said. “It’s kind of a joke to me…it’s not like that anymore. You know, your hat cost more than my first car,” Serena said. “It used to be beat-up VWs and now it’s Range Rovers and Teslas. It’s just the entitled element that bothers me.”
Although Jimmy and Serena don’t live in Topanga anymore, their connection is still deep. Jimmy works in the canyon every day for his business, Topanga Plumbing, and after work he goes up to the Trujillo Ranch and feeds the horses, something he has done since he was a little boy. They often meet up with their childhood friends with whom they have a tight bond. The couple is preparing for Rose’s memorial service which will take place at the Topanga Community House this month.
Jimmy shared some thoughts about his mother. “She stopped volunteering decades ago,” he said. “She figured she’d already done her time. All she had to do was just be here and just that alone meant a lot, to a lot of people.”
“She loved this place,” Serena said. “This was a hard ranch life for her, but she absolutely wanted for nothing. She was full of gratitude, and her simple life was all she needed. She would walk out here and just go, isn’t that beautiful? It is.”
