Coming back up Wilshire, as we slowly made our way out of Santa Monica and towards Brentwood,
both of our easy strolls gave way to pronounced limps. We had started our walk back at 3rd street and were now approaching the 20's. The Virginian wasn't equipped with the right footwear. That was her excuse. Mine had more to do with the same 'old before my time' afflictions that come and go like the weather over the bay. Whatever it was, we both needed a break. A little pit-stop from the exercise.
Around where we were, Wilshire opens out into a wide, multi-lane carriageway, buffered on each side by stubby commercial spaces. It has the feel of those wide, winding highways that accountants ride through as they make their way home after work, past outer suburbia and on towards the outer, outer suburbia of their pre-fab McMansion houses. The white noise of never ending cruising steel, crunching changing gears and screeching brake-pads is often accompanied by a visual palate of blacks, greys, charcoals and browns. All over the world, such exact roads exist and on their sidewalks, as this all rushes past you, one tends to feel lonely and silent.
And Wilshire does look, sound and feel like that, but this ain't no kind of suburbia. This is Westside. Here, there are the beaches and the malls and the golf courses and the houses set amongst rolling gardens and the multiplex cinemas and the diners operated by consecutive generations of the same family and an uneasy sensation of general detachment that are all synonymous with suburbia, but this ain't no kind of suburbia. Los Angeles is one massive, spread out beast and Los Angelinos are so wrapped up in the road travel this necessitates, that, when compared to other cities, what they consider 'The Suburbs' begins much further out from the center. And even then, what is defined as 'The Center', changes depending on whom you speak to.
I don't expect this to make too much sense to you. Unless you have lived here, it won't.
Anyways, we made our way past the parking lot now converted into an outdoor Christmas Tree warehouse and towards the up-on-high, orange neon sign in front of us. It displayed a simple image of a floating Mexican wrestling mask. The Virginian spoke of the of the dark restaurant and bar it served to announce. Arriving at the windowless, square shaped, single storey bunker sitting at the opposite end of a small vacant lot, she pulled back a padded leather door and we stepped inside – just for a break from our exercise.
First effort was all put into adjusting our eyes. To the left snaked an S-shaped bar, over which hung several lines of tiny, novelty lights – little plastic chillies, glowing alternating red and orange. These were supplying all the light, which is to say that there wasn't much light at all. Perhaps there was a red lightbulb or three scattered around the other side of the room, but it was too dark to really notice. Two stools sat empty at the further end of the bar and we claimed them immediately.
Down along from us sat two rambling, middle age men dressed in the usual Westside manner (tattered, loose T-shirts and jeans - all part of a general refusing desire to mature their image beyond what they looked like in adolescence), a lone urban cowboy nursing a light beer, a Latino chap working through a pile of papers in front of him and three executive looking fellows all with white hair and several of the top buttons of their business shirts undone.
The bartender, had either dark blonde hair or light brown hair and a soft smile that somehow seemed friendly whilst not necessarily hospitable. She looked to be pushing the northern end of 40 years of age and moved with the tiredness that would entail. We ordered margaritas, she offered some chips and salsa and we settled into the rich vibe the joint and it's patrons had been easily working on for hours.
The room was divided by a partition through the middle that served to separate this small bar area from a small dining area beyond. Wrapping around the walls on that other half was several fifties-style diner booths, large enough to accommodate six patrons each. There were five of these booths and maybe four more groupings of tables and chairs scattered in front of them. The same line of glowing plastic chillies ran around across the top of the walls, but each table did come with it's own little addition of flickering candle. Something about a barely lit room is so damn magnetic to me.
The two overgrown teenagers besides us started talking football. College football. Either side of the bar was adorned with a widescreen TV and college football was what they were showing. I got on my usual soapbox about how unjust it was that these young athletes get paid nothing to smash into other helmeted kids, whilst all the time raising hundreds of millions for their schools. That is really the only semi-informed opinion I have on any college sports. Other than that, I got nothing. But they were way too wasted to notice and kept me in their conversation longer than I had any real right to be.
They were two old friends who didn't get see each other as much as they once did. One lived in LA and one was visiting from the east coast. The day before, their Thanksgiving lunch in The Valley finished up whilst the afternoon was still early. The rushed affair was made up of just the two of them and the self-loathing of that loneliness started to descend down. They could have chosen to face that grey cloud with a little booze and melancholy and whole lot of honesty. They could have. But they didn't. Instead, the local based one put out that phone call for drugs and they headed for Hollywood. 24 hours later and they had somehow made their way further west, still mumbling and rambling on and in desperate need of a bed.
Our bartender had seen this all before. Many times. The venue was designed to entirely block out the sunlight and replace it with a post-midnight, dingy gleam. The sort of folk this attracts are those aiming to refuse to accept that the sun has come up. It was a place to deny the senses and repel responsibility. She showed the little rolling mess next to us a generous slather of patience and forgiveness. That smile never left her face.
This felt like the beginning of my kind of scene. The room and the soft, red barstools, filled with dulled light and flawed souls. The sort of thing that felt part Bukowski, part Hunter S. and part old discarded, black and white MGM film. I wanted in - or, to be more accurate, I wanted back in. I've stepped away from the darker places of my imagination lately - or maybe, to be more accurate, I've stepped away from the darker places of my reality. I’m trying to get back and sometimes to do that, you gotta get away.
But today wasn't going to be the time to get back to mine. The Virginian and I were only passing through. We weren't dressed and ready to stay any longer than we already had. We were in the middle of a workout and could only really interrupt that with a couple of drinks and a few corn chips. We were just on a break. So we fell back out onto Wilshire with it's sunshine and suburban sound-scape.
I know that bar is there and I know where it is - just a little further on down the road.
