Through a series of accidents and misunderstandings, I ended up becoming a journalist. First, a magazine hired me to write a short story; then they asked me and my «dark sensibility» to write an article about S&M nightclubs. I did, and some time later someone at the magazine gave my name to an editor at the Los Angeles Times, who called me up and asked if I'd like to do a weekly feature for the «Life and Style» section on, of all things, nightclubs.

This was ludicrous for many reasons, the least of which was that I had a baby on my hands. First, I don't like nightclubs and never did: the woof-woof, flash-flash gives me a headache. Second, I don't dance, and third, I'm known among my friends as someone who hates music. That isn't quite true, as I don't think anyone actually hates music; it's just that when I was sixteen, I was listening to 78s on a crank-up Victrola, while my peers were listening to whatever people listened to then--you see, I hardly even know. But I was broke and therefore decided that I would be a perfect nightclub critic, so long as I could turn up enough cocktail lounges and wagon-wheel-chandeliered hole-in-the-wall joints to keep me out of trouble.

My idea of a good bar is a place that serves beer and jug wine in juice glasses and has a pool table with no waiting, a microwave with a sign taped to the door that says «Meatballs, 10 for $1,» and Otis Redding on the jukebox. When I was growing up, my best friend, Karen, lived half a block away from a club on Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard called Geneva's, where we used to go to get barbecue, and which was the first place I ever heard «Brick House.» We weren't old enough to be there, but we were lipsticky preteens, and I was usually the only white person, and more often than not a couple of guys would flirt with us while we waited for our take-out. Since then, whenever I heard about a good bar, I went there hoping for Geneva's, but either I was too old or Geneva's really was the best bar in the Western world and it was a useless search.

Hollywood bars were particularly bad. The first one I went to, taken there by an acquaintance from New York--both of us new in town, with purses full of parking tickets--was the Coach 'n Horses on Sunset, because this was supposed to be a good bar. I didn't think so. Though it was dark and beery inside, there weren't any old people, which means a place isn't serious, it has no legs. The same held true for the Formosa, a West Hollywood Chinese restaurant that had the virtue of inedible egg rolls, but also a homogeneous population of rock-and-roll types who all looked as if they considered «Stairway to Heaven» an old standard.

I found a measure of solace at the Spotlight, where one of the regulars was an elderly transvestite in a wheelchair, and I didn't mind Bob's Frolic in a pinch, or Jumbo's Clown Room, which was a lineoleum strip bar in a minimall on Hollywood Boulevard where the girls looked very real and some of the patrons actually wore raincoats--but I didn't think any of these would do for my maiden Times assignment, since I really did want the job.

It dawned on me that L.A. was the first place I'd lived where I didn't know anyone who wasn't white, and I decided that was ridiculous and headed south to look for Geneva's, or something like it, or at least a place where even if everyone was twenty-three, they weren't all white.

I landed first in Lemert Park, at Fifth Street Dick's Coffee House, which wasn't a bar or a nightclub, but was still a joint. A tall, narrow space lined with counters and stools, a stairway in the back, marked by a sign that read: «Support jazz and jazz players. This is your music. Only you can let someone else own it.» The stairs led up to a low-ceilinged loft the size of a small motel room, with a tiny stage and some folding chairs, and a jazz trio playing furious bebop. Of course, given my nature, I don't really like bebop, but neither do I disapprove of it, and most of the time I like other people who like bebop, so I was happy, and I went downstairs and sat drinking coffee, and fell into conversation with a middle-aged white woman and her black daughter, who was a public school teacher, and a friend of theirs, a gray-haired man in a mudcloth coat and kepi who kept an African arts shop around the comer on Degnan Boulevard. It was a highly miscible crowd, everyone talking about the African-American renaissance and the community, again and again in excited tones, because it was new and they were still surprised that it was happening. Later, I walked over to the World Stage, a little place that looked like a storefront church, except that again it was jazz, and not even coffee this time, just the folding chairs. I sat, watching people listen, and ended up fascinated by a thirty-year-old man in knickers, socks, a tweed jacket, and a porkpie hat, who stood in the doorway surveying the scene, not entering, but stopping in to check it out on his way from one thing to another: it was an iconic image, and ever after it's been this man who springs to mind when I hear about «South Central» on the news-not the gangstas, not the riots, but the dapper man in the doorway of the jazz club who was on his way somewhere.

I left at two A.M., which I knew by then was still considered early in the evening in Liemert Park, where the real jam sessions began as the musicians who were in town to play the jazz clubs in Hollywood and Beverly Hills started dribbling in after their paying gigs let out. This was the place to be at six of a Sunday morning, if you were going to be anywhere other than bed, which I never am.

Then, on another trip south, I finally found my Geneva's--a blues tavern called Babe and Ricky's Inn on Central Avenue and Fifty-fourth. It's a frankly scary neighborhood, and you park, I'd been told, where the doorman can see your car. The doorman was a small, scarred, near-hunchbacked, pop-eyed man in an old army jacket that hung to his knees.

Inside it was a shotgun tavern; like all such spaces, it had a bar along one wall, a stage opposite, and room to barely squeeze past the bar stools to the booths in the back. The pool table was covered with a board and a tablecloth, on it the remains of somebody's birthday cake. On stage, an old man in a Jheri Curl and a sharp three-piece pinstriped suit with a nipped-in waist and flared trousers was on the sax, backing a proud-chested singer in a double-breasted maroon gabardine with a luxe sheen to it. In the booth closest to the stage, an enormous woman was enthroned on a pair of big pillows, the kind you normally see on a bed. She wore a black sequined dress and a black sequined hat on her gray, very coiffed head, and her eyes and mouth seemed to have been frozen in a benign smile for centuries. She nodded to the music, and between songs nodded in something I interpreted as general approval of a world in perfect working order, at least in that barroom eternity of which she was clearly the mistress. I knew right away that she was either Babe, or Ricky, or Babe or Ricky's mom, and that she'd always sat in that booth, and would be sitting there for ever and ever, and I worshipped her.

My friends and I shared a booth with an elderly couple in evening wear, who were on the way to their son's birthday party. We asked for martinis, and the waitress shook her head and said, «Beer.» We said, «Okay, beer,» and drank Budweisers from the bottle, while the couple next to us winked and doctored their Cokes from a half-pint of rum.

When the band took a break, an old guy in a cowboy hat approached the jukebox, then looked across the bar at the proprietress and called out, «Laura! Is it okay?» She nodded and waved a queenly hand at him, and he dropped his quarter in and played his song.

We weren't the only white people, or the only young people, or the most fabulous or pretty people, by far. On the way back from a trip to the rest room, I smiled at Laura, and she reached out and took my hand. «I hope you're having a nice time,» she said, «thank you for coming.» I felt like bawling, or like sliding into what was left of the booth next to her and sitting there for ever and ever. This was a perfect world, and even though I was a visitor, I felt more at home than I did in any of the places I really lived. I must have been romanticizing the situation--but then, that's ultimately what the nighttime congress of strangers in a bar is for: being an outsider in a warm room. Who doesn't feel at home in the act of tearing shreds of romance from the teeth of pain, listening to someone with a life sing the blues? That is what a good bar is all about, and that is how I felt at Babe and Ricky's.

I wrote up Liemert Park for I the Times story (I couldn't write about Babe and Ricky's, it was too personal), and I got the job. After that I covered Russian cabarets in the Valley, piano bars in Santa Monica, even the cocktail lounge in a Denny's restaurant in Glendale, anyplace where I wouldn't have to dance and that wasn't too noisy, and I went back to Babe and Ricky's a couple of times before it closed down for good, though not as often as I might have since I had to go to so many new places for my new job.

Then I learned that I was in fact, technically speaking, a «society writer» for the Times, and that my job also included something called party coverage, which meant that I ended up one night stuffed into a three-dollar ball gown from Goodwill, playing pattycake with Bob Hope at a reception for Prince Andrew at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, which was both exciting and humiliating, and I realized with a shock that I was now a journalist.

© 1997 by Hillary Johnson