Night in the City of Dreams

A friend once described L.A. as Fresno without the night life.

That was pretty much true when I came here 25 years ago and sundown sealed the town up tighter than a tomb.

You ate early, watched a little telly and then hopped into the sack, yours or someone else’s, and that was that.

The night outside was whispery-quiet and Bible-black, swept clean of just about everyone but the kinds of insomniacs who haunt Laundromats and all-night coffee shops.

Coming here from up north was something of a culture shock, because San Francisco was one of those places that invented sundown, and I was out a lot of the time crawling around the bay with the best of them.

I expected something different in L.A. because we’d heard about all those Hollywood parties and seen pictures of guys in tuxedos and women in gowns doing the town, but by the time I arrived the parties had all ended.

I’ll get arguments, I know, from those who can name a couple of dozen places that shone like beacons in the wee hours back then, but there weren’t enough of them to light the night. It was a transition period and an uneasy stillness lay over the dark sidewalks.

I remember once wandering all over this big, gray oatmeal of a town after a movie looking for something to eat that wasn’t a chiliburger and finding only a Chinese restaurant that served cold chow mein on a chipped plate.

Even those places along La Cienega shut down before they should have and Sunset Boulevard, the vaunted “Strip,” was a joke. Hollywood was a freak show, but the freaks scattered like lizards when the sun went down.

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I pay a lot of attention to L.A. after dark because night is a writer’s milieu, an arena of exotic fantasies. There’s a special quality to the darkness, an alto clarinet that soothes stress, a drum riff of steel brushes that lures you to quiet meadows of the mind.

I prowl like an old cat when the sun dies and stars appear diamond-bright over a velvet city. Day is a time of opals and emeralds but night belongs to those specks of hard, twinkling glory that God gave to lovers and sky-gazers.

What brings this all to mind is a growing awareness that L.A. has discovered sundown. Suddenly there are more late-night restaurants than San Francisco ever dreamed of possessing, more equity-waiver theaters, more jazz clubs and more coffee houses than ever existed in the old North Beach days.

Wandering around a few nights ago I heard a singer named Jane A. Johnston epitomize what the old cabaret singers used to be and are again in a city moving about after dark.

She was knocking ‘em dead at the Cinegrill in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where they say a vision of Marilyn Monroe haunts the back side of a mirror and the voice of Humphrey Bogart growls through the lobby in the stillness before dawn.

Johnston uses the middle initial, she says, to distinguish her from the other Jane Johnston who sings. I wasn’t aware of either one of them before hearing Jane A. at the Cinegrill, but who cares?

She’s a combination of Sophie Tucker and Shirley Bassey with a voice that sends chills through her audience. She can make you laugh and make you cry and make you glad you wandered into the night, looking for music.

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Finding a late place to eat is easy now and you don’t have to rot your insides with Tommie-burgers anymore. Restaurants with honest-to-God chefs attract after-dark diners like moths to a flame, and the moths come aflying.

The Sunset Plaza shopping area, for instance, was jammed with people dining at a half-dozen sidewalk cafes that could have been along a boulevard in Paris on a night as soft and warm as a woman’s kiss.

Not far away, coffee houses that catered to unpublished poets were doing a nice business and you could sit there for hours sipping lattes and wondering how anyone could stand in front of a place full of strangers and read the kinds of poems that even Allen Ginsberg wouldn’t touch.

But, hey, this was night in the City of Dreams, the reemergence of movement after dark, when fantasies thrive, music plays and doggerel drifts starward to the level of poetry.

We ended up dining at the fabled Le Dome as the clock ticked toward midnight, finally hunched over cognac and feeling the weary lateness, at peace with the drum riffs and the clarinets.

I’m not sure why L.A. is coming alive when the sun goes down. Maybe it’s the declining crime rate or the influx of New Yorkers or something magical and wonderful we can’t begin to perceive.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is mood and tempo and the soft enclosures of night’s embrace and being a small part of it once in awhile. What matters is recognizing the change and knowing that we aren’t in Fresno anymore.

Al Martinez can be reached online at [email protected]