Irony is that I met her at a bar called ‘The Black Cat’, at the Sunset Junction on the East Side, and that I lost her at a bar called Lucky’s on the West Side. Both establishments invoke some sense of chance, too fitting for the LA dating scene, but maybe that’s just a bar ‘thing’ – to make you feel from the name on the wall, that anything could happen. Since this is a blog, here are reviews on two of LA’s magic rabbit feet.
The Black Cat was her choice. We met late – 9 o’clock. I waited outside – nervous when she rolled up in a white Lyft. We did not recognize each other on the sidewalk but when I followed her inside we laughed about that. The bar is a speakeasy-style with long brass furnishings and tile flooring. No circular flow, instead a long and narrow collection of taps. Alcohol like you might expect, and hipsters like you might expect, but all of it nicer.
“I saw Jon Hamm here,” she suggested toward the lounge seating near the bar’s front. “He watched my bag.” She seemed to me a cynic. Smart and quick and skeptical. So I found the John Hamm sighting charming – a hint at something softer underneath the armor that we both held up for ourselves.
We ordered whiskeys, I think, but it’s a dim memory. I can report that The Black Cat: its staff, its purse hooks, even its stools amplified our night. The bar’s charm melded into a comfortable blur of propriety around us while we drank, and as we drifted from surface topics to questions or challenges: God, Trump, Spielberg’s legacy and the death of modernism after Joyce. We drifted from alcohol to cigarettes, to other bars, and to other secrets.
She walked me to my car when we were drunk at the end of the night, the two of us laughing at one another. And she took a Lyft ride home. I watched her go, knowing that something important had happened, though I was unsure of what exactly, or for how long.
Black Cat proved to be a happy stroke of chance, but Lucky’s on the west side was a mistake for all parties involved. Lucky’s is a gastro that sits on Culver Boulevard in the scooped out bones of a used-to-be red brick eatery known as Dear John’s, still proudly displaying that marquee as if in reverence. In retrospect, the use of an old marquee over a new bar was another dead albatross I should have heeded.
She was exhausted, this time not arriving shiny in a Lyft but arms-crossed and sullen, while we gazed together, bleary-eyed across the bar I’d chosen. Inside it was a shouting match of business types standing at high tables in the room’s dead center. I couldn’t hear her snarking remarks about the din over the sound of it. The staff was almost always missing but friendly when they appeared, and the bar was not long or brass, but only stained wood made to look trendy. We ordered food to pick ourselves up and to fill the silence that loomed over our corner booth.
My sandwich reminded me of ‘hot lunch’ from grade school. It was a badly carbonized chicken stuck between two chewy buns. She ordered a burger that I think was just ‘fine’. We washed it all down with margaritas: served wrong – in high stem glasses with borders jagged from so much salt, that glittered on our loaded table like diamonds after we had walked away.
In the parking lot (where it was quiet) the ill-fate found us. We broke apart in a fond way, with tears while she voiced to me her concern for our futures: mine and hers as separate, and disparate things. It was not a long dalliance but long enough to write about.
She did not Lyft away. I drove her home and we slept in her bed together. And that has made the pain of parting all the sweeter for it. -FM
El Golpe Avisa 