Their Evenings Begin When Most People’s End. For Them, Finding the Hottest Underground Club in Town Is an Art. : Creatures of the Night

It is 9 p.m. on a Wednesday, the night when the downside of the workweek begins for most people. At the Imperial Gardens on Sunset

Boulevard in Hollywood, Suze is eating sushi. She is dressed in a satin Jacquard dressing robe over a black dress, a long string of pearls draped bandoleer-style from shoulder to waist. “I tell people the robe is borrowed from Hef,” she giggles. “But someone asked me if that was a store in the Beverly Center, so I stopped saying that.”

Suze (she pronounces her name so that it rhymes with cachet ) is “trendy eccentric” tonight, a style she alternates with her other favorites, “trendy wild” and “trendy buffoon.” She is also wearing slippers; fingerless, elbow-length, black tulle gloves with Swiss dots, and white-tipped, French-manicured fingernails. “Once,” she confides, “I got all decked out in a lame dress and a big blond wig. It was like Cinderella meets Goldfinger.” Nearby, Laurie Anderson and Boy George look-alikes are busy being seen. Later on, a club called Glam Slam is scheduled to erupt upstairs.

“These clubs--they’re not really the place to meet people. Just to dance, dress up and see people. But you see the same people time after time, and after a while you know them,” Suze says. “It’s almost uncool to strike up a conversation--too bar-like, except if you’re talking about clothes.” Dressing to go out dancing is a ritual, and Suze spends hours preparing.

Suze checks out the scene upstairs. Ten-thirty and nothing’s happening yet. Some flashy people in a white stretch limo arrived earlier, but they have left. A man in his 30s, wearing a suit and escorting two friends visiting from Georgia, asks where the action is. The Marina, he’s told. Suze decides to head for Silver Lake.

By day Suze is Susan Sachs, a 26-year-old staff writer for Entrepreneur magazine. At work she wears fake secretary glasses to get in the mood. “A lot of the people you see in clubs have day jobs, too, but they won’t admit it,” she says. She is also the host of a cable-TV talk show, “Cafe Boudoir,” on which artists, photographers and bon vivants talk about Los Angeles after dark.

But mostly Suze is one of the hard core of party hearties who work by day to dance by night. She takes naps to steel herself for the almost nightly round of club-hopping that begins at about midnight and often stretches past 4 in the morning, ending in an all-night restaurant like Gorky’s, Canter’s or Pennyfeathers.

Suze is one of the late-night cognoscenti, for whom knowing where the action is has become something of an art form. Their domain is any of a dozen evanescent after-hours clubs that seem to spring up overnight, many without permits or even a steady location, across Hollywood and downtown. They appear fleetingly in ballrooms and hotels, in a private loft, in little more than a shadowy alcove or mezzanine. In fact, a club’s stability seems to run in inverse proportion to the excitement it generates. “I can’t imagine not doing this now. It’s just what I do,” Suze says. “It’s very cool to go around and be saying, ‘Oh, I’ve been going to clubs for five months and I’m burned out.’ But sure enough you see those people out again on Saturday night--and I do that, too.”

In Silver Lake, Olio, an eclectic cabaret on Sunset Boulevard that often offers late-hours dancing, has no show tonight. But Suze knows that L.A. Nicola, an elegantly pastel, high-tech restaurant nearby, frequently has art parties on Wednesday nights. In any event, maitre d’ David Hall has a reputation for knowing everything about where to dance. As Suze approaches L.A. Nicola’s neon martini-glass sign, she can hear the music. An opening-night party for a show by photographers Grey Crawford and Michael Levine is in full swing.

Strobes flash as Suze makes her entrance, and heads turn in amusement and awe. She sips champagne and mills around. In one part of the room, people on ladders are drawing on a huge roll of seamless background paper. Others are having their pictures taken in front of it with a 4x5-foot Polaroid camera. A man who thinks Suze looks like a nubile Barbra Streisand asks to be introduced. After midnight, she will return to the Imperial Gardens, where Glam Slam produces a frenzied evening of dancing that lasts until 2 a.m. But for now, L.A. Nicola is enough. “This,” Suze says in an excited whisper, “is happening ! “

The yuppie-wave disco music blares thick as acid fog in October as dancers snake about a cavernous dance floor. In raised plexiglass booths, two scantily clad female dancers hold a three-foot-long model rocket between them and lunge their hips salaciously. It is a Friday, opening night of a late-hours club called Booth, at the Park Plaza Hotel in the mid-Wilshire district.

Power Tools, another club open on Saturday nights, has been going strong at the same hotel for more than a year. When it went from being an underground club, floating from one location to another, to its new place at the hotel, Power Tools drew international press, celebrities and a hot crowd who, after a few months, moved on to wilder fare. That left it to collegiates, tourists and mainstream clubbers who just want to know that the place will be there when they go out on a Saturday night.

Booth was supposed to be the best of both worlds--a club with an underground ambiance in a permanent location every Friday night. The buzz had been out for a week: An enormous sum had been invested, and the owners had flown in a planeload of New Yorkers, club-goers who really know . Celebrities were invited. L.A. Nicola’s David Hall was hired to work the door to make sure that the clientele radiated class, pizazz, a feeling of the avant-garde. Tables were set up on risers along two walls, where people could watch the dancers, movies and performance art. Conspicuous in the middle of it all was Suze. She had come with three friends to check the place out. Her dress was covered with dollar bills. Hundreds of them, taped on. Several hours of work.

Yet somehow, the new club wasn’t working. The music was too disjointed to really set a tone. The crowd, though correctly populated, just didn’t have that je ne sais quoi. It was almost interesting, almost exciting--but certainly no improvement on Power Tools, which on second thought would still be there tomorrow.

And if not Power Tools, then Probe, Ice, Lunch and Scream; Blitz, Crush, the Quest and Facade. Glitter rock, funk, Rio disco and gloom slam. The wee hours can turn a Westwood delivery boy into a rock star, an Encino hairdresser into Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. By day there is work and reality, but after midnight the denizens of the dark converge in a secret nightclub never-never land where Riverside meets Rio and Newhall meets New York. For a juke-joint junkie, dancing till closing time is the ultimate high.

Later that week, at L.A. Nicola, David Hall apologizes for the music at Booth and says the club has hired one of the scene’s most sought-after deejays, Henry Peck, owner of the Vinyl Fetish record store. But the following Friday, Booth is even less of an event. The few hundred people who can “make a club happen” did not come back for a second look. When the club closes for the night, Hall quits. It just didn’t have it--too unhip. Suze, sighing into her tulip of champagne, all too knowingly agrees.

When Kristi Smart steps onto a dance floor, it is as if it were a boxing ring. Lean and lithe, dressed in self-made laced-down spandex and fringe, she weaves through the throng and moves like a whip. If another dancer tries to move in on her space, she goes heel to heel defending her territory. The music is hot, and Smart prances around in the full heat of exhibitionism. She doesn’t leave a club till 3, and she won’t go to places that close at 2.

Smart is a 28-year-old fashion designer, RTD rider and dance-club fanatic. At lunch at L.A. Nicola, where she had a fashion show last November, she wears an earring made from a lock of her own hair. She has made clothes for Hollywood boutiques and rock musicians, and one of her dresses, “layers and layers of periwinkle and black-suede fringe,” was worn by a transvestite in “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.”

A Trade-Tech graduate and self-described one-woman sweatshop, Smart says she goes dancing because it’s a good way to advertise her fashion designs. People ask about her clothes, and she hands out cards. The hottest thing going, Smart says, is the Scream club Saturday nights at the Embassy Ballroom. “People are dressed in black rags with bat wings.”

Marty Barrack, a 38-year-old sales representative for Sacha London shoe importers, prefers upscale clubs like Vertigo, at Myron’s Ballroom on Grand Avenue, downtown. The dance floor is spacious and ritzy, and sensational dressing is the rule. When lines form outside, doormen allow only the fashion plates in.

Barrack, a permanent card holder at Vertigo, owns a 2br, 2ba + sec prkng + pool condo in West Hollywood and drives a BMW. He travels frequently, and clubs are the core of his social life. At Vertigo, there is a swank gourmet restaurant where the likes of Cheryl Tiegs, Julian Lennon, Matt Dillon and Mick Jagger are said to have been spotted. On the throbbing dance floor outside, “General Hospital” star Tia Carrere dances till closing time with Troy Beyer of “Dynasty.” Nick Colachis and his twin brother, Jim, 27, who own Vertigo with Mario Oliver, 29, say that if people are still having a good time, Vertigo will stay open till 5 or later--though, being a legitimate club, Vertigo does not serve liquor after 2.

On a Friday evening, Barrack prepares for a night of dance and adventure. He’s been out of town for days, and it’s a little like going to war. He has picked his clothes carefully. In most clubs, the women tend to go out in a group. Men, if they arrive together, break apart early. In Vertigo, the women are bolder. Barrack is dazzled. “These girls just cruise the place,” he says. “They’ll follow a guy around until he starts talking to her. Sometimes they just don’t realize how beautiful they are.”

Barrack figures that there are about 2,000 regulars, people he sees all the time at the clubs. “It seems like there are always the same men, but the women are always changing,” he says. “The men--a lot of them are Swedish models. Some older guys and a lot of foreigners who seem to have a lot of money.”

It is sex--or more important, the illusion of sex--that makes club life exciting to the princely bachelors of the after-hours set. Sex and a scene: the physical excitement of dancing, the heady chase and the occasional conquest. And somewhere among the dancers and the music and the lure of the late hours, there might be the one. “I’m looking for someone,” Barrack confides. “At this point, I’m tired of 20-year-old girls and would like to meet someone out there. But I still go out. I like to dance, and I need the company.”

Barrack, it turns out, used to go out with Kristi Smart. “Oh?” she replies, her voice rising irritably when his name is mentioned. “The shoe salesman ? “ She considers giving him a call. “Maybe he’d wholesale me some white boots to paint. The boutiques love them.”

As hard as the owners of clubs work to stay exciting, they also struggle to stay legal. One immensely popular new club--which intended to stay open for only six weeks--is housed in a former restaurant. The 400 people dancing or schmoozing around the bar number far more than the legal capacity of 175. Meanwhile, another 100 or so drink outdoors in the parking lot.

A visit from the fire marshal can quickly close a club down. One owner grumbles that a rival regularly calls the Fire Department to cite his club. “In New York the police and the fire department help you; it’s good for the city. But here . . . .” He shakes his head. “And there is no way you can pay them off.”

Matt Dike and Jon Sidel, both 24, who run Power Tools (and have opened a Power Tools in Houston) also ran 7th Grade at the Design Center on Spring Street. It was open last spring for four weeks, then closed down for a couple of weeks, then opened for another three and again was closed down for non-compliance with liquor regulations. Frequented by artists and locals, the club had all the right music and drew the right people.

The club opened again for one night in October as a benefit for Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s gubernatorial campaign. Young Democrats and club-goers turned out in full regalia, as did Bradley himself. The next night, an exhausted Sidel was astonished to be confronted by the Fire Department, which said he might have to cut his capacity at Power Tools by 200.

Club Lingerie, on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, has been throttled recently by the same sort of problems. Its legal capacity is being strictly held to a number that will hardly support the kind of talent the club is accustomed to presenting. The Fire Department has emptied the place several times in the past year, even though its location has been used as a nightclub since the 1930s. Once cited, clubs often close and open in another location with a different name and the same crowd. Word of mouth circulates about the what, when and where. Announcements of new or relocated clubs can be found in the ladies’ room, literally on the dance floor or in the parking lots of happening clubs.

Janice Holly DeSoto, 29, a clothing designer who works part time in the Square One L.A. furniture design studio, owns White Trash au Go Go (Saturdays) and Blitz (Thursdays), both located in an underground cave behind the behemoth Osko’s disco on La Cienega Boulevard. Other clubs have opened in the disco upstairs, capitalizing on her success. But none has matched her peculiar and popular brand of anti-hip.

DeSoto does not want the patronage of “Westwood, Valley, Beverly Hills or gold-chain disco people.” In high heels, net stockings, a leopard-skin skirt, strapless black top and spiked black hair, she keeps an eye on business.

On a Thursday night at Blitz, Henry Peck is the deejay, and the club is pulsating. No poseurs. Real dancers. The nitty-gritty. Funky black leather. “A lot of stars are not in touch and don’t have the time to find out where to go,” DeSoto says, “so they play it safe and go to Helena’s (a private club in Silver Lake) or Tramps.”

Rocker Charlie Sexton comes to Blitz, as does Nigel Harrison, formerly of Blondie, and members of bands such as Gene Loves Jezebel and Lords of the New Church. Other than that, it’s night-lifers and dance-club lovers.

Among them is Marc Gass, a 35-year-old television director. In the 4 1/2 years since he moved to Los Angeles from New York, Gass has been an intermittently heavy night-lifer. When he’s working, he’s busy day and night. But after the wrap, he’s got to unwind.

When he’s on the dance floor, he’s as young and free as the after-hours crowd working it on out at Johnny’s in the Basement. But now and then, he’s reminded of his, ah, maturity. One time Gass walked into Blitz and a woman walked up to him and said, “You must be really cool for them to let you in that bald.” He laughs loudly. “All the guys in there had lots of hair,” he recalls. “It’s very ‘60s. I had lots of hair in the ‘60s, too.” These days, he wears a hat.

“I don’t go to Ports or the trendy bars because all the women I meet there are actresses, and I always get asked for work,” Gass says. “I don’t want to have to deal with the desperation of the talent in this town when I’m on my own time. For the same reason, industry hangouts don’t appeal to me. At Helena’s you see Jack Nicholson and Ed Begley Jr. hanging out and table-hopping in their falling-off sneakers. Typical Los Angeles. All the men are dressed casually and the women are very dressed up.

“When I go to Helena’s, I feel like a babe in the woods. I see one wealthy-looking gentleman at the bar with three gorgeous Oriental girls, and if I talk to one of them they treat me like I’m not there. So it makes you wonder. When I’m working and I’m visible on the set, they all come to me. But when I’m out incognito, on my own recognizance . . . that’s what this town is like.”

Club Lingerie is definitely a mainstream club, open only till 2, but many a late night out starts there. It features three levels of sophistication with its expansive dance floor, tasteful bar area and decidedly underground-style mezzanine. One of the best places in Los Angeles to hear live rock and idiosyncratic music, it almost always is a good bet for the would-be scenester who’d like a partner for expeditions into the underbelly of the after-hours scene.

Warren Salyer, 38, a studio manager at JVC in Hollywood, met Linda Parisi, 29, a psychiatric nurse at Cedars-Sinai, there in 1983, shortly after she moved west from Champaign, Ill. Eventually they moved in together. He liked the fact that her working the night shift allowed him to continue exploring the clubs. “I wanted to be out of the mainstream. That’s why I don’t like discos,” Salyer says. “If I wanted to be in the mainstream, I could have stayed in Alabama. These clubs open, then they get popular, then the people who made them great move on and open another club.”

Parisi has her own reasons. “I like those kind of clubs better,” she says, “because people leave you alone. You go to a Red Onion, and the men look you upside and down. At the underground clubs everybody is too concerned with themselves to care. You can really cut loose.”

Late one Saturday night they are on the prowl downtown, trying to find the latest incarnation of a club called Plastic Passion. The couple found out about it when it was on 8th Street; then it moved to the Clark Hotel at 5th and Hill streets, the Embassy Ballroom and, finally, to a loft east of Alameda Street, where it felt more like a private party.

At the last known location, Salyer and Parisi spot a man leaning on a car blaring music. They pull up to where he’s standing, hoping he can tell them where the action is. They roll their window down a crack, and the shadowy figure hands them a map to a warehouse several miles west.

Passing cardboard condos where the homeless sleep unconcerned with after-hours clubs, they see a throng of cars and outrageously coiffed scene-makers moving toward a huge warehouse near Long Beach Avenue. An armed security guard wearing a T-shirt and jeans motions them in. Seven dollars. Nobody checks IDs. They buy wrapped candies to trade for drinks--soda, beer and wine.

Inside, hundreds dance, strobes flash, projected slides slither on the walls, and strange characters--including a young woman dressed like a bag lady and a man with the seat cut out of his trousers--weave through the crowd. A few Day-Glo decorations resonate in the black light, a total outlaw scene. Music pours out of an improbably splendid sound system. It is after 2, it is after 3, it is after 4. The party rocks on into the morning. “This,” says Salyer gleefully, “is a club!”