‘I mean, here I’d been thinking about Laura all afternoon and suddenly I am confronted with Casablanca.’ : Play It Again, Carlos

It was a night full of mist and magic, and I could feel in my bones that something was afoot . . . something different, something memorable.

A fine spray settled on my windshield, but I just left it there, afraid that turning the wipers on would break the spell and the night would turn polyester.

I get that way every once in awhile when I can’t shake the feeling that there are wonders around the corner.

A voice in my head keeps saying, Something’s coming!

Part of the feeling this time came from a chance encounter earlier in the day with the man who wrote the music for “Laura,” maybe the most haunting melody of my generation, and I was still seeing a face in the misty light.

The man’s name is David Raksin, and he was more concerned with a traffic ticket he’d been fighting for two years than with a melody that has enriched the world.

I talked him into playing “Laura” for me on the piano in his studio, and it put me in a kind of dream state that persisted into the fog-laced evening.

Laura to me is what the lost Lenore was to Poe, a kind of shadowy vision of perfection that can never be, a memory of something that never was.

You know what I mean.

When I finished work I drove to the ocean, which is where the magic is, and into Venice, where a sign off Lincoln Boulevard caught my attention, looking vaguely surreal through the fog.

The sign said: “Casablanca.”

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I mean, here I’d been thinking about Laura all afternoon and suddenly I am confronted with Casablanca.

Al Martinez

I was in a time warp, tumbling back through four decades to another movie and another song, almost as compelling as the first, that talked about time and love.

You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss , a sigh is just a sigh . . .

The sign identified a restaurant, not a film, although the restaurant is kind of a re-creation of Rick’s place, right down to a life-sized replica of Humphrey Bogart in a white dinner jacket and black slacks, pouring a drink.

Carlos Haro, the owner, even has a copy of the original script from “Casablanca” on the wall, and his waiters wear red fezzes on their heads, just like in the movie.

I wandered in to sip Scotch and listen to a guy on a harp play “As Time Goes By,” and pretty soon I was talking to Carlos.

His dad started the restaurant and named it Casablanca because he used to watch old movies during siesta in Guadalajara and fell in love with the gang at Rick’s.

Carlos carried on the tradition by picking up artifacts from the movie. One of them is Dan Seymour.

Dan isn’t an artifact, really, but one of the last half-dozen actors in the movie still alive. He was Abdul, the Arab who guarded the door to the casino at Rick’s.

I found him sipping vodka in a corner booth.

He’s a big, burly man of 72 who speaks and gestures in the grand manner of a guy with both size and an actor’s flair. He’s been in about 70 movies and 250 television shows, but it’s from “Casablanca” that everyone remembers him.

“We didn’t know we were making a legend in those days,” Dan likes to say, “we just thought we were making a movie.”

Even his laugh is big, booming through the room like the beat of a bass drum, his white goatee quivering with satisfaction.

“You know,” he said, “I was told that my mug is seen somewhere in the world two or three times a day every day of the year because of that movie. That’s how often it’s shown.”

He began coming to the Casablanca about three years ago.

“I’d heard about the restaurant,” he said, “and it sounded pretty L.A.-ish, but I decided to give it a try. I knew as soon as I saw the parrot inside the doorway that it was my kind of place, and I’ve been coming here ever since.”

Chicago-born, Dan came up through vaudeville and burlesque, doing knockabout stuff with songs and dances, to a movie career in Hollywood.

He did four movies with Bogie, who called him “the kid,” and three different versions of “Casablanca,” including a play and a Marx Brothers comedy.

“We knew when we made ‘Casablanca’ that we had a good picture,” Dan said, “but no one ever anticipated it would be anything more. Even the song was chance.

“We were looking for music and we found this guy from New Jersey who had written two or three tunes. When we heard them, someone said, ‘I like that one.’ It was ‘As Time Goes By.’ ”

We talked until it got late. I felt I’d been transported to the era of Bogie and Bergman.

When I left, Dan said, “A press agent named Dan Seymour died in 1982 and everybody thought it was me. Tell them it wasn’t me. Tell them I’m still alive.”

I wandered back out into the night, caught up in the fantasies that shaped my youth, when poets made magic and trains flashed through the night.

I could see Laura’s face and I could hear Bogie’s voice and I kept wondering where all the lovers and the heroes had gone.