Faces in the Night
A rainy night in the City of Angels.
Street lights glisten like an old lady’s jewels in the wet pavement of Sunset Boulevard. Storefronts beckon like visions in a mist on Melrose.
There never used to be nights in L.A. There was daytime, dinner and hit the sack, Jack. Not always your own sack, but a sack nonetheless.
Night was discovered in places like New York and San Francisco, and they kept it to themselves for a long time.
Sure, there were parties here and premieres and discos where the in-crowds gathered, but not a lot of clubs where a guy like me could wander in looking for jazz and cognac.
I’m speaking from the perspective of the 20 years I’ve been here, down from Baghdad by the Bay to this big, gray oatmeal of a town where they ate supper and watched TV and listened to their hearts beat.
Sex on Tuesdays and bowling on Thursdays, God save their vapid souls.
But something’s happening. New clubs and restaurants are lighting the darkness, and their tempo is a drum riff.
I think we’re discovering sundown.
“If you’re gonna write a column,” a friend once said, “you gotta drink the night.”
He didn’t mean it in alcoholic terms. He meant you’ve got to prowl the streets when the light dies because there’s a whole different kind of life clinging to the flip side of day.
You find night people writing poetry on paper bags in coffeehouses like the Cobalt Cafe, crying over cigarettes and black coffee at Denny’s or talking to a lover on a corner phone at Mirabelle.
And you find them singing and being seen at Matty’s on Melrose.
The place has only been open a few months and they’re already saying it’s as close to New York as you’re going to get in L.A., a shard of Manhattan twilight flung west.
Matty is Matty Danza, the brother of Tony Danza, an actor on the kind of television shows you only watch if you’re recovering from a double bypass and can’t get off the couch.
Broad-shouldered and ebullient, Matty greets you like you’re a father he’s never seen and tries to fill you in on his life in one breathless monologue.
But it doesn’t matter because the noise level in Matty’s only allows every third word to penetrate, trimming the monologue by two-thirds.
“It’s a New York noise,” someone explains in a complimentary fashion, and lets it go at that.
Matty’s is an intriguing blend of mid-level celebrities, big guys who walk with their palms facing backward, and women like the ones in the song “Lush Life,” with after-midnight faces.
When I walk into the place, a drug agent named Lou Diaz, who calls himself an undercover actor, is at the microphone singing “It’s Not for Me to Say.”
Diaz is chief of technical operations for the DEA downtown. He looks a little like Lou Costello from the old Abbott and Costello comedy team, with a vocal quality that falls somewhere between Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.
It isn’t often you find a narc at the mike, but this is L.A., man, and this is night. As the bookie Sidney Sideways used to say, “Go figure it.”
A deli meat-chopper turned actor who calls himself Johnny Roastbeef is also at Matty’s; so is Robert Forster, who used to star in the old television series “Banyon” back in the ‘70s.
Everyone keeps telling Forster how good he looks, like he has just risen from the dead or something, until he stops and says, “There are only three ages in Hollywood. Youth, middle age and ‘Gee, Bob, you’re looking good.’ ”
Matty bounces from table to table like he is on the end of a long rubber band, and when he bounces past ours he is telling someone, “I hate guys who like me when I hate them.”
That somehow makes sense on a rainy night.
From Matty’s I go to Grappa Ristorante on Sunset, at a corner where the world gathered in the old days, looking down the Street of Dreams.
Nick Edenetti is belting out Sinatra-like tunes in a small side room like he is on stage before a packed house at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
He has been L.A.’s quintessential saloon singer for 25 years, singing to a crowd when he’s got one or singing to the moon when he hasn’t.
I’ve seen him in places where the lights have gone out and the sound has failed, but Nick just keeps on croonin’. When the Earth swallows L.A., he’ll be the last guy left and he’ll be singing “Make it one for my baby. . . .”
He’s singing it now when it’s time to leave, and the song follows me through the mist to the car. Crazy night. Singing narcs and Liz Taylor look-alikes. Go figure it.