Life in the lot

A wiry man wearing a parachute jacket in a Hermes-like print pulls a rollaway suitcase through a parking lot. As he nears the entrance, two men in blue knit caps step from the shadow of a key-cutting hut and nod at the bag. The three confer, stepping aside to let a Lexus through. The car parks and disgorges a dad and two teenage girls in pajama pants; they take a wide step around a one-legged man asking for change in front of a liquor store, then pull open the door to an ice cream shop, which releases an incongruous whoosh of rosewater.

It’s 10:30 p.m. on a recent Friday, and the parking lot, on La Brea just north of Sunset in Hollywood, is beginning its nightly convergence. Mostly, the parking lot players keep to their quadrants: miscreants on the south side, liquor store and bar customers along the west, AA meeting attendees on an overhanging balcony, and various others lingering in the fluorescent glare of Launderland or near the dark north wall, with its 10-foot high mural for LA Xpress and the colloquial name Pee Alley. But it’s a small space for so many groups whose purpose in being here is either the pursuit or avoidance of alcohol.

Booze is messy, it makes people clumsy and loving and incautious, which means that every night on the lot there are cultural collisions. The night before, it was a skateboard that sailed off the balcony and crashed through the windshield of a VW Beetle; tonight, it’s a guy in a motorized wheelchair whizzing back and forth, asking pretty girls heading into the Lava Lounge to help him over a 2-inch-high curb.

“The thing is, that guy pushed the chair in here himself earlier,” says Christopher Neal, who, from his position working the door at Lava, monitors and mixes with the denizens of the parking lot, which he calls “a vortex.”

“You get everybody,” he says, as Heart’s “Barracuda” seeps from the bar and a DJ loads in milk crates of LPs. “We got a guy here who runs around wearing only half a hood and underwear. We call him Daredevil. We get the girls in the Range Rovers who curse me out when I tell them it’s a $3 cover.”

Neal returns a wave from the one-legged man. “And we’ve got Lucky,” he says. “He’s here every night, trying to sweep up.”

Sweep up? “Getting whatever’s left in the parking lot,” he says, as Lucky makes his way over on crutches.

“Can you help me?” he asks, holding forth a grimy baseball cap. He has several coffee-colored teeth and a white bandage on his knee stump. How’d he lose the leg?

“I got shot, 15 years ago,” he says. “But I’m still here. I tell everybody here, if I die I’ll let you guys know.” He nods as a guy speaking Italian into a cellphone drops a few dimes into his cap. “I’m the only one in this lot keep to myself, doing my panhandling night by night.”

Lucky hop-steps back to his spot in front of Roman’s Liquor as the drama group from the Next Stage Theater tromps down the stairs, as it does each Friday around 11 p.m. The dozen or so guys in Ugg boots and girls trailing long crocheted scarves loiter in the lot, reciting lines and trying to belt out Christina Aguilera’s “The Voice Within,” which apparently annoys a transvestite in pink Spandex near the key hut, who shouts a slur challenging one actor’s masculinity. The actor tears off his shirt with swashbuckling flourish, and the two shout unprintable words for a few minutes, a free tinderbox of a show for customers at Mashti Malone’s, who sit 10 feet away on the Iranian ice creamery’s small patio, working through cups of orange blossom gelato. A friend of the actor’s convinces him to get in her car, and as she backs out the rollaway suitcase is revealed, sitting unattended against the south wall.

Around 11:30, dozens of young people start up the urine-steeped staircase on the north wall. They’re here for a late-night AA meeting, and most arrive on foot, wearing Mohawks and prom punk, carrying Burger King bags and puppies.

“HOO HOO HOO,” chant the 70 or so attendees, before they break and sit through the midnight meeting inside the Next Stage, with its posters for “Citizen Kane” and “Casablanca” and a stage the size of a dining table. Or most do.

“What are you doing? Move it!” shouts a guy in a Honda Element as a red Cherokee with a dangling grille stops in front of Roman’s, blocking all traffic.

“It’s not in the way!” shouts the driver, getting out of the car and taking the stairs two at a time. The guys in the blue knit caps, spitting out sunflower seed husks as they lean against the hood of a nearby car, watch impassively as the driver of the Element leans on his horn.

“Easy, easy now,” says Lucky, patting the air, indicating the guy should lay off the horn.

“A lot of them are court-ordered,” says Neal. “She’s probably just going up to get her paper signed.” Sure enough, in two minutes the girl is back from the AA meeting, and, after buying a 12-pack of MGD, drives off, while flipping Mr. Element the bird.

By 1 a.m., Mashti’s has closed, Launderland is dark and the guy in the Hermes jacket has swapped the suitcase for a half-dozen packs of incense, which he waves overhead as he circumnavigates the parking lot. And Neal is being more selective about who he lets in as last call approaches.

“I have ID,” an inebriated girl says as she rifles through her wallet. Instead, two Trojans pop out. The girl giggles; Neal scratches his eyebrow. She can’t find her ID and totters off. Next, two guys with thick necks and Raiders jerseys veer off from a trip to Roman’s.

“You got a band playing?” asks one. This, despite Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” coming from inside.

“DJ,” says Neal.

“Trip-hop? Ambient?” asks the other.

“Eighties,” says Neal, and clasps his hands in front of his crotch, a posture that says: This conversation is not going further. The guys stand flat-footed for a moment and then walk back to Roman’s.

“You convince them this is not the club they’re looking for,” says Neal.

As the action in the parking lot wanes, the scene on the balcony surges, the AAers hanging out until nearly 2 a.m., shouting and laughing and making out, and smoking so much that, from below, it appears something’s on fire, a wide swath of white curling over the roof and rolling skyward.

“You do your time down there, you get screwed up,” says a recently laid-off real estate agent named John, indicating the lot below, “and then you come up here and get better.”

The other end of the balcony is very dark, and oddly silent. Lucky has made his way up here, with a bottle of Cisco and the comics.

“I don’t like to drink in front of people down there,” he says, though there are not many left in the parking lot. He arranges himself among a few windblown newspapers and soda cups, and what looks like a dropped sweater. A closer look reveals frail ankles in thin, dirty socks, extending from beneath the sweater.

“I don’t recognize those clothes,” Lucky says, sounding concerned as he moves his hand close to but not actually touching the sleeping body, which is as slight as a child’s.

By 2:10, the stools reserved for smokers outside the Lava Lounge have been pulled in, the lights at Roman’s turned off. There are few cars left in the lot, the suitcase is apparently gone, as is the guy in the Hermes jacket. A cop car cruises through, causing the clot of people hanging by the key hut to scatter. Ten minutes later, they’re back.