Downtown L.A. 90013

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Oh, downtown L.A. There you are, with your homelesses and your marbled pieds-à-terre. With your twentysomething urbanites going home to their not really very interesting condos of beige while at their door the crazies mumble and pee.

There, next to a vacant lot and framed with coils of barbed wire, La Cita never sleeps. It is a marvelous beauty of a place, a Mexican bar by day and a home for hipsters at night. They scowl, the hipsters, even under the twinkling lights and traversing the lawsuit-ready pitted dance floor. (We are there early, and they do not dance, yet.) But they lap up this little slice of Metrophage-ian dystopia: the Poors outside, waiting on a bus or a buyer, are all the proof the children need that they are brave and beautiful and reckless and not in Encino anymore.

On the first and third Sundays of the month, the folks of La Cita (the same who perpetrate both Shortstop and Footsies) offer us the Clap—catch it! they tell us, and how could we not? There’s Mustache Mondays, and Punky Reggae Fridays and a big crowd for Dance Right Thursday nights. But it is just after 10 on a Cheap Soul Tuesday when we walk in and are greeted by a smiling bartender. We ask about the beer selection; would we like a $3 Tecate? That sounds just fine, yes! Would we care to pair it with a shot of tequila? In fact, we would! Nathan then gives us a small tour of his recommended pours, shitting all over the rarest ($45 a shot, thank you, come again) and saving his love for the Casa Noble, which on this night will set us back $5 or $7, I forget which, as I am now drinking tequila and ’cate.

One of our best friends lives less than a block away, across Hill Street, in one of the beige things for upwardly mobile young ones who want access to the haute life and think they’ve found it on their shared rooftop patios, despite the fact that their own (pretty expensive) apartments have no windows and no view; we call him to come join us, because it is wonderful and magical and very, very red, and we should make it our neighborhood hangout—we spend a good bit of time in Little Tokyo and downtown, we should be spending more of it right here—but he is either lazy or hates us or is busy ’batin’.

It is a perfect dearth of people in the sparkling time capsule of toreador murals and ceiling-mounted blue and green Christmas lights breaking up the bar’s hellish (and sort of horny!) bath of red; the unfriendly hipster children, for the most part, have betook themselves to the smoking patio, above whose barbed wire frame loom downtown’s towers, dwarfing our property so it is the coziest thing. There is a darling, tiny dance floor out there, too, enclosed with brass banisters; it is a dance floor for a very small cruise ship, and I want very badly to shake it to the cheap soul (in this case, “cheap soul” comprising both Paul Simon and Morrissey among the actual thing, for gigglez) but the hipster children are glowering at us, and I am both middle-aged and wearing a cardigan, crimes I expect to commit again soon.

We are back at the main bar, because Nathan is friendly and it’s just so red! If you wanna dance with the kiddos, he tells us, we must wait longer, say till 12:30 or 1 am, but we don’t actually want to, so there’s that; if we prefer this current lonesome vibe, and we do, we should come during the day, anytime after it opens at 10, and then we can drink $2 beers with the Mexican day crowd. We’ll be doing that tomorrow.

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