“What if I told you his name was Hamlet Bleeker? Auditions are Friday morning. Do it! Working is always better than not working.”

“Isn’t Leon afraid that Denise will fall in love with me? I am so much better looking.”

“But you’re not richer and more powerful, and you never will be. Audition.”

Diana drove through the Central Avenue district, known for its raffish cafés and jazzy clubs, its after-hours cabarets and jam sessions. I’d been lots of times with groups of friends to the Dunbar Hotel, or the Club Alabam, places where the music was cool and the reputation was hot. I’d never heard of the Comet Club, which is where we stopped. She handed the guy five dollars to park her car, saying it shouldn’t be too far away. She’d need it again soon. She also threw money at the big guy manning the door and collecting for the cover charge, and the six of us sashayed into a dark club full of roiling jazz, where the musicians played their instruments the way a moth plays with a flame, daring it to kill him.

“See what I mean about cool, daddy-o?” said Diana, giving us all a knowing grin as we followed her to the bar.

Galaxies of planets and orbs were painted across the ceiling in dull gold and amber and a dirty white. The chandelier twirled slowly, rotating shards of starlight over all, and splashed along the walls were comets with fierce, beautiful tails. All this was dimmed by thick clouds of cigarette smoke and the scent of reefer. We crowded at the bar and ordered drinks while money and liquor and music flowed all around us. The crowd was perhaps two-thirds Negro and one-third white. Many tables had black and white people together, something you never publicly see except on Central Avenue. Though there was a dance floor, no one was dancing except for one lone woman, who nodded and rocked, eyes closed, hips swaying. Everyone else, unless they were talking or flirting, succumbed to the rhythms, enchanted. The jazz was nothing I recognized, nothing I could groove to, and it was so loud that everything had to happen by way of expressions or gestures like a silent film.

The Negroes were indeed cool cats, wearing formfitting jackets, their slim legs in tight pants, their women in luxurious clothes that clung to their bodies, their hair sleek and shining, even in the smoky ambience. Most of the white men wore tuxes, their women in evening gowns and long white gloves; expensive furs lolled over the backs of chairs like animals at rest. The six of us were more casually dressed—Bongo in nonstop black and a beret, Jonathan in a shirt open at the collar. The two actors wore sport coats. Diana’s silk trousers swayed when she walked, and I wore the proverbial little black dress with a gold belt.