Jonathan and I followed Terrence to a table, where we crowded in with Clayton Strong, Rita, and two others, friends from UCLA. For the friends’ benefit, Clayton and Jonathan recounted the loincloth-burning party at Casa Fiesta, and commiserated over toga roles. Clayton recited the stale paeans reserved for Negro actors, nearly all of which began with “Master,” and Jonathan offered up some of the god-awful lines he and Paul Newman and Jack Palance had recited in The Silver Chalice. Jonathan had everyone laughing till it hurt, then he bought another round of drinks and invited all of them to Casa Fiesta next weekend.

“Laurel Canyon?” said Terrence. “We better not show up there unless we’re parking cars.”

“No,” I said, “everyone comes to Casa Fiesta.”

“That’s true,” said Clayton. “I thought Rita and I were goners the night of the toga-burning party when the police and fire department showed up. We could have been busted, and it would have gone hard for us, but”—he nodded to Jonathan—“he sent us upstairs to wait till the coast was clear.”

“We put the bedroom to good use,” said Rita.

Musicians gathered again on the stage and tuned up. Booker was the last to appear, while Diana came to our table, where she all but oozed sexual surfeit. We could smell it on her.

“What do you think of the music?” Terrence asked me once they started in on a new set.

“When I think of jazz, I think of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald. I saw Sidney Bechet play in Paris a few times.”

“That old-timey stuff? That’s New Orleans crap. Sidney Bechet is old enough to be my granddaddy. Nobody but squares digs that anymore! Everyone who’s cool digs bebop, hard bop, progressive jazz. West Coast Cool, that’s what we call this.” He nodded toward the bandstand, where, even if the musicians were cool, sweat gleamed on all their faces. “The greats all got their starts here on Central Avenue, grew up around here. Buddy Collette, Art Pepper, Chico Hamilton, Charles Mingus, Dexter Gordon.”

The names meant nothing to me, but I nodded as though they did.

“When I was a kid, you’d ride up and down the streets delivering the evening paper, and you’d hear all these kids practicing, and playing in church. That’s where they learned their licks, most of them, playing hymns in church.”

“A hymn in church seems a long way from what they’re playing here.”

“No, see, Roxanne, you gotta know your hymns before you can bust them up into something else. A hymn is comforting because every chord has its expectable chord right behind it, every note has its expectable note right in front of it. Jazz takes all that, shatters it. Jazz don’t comfort. Jazz wakes you up, because you never know what’s coming next.”

“Did your brother play hymns in church?”