I walked across Broadway south to Sixth, a walk I’d done many times in the past. On Sixth, I passed the beat-up doors of the old fortune teller, now shuttered. I was on my way to that dank oasis in the middle of the concrete depths, Cole’s, the disputed French dip originator and pre-Prohibition bar that nourished countless L.A. workers, politicians, mobsters, poets, and artists alike. My first visit was back in 2014, when my father was living around the corner on Los Angeles Street and Fifth, and 40 years after the city designated it a Historical Landmark and a State Point of Historical Interest. 

Inside, the atmosphere is a little frantic, a little uncanny, a little out-of-one’s-head. The lights seem half on. I don’t recognize a single member of staff. The music is on some erratic shuffle and awfully loud. I spy three older ladies at the bar dressed right out of a 1930s night out, veiled tilt hat and all. They push off the bar, drinks in hand, and head round the corner to where mahogany booths line burgundy, damask-patterned walls by the pool table. Seated at the bar, a middle-aged man with lonely eyes and a glass of white wine tries to chat up the bartender. A couple of older guys, one with a flat cap who remembers the Cole’s of the ‘60s, the other in a Dodger’s cap who likely celebrated the '89 World Series, sit at a two-top by the window. I take a stool at the end of the bar by the pass. Beside me is a large backpack, well-traveled, and beside it a frenzied, sunburnt man who looks as weathered as his belongings. On the bar before him is a basket of leftover fries and a tall Hamm’s and he talks freely about taking over the bar. 

You see, the pending closure of Cole’s is something of a Los Angeles tragedy. Back in July, the bar’s owners announced they’d be closing its doors for good in August after 117 years in the ground floor hollows of the Pacific Electric Building because of yet another rent raise. Cole’s, despite its city-sanctioned accolades, has no protections against lease demands, of course, non-building-owners that they are. Just another blow to that crumbling chunk of the city from a bygone era when rent was fathomable and we were all each other’s got. But, popular demand has bought it a temporary respite, if only until November. After ordering my martini and taking that first, crucial sip, my shoulders slacken and I settle in.

I hear the gruff voice of the traveller make some financial inquiries. He’s a vet, he says, so he can get a business loan “like that.” After throwing out some concepts and corresponding numerical figures, he says he’s a marketing guru, before adding he can get a Jewish cook back in the kitchen to “pump out briskets tender like you wouldn’t believe.” All this may just be true. The bar staff are compelled to nod politely and casually for it’s certain they’ve heard all this a million times since July. He crunches some numbers. “What, a mil? One-point-five? I can get this place back up and running within two weeks.” The rest of us drinkers sip solemnly. 

Inside, the atmosphere is a little frantic, a little uncanny, a little out-of-one’s-head. The lights seem half on. I don’t recognize a single member of staff. The music is on some erratic shuffle and awfully loud.

“Let me ask you something,” he says to the bartender. “What’s the rent here? Seven, eight k?” Maybe she doesn’t quite hear him at first. After a pause she reveals, with apathetic humor, “20k.”

“A month?”

“A month.”

The traveler’s mood shifts. He’s drawn inward. He tries to crunch some more numbers while he drinks some more of his Hamm’s. He corrals the staff to help him, to pull out the calculators on their phones. New patrons arrive, however, and the bartenders leave him to his cruel calculus. He’s talking to himself now. He turns to the man beside him with the white wine and announces, “You need, like, at least ten $70 checks a night every night just to break even—just to pay rent alone!” He repeats some slightly varied numbers to the busy bartenders. To anyone who will listen. He keeps muttering to himself. 

My friend W arrives. He tells me about a couple of people smoking fentanyl outside, and, with a sly grin, that he caught a hearty whiff (W’s two years sober). I catch him up on the Cole’s situation and the traveler’s mindfuck, who soon thereafter finished up his beer, gathered up his belongings, and hastened down the wind. W’s not surprised. We grew up here, and it seems many of us maintain a strange sort of carefree resignment. Something magical about L.A. somehow remains, we believe, even while it’s also been withering on the vine at least as long as we’ve been alive.

Earlier, I’d spent some time at The Last Bookstore on Spring, the amusement park of bookstores, and met again the all-too-familiar sight of barren bookshelves in the classic fiction section. In many sections, in fact. I’ve noticed the shift over the last few years. A few months back, an employee told me they were struggling to maintain stock, the level of donations beginning to dwindle. What—had the broken water main of people heaving out their books finally run dry? It was a stunning Saturday afternoon in Downtown Los Angeles and it was awfully sleepy out there.

I settle my bar tab and W and I wander out onto Sixth, draped in the shadow of the old Santa Fe Building. We walk west toward Main. There, we spot a bright-eyed, well-dressed, middle-aged couple sitting in a small service stairwell looking gleefully into each other’s eyes, their gaze penetrated by the flame of the woman’s lighter over the man’s glass pipe. Between them on a step, a chilled bottle of decent rose, two wine glasses. A touch of class on the precipice of abandon.