Nearby, at O'Hara's, a jazz band plays behind a full-voiced diva singing Oleta Adams' "Get Here" to a group of slow-dancing couples in front of the stage, while on the corner of Young Circle, a dark-haired man puffs a hookah at a table outside the falafel and gyro restaurant.
The past six months or so have ushered in at least five new bars and clubs in Hollywood: Sonar, Zombie, Club XIT, Nikki Marina, and a bare-bones joint called Duck-Inn. Sneakers, which has been around for quite a while, is tarting its décor up a bit to keep pace. Hell, we've even got bar-top dancers at Coyote Bar and Grille strutting in the same old belly-baring tanks. These chicks are honest about their seminudity, though; they've got dollar bills pouring from their belt loops.
Sorry if I neglected any other new places, but this I-95-ramp-side city -- which has never been the hub of South Florida nightlife -- is blowing up. The storefronts on this strip have such a variety of strong flavors that only people with the most diverse tastes could meander from one venue to the next. It's a mind-fucking task to divide my attention between the muscular, tattooed, domestic-beer-drinking man pouring out of the Octopus Garden (1942 Hollywood Blvd.) and the disconcerting fact that there are velvet ropes on Hollywood Boulevard.
My expectations were low when I arrived at the ropes outside Sonar on Friday night at midnight. But when I put some questions to In Bal, the tall woman with blond, curly hair at the door who turned out to be the owner, she did something I was not prepared for: She thought for a moment, then gave straightforward, discerning answers. Bal, who moved to Florida from New York last year and opened the club three months ago with her brother and sister, began, "On Saturday and Sunday, you'll hear New York underground music in here that you would never hear in South Beach. Space and Crobar do not compare."
So why Hollywood, then?
"I did my research," she replies. "The amount of money I spend here is a lot less than I would spend in South Beach or Palm Beach. And this area is about to go crazy. Next year, there is going to be a huge turnaround. Hollywood has amazing plans for local business. My club does not really get tourists. It's not seasonal."
She invites me in to have a look around. Walking into the dark club, it seemed like the walls were closing in around me. Sonar is like a large cell, lighted only by the red glow that comes through the plastic bar top, which we visited for some refreshment. A red spiral staircase leads up toward the DJ booth and another room -- VIP, I presume -- but I didn't visit. Chicks with mod haircuts and tattered jeans were working behind the bar, serving drinks to a crowd of 60 hipsters and goths who were wearing 90 percent black -- many of them in the dark-eyed fetish style that is a throwback to the days when Squeeze and the Edge ruled Fort Lauderdale. On the dance platform in the back of the club, a woman in thick-heeled boots and a stiff black tutu was entranced by Morrissey's moans echoing off the walls.
I slip into the bathroom to find a girl with long red hair kneeling in front of the sink. "Usually, we hang out at fetish parties and Kitchen Club in Miami," she says. "But now we come here on Friday nights." I look down and notice that her breasts are hanging out of her shirt.
"What are you doing?" I ask her.
"I'm duct-taping my nipples."
Jolly good. I head back out to the main room of the club and find that a New Order song is playing. It makes me feel cozy, and I start dancing with my friend Lola. We're watching some short, bespectacled girl getting totally into her groove, and it's hard not to notice how unpolished yet cool are her moves. She seems more bent on enjoying herself than expressing herself or attracting anyone. It's cool. We're doing the same.
Until...
A shark in a blue button-down shirt -- whom I've already graciously allowed to dance in my space and dismissed -- hovers. Lola and I find it necessary to look only at each other and bite our lips to keep from laughing. Gentlemen, this means go the hell away. He's not getting it, though, but just kind of standing off to the side of us, trying to make eye contact. Lola busts up laughing, and he notices. I close in on her and start laughing too. The man disappears behind the bar.
Poor bastard, I think, until he circles back around with his fingers pointed like guns. Jesus Cristo, por favor. You can't even shame a man these days. It's back to the bar to slam another vodka cran. We overlook the dark scene with a nod of approval, and we're out.
Next, Lola and I head for Zombie, where roughly 50 people stand at the lean-to bars eyeing the dance floor, anticipating some slight change in the atmosphere that would get the party started. WPYM-FM (Party 93.1) mixologist Erik Velez, donning a white button-down, looks over the scene delivering hit-or-miss tunes while a Rastafarian-capped drummer hits up the bongos. All the trappings of a party were there, but it just wasn't taking off.
A middle-aged blond woman in black pants and a transparent shirt that reveals a black bra doesn't seem to mind. She is out of the house, probably hittin' the floor for the first time since she danced the chicken at the wedding of a now-divorced couple. Two short women just sort of stand off to the side of the floor near the empty VIP room, clutching cocktails like security blankets, when two tall blond "it" girls arrive on the scene, throwing their arms up in the air to make a grand entrance. They dare each other to get up on the blocks in the center of the floor. Neither seems moved enough to accept the challenge.
These "it" gals are the kind of chicks guys pick up over 93.1 hits like Laava's cliché-packed "Wherever You Are." You know the one: "When I feel blue/I think of you/'Cause you're so true/Wherever you are/near or far/You still are/my shooting star." With inspiration like that, there's only two things to do: go home and have slobbery, mutually unfulfilling sex or braid each other's pubes into friendship bracelets.
Next, a remix of Michael Jackson's "Billy Jean" comes on, with snippets of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech mixed in, and Lola starts to lose it. "Is nothing sacred?" she asks. "I can't believe that people are using Martin Luther King's words as something for people to shake their ass to." So we head out.
At 10:30, a cover band called Rewind is playing classic rock at the 14-year-old Club M, just across the street from Sonar. It is packed with middle-aged couples and single men in their 20s. The goateed front man, who's performing in sweats, belts out, "I feel like making love," and a big-haired blond in heels, army pants, and a white tank top walks over to a table of her friends and starts humping the air, pulling her fists in toward her groin. The table starts clapping and laughing.
When Rewind launches into its final song, a competent AC/DC cover, a bald man in his 40s with tinted glasses and hoop-pierced ears gets up with the blond woman and lifts one pant leg up slightly as he struts to the dance floor.
I ask him what the pant leg thing was about when he sits back down.
"That was my signature move. I used to win all the dance contests. I do the mambo. Aren't these guys great?" he asks, gesturing toward the drummer of the band.
"Yeah," I affirm, "they're pretty good."
I ask him where else he hangs out in Hollywood.
"Normally I hang out at the Beefeater [a steak house down the street]. But now, I'm going to be coming here more."
And of Hollywood's diverse new club scene?
Not for him: "The rest of the places I would give you 3 cents for."
