The "World-Famous Palomino Club"

(From Rain Dodging 69-71)

. . . Weeks later, I reentered the legendary Palomino to see the Everly Brothers on their long-awaited reunion tour. Immediately I thought, Yes, I really could work here at The Palomino. It would be fun. Yes, grungy, raucous fun! The San Bernardino mountains seemingly within arm’s touch, there should have been a marquee flashing: “Lousy food, expensive drinks, great music.” I could indulge my closet fantasy here to be a cocktail waitress: A few years before, in Cleveland, I was sitting in a back tier at a Friday happy hour with teaching colleagues, in front of a trio playing good jazz. My dear old friend, Joanne Lockley, was serving a tray of cocktails. I hadn’t seen her in a few years. She was smiling and partying along with her tables—at least that’s what it looked like to me. How fun to help people have a good time. No responsibility, no teacher anxiety following you home each night.

Summer turned into autumn in the City of Angels and a nearly depleted savings account. For weeks while sipping morning coffee and perusing through the Sunday LA Times, I had noticed regular ads for help wanted at The Palomino. So three days after the Everly Brother’s rousing performance, I returned for their weekly Monday-morning cattle call.

The first impression that comes to me in looking back on my waitressing days at The World-Famous Palomino Club is to compare its long tables extending lengthwise from the stage to the dining hall at Oxford at High Table.1 Think Hogwarts’s Great Hall, but substitute the master paintings of John Wesley, Cardinal Wolsey, and Henry VII with dusty eight-by-ten-inch autographed glossies of the likes of George Jones, Dottie West, and Conway Twitty.

High Table at Lincoln College,
SJ Godwin 2012

Hired to serve cocktails and overpriced, undercooked dinners by maniacal owner Tommy Thomas, I chose my requisite two free Palomino T-shirts, one pink, one powder blue, both V-neck. Jenette, a tattoo-covered waitress before tattoos were the cultural norm, had walked me to the T-shirt closet in Tommy’s cramped office behind the front bar.

In the weeks that followed, I regularly picked up Jenette on the way to work. The first time, she was still getting ready in her squalid one-room studio. As she changed into her tight-fitting Palomino T-shirt and jeans, I discovered that Jenette, quiet and statuesque, was covered with tattoos from her collarbone to her toes. There were psychedelic swirls, skulls and crossbones, tigers, a veritable plethora of tattoo regalia. The first time I saw them, my eyes grew as big as Candye’s bosom. Another “What’s a nice Jewish girl” moment.

I’d bet all my Saturday-night tip money that I am the only server in Palomino history who went to the public library to research names of cocktails before showing up for work my first night. I had lied—and expected my mother to swoop down from the heavens and strike me—when writing on my application that I had cocktail-waitress experience, not that it ended up mattering.

Of course, I was outed the first night by Frank, the head bartender, who was as misplaced as I. He should have been lecturing in front of a college class- room, not behind the bar where they had filmed the Clint Eastwood–orangutan bar scenes in the Philo Beddoe Every Which Way and Any Which Way films.

Frank disdainfully corrected me when I, trying to act experienced, called a chimney a brand of scotch when giving him my order.

“A chimney . . . is a glass,” he sneered, under his elegant mustache, as he set the tall glass on the pouring tray.

Busted.

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