This neighborhood in Beverly Hills could use a triple shot of espresso.  The architecture is understated to the point of blandness, especially at night when the colors darken into monochrome.  My headlights shine on glassy ground-floor stores, restaurants with private office suites on top, boringly posh homes on elevated setbacks behind stucco walls, the occasional palm-draped apartment building with “Oaks” or “Arms” in the name.  I’m almost asleep behind the wheel.  Then a geezer is pulled into the street by a yappy little dog on a straining leash.  I adrenaline-rush wide awake and slalom my Ford Explorer around the jaywalkers.  Last thing I want to do is add vehicular homicide to today’s list of Shit That Went Wrong.

The façade of the Aqua Lounge is so unremarkable that I almost cruise right past it.  I squeeze in between expensive foreign-made bumpers, parallel parking in disappointment.  This basement location on Beverly Drive used to be a sin pit.  When I started at UCLA it was Larry Flynt’s Supper Club, a tits-and-steak burlesque joint.  Before that it was an upscale skin bar called the Beverly Club.  But now it’s just another glitzy club trading on washed-up celebrities and the gawkers they attract.  I’ve seen Erik Estrada here before.  That kind of place.

On the sidewalk I can already hear the salsa thumping.  Once the doors swing open the beat reaches right out, making my heart a metronome.  Inside is a new Sunday ritual known as Mambo Nights, when copious helpings of Latin music collide with the too-cool-for-you stylings of the lounge – beaded bar, aquariums stocked with eels, walls of basswood and textured clay.  I pay my $10 cover and eyeball the beautiful people moving like sex on the dance floor.

“Yo!  Nick!  Over here!”

Above the crowd I spot a pudgy arm waving frantically.  My mood leaps.  It’s a rare Enrique sighting.  He’s a perpetual graduate student who’s been in the Latin American Studies department longer than anybody except Professor Emeritus Hercules Gutierrez himself.  Enrique slides to his unfashionable Rockport-clad feet, a bulbous married 38-year-old who grins in triplicate if you count his double chins.

“How you been, dude?” I ask, embracing him in a bear hug.

“You’re even more fashionably late than us Hispanics,” Enrique jokes, hugging me back.

“What the hell brings you down from Northridge?  Isn’t this scene a little hip for you?”

He acknowledges my putdown with a yeah-yeah-whatever gesture.  “I drove down to congratulate my favorite gringo.  You passed your orals, right?”

“Last week.  Did you really drive down just to congratulate me?”

“Hell no.  I wouldn’t even drive to Van Nuys to see your sorry ass.”  He jerks a thumb in the direction of Malibu.  “Believe it or not, I ran in the Cancer Challenge 5K.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“I walked some.  But still, I finished the fucking thing.”  Enrique rubbernecks around.  “You here with Phoebe?”

“Nah.  We broke up.”  The confession hurts more than I expect.

“Always happens before your dissertation research.  They realize you’ll be gone for a year and panic.  I lost a fiancée that way.”

“No shit?”  It’s a story I’ve never heard before.

He picks up his drink – a mojito, in keeping with the salsa theme – and turns toward the dance floor.  No stories for me tonight.

Javier commands the center of the throng, whirling gracefully.  Everybody seems to be mesmerized by him, including us.  He’s a waifish Puerto Rican with an abundance of lips and eyes.  Slicked-back hair reaches halfway down his delicate neck.  Beneath the open V of his shirt is a perfectly smooth chest and flashes of a tattoo, right above his heart.

“Javier dropping out is a big blow to the department,” I say after a while.  “He’s the best of us.  No offense.”

Enrique bristles a little, but only a little.  He knows it’s true.  “Frankie told me you’re angling for the rest of Javier’s funding.”

I shrug.  Best neither to confirm nor deny.

“Just remember what you’re looking at.”

“What do you mean?”

“Me, dumbass.  I got all the funding UCLA could offer and look at me.”  He rescues a mint leaf floating in his drink.  “I’ll probably never finish my dissertation.”

“Stop talking that shit.  You’ve got a real life slowing you down.  A wife and kids, dude.”

“So will you someday.  Probably sooner than you think.  I’ve decided that’s the difference between academia and real life – real life always happens faster than you want it to.”

But right now real life is dragging on a belly of lead.  Enrique finishes his mojito.  The waitress brings two more, one for each of us.  We make smalltalk with a couple lawyers from Santa Monica who want to poach the extra chair at our table.  We let them take the chair and go back to watching our colleagues on the dance floor.

“You’re the only gringo here,” Enrique observes.  “Weren’t the other white students invited?”

“You know Javier.  He’s just more comfortable around you guys.  I’m kind of surprised he invited me at all.”  Enrique’s comment is an ethnic overlay on my perception of the crowd.  I realize I’m one of the few white faces in the entire club.  I tend to forget, given my fluent Spanish and ease with Hispanics.

“So you’re single now, huh?  You should hook up with Sophia,” he’s saying, voice almost lost in a swelling electronic riff.

I follow his gaze to the second-year student in the Ph.D. program.  She’s a minky Ecuadorian in an Adidas track suit, moving with hips like greased ellipses.  “Sophia?  No way, dude.  Josefina is the one I want.”

Together we turn toward the Chilean who recently joined the M.A. program.  I’ve never seen so much sun-streaked hair and curvy limberness crammed into a little black dress before.  Her haughty carriage implies breeding in the non-husbandry sense of the word.  She seems like royalty because she is royalty – the progeny of an aristocratic European family with a “von” in their surname.

“I heard she doesn’t even know how to drive,” Enrique says in awe.

“It’s true.  She’s been chauffeured her whole life.”

Then Maria sashays in front of her, interrupting our fantasies.  Maria fucking Ortiz, a name that cries out for funding.  She’s Hispanic in skin tone only.  Otherwise she’s just a hippy pot-smoking girl from Anaheim.  If you want to understand everything wrong with academia, start with her.

“Did you know Maria’s Spanish is so bad she can barely conjugate?” I say through clenched teeth.

Enrique glances sideways at me.  “She’ll become fluent.  Just give her time.  You’re born with the skin, not the Spanish.”

“I bet she winds up at a private college somewhere, gets tenure without publishing jack shit, and lives happily ever after.”

“I’ll drink to that,” he grins in triplicate, raising his glass.

I clink with him and pour the rest of the mojito down my throat, gagging on a mint leaf.

And I’m still gagging now, remembering how I felt looking at Maria Ortiz, an innocuous victor in this zero-sum game of gender and skin tone and ethnic-sounding surnames.  It takes effort, superhuman effort, to remember I still have the advantage off-campus.  Like a fellow white male counseling me about career prospects once said, “What’s the worst that can happen to you?  You’ll get your Ph.D. and go work in the private sector and rise to the top like scum.”  But that’s just another wrong, and two of them – minority favoritism in academia, white privilege in Corporate America – don’t make a right.