Whisky a Go Go

Whisky a Go Go is a West Hollywood nightclub in Bret’s recollections of driving alone through Los Angeles as a teenager. It marks the freedom and adult role he associates with obtaining a driver’s license, while later becoming one of the places through which he tries to make sense of Robert Mallory’s unfamiliar familiarity.

Setting and Bret’s Nights Out

After getting his license, Bret describes a Wednesday-night routine of leaving his house on Mulholland without asking his mother’s permission, telling her only that he would be home by midnight. He drove down through the empty canyons with music playing, parked near Sunset, and used a fake identification card to enter the club; on some nights, he was not asked for identification at all.

Inside, Bret would ask a man by the bar where he could buy cocaine. The man usually pointed him toward a platinum-blond youth at the back of the room. Bret handed over folded cash, ordered a whiskey sour, and waited while the youth went to the manager’s office and returned with a packet. The club was one stop in a larger pattern of unsupervised nights that combined driving, drinking, and drug use.

The Club on Bret’s Los Angeles Circuit

Bret’s account connects the venue to a distinctly automotive geography. After leaving, he drove back up into the canyons, cruised along Mulholland, and descended Laurel Canyon through Studio City, Sherman Oaks, Encino, and Tarzana before heading back toward his home. The club was not an isolated destination so much as part of a route through the city’s darkened neighborhoods, traversed alone in a car.

That freedom carried into the next morning: despite his late nights, Bret says he could arrive at Buckley’s parking lot shortly before class in uniform, feeling pleasantly buzzed rather than tired. The contrast between the school-day appearance and the nocturnal routine makes the club part of his double life, in which outwardly orderly participation coexists with unsupervised risk.

Robert and the Question of Recognition

When Bret first meets Robert at lunch, he feels he has seen him before but cannot identify where. Trying to account for that impression, Bret asks whether Robert had been at parties or clubs, naming Whisky a Go Go alongside the Seven Seas, the Odyssey, and the Starwood. Robert says he does not think they have met and adds that he rarely goes out and does not know anyone in Los Angeles.

Bret believes him at the time. The question nevertheless gives the club a second role: it becomes one possible point of contact between Bret’s established nightlife and Robert’s apparently separate life. Robert’s answer does not resolve Bret’s sense of recognition, and his striking appearance soon persuades Bret that he will quickly find a place in the closed social world of the senior class. The venue remains part of the unresolved impression rather than evidence that the two had actually met there.