(I’ve fictionalized places and names in the next three columns, for obvious reasons.)
The first time I walked into Rockets it was a Sunday evening. 
It’s easy to miss – barely more than a house front on a dual carriageway. Outside the club, a handful of flash Harley’s parked. Bikers’ Night? Inside, the band was playing a kickass mix of soul, rock and reggae. Every member talented far beyondthe average bar band and the singer one of those performers able both to sing and engage his audience, bring them with him, sometimes integrate their voices, with compelling ease. 
A few days earlier, I’d been in another club, the band playing extreme up-tempo versions of Bob Marley classics and its singer much more concerned with engaging – chivvying – her audience than actually singing. It was so irritating that I left.
Rockets is basically a long narrow room, a bar running down one side, a row of tables down the middle and along the wall opposite the bar. It was packed. Two hundred people? The youngest there maybe thirty; the oldest up in the indefinables. Seventies? Eighties? It was indeed a bike night, for several men, most of them on the larger side, wore colors. One, shaved head, yellow shades, sported an embroidered vest that proclaimed him ‘Big Daddy Ben – One Man Gang.’ This was a tough crowd, if only in appearance – though it would take a very hard man indeed to put that appearance to the test; and why would you, since the atmosphere was so mellow, the music so tight and everyone gently grooving, drinking, dancing and having a fine time on a Sunday night.
Walking in, we were a few Whites in a Black room. Not a glance, not a frisson, not a moment of discomfort, WTF? or even surprise. I’m pretty damned certain that if three Black people walked into a Santa Monica club packed with two hundred Whites, those strangers would not have felt – or been made to feel – anywhere near as comfortable as we were. Moreover, were I Black I would not be this magnanimous. I would have wondered, and probably asked out loud, what the fuck these three Whites were doing on my turf.
(To put this in further context, I visited Rockets just a couple of weeks after a white supremacist youth shot dead numerous black churchgoers and was obligingly fed hamburger and fries shortly afterwards by the white cops who gently took him into custody. Days later, the black congregation was praying for his forgiveness.)
Up next – Part Two – Glory