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 groundfloor 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 somnambulant behind the wheel. Then a geezer is pulled into the street behind a yappy little dog on a straining leash. I startle 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 facade of Larry Flynt’s Supper Cabaret is so demure I almost cruise right past it, just a textured stucco archway decorated with floodlight splashes and flirtatious signage. I squeeze in between expensive foreign-made bumpers, parallel parking in disappointment. Where Larry Flynt is concerned, I think it’s only fair to expect in-your-face tastelessness on a megalomaniac scale. My brother Brian would be heartbroken to see his Hustler subscription dollars wasted like this.

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 Hustler stylings of the lounge — mirrors everywhere, leopard-print couches, velvet chairs and iron tables sculpted in the form of writhing female bodies. Eyeballing the beautiful people moving like sex on the dancefloor, I’m struck by the thought that Larry Flynt doesn’t know jack about real pornography.

“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 program longer than anybody except Professor Emeritus Hercules Gutierrez himself. He 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.

I break away. “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 come here 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.”

“You finish in less than an hour?”

“With this physique? Not fucking likely.” 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 dancefloor. 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 program,” 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 I taught you.”

“Remember what?”

“It’s not the funding that matters. It’s what you do with the funding.” He rescues a mint leaf floating in his drink. “I got all the funding UCLA could offer and I’ll probably never finish my dissertation.”

“You’ve got a real life, though. A wife and kids.”

“So will you someday. And probably sooner than you think. That’s the shitty thing about life — it always happens faster than you want it to.”

For a while time drags 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 girl-shaped chair at our girl-shaped table. We let them take the chair and go back to watching our colleagues on the dancefloor.

“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 kinda 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. I tend to forget, given my fluent Spanish and ease with latinos.

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

I follow his gaze to a minky Ecuadorian in an Adidas track suit, moving with hips like oiled ellipses. “Adriana? No way, dude. Josefina is the one I want.”

Together we turn toward the Chilean, a vision of desire in her little black dress and platform mules. She’s willowy and sun-streaked and mobbed by men. She’s also whiter than I am, the progeny of an aristocratic European family. The haughty tilt of her jaw implies breeding in the non-husbandry sense of the word.

“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 Ortiz, a name that just 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 her, 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.