Slowly the freeway came into focus around me. Traffic was still slightly heavy on the 405 northbound coming out of Westwood, up over the hill into the San Fernando Valley. Most everybody was doing sixty-five to seventy miles an hour, standard speed for that time of night; for most of them, coming home late from work, it was the only time of day they were in their cars when they could drive that fast. I outpaced them only slightly, maybe eighty-five miles an hour, weaving in and out automatically, brain more or less disengaged; driving, yes, but not dangerously fast, in the cool night air, windows down, and then all of a sudden there were sirens shrieking at me, a bubble machine pulsing a beautiful blue and red. Sucker. I had a lane and I drove it like Worthy in his prime, cut through traffic crossing three lanes, onto the Mulholland Drive off ramp, and went zooming up the ramp into the wealthy gloom.

I read in the newspaper the other day that within the decade the average speed on Los Angeles area freeways will be 17 miles per hour. Suggestions to alleviate this awful mess include double-decking the San Diego freeway.

What brutal nonsense is this? Double-deck the freeway?

Up on Mulholland Drive, parked in my black '69 Sports Satellite, behind a silver Mercedes that shone under the street lamp, I could not help but wonder: Do they know the dangers? Do they know?

Three Highway Patrol squad cars went zooming down Mulholland while I waited, seat tilted all the way back, staring up at the car's roof. After a quiet hour had passed I sat up again, connected my seat belt and started the engine and eased the black bomb back down onto the freeway, and made my sedate way down the north side of the Big Hill, over to the 101 East, and home to my apartment in North Hollywood.

The night is too long.

I don't know who I am any more.

I don't know what I am.

When I was very young, six or seven, and I first learned of vampires, it scared me more than I ever let anyone know. For two solid weeks I went to bed and tied one of my father's big clean white socks securely around my neck. When you're six you can do that, and it helps; pity the poor bloodsucker who tries to take your blood with that sock securely wrapped around your neck. I would wake up in the night, giggling at the thought of the perplexed vampire biting into the sock; as I got better at standup, bits like that became the mainstay of the routine.

The story about the sock to ward off vampire bites never fails to get a laugh.

I spent the rest of the night prowling restlessly through the house. I was viciously hungry but nothing sounded good. A steak shown in the Sizzler ad on the TV looked just good enough to make me violently sick in the kitchen sink. Fortunately, there wasn't anything except beer in my stomach.

About one a.m. I headed out into the January night.

The 7-11 on Laurel Canyon, just down the street from my apartment, is a late-night social spot for half of the brain-dead in North Hollywood, extras from the in-color remake of Night of the Living Dead who never forgot that one moment of twisted glory. Some of them doubtless had speaking lines. These are the whites who can't find their way to a club, or would only get themselves kicked out if they did, and the Mexicans and Iranians. There aren't many blacks in North Hollywood, I don't know why. There's a couple million of them south of Wilshire.

I picked up a Los Angeles Times and a six-pack of Bud. There were about ten Iranians standing over by the pinball machines, who ignored me, and an amazingly fat white man rummaging through the cold storage section. He had a box of Twinkies and three pint containers of Cookies 'N' Cream Haagen Dazs out already, and he was searching for Number Four . . . the right ice cream, sir, you understand this is an important decision for me, not one I make every day, no. . . .

I walked back home through the cold night air, with my beer and my paper. In the next two hours I drank the entire six pack and read the Times from one end to the other.

Most of the news was the sort of thing you expect. Wars here and bombings there; the President had his foot in his mouth again, and the Times editorials seriously questioned his ability to run the country effectively. The comics were only fair; Doonesbury made me smile, but only Calvin and Hobbes made me laugh out loud. Yes, even while some hideous vampire transformation overtakes me, Calvin and Hobbes can make me laugh. . . .

I was just stoned enough for the headline to leap up at me:

BLACK DEATH LIVES ON AMONG SQUIRRELS

Meaningless thoughts gibbered in the back of my skull. ". . . this ancient scourge, the same disease that ravaged Europe in the Middle Ages as the 'Black Death,' is alive and well and living in ground squirrels in the hills that ring Los Angeles."

Could this be true? They assured me it was. "While ground squirrels stay alive, the fleas will stay on their bodies. But if you get a die-off, then an area can be hopping with infected fleas. When some warm body walks by, they jump on and take a blood meal wherever they can."

I put down the paper and made it to the bathroom before I had to throw up again.

Morning hit like a hydrogen bomb, which it was, ninety-three million miles away.

The day dawned cold and clear and gray, terribly overcast. The weather caster on Channel 2, a nice Mexican fellow with more teeth than he needed, said that it was going to rain. He smiled, imparting the news. This same weather caster once appeared on Romper Room as a guest; the children on the show rioted, and he didn't notice because he was smiling at the pretty host. (Couldn't fault his priorities--she was one of those hot Romper Room hosts.)

I got dressed, took my .38 revolver out of its hiding place and dug around in my junk drawer until I found some bullets for it. I loaded the gun with the four that hadn't got stuck together when the Crazy Glue leaked, and put it in the right pocket of my duster. I rubbed Number Fifteen sunscreen over my face and hands, and dropped the tube of sunscreen into my other pocket. Sunglasses on. . . .

And I sat there for almost two hours getting my nerve up. Staring at the door. Finally I got up and opened and stepped outside, wondering if I would burst into flames--

It was like walking out into a storm of needles. I stood just outside my door until I was sure that if it got no worse, I could take it, and then went down to the parking lot, got into the black bomb, and went to see Doctor Death.

The first time I ever saw Doctor Death, she was drinking beer, telling a story at one of my parties. She was a good looking, tall blond girl with a big chest, wearing a black leather dress with little scarlet zippers and red, silk-lined boots. Her shades were the purest mirrored monochromatic blue I'd ever seen.

"So there we are, off with the goodies," she was saying to a crowd helpless with laughter listening to her, "making our getaway, and all of a sudden this cop comes from nowhere and makes like he's following us, and I mean, I'm pissed, okay? Cause the ice cream in the back seat is melting, and I have so much speed in me I wanted to run for it. But Kathy says fuck the ice cream, Christopher is a Pinto, and he won't outrun the ugly Chevy the cop is in." Doctor Death paused in the middle of the story, and looked straight at me, standing on the outskirts of her audience, and said as though the thought had just occurred to her, "And you know, it made sense, cause she was right. Anyhow I'm speeding real bad, and I have the twitches, but it's okay cause the freeway's right there, but then there's a roadblock and a sign that says 'Men at Work,' and I can't get on. So I make a quick right hand turn onto Sepulveda thinking I can make a U-turn zip across the street and get on the on-ramp on the north side of Wilshire. And the cop is still following me, and somebody moved the on-ramp on me. I'm in a lane that only turns left and the on-ramp is on the right side of the street. The only way I can get to it would be to turn right from the left turn lane and go east in westbound traffic. And there's a cop in a Chevy behind me.

"So Kathy says, 'There's something wrong here. You better turn, cause the light's not getting any greener and there's a cop in a Chevy right behind you.' So I turn left, and the cop follows me, and I'm like panicking. I pull open my ashtray and dump it out on my lap. There's seven little white ones, two pink ones and one big red-and-white one that I was afraid to take, so Kathy ate it. Then the cop hits us with the lights, and we pull over, and he looks us over and says to Kathy, 'Miss, I think you should drive, since you're obviously not intoxicated.'" By this point Doctor Death was laughing so hard she could barely continue with her story, and she had most of the crowd with her. "That set me off, cause I was less stoned than Kathy was. I start yelling at the cop that the goddamn ice cream is melting--"

She talked for, God, an hour. Maybe two, I don't remember. (I do remember how the story ended; the cop asked her for a date.) We ended up having breakfast at Denny's at four in the morning, and talking until noon the next day, when both of us had to go to bed.

We didn't go to bed together. Not that I didn't suggest it.

Doctor Death hadn't gone to bed yet--she goes to bed at noon, though not with me--so we sat at her kitchen table and talked while she drank black coffee and ate peanut butter Captain Crunch out of the box.

Kathy came out of her bedroom wearing a t-shirt that was too tight, and a pair of pink panties. She glanced at me on her way to the kitchen, sitting in the living room in duster and sunglasses, and muttered something that might have been Hi, Thomas or maybe Fuck you. Kathy and I went out back when I was still working as a detective; I don't think she ever forgave me for the four and a half hours we spent in jail that last evening before Terminal Sue bailed us out.

"This chick I met at your party. Lila."

Doctor Death nodded. "Yeah?"

"Where do you know her from?"

"Sears Business Systems," she said promptly.

"What? Where?"

"I sold her a computer."

"You're kidding."

She looked oddly defensive. "No I am not kidding."

"You sold computers for Sears?"

She lifted the box of Captain Crunch and held it to her mouth, tilting it back. She looked at me, munching. When she spoke, still eating, I could smell the peanut butter on her breath. "It was a long time ago. Years and years."

"You're a waitress."

She nodded. "Now I'm a waitress. I used to sell computers."

"For Sears."

"For Sears. I sold one to Lila." Doctor Death shook her head. "If you want her phone number, I don't have it." She looked puzzled briefly. "Anyhow, I thought you two left together."

"We went to a hotel. I woke up and she was gone. Two days later she showed up at the Comedy Store while I was working and--"

"--you went to a hotel and you woke up and she was gone." She nodded. "And you don't have her phone number but you do have serious lust."

"No, I have a problem. You sure you don't--"

Doctor Death looked tired. "I could call my friends and see if anyone knows her number, or where she lives. I don't have it, though." Curiosity warred with courtesy, and won. "What'd she give you? Was it--no, you wouldn't have the test results back yet on HIV. So--"

"She bit me!" I yelled at her.

"Oh, Jesus." Doctor Death shook her head in disgust. "I'm sorry, Tommy. I should have warned you she was a vampire."

As I left Doctor Death's apartment, I noticed graffiti on the side of the apartment facing Sunset Boulevard.

On the top it said, Michael Eisner is Satan.

Below that, in a different hand, somebody had added, And Disneyland is Hell.

Century Thrift, Doctor Death had told me. She'd even, to my amazement, dug up an old business card, for Lila Macauley, Investment Counselor, Century Thrift at 11201 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 500. I knew just by looking at the card that it was old; the phone number listed was a 213 area code, when that stretch of Wilshire had switched over to 310 years ago. Information had no listing for Century Thrift; I drove down to 11201 Wilshire, the World Savings Building, and went up to the fifth floor. Suite 500 was empty; the fellow at the receptionist's desk next door, 510, was extremely effeminate, extremely polite, and didn't seem to find anything at all unusual in the way I was dressed. He told me that Century Thrift had gone bankrupt over two years ago, right after he'd come to work there. "The fellows who ran it haven't gone to jail yet. Haven't even been charged. I keep waiting, but so far I haven't heard anything about it. Did you lose money?"

"No. Actually I'm looking for someone. Lila Macauley, a blond woman, about 5'6", really great tan. She used to--"

He shook his head. "Sorry, I doubt I'd have noticed her, and I certainly wouldn't have remembered her after all this time." He smiled at me; a nicer smile, I suppose, than most straight men manage to dig up for the women they meet. "Not my type at all."

There was no Lila Macauley listed in the 213, 818, 310, 714, 909 or 805 area codes. All of those area codes are within an hour's drive of downtown Los Angeles.

It started raining as I drove to UCLA.

I hate the rain. Nobody in the entire Goddam city knows how to drive in the rain, including me, and I refuse to learn, too, no matter how easy it is. If I wanted to know how to drive in the rain, I'd move to Seattle.

You know, the whole world thinks Los Angeles is shallow. It's not. It's just warm. Lord knows, we could be deep. And depressed. And wet. I'm sure everyone in Seattle is deep. They can't do anything except read and watch old, meaningful movies of the sort they don't make anymore, since they can't go outside nine months a year.

I made a promise to myself to go see Sly Stallone's next movie the day it opened.

I drove down Wilshire, hating the rain. The rain didn't even stop the needles-on-the-skin effect, which just made me hate it more. I could feel my tan fading underneath my SPF 15 sunblock.

Let me tell you something about Los Angeles, anyway. I don't merely live in Los Angeles. I live in La Ciudad de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles--the City of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels. Where do you live? In New York? Fort Worth? Chicago? Unless you're very fortunate, you don't live in the City of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels.

For years I used to send the same Christmas card to everyone I knew around the country. It said: "Greetings from L.A.! Things are a bit whiff at the moment, from all the dead fish caused by the radioactive sludge that regularly washes up in Santa Monica Bay, but fortunately, the incense we burn in our Satanic rituals helps mask the odor." It showed a picture of what I suspect was New Jersey, but was certainly not any part of L.A.

You know, the truth of the matter is, Los Angeles really is a lousy place. It rains all the time.

Don't visit us. You'd probably enjoy Las Vegas more anyway.

I drove down Wilshire, hating the rain.