John the bartender was a better version of me. Taller by at least a quarter foot, even darker-skinned, and an inch or two more broad, John was a friend from Texas; from a time when liquor was cheap and life cheaper still.

He got in the whiskey business and ran a series of unlicensed bars around LA, one after the other. The new one, like all the rest had been, was called John’s and you could gain admittance only if he wanted you to.

“Easy, what you doin’ comin’ up the back stairs like some sneak thief?”

“Sneakin’.”

“What you need?” He had already turned around and was walking down the slender, dimly lit corridor toward a distant red door.

“What do most people need when they come to a saloon?” I asked, following in his wake.

“Most of my customers come to drink alcohol.”

“Drink’s only the primer. They really come to be with other fools and talk to you about their foolishness.”

“Any problems Easy Rawlins got is beyond a poor brother like myself,” John opined. He passed through the red door into a bright blue hallway that was half the length of the first.

I laughed and followed until we exited the blue hall through a yellow door leading to the area behind his bar. The drinking room we faced was quite large, brightened by a wide skylight gathering the little sun left in the sky.

There were only three customers. All of them black men intent on their libation. I didn’t recognize anyone.

“Where’s Tiny?” I asked.

Tiny was the three-hundred-pound bouncer who was usually perched on a high stool behind the green, metal-jacketed, third-floor front door.

“Tiny don’t come out till the sun go all the way down,” John said like he was Moses delivering the Eleventh Commandment from on high.

I made my way to the other side of the bar and sat on one of the tall oak stools.

“What’s your pleasure?” John inquired.

He might as well have asked me to explain the theory of relativity. I sat there counting scars the barman’s face had accrued over many years of doing business.

“What’s wrong, Easy?”

“How many years we know each other, man?”

“Might be as much as thirty. Near ’bout anyway.”

“Have I ever given you anything?”

“One or two tight spots and some good laughs.”

I took the keys to my Rolls and put them on the mahogany.

“That’s the ignition and trunk key. You can’t keep it. At least I don’t know if you can. But there’s a right-side-drive yellow Rolls-Royce locked up in your garage out back. Why don’t you hold it for me a couple’a months?”

That was the first and last time I ever saw a boyish gleam in my friend’s eyes.

“What I got to do for that?”