When I received his file from Bethanny, I saw that Lawrence was only at 50 percent on the PSAC. Bethanny had noted that Lawrence said he was always alone. And when I arrived at his apartment, I could tell that, besides her, I was probably the only person who had come to see him in weeks, if not months. He lived in one of those 1960s Los Angeles apartment buildings broken up into eight one-bedrooms. They had once been advertised as perfect for single people on the move, but Lawrence wasn’t on the move anymore. He hadn’t been for a long time.

I had googled him immediately after receiving his file and discovered that Lawrence was once a pornographer. One of those seventies San Fernando soft-core-movie directors—just loads of breasts soft-lit and bouncing across the screen and men with mustaches licking their lips in anticipation. Nothing crazy. I didn’t even feel shy about going to see him after I found out. What was he going to say? Evelyn, I was a pornographer?

“You’re Evelyn,” he said when he opened the door.

“I am.”

I found it a little exciting when I looked up his movie titles that there were a slew of women’s names with By Night added after them. Terri, Toni, Wendi. Anything with an “i,” basically. Stage names. I wondered if any of them were dead or dying, too. I wondered if his apartment was full of VHS tapes that he still watched regularly.

I also wondered what Lawrence’s obituary would look like. Would it say B-movie director, or would it say King of double-D pleasure flicks? I thought about the story of the B-movie actress who was found mummified in her house. They said she could have been dead a year. Spiders had spun webs inside her mailbox for months before anyone bothered to look. She was somebody, until she wasn’t.

Lawrence had been handsome at the height of his fame in the seventies. But now his entire apartment smelled like Vicks, and his white V-neck was soaked through with the ointment. As I walked in, I noticed empty jars of it in a Ralphs bag he had tossed beside the front door to be thrown out. There were some framed movie posters on the wall, but nothing too risqué. He needed a haircut and a shave.

“It’s a mess in here,” he said.

His trash was filled with used tissues and takeout soup containers—hot-and-sour was his favorite, he told me.

“I don’t care that it feels like it’s eating a hole through my stomach.”

I noted the several bottles of Imodium A-D on his counter. And rows of empty orange pill-bottles lined up under the windowsill as if he was starting a collection.