He’d never cruised for tail, oh, no; yet he hadn’t banked on being romantically alone this early in life either. He’d even wanted children, at different points. Vital, wholesome boys with trampoline feet, pecs covered in varsity letters. They’d outrun him, outwit him, outlast him.

The best candidate for co-father had slipped through his fingers years earlier. That was Fletcher, the Brit who audited him during his flush New York years in the mid-eighties. The only man Raymond knew who could look sexy in a cardigan. While the going was good, it was great. They were both tall, lean, and often mistaken for brothers. They test-ran fatherhood on dates to Broadway with Fletcher’s teenage son. But Fletcher discovered that America was such a conformist country that even its deviants cleaved to convention. And so he, too, fell in line. He never advertised his sexuality and avoided all the souks where AIDS had cast its pall; his preference was to act as if he belonged to a separate caste, if not species, from those he called “the gays.”

Several years after Fletcher’s departure, Raymond left Manhattan too. As he packed his bags, Lena sent him off with her peculiar form of fare-thee-well: “The bad thing about Cullifornia is that you’ll be surrounded by ee-juhts. The good thing about Cullifornia is that you’ll be surrounded by ee-juhts.”

Raymond’s Jaguar sluiced through Eagle Rock, once a scraggly enclave of flag-waving blue-collars but increasingly home to vegan “creatives” and the offspring they in full sobriety named Axel or Tito. In spite of—many would say, because of—these new migrants, some of the ugliest new architecture in LA County had sprouted in and around Eagle Rock, clinging to the hillsides like Bauhaus dingleberries.

There, on the main boulevard, Raymond found free street parking. It was less of an LA miracle once he realized where he’d parked—nobody wanted their car jacked in front of an adult video duplicating service; just imagine going in there asking for help. He sprinted the half block down to The Green Man, and was baffled to find that it had the stained glass windows and rustic oak door of an old-school tavern. He checked the address on the printout in his hand.

Inside, the place reeked of old cigarettes, but it was unmistakably a vintage gun store. Old-fashioned firearms of every kind were displayed behind glass on every wall. Minding the cash register was a jowly lady with gray-blond hair. A T-shirt cheetah stretched across her ample chest and tail-eating serpents circumnavigated her arms.

“What can I do for you, sweetheart?” she said.

“This is The Green Man, isn’t it?”

“You mean the old Irish pub? That’s long gone.” She blew a puff of Lucky Strike at him. “I kept the exterior just to fool suckers like you inside so I can sell you an 1889 Winchester.”