I rolled my eyes to the ceiling as an all too familiar feeling started to come over me. 'It's not his fault,' I told myself. 'He could never understand.' "Go ahead with what you're going to say," I said, leveling my eyes at him.

He took a drink of my beer as he began. "Last year after I lost my job at the Whiskey, I started helping my buddy Dominic with some drug deliveries, heroin mostly but there was some coke too. I didn't do it for very long, but I needed rent money. Anyway, one night we're out together and he gets a page from his boss about some special drop he needs to do. 'This is a big one,' he says to me as he pulls into the parking lot of this gay bathhouse out on Vine called 'Members Only'. He comes back five minutes later with an overnight bag under his arm. We drove from the bathhouse straight to the church, her church.

"Now I can tell there's a swinging party going on because we had to park two blocks away. We go inside and the place is hoppin'. The air was thick with smoke: tobacco, marijuana, opium, you name it. I peer through the vestibule into the main room and it's full of people grinding on a dance floor below the altar. Some out of town hardcore gothic band is blaring from the short stage behind the pulpit where the lead singer stood, while naked men and women completely covered in different colored body paints are dancing in cages on either side of the band."

"That's bullshit," I interjected.