It was still in the low nineties outside when I left for the club. When it's hot at night and there's no wind, all of downtown L.A.’s visceral smells hang thick in the air, assaulting as you pass. But still, it felt good to be outside, even on a muggy night like this.

I'd been cooped up in my room for three days straight, knowing the management wouldn't put a padlock on the outside of the door if there was still someone inside. I had lived, if you can call it that, in the Ohio Hotel for five months, and every time I was even a day late with the weekly rent, those bastards put that same blue, spray-painted padlock on my door. If you didn't pay the rent by the end of that week they would remove the lock along with all your possessions. That hadn't happened to me yet but was only four days away. They were already scurrying through the drawer in search of the blue one when I passed by the front desk on my way out.

There was a line outside the Necropolis Club. It seemed there was always a line. Thankfully the bouncer on the door let me in without waiting. I was supposed to meet Martin at midnight; it was 10:45 when I arrived.

The once quiet Necropolis had been my bar of choice for the past year. But with one write up in the LA Weekly the amateurs started pouring in from as far away as Simi Valley and Chino. But for all its newfound popularity, the bar itself hadn't changed. The Egyptian themed club sat in an old movie theater, and all they did to modernize it was to remove the seats, level the floor, put bars along the front and back walls, and build a stage in front of the large silver movie screen, which showed black and white films without sound behind the bands. The bar tops along each wall were lit by blue-white neon underneath thick frosted glass, making it look as if they served nothing but iridescent blue liquors to the patrons. The walls had been stripped clean, painted black, and covered in twenty foot tall, white bas-relief portraits of strange-looking Egyptian gods.

"Hello Evan," a familiar voice said from behind the bar.

"Henry," I said, smiling at him as I took the last empty seat at the back bar.

"What can I get for you?"

"Give me a beer."

"That'll be two bucks," he said, nodding to someone holding up an empty glass at the other end of the bar.

I had less than a dollar on me. "Run me a tab will you Henry? I'm going be here for a while," I said, lighting a cigarette. Henry smiled and went down toward the man with the glass.