I could walk through Dogshit Park in eighty years and still see the same faces: clustered around a bench on the northeast corner, four or five Navajo Indians hold a debased pow-wow, passing amongst themselves a bottle of Pisco and a pack of filterless Camels, a tubercular tribute to a young, smirking Sun God in the marketing division of Phillip Morris; a group of toothless old darkies sit huddled near a garbage can next to the swing-set, shuckin' that slow shuck, all orange-livered eyes, wetnursing a jones for Jim Beam; the skaters, the hackey-sackers, the prowlers.

Johnny was, by my estimation, a Casualty, though a functional one. He walked everywhere, and everywhere he walked, a bright, pleasant grin stretched his facial musculature, and he looked like a carpenter who had plied his trade well. His faded jeans and T-shirts always somehow freshly laundered, his sun-yellowed hair combed forward in a Caesar cut, the only blemish on his person the weather-chapped lips which spoke calmly, peacefully. A Casualty.

I wish to this day that I had been able to ask Johnny to lunch, but the trust was hard-won and, to my mind, random and accidental, like a hunter of yage coming upon some young, abandoned puma, whom the beast recognizes as being as scared as she. So when I passed Johnny on the streets of Isla Vista, it was always the same scene: a vague, slowly-remembering dawn of recognition, followed by a thoughtful pause. Then we would walk toward the storage shed he kept in such a strip along a side alley near Dogshit Park. A quick whisk of the combination lock, door opens, Johnny pops in and out, while I stand, heart palpitating, spared but for the grace of God by the fast-rushing surveillance team that reportedly had been closing in on him in recent weeks, just a click of the cuffs, the world as one knows it savagely altered.

Once, a few years earlier, I had felt such heat prickle the back of my neck, and probably I should've been taken off the road anyway... just another Thursday night at Grandma Gertie's. But somehow I had one-eyed it toward the beach and gotten as far as the Tony Riviera before losing my bearings in a decrepit Ford Fiesta rag-top convertible. The fear of God becomes real in times like these: palpable - a cleansing sort of fear that makes one promise outrageous lies; a nerve tonic coming on like a veritable Beacon of Light, rinsing the pitchers from the dross; a grounding magnet to lead the rag-top Ford Fiesta slowly, carefully away from the marked patrol-car following so intolerably close behind, those sixty hits of Woodstock acid in the wallet suddenly feeling rather superfluous.

When I had entered the fringes of a less-affluent neighborhood, the patrol car hit its lights once and veered off onto a side street. And as soon as I hit the neon pulse of State Street, I parked at the Bank of America monstrous parking structure and took in a clammy, late-night movie, and prayed.

But I had no such fear this night; I was sober like a Baptist at Easter and took the freeway straight home. When I returned after midnight, the wood-shingled house I rented near the beach was almost dark, only a soft-orange glow from a Chinese lantern in an upstairs window to tell me that Scott was still up. And I knew we would talk this night, because we had not yet, and things would explode if we didn't.

I'd been living in the house for nearly three months, and my bizarre hours kept the roommates guessing. As Scott was sole signatory on the lease, and as I paid rent to Scott, all questions as to the democracy of the household had been erased during the pre-screening phone interview. A subsequent personal interview revealed the young lessor (in my cheapest armchair analysis) as a harried draftsman by day, a brilliant, frustrated, inconfident artist by night, the middle child of alcoholic parents since divorced, at just over five-foot five, suffering Little-Man's syndrome, a compulsive cleaner who, though aware of his compulsion, recognized it as merely the tip of a larger, more formidable neuroses to which he felt powerless and resigned. In short: a perfect candidate for some of the blotter acid I had been allowed by the kind Fates to escape with late that afternoon.

I took a seat at my computer in the downstairs bedroom, tapping out one of my unnatural stories for Paddy, Peter Gabriel-era Genesis hissing perpetually through the speakers, until I heard the sound of the microwave. Then I unlocked the door and readied myself for a certain psychic hell that thankfully never came. Instead, Scott shrugged and turned his palms toward the ceiling, smiling in some resigned way.

"What's going on?" he grinned, not looking past me and into my painfully lighted room with the faux-vaulted ceiling, not looking overly concerned with what it was I was doing at nearly two in the morning, not even looking much like the same fussy landlord with whom I had withstood such a grueling interview weeks earlier . . . just a man in his early prime wanting to know what lay at the heart of such a strange goddamned animal as was living in the bedroom underneath him.