11.

THE EL ROYALE IS in this odd little corridor—the Rossmore Corridor—between Hollywood and Hancock Park. It’s a four-block stretch of old buildings that have hung on, beautifully preserved, from another era, circa 1930.

As a neighborhood, it was probably a baby conceived by developers in the Jazz Age but was born right after the crash, so it was stunted and never grew, died out after four blocks.

And now, decades and decades later, it’s an island of elegance amid the blight. It’s like the whole corridor could be one big version of the movie The Shining: all the buildings filled with beautifully dressed people from the past drinking highballs for eternity.

Yet just one block to the north of this elegant, ghostly stretch is your standard Los Angeles bleakness: six-lane thoroughfares of strip malls, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants. Nothing over two stories, just flat urban sprawl without character or beauty.

And that’s where I was coming from, the north, down Vine Street, but as I crossed Santa Monica Boulevard, the Rossmore Corridor announced its spectral self in the distance, and the first tall old building I could see in the misting rain was the seven-story art deco Ravenswood. And I knew it was the Ravenswood—a spooky name if you ask me—because it has a great big lit-up sign on its roof, done up in large Germanic-looking letters.

Then beyond the Ravenswood, I could see the glowing rooftop sign of the twelve-story El Royale, which is the tallest and fairest of all the old buildings. It’s the palace of the neighborhood, and its sign is famously beautiful as well: the “El” is perched above “Royale,” in an elegant font, and the whole thing is done up in green neon, like the color of new money, a meretricious beacon that can be seen at a distance from all directions.

Then I crossed Melrose and was in the shrouded corridor itself. Here the road narrows and twists and changes its name, Vine becomes Rossmore, and suddenly after the flats of lower Hollywood, you’re in the shadows of these beautiful tall old buildings, which form a canopy, an enclosed feeling, and it’s like a movie set of a lost city.

That night, it was especially beautiful in the rain, this little preserve from another time, and halfway through the four-block corridor, I drove past the El Royale. It was on the left, on the other side of the road, and through elegant glass doors, I glimpsed its wooden golden-hued lobby, where a doorman was surely keeping guard, and I kept going. I hoped Sebastian was home, up there in his penthouse.

Then the corridor came to an end, like a tunnel ride in an amusement park.

It was no longer 1930—I was back in 2023, whether I liked it or not—and at the stoplight, I made a left on Beverly, then a left on North Arden Boulevard, which runs parallel to Rossmore.

Using the green neon sign as my lodestar, I found the building that had its back to the El Royale. It was the St. Francis Catholic Church, which I took as a good omen. St. Francis is my favorite saint—his prayer, his thing for animals—and I drove down the church driveway to its parking lot in the back. At the end of the lot was a high concrete wall, about twelve feet, and on the other side of that wall was the backside of the El Royale.

There were a few cars in the church lot, and I noticed, as I parked the Mercury, that a metal door in the back of the church was ajar. A folding chair was propping the door open, and attached to the door handle was a circular metal sign with a triangle stenciled onto it, and inside the triangle were the letters AA.

It was almost nine p.m. and there must have been an AA meeting going on in the church, and a few souls, based on the cars in the lot, had ventured out in the rain to attend. I was tempted to go in there myself and get a free coffee, though I did feel some pull, beyond coffee, to check out the meeting. I’ve always been very fond of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I thought it might be nice to just sit there and listen and forget about my life for a little while. Years ago, I had gone to meetings and liked them very much, the coffee and the stories and the camaraderie, but I could never stay sober, which is, naturally, a big part of the AA program, and so I stopped going.

But then I found an analyst, Dr. Lavich—she was affiliated with a psychoanalytic institute that treated ex-cops for free—and I began seeing her four days a week, which proved, in my particular case, to be more effective than AA.

And it was real old-fashioned analysis: every day I’d lie on the couch, like one of Freud’s patients, and Dr. Lavich, who was in her seventies, would sit behind me in her chair, listening wisely and patiently as I unraveled a lifetime of confusion and distorted thinking. She would interject when she thought it prudent, and often her dog, Janet, whom I had a crush on, which was not your usual transference, would be in her lap.

Well, the analysis really helped.

My drinking lessened considerably, almost to nothing; my suicidal ideation, which had plagued me for years, went silent; and I stopped having relationships, which was good for everyone involved. Dr. Lavich had said once, “Troubled people love in a troubled way.”

I did meet George two years into my treatment, but that was a healthy relationship from the start, if worshipping him like a sun king is considered healthy, and, overall, the analysis was a great run-up to Buddhism. In analysis, you study your pain, take responsibility for your choices, stop acting out, and begin behaving like a rational adult. All of which could describe the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths: acknowledge your pain, study your pain, stop making the same mistakes over and over, be a good person.

So I loved seeing Dr. Lavich, but then after four years on the couch, I began that horrid stretch of killing men in self-defense, in the line of my work, which culminated in fleeing to Mexico and getting the new face. But even then I couldn’t escape it: I killed Diablo.

None of this, of course, was Dr. Lavich’s fault or Freud’s fault. I was a deeply confused person in a violent profession, and after I settled down in Dos Ballenas, I ended my analysis over email. Quite frankly, I had killed too many people to be on the couch anymore, though I didn’t tell Dr. Lavich that. I simply thanked her for everything and said I had moved to Mexico. She wrote a short but sane reply—analysts are famously quite direct—and she let me know that the porch light was always on, as it were, for me to continue my treatment, should I return to LA.

And now that I was back, I did wish I could go see her and lie on the couch. But in analysis you’re supposed to not censor yourself at all, otherwise it doesn’t work, and I just couldn’t tell Dr. Lavich what I had been up to: she might try to have me arrested. Or committed.

So there was no calling her for help, and I didn’t go into the AA meeting to share my troubles. I was alone, had no one to turn to, and what I needed to do was focus and find Sebastian, and along the back wall of the church parking lot there was a large metal dumpster, which I thought I could use to my advantage.

I got out of the car with my new umbrella—it was still coming down hard—and as I approached the dumpster, which was as tall as me, I saw that leaning against it was a thickish mat, the kind that children might nap on or use for tumbling. There was a rip in it, and it had probably come from the day care at the church. I thought of lifting the dumpster lid and throwing the mat inside, things would look neater that way, but I had my own business to attend to, and I tossed my umbrella on top of the dumpster, then climbed up after it.

Standing on the dumpster, I could easily reach the top of the wall and pull myself up, but the wall, at the top, was embedded with shards of glass, in lieu of razor wire. I would get sliced to pieces, which was a problem, but then I realized I had an obvious solution. The gods had provided me with exactly what I needed—maybe because I was in a church parking lot—and I got that thick mat and draped it over the edge of the wall, over the jagged pieces of glass.

Mat in place, I glanced back at the church: no one was coming out of the AA meeting; no one had seen me. The rain was really coming down, but I closed my umbrella—it was the compact kind—and shoved it into the back of my pants.

Then I grabbed hold of the mat, which was slippery and wet, but I managed to pull myself up, and using the mat like a pommel horse, I got one leg on each side of the wall.

I was now looking at the shadowy back lot of the El Royale, which was not a parking lot, but used solely for large deliveries and for garbage trucks. There were about twenty yards of pavement between where I sat on the wall and the back of the building, enough for a truck to turn around in, and on the right side of the lot was a driveway that I knew would lead to Rossmore and a security gate.

Directly across from me was the El Royale’s loading dock for moving old tenants out and new tenants in, and next to the dock was a short set of metal stairs that led to a metal back door. There was one spotlight above the loading dock, providing some meager illumination in the rain, and I saw three cameras total: two by the loading dock and one by the door. But the cameras probably didn’t reach the top of the wall, where I was perched twenty yards away. At least I hoped not.

The drop to the ground was twelve feet, but directly beneath me, about six feet below, was a row of large metal dumpsters, like the one in the church lot. And I was glad to be above the dumpsters, it was better than dropping onto hard, wet pavement, slipping and breaking an ankle, but the dumpster I was above had been left open, its lid thrown back against the wall.

Inside the dumpster, there was a mass of black garbage bags and white garbage bags—the container looked to be about half full—but the light was poor, no moonlight or starlight. I just hoped there wasn’t anything sharp or too disgusting in there, but I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t slide the mat along the wall and get to one of the dumpsters whose lid was closed.

Still, I didn’t like the idea of jumping into a pile of garbage in the rain, seemed like a bad idea, and I thought of retreating. But then how would I get into the El Royale? I could never get past the doorman, not in a building like that, and since I had come this far, I figured, Oh, what the hell. Can’t be that bad. I’ll hit the garbage bags and pop right out.

So I pushed myself off the mat, hoping for the best, and I landed in a nightmarish bog of garbage and water, and I sank all the way to my waist, half my body, and I tried to grab the lip of the dumpster, but I couldn’t get purchase: my feet had perforated the garbage bags I had landed on and it was like I was standing on something alive and roiling. And the dumpster, from all the rain, had at least three feet of water in it, which I hadn’t perceived from above, and there was a lot of movement in the water around my hips.

I thought there were fish in the dumpster, carp or something, which didn’t make sense, but then I realized that swimming all around me in the wet darkness, as my eyes adjusted, were at least thirty or forty rats! I had landed in a drowning rat colony!

And some were trying to climb up me now to get to safety, to dry land, and I began to knock them off, utterly terrified and screaming like a banshee, and then one of them bit my hand, but that was a good thing. It was like a cattle prod, and I don’t know how I did it, but I somehow launched myself out of that ratty bog, and with the panicked strength of Hercules, grabbed the edge of the dumpster and vaulted to safety.

I landed on the pavement, awkwardly, nearly twisting an ankle after all, and then I brushed at myself, like a crazy man, like Bogart in that movie where he gets covered with leeches, but no rats had made it out of the dumpster with me.

Then I had a moment of insanity, thinking there was one in my pants after all!

I shook my leg wildly and nearly took off my pants, but that was just madness that passed. I realized there was no rat, and when I started to calm down a little, I looked at my hand. It was bleeding but not terribly. The rat bite was just four little puncture wounds along the edge of the hand beneath the pinky. The pain had been more psychological than physical, and growing saner by the second, I looked about me: luckily, no one had witnessed this spectacle of a man falling into a rat-infested dumpster, and the rain had probably covered my screams. It was really pouring.

I removed my umbrella, which had made the journey and miraculously not fallen out, and I opened it, shielding myself from the downpour, not that it made much difference. I was already soaked, especially my pants and shoes. Worried, I checked my jacket pockets, but I still had my wallet and phones and all my implements, most importantly the .38.

Then I looked up: the El Royale was towering over me, twelve stories of sporadically lit windows, and at the top were the penthouses, and above that was the glowing neon-green sign.

With the umbrella shielding my face from the cameras, I crossed the twenty yards of pavement, went up the metal stairs to the back door, and put on a pair of the thin white latex gloves. In case I had to go to plan B with Sebastian—murder, not confession—it was better not to leave behind any fingerprints, and I took out my lockpick. It was a fancy building, but the lock wasn’t that good, and I went through it. Then I was in a wide, roughish-looking corridor, with scuffed walls and metal doors leading to generators and furnaces and the like, and at the end of the hallway was the large service elevator.

I didn’t see any cameras, but I kept my umbrella open just in case, and I walked quickly to the lift. There was a stairwell near the elevator, behind a fire door, and I thought for a moment of climbing twelve flights to Sebastian in my sopping-wet pants and shoes, but I figured there was a greater chance of running into someone on the stairs than in the elevator. It was nine o’clock at night; most of the building staff would be off duty.

I pushed the button, and the elevator was already at this level, which was the basement. Keeping the umbrella as my shield against any cameras that might be inside, I entered the wide lift, big enough for a piano, and pushed PH. Not wanting to peek out from beneath the umbrella, I couldn’t be certain if there was a camera or not. It was an old building and an old lift: the service elevator might not have been hooked up to surveillance.

Nevertheless, it was a nerve-wracking two-minute ride, but no one else called for the elevator and no security stopped its progress. I made it, unimpeded, to the penthouse floor.

I stepped out of the lift, and the service elevator was housed in a separate hallway, behind a fire door, which I went through. I had my umbrella, my cloaking device, in place, and I was now in a grand beautiful hallway of dark red carpet and oak paneling. I walked past Penthouses C and D, with ornate wooden doors, and in the middle of the passageway, as I squished along, was the main elevator, whose doors were brushed gold with flowers etched onto their surface.

Then, at the end of the corridor, across from each other, were two more impressive wooden doors. One marked A and one marked B. My umbrella still very much in place, I went to B, which was on the left, and put my ear against it. I could hear music playing inside.

Sebastian was home.

With my left hand still holding the umbrella, keeping my face from being recorded by any prying cameras in the hallway, I got out my lockpick with my right hand. Underneath the quasi-translucent skin of the white latex glove, I saw that blood from the rat bite was pooling, but it didn’t look too bad, and I got the lock to tumble.

Then I put the pick away, took out the .38, and went in to say hello.