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nodded and smiled. His teeth were bright and clean and a gold cap sparkled to the left of his incisor.
    “My name is Assan, my friend. I will help you.”
    He led Duncan to a stairway behind his mini-mart. A rag pile lay beneath the steps. It moved and Duncan realized the rags contained a human. Assan led him up the stairs. At either end of a dark hallway lay two doors. A pipe crossed the hallway at head level. Assan walked under it but Duncan had to duck. Assan threw open the door on the left.
    “Your new home, my friend.”
    The room was half the size of the store below, with a small kitchen and a bathroom beside it. The floor was dirty hardwood and the walls peeling gray. A couch sat by a wall, a rip in its red vinyl cushion revealing foam the color of Assan’s skin. An old typewriter sat atop an older metal desk. Two lights hung by rusty chains from a water-stained ceiling. It was a dingy room that smelled of dust and mildew. Assan had tried to rent the studio at two fifty a month, with no luck because of the noise from the bar across the street. But what Duncan noticed were the windows facing east, with all the morning sun he could want. He looked out. Across four traffic lanes and next to a hardware store stood the Hollywood Bar and Grill. There were no windows in front, just a steel door set in a dirty, brick wall and the name spelled out in blue and red neon. Three Harleys were parked in front between a BMW and a Toyota truck. Rock music drifted from the door as three men sporting leather and long hair emerged from the bar. They got on the Harleys and thundered away.
    “For you, my friend,” Assan said, “three hundred dollars a month.”
    Duncan sighed. It was not much, but it was his only prospect, and the windows and open space appealed to him. Plus his van was dead and he had nowhere to go and no way to get there.
    “I’ll take it.”
    “Very good. But no pets.”
    “Sure,” Duncan said. “No, wait a minute. I have a cat.”
    “One cat then. But no dogs. Dogs are very messy.”
    “They’re not nearly as bad as horses.”
    “No horses!”
    “I was kidding.”
    “Horses are messy. Cats are clean. Have you ever given a cat a bath?”
    “Can’t say I have.”
    “It is not necessary. They clean themselves.”
    Assan went downstairs. Reality slowly but thoroughly slapped Duncan with meaty fingers about his face and head. The walls needed paint and the floor required sanding. He turned the taps in the kitchen. The water ran rusty. The refrigerator and water heater worked, as did the toilet, but the tub was a disaster, the shower head needed replacing, and the lock on the front door was broken. Assan returned with a lease, a pen, and a beer. Duncan twisted the cap off and downed the beer without stopping. He could not remember a beer ever tasting so good. He belched quietly and set the bottle down. Consigning himself to an uncertain fate, he took the pen.
    “Where do I sign?” he asked.
       
    “Hey, Roscoe,” Misty said to the bartender the next afternoon when she reported for work at the Hollywood Bar and Grill, “some guy across the street wants me to come up to his studio and pose for him.”
    Roscoe was a huge biker of a man with a black rose tattooed on the back of his bald head, a fu-Manchu mustache hanging down to the gold nipple rings piercing his pectorals, and tattooed muscles built up over ten years pumping iron in and out of prison. Misty dropped her bag and sat at the bar. She was a naive young peroxide blond from Ohio with artificially enhanced breasts and big brown eyes.
    “Did he try anything?” Roscoe asked.
    “No, he just asked me to pose.” Misty twirled a strand of permed hair around a finger. “He’s kind of cute.”
    “So why tell me?”
    She picked up her lingerie bag and headed for the dressing room. “Just thought you should know.”
    “So now I know,” Roscoe said.
    He forgot about it until Champagne clocked in and told the same story. Her real name was Mary.