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car and drove up to Sunset. As usual the traffic was hardly moving. Carloads of hicks were there to disgust themselves with the creatures that inhabit the Strip at night. Carloads of freaks were there to see and be seen by their buddies on the street. Past the pulsating discos, the chic coffee houses, and the not-so-chic porno palaces, the sidewalks were a solid stream of the stuff that feeds off and is fed to the Hollywood dream machine. Pot heads, coke sniffers, hash eaters, speed freaks, skag shooters, bikers, draggers, racers, pimps, pushers, prostitutes, religious fanatics who have been saved, homicidal maniacs who never will be, yogis, Krishnas, Buddhists, Maoists, urban guerrillas, neo-Nazis, drag queens, butch dykes, leather boys, chain-mail girls, starlets hoping to be discovered, has-beens hoping to be rediscovered, and those who are there because there’s no place else to go. All the scum of the city flowed down the street, and I was going to have to Wade through it to get some answers.
    I finally reached the place I was looking for, Scorpio Rising, and managed to find a parking place in front. A red neon scorpion sprawled across the black exterior of the building. The heavy double doors were black leather and decorated with astrological signs formed out of brass studs. Each of the innumerable places on the Strip had its own gimmick. Scorpio Rising’s was the occult.
    I went inside and my nostrils were immediately assaulted by the odor of unwashed bodies, booze, incense, and the sickly sweet smell of burning grass. The feeble lighting emanated from plastic skulls mounted on the black walls. A transvestite band filled the small room with the sound of a jet engine as they exploded smoke bombs.
    A few people writhed on the dance floor in the center of the room, but most sat around tiny tables, unmoving, unseeing, unhearing, wrapped in some inner fantasy.
    I moved through the room, roughly pushing bodies out of my way, but the bodies did not even notice.
    At the back of the room was a door marked Private. I started to open it when someone grabbed my arm.
    “Can’t you read? It says ‘private.’ That means you can’t go in.”
    It was the bartender. He was a head shorter than me, but must have weighed 250 pounds, with the build of a weight lifter gone to fat. His immense beer belly hung over the top of his pants.
    “Thanks for the explanation,” I said, “but I’m expected.”
    He moved in front of the door.
    “I don’t think so,”
    “I do.”
    I moved suddenly and caught him by surprise. A short quick punch into his protruding belly. My fist sank in up to the wrist. He just stood there. His face turned bright scarlet, then white, then green. I pushed him aside and he crumpled to the floor, a trickle of vomit starting to ooze from his mouth.
    I looked around. No one had noticed. I opened the door and went in.
    There were six of them sitting around a table in the center of a room that had strange signs and markings scrawled on the walls. Up against one wall was an altar of some kind, surmounted with an upside down cross. I don’t know if they believed all that black magic bullshit, but they sure seemed to have all the props.
    They were all about the same age—nineteen or twenty. There was one girl among them—at least I thought it was female. Anyway, they all looked the same with long, stringy, dirty hair; yellow, pimply complexions; and dull, sneering e yes sunk in dark sockets. Most of them I had seen before. Two of them were passing joints, and one of them was snorting up a spoon of cocaine. This was apparently my lucky day—the coke sniffer was George Lansing II.
    One of the ones I had met before, who seemed to be their leader, had turned around when I entered.
    “What the' fuck do you want? Can’t you read? This is Private. Get the fuck out of here!”
    It was the voice of a spoiled, rich brat who was used to getting his way instantly.
    “After I get some answers to a few questions.”
    “Oh,