Drink Issue 2009

Light Of Love 

On not being scared to drink at the Spotlight   
By Sarah Tressler 

Inside the Motherlode at Santa Monica and Robertson – described as the second oldest gay bar in Los Angeles by “Uncle Ronnie,” arguably the most fabulous AARP-qualifier still in operation in Hollywood – the bartender cautions me against going to the Spotlight, which is evidently the oldest gay bar still in operation in Hollywood. “That place is scary,” he says.

This is a sentiment I’d already heard a lot – but no one had anything too specific to say about it. Most just clucked their tongues and shook their heads. So when it’s time to finally visit the Spotlight – formerly frequented by Rock Hudson and Johnny Mathis – I am too nervous to go inside. I sit in the café directly across the street at the corner of Cahuenga and Selma. Nearby is Hairroin, a hair salon that presumably fosters addictions; Big Wangs, a restaurant specializing in what I can only guess would be chicken wings – ahem – wangs; and a manicurist where I saw a neatly groomed man getting his nails done. I stare out the plate-glass window at the Spotlight. The blue awning over the door informs passersby that this bar was “Est. 1963,” the year JFK was assassinated and MLK gave a speech about a dream.

When I finally sweep aside the curtain that blocks sunlight from the Spotlight’s depths, all I see is a typical bar. On the right is the bar itself, behind which a man in a ball cap and a gray sweatshirt pours drinks for his customers under the flickering light of ceiling-mounted televisions. On the left, a pinball machine, darts, a digital jukebox (“100,000 songs”!) and a smattering of tables and chairs. At 12:45 p.m. on a Wednesday, the juke is pumping out Britney Spears’ “Piece of Me,” the soaps are playing on the televisions, and seven men are seated at the bar.

Tony, the bartender in the ball cap and sweatshirt, is 72. The first time he poured a drink for a customer at the Spotlight, Nixon was in the White House. Rick, one of the men at the bar, is an executive assistant who’s been coming to the Spotlight for three years. Rick names everyone in the bar and gives a brief back-story on each one of them – after he finishes fighting with his boyfriend about whether frozen blueberries can be baked into a pie. This is the scary bar?

“It used to be a pretty shady place,” Rick says. “But they hired a new security crew here, David and Keith – and they’re a couple. They’re really nice. We had lunch with them down in Laguna one time.”

I spotted Rick’s boyfriend Joi smoking outside the Spotlight the day before.

“I come here as often as I can,” he says. “You know what I really love about this place – and I’ve only been coming here for two years – there used to be a lot of hustlers and street kids, they were characters here. But now it’s just the best place to sit and strike up a conversation.”

The Cahuenga Corridor revitalization has helped the bar overcome that “scary” patch. Investors have been sprucing up the area with new restaurants and clubs, including Goa (a celeb club stop which has since been shut down) and Kitchen 24, a trendy, upscale diner. All this activity has caused some worry for the patrons of the Spotlight, though.

Kevin McNickel – name changed at subject’s request – has been coming to the bar for the last two years. He has his suspicions about the future of the Spotlight.

“Why was there a city planning committee notice on the wall of this bar over the summer saying that this bar with the attached building directly north of it on Cahuenga is being sold into some new hoity-toity club? All the normal people in Hollywood who remember the old Hollywood are very sad if this bar closes,” says McNickel.

Rick agrees: “I only hope Don Samuels does not ever, ever sell this place.”

Don Samuels is the owner of the Spotlight. Everyone I talk to tells me to talk to him. His nightly schedule is predictable: at about 7 p.m. he arrives at his bar, takes his seat on the end by the door, and stays there until it closes. I make plans to return that night to chat with him, but I am cautioned – again.

“I get out of here way before sunset,” says McNickel. “I’ve never been here at night,” Rick says. “At nights, it gets a lot crazier.” And Neil, a waiter who’s come in for a post-work drink that afternoon, also warns me to take care when coming back at night.

“In any bar in Hollywood, you need to keep your wits about you, because there’s always someone in the bar watching you. People who come in to watch you drinking – robbers, hustlers, muggers,” he says. Neil also says that he leaves the bar before 9 p.m. I tell him I’ll bring my boyfriend for safety.

“Is he good-looking?” Neil asks.

When I return, it’s after midnight. A tall, tan, bald man in a yellow tank top is tending bar this time. Ben, as he introduces himself, or Benji, as he’s called by some of the other patrons, has tended bar at the Spotlight for nine years.

“My first day here, I worked the 6 a.m. shift, and there were people waiting outside when I got here,” he says. At the end of the bar, I see an elderly man in an English driving cap munching on the tortilla chips the bar hands out with drinks. Ben confirms that he’s Don Samuels.

Before I make my way to the man in charge, I chat with 79-year-old Floyd Wightman, a retiree who formerly worked in corrections for the California Youth Authority. Floyd’s been haunting the Spotlight since the ’50s, before the original – on Vine and Selma – burned down.

“I come here almost every night. It’s a kind of like a neighborhood bar,” he says. “When people come in, you don’t bother them, they don’t bother you. They are very friendly. People are very congenial, they’re very pleasant, they’ll talk to you – they don’t seem to have any hang-ups, which is good.”

Wightman says that when he had surgery last July, Don Samuels called him in the hospital every day.

“He’s concerned about his customers. He does that with everyone,” Wightman says.

Samuels entered into the business in 1974 with his partner. When his partner passed away in 1981, Samuels became the sole owner, and has been coming in nearly every night since, despite suffering a stroke that has impaired his speech.

“We don’t care who comes in, as long as they’re presentable and clean and they respect each other and the people here,” says Samuels. “You show respect, you get respect. That’s my philosophy. Come in for a good time, have a few drinks, and meet other people. You have any other reason, we don’t need you.”

Samuels says he has been approached by developers who have wanted to buy him out. “I’m not interested now in selling – because all my employees are very loyal,” says Samuels. Then, as an afterthought, he adds, “And I wouldn’t have any place to go every night.”

The Spotlight, 1601 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood. 6 a.m. to 2 a.m.; (323) 467-2425. www.spotlightbar.com.

 Drinking With

Jon Shook, Animal
The places I like the most include The Cork – Adams Boulevard, just east of La Brea – Tiki Ti, and Jumbo’s Clown Room. I live on Normandie, so Jumbo’s is actually my local bar. In L.A., you definitely need a local bar. Where I go really depends on my mood, but that’s the great thing about L.A. – it’s really diverse. If I’m looking for a laugh I might go to Jumbo’s or the Cork, which is kind of in a rougher neighborhood – like a mother might be there with her son. While I do like going to dive bars, I wouldn’t go to, say, Tiki Ti if I want a vodka drink. For something like that I like The Four Seasons on Robertson. Some of the most interesting people in Hollywood. I like people-watching – and it’s really a riot there. (as told to Guelda Voien)

The Cork, 4771 W. Adams Blvd., Los Angeles; Jumbo’s Clown Room, 5153 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood; Tiki Ti, 4427 W Sunset Blvd., Silver Lake; The Four Seasons Hotel, 300 S. Doheny Dr., Los Angeles.

Kristen Trattner and Monica May, The Nickel Diner
Kristen: I’m a big drinker. Right now I bounce between the front bar at Cole’s and The Varnish [the new bar by Eric Alperin] in the back. I like to keep it within walking distance. We either start with an Old Fashioned or a Sazerac made by Raul at the Varnish. He really knows how to snap the neck of an orange peel. If you listen closely you can hear a shriek.

Monica: I’m very fond of the Death in the Afternoon – an absinthe and champagne cocktail. (GV)

The Varnish and Cole’s Original French Dip, 118 E. Sixth St., downtown.

Susan Feniger, Ciudad, Border Grill and Street
I’m in the restaurant until late, so I try to end up near my house. I will often end up at the Brentwood, because it’s open late. At night, it’s really a neighborhood hang. I know the bartender and all the servers have been there for a while. I may have a Campari and soda if I don’t feel like much, or a glass of cab. I’ll drink dirty martinis often, very dirty ones, Ketel One but I like it very dirty, or vodka-sodas. And when my restaurant opens I can’t wait to go there and sit by the fire pit. (GV)

The Brentwood, 148 S. Barrington Ave., Los Angeles.

Lee Joseph, Dionysus Records
I love to drink at Bigfoot Lodge and Saints & Sinners. Not only because I DJ at both (Club London Calling every Wednesday and Satanic Swingers Lounge every Thursday) or because I get the employee discount. I love the ambiance of Bobby Green’s creations – one part art installation and two parts escape! Inside one of his establishments, you are in the fantasy world of an adult Disneyland – sort of a punk rock equivalent of the Depression-era movie houses. I also like that both bars have an excellent selection of single malt scotch. Great music and no distracting televisions to be found! (Ron Garmon)

Bigfoot Lodge, 3172 Los Feliz Blvd., Los Feliz; Saints & Sinners, 10899 Venice Blvd., Los Angeles.

DJ Wolfie
The Edison features my favorite “just legalalized green stuff” to drink – I speak of course of absinthe, which up until recently was illegal. Otherwise known as “The Green Fairy,” it is the drink that Van Gogh quaffed heavily. In addition to helping him see the world in an impressionistic light, it also led to him chasing Gauguin around his house with a straight razor – the same razor later used on his own ear. The Edison serves it in a lovely potion bottle, complete with cork. Bring your own razor. (RG)

The Edison, 108 W. 2nd St. # 101, downtown Los Angeles.

Hadrian Belove, Cinefamily
The best bar in the world is in K-town. Don’t know the name because the sign’s in Korean, but you’ll know it by the painted billboard of Kim Jong Il in a profile face-off with some other guy probably from South Korea. Wallpapered with old Korean newspapers, the wood-slatted booths are the ideal to settle in for a good long drunk. The booze is cheap, the service is good, and you can practically move in. You can order spicy beer-friendly food and fresh fruit, and you can’t beat the atmosphere. (Chris Ziegler)

6th and Berendo, Koreatown.

Paz Lenchantin, the Entrance Band
Bardot where Derek James DJs most Wednesdays nights. I get a cold glass of Stella – I like it when the bartender secretly spikes it with a hit of acid. (CZ)

Bardot, 1737 N. Vine St., Hollywood.

Elita Loresca, KNBC
Sorry L.A. City Beat readers, but since I don’t drink that much, I’m not exactly an expert on local bars. On occasion, my fiancé and I like to go to The Yard House in Pasadena. Their bar has a huge selection of beers, which he likes, and I’m a big fan of their sliders. They play a great selection of music and it’s one of the best places in town to watch the “big” games. Don’t know what they have in store for St. Patrick’s Day, but I’ll bet there’s going to be green beer available for the tasting! (Matthew Fleischer)

The Yard House, 330 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena.

John Coltharp, lead barman at Seven Grand
Something sets The Varnish apart from other bars in this city. Milk & Honey of New York is widely considered the Mecca for cocktail dorks, and its owner and creator has brought the same obsession to Varnish. The glasses come out of a freezer. The drinks are rushed to the table like a soufflé that might drop. Good cocktails are supposed to be cold; his are the coldest you get. The amount of good bars using fresh-squeezed juice has gone from “count on one hand” to “well, they’d better or I’m getting a beer and a shot.” More than anything, the commitment to specificity makes the Varnish unique. It’s euphoria that moves past vodka tonic and rum coke.

(Tom Child)

The Varnish, 118 E. Sixth St., downtown Los Angeles.

Tony Lovett, author of L.A. Bizarro
No curmudgeon in his right mind would divulge the name of his favorite bar – including me. But I am willing to do the next best thing and give up The Safari Room since I also outed the place in the forthcoming update of (shameless plug ahead) L.A. Bizarro, coming later this year from Chronicle Books. If it were located in the heart of L.A., this time-warp from the 1950s would be packed nightly with the Bettie Page-haircut/porkpie-hat-set. And yet, despite its location in the back country of Mission Hills, Safari Room appears to be showing up on the radar for a growing number of hipsters. Boo-hoo. I love the place for its clichéd African décor – spears, giant tortoise shells, Zulu masks, etc. – which appear to have remained untouched since 1957. The bar is long and un-crowded, the drinks are efficacious, and the old-school fare served in both the bar and restaurant takes me back to my ’60s childhood. My favorite cocktail here? Shrimp. (Will Swaim)

Safari Room, 15426 Devonshire St., Mission Hills.

The Gaslamp Killer
These days I don’t go to Hollywood or downtown. My favorite drinking spots right now include Verdugo Bar in Glassell Park. They have more beer options – rare beer options. It’s like heaven. It’s a ridiculous section of beer and I like beer. It’s an old ’40s bar that’s been restored. I also like The Airliner on Wednesdays – there are lots of young people. It’s also really old and restored, drinks are super-cheap, staff is super-friendly. The drinks are really cheap. (GV)

Verdugo Bar, 3408 Verdugo Rd., Glassell Park; The Airliner, 2419 N. Broadway, Lincoln Heights.

Gabriel Hart, Jail Weddings
First off, Akbar, which is right around the corner from my house. They have $2 Anchor Steams on Mondays. It’s probably the cheapest drink in town. My other favorite place is The Bounty on Wilshire. But I really like brown-bagging. A lot of us will go to what we call Bedpan Park – it’s this great drinking-in-public spot. So obvious, the cops never give us any trouble. (GV)

Akbar, 4356 W. Sunset Blvd., Silver Lake; The Bounty, 3357 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles.

Tough Hooch for Tough Times

It’s a conundrum as hard as a cirrhotic liver: With the economy cratering you need a stiff drink, but with the economy cratering your budget has no room for a trip to a bar or liquor store. So you do it yourself. And more than 60 years ago, America’s greatest food writer published a recipe for homemade vodka.

M.F.K. Fisher, the recipe’s author, grew up in Whittier at roughly the same time as Richard Nixon. Unlike Nixon, she didn’t grow up to be a notorious drunk dialer. Also unlike Nixon, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher was charming and witty, with an elegant prose style.

Her reputation as a food writer rests on a series of books, beginning with 1937’s Serve It Forth. In 1942, she turned her attention to eating well despite wartime rationing with How to Cook a Wolf. The recipes – none of which actually involves a wolf – range from the standard (“A Basic Minestrone,” “Spoonbread”) to the more unusual (“Mock Duck,” “Tomato Soup Cake”).

But surely the most unexpected one has the simple title, “A Vodka.” Fisher says she first learned of the recipe from “a Junior Leaguer from Ohio.” Junior Leaguers are, of course, pillars of society, and this pillar apparently had access to “an honest but unscrupulous druggist” who was willing to sell her “a quart of good alcohol.”

The recipe itself is quite simple:

1 quart of water

One half an orange rind, shaved

1 teaspoon glycerin or sugar

1 lemon rind, shaved

1 quart alcohol

Simmer the first four ingredients very gently for about 20 minutes. Remove from stove. Add alcohol and cover instantly with a tight lid. Let cool and strain.

To make a very acceptable liqueur add more fruit shavings and spoonful or so of honey.

In the second edition of the book, Fisher adds, “My Uncle Walter, the most accomplished early-morning drinker I have ever known, says it is superlative in tomato juice.”

Despite Uncle Walter’s endorsement, this recipe would seem to clearly fall into the Drink at Your Own Risk category. True, it’s been in print for 67 years, and there are no reports of anyone going blind from drinking the vodka – which is reassuring – but there are no reports on what it does to your liver, kidneys or brain, either. Of course, if your brain thinks it’s a good idea to drink stove-top vodka, it probably deserves whatever happens to it.

Our brain told us this was a reasonable risk, and so, of course, we plunged on.

We found our pure alcohol at BevMo – asked at the front counter for “alcohol for cooking,” and were guided quickly to Everclear. Jay the Clerk handed us a bottle. We admired it: great retro label of simple color like something out of bourbon country (black and red ink on sepia) wrapped over a clear glass bottle of equally utilitarian design, and a warning that the stuff should be kept far from open flame: Everclear is 75 percent alcohol.

Jay looked at us steadily and asked, “What are you going to do with it?”

“We’re going to make vodka on a stove,” we said.

We explained Fisher’s recipe. Jay listened intently, and then offered, “That’s not really homemade. I mean, it’s not like you’re distilling it.”

Then Jay offered his own recipe for home vodka, no more homemade

than Fisher’s.

Jay went to college in Arizona, and noticed that the labels on high-priced vodka often claim they’re filtered over and over, almost ridiculously scrubbed – “like seven times or something,” Jay said.

So Jay bought a bottle of cheap vodka (“I think it was Popov”) and ran it through a charcoal filter.

How’d that taste? “A little like charcoal,” Jay admitted.

That wasn’t the worst of it: for the next two days, Jay and his roommates, like gas victims in the Great War, battled blinding headaches, photosensitivity, and vomiting.

“Thanks for the tip,” we said. “We’ll stick with Fisher.”

“No, no,” said Jay. “There’s more.

Undeterred, Jay and his roommates bought a cheap Britta water filter – “the countertop kind, a pitcher” – and ran some Popov through that seven times.

And then they drank it. Jay said the Britta filter system worked perfectly. A college dorm taste test on friends and neighbors concluded there was no measurable difference between Grey Goose and Britta-filtered Popov.

At home, we followed Fisher’s recipe to the letter. Or almost: We always take shortcuts in the kitchen: on one day, our chocolate chip cookies turn out better than anything that fell upon the Jews during their biblical wandering; on another they taste like something for backpackers or astronauts. We precisely simmered water, sugar, and a peeled lemon. But in the absence of an orange we used orange juice. And at 20 minutes, we killed the heat and added the entire bottle of Everclear – discovering only then that one liter is not quite a quart. We replaced the lid and set the whole thing outside to cool but grew impatient and proceeded to search for a strainer.

But what kind of strainer? We started to pour a small amount into a funnel over the tea strainer that, in turn, we set over a Pyrex measuring cup.

Steam – roughly 37.5 percent alcohol – rose like sand in our eyes.

Temporarily sightless, we overwhelmed the diminutive strainer and lost about five shots of steaming homebrew vodka on the kitchen counter. When our vision cleared, we noted that the few ounces of vodka in the measuring cup were sort of murky – vaguely orange juice-colored, actually.

With Jay in mind, we bravely continued, filtered the rest of the vodka, threw the stripped lemon into the compost pile, and shook up several lemon drop martinis. The lemon drop is murky itself, of course, so no one worried over the cloudy color; our subjects drank deeply from the well of Fisher-brand vodka, and they declared it good. They drank through dinner. They drank through dessert, conversation and Zack and Miri Make a Porno. It’s not excessive to observe that the subjects were positively effusive about Fisher’s vodka – its taste (“comparable to the very best,” said one) and the price: nearly two quarts of 75 proof Southern California vodka for about $16, the cost of one bottle of Everclear.

 “Did You Ever Hear About The Time That I Tried Sexual Intercourse With a Pizza?”

Drinking in the garage with Tony Millionaire
By Tom Child

Tony Millionaire somehow manages to balance his jobs as comic artist (the rum-soaked Maakies, making its City Beat debut this issue and viewable on his website, maakies.com) and co-creator and writer of The Drinky Crow Show (appearing on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim) with, shall we say, a rather European approach to alcohol consumption. Drinky Crow’s Maakies Treasury, a collection of the second five years of the strip appears in stores this month.

Tony Millionaire: Let me get a better phone. And let me get a beer. And now I’m ready.

L.A. Citybeat: You said that you have some issues with drinking in L.A. – or at least the ability to do it safely.

When I was doing my heaviest and most creative drinking I lived in Boston, Berlin and New York, and in any of those towns, you could either walk to the bar and walk home or you could take a cab or you could take a subway and just go home. Boston was a little tough because subways all closed before the bars closed, so you had to get a ride. But I didn’t have a driver’s license so I didn’t care. But in L.A., you know, if I were to walk to a bar it would take me like an hour and a half, and getting a cab home is practically impossible. So it’s totally changed my drinking. When I got to L.A. – and got married and had kids – it wasn’t really a good idea for me to be staying out ’til three in the morning at a bar anyway. So I usually do all my drinking now in the garage with a can of beer and a pen in my hand. It works out fine. The way that I work is during the day I take care of business, run around, go on errands, make the phone calls, and then at night, the kids go to sleep and I can pull up to the desk and start drinking the beer. Because I really have a hard time drawing when I’m not drinking. You keep thinking, “Oh, great – after I finish this I’ll have another beer.” It keeps you going.

What’s your favorite beer?

My favorite and only type of beer that I like to drink is Budweiser out of a can. I don’t even like it out of a bottle. Anybody ever walks around here with a Bud Lite, my daughter starts screaming at them: “Lite!” She hates it because I hate it. I never understood why anybody would put water in a beer.

What was your favorite place to drink in L.A. before you just started drinking in your own house late at night?

Before the kids were born, I lived in Silver Lake, so I had a couple of bars that I really liked over there. Do you remember the Smog Cutter? Oh my God, it was the greatest. It was down some little road right near my house. I could just walk home from there and my wife and I would go there. It was run by people from Thailand, and there was a woman who ran the place and behind her there was like a photograph of the president of Thailand. She said it was her uncle, but nobody believed her. They had pool tables there. We went there with John Flansburgh from They Might Be Giants one time. He’s an old friend of mine and we went down there and sang karaoke. Anyplace else, I would never sing karaoke, but that place was such a rundown dive … a very weird place, very funny. That must have been six or seven years ago that I was going there. There was another place I liked to go, and of course I’m terrible with names – Ye Rustic Inn. You always meet guys like Dino Stamatopoulos there. Jay Johnston. A lot of the really drunken comedians. And once you get tired of all the drunken comedians, you can go across the street to that other place, which is some weird … like Midnight Happy Time or something? And it’s filled with old men and there’s always some Frank Sinatra on the jukebox.

What sort of things happened to you during these drunken times?

Well, did you ever hear about the time that I tried sexual intercourse with a pizza? Oh, you didn’t? It was back in New York when you could really get drunk and just climb into a cab and nurse a hangover for a couple of days. It was the closing of the Screw magazine offices. They were moving to new offices, so people were in the Screw magazine office, going through all the files, taking out all the weird original drawings and stuff that they could find – drawings by Robert Crumb and Spain. And then we all went to this bar that was down the street from there. Things got crazy. Somebody ordered a pizza and then in front of all the famous cartoonists over there, like Kaz, Sam Henderson, all those guys, I took a slice of pizza, put a hole in it and then I pulled my flaccid penis through it and stretched it out. I don’t think anyone got a photo of it, but everyone laughed. Then later the rumor was all around town that Tony Millionaire fucked a pizza. If I had actually gotten an erection and screwed a slice of pizza, it would have been much more disgusting and disturbing and perverted. But to pull your penis through a slice when it’s not hard – see, that’s just a wacky joke. Yeah, that was a fun place.

What’s most surprising about you for someone who only knows you through your comics?

They’d be surprised to know what a sweetheart I am, and that I’m a gentleman. I mean, I was a drunken crazy man like Drinky Crow, but now I’m pretty much a loving dad. I stay at home with my two little kids and they go to school a block away. And my wife, we work in the garden and grow flowers and stuff. So now, in order for me to come up with a good joke for the strip about Drinky, I have to remember. It’s kind of nice.

 Napoleon Paid For It In Cash

Brownbagging 211 in Chinatown’s newest park
By Nathaniel Page

Magic Napoleon Johnson is out on a $2,500 bond after three weeks in Twin Towers. “I grabbed the cop’s gun, then I smacked his ass,” he says of his arrest, swinging a wild, demonstrational haymaker. “And the other one took off running.”

“I’m an eighth degree black belt in Loma Lima,” he continues, mangling the name of the Samoan martial art. “I’ll kill yo’ ass!”

Magic Napoleon has been pestering passers-by near Montana Bail Bonds. He wears a beanie, shades, and ratty, baggy, mismatched attire. He carries earphones and other accessories suggesting a lost boombox somewhere. His crooked, narrow teeth are encased in plaque and his long fingernails are packed with grime. Born 55 years ago in St. Louis, Herbert Duncan and Pauleen Johnson raised Magic in a liquor store.

“Hey man, I’m trying to get back out to Victorville,” he tells me.

With his glassy, bloodshot eyes and his incorrigible fidgeting, Magic Napoleon looks like the kind of guy with whom I’d like to have a beer. He immediately accepts my offer.

We set off toward Chinatown. I want to sit at a bar. “Naw,” he says. “They ain’t got 211 at the bar.”

We go to a liquor store, where he walks directly to the Steel Reserve 211 and grabs two 24-ouncers. We continue to a Chinese buffet. On the way, Magic Napoleon tells me he is the manager of the “Albertsons on Riverview” in Victorville. (After research, it seems there is no such location.) He needs to get to his ranch out there, or to his El Camino, or to Slauson and Crenshaw. “I got a lil’ cousin down there,” he says. “Works at Paramount Studios. Looks just like Obama.”

Magic Napoleon made a fortune selling crack and sherm down in Compton. “Give me some crack. I’ll sell it,” he assures me. But he won’t elaborate. “I’ll have people wanting to kill my ass,” he says. “Shit, I’ll kill yo’ ass.”

Magic Napoleon threatens to kill me four times overall. But his rat-like frame and what I assume to be a weakened heart make the threats unimpressive.

At the buffet, he orders deep-fried chicken and pork chops. Then we brown-bag it in the new circle park on Main and Alameda beside an unconscious vagrant while Magic Napoleon spins a yarn about his three-million-dollar ranch. He chews the swine bones loudly, mouth agape, grease running in gobs through his salt-and-pepper goatee.

The ranch is four bedrooms with an attic and a basement, a four-car garage, and a “big-ass hundred-inch tee-vee set in the mutherfuckin’ wall. Twenty acres. Coyotes. Raccoons. All that motherfuckin’ shit.” Napoleon paid for it in cash. Four concubines lodge with him. “They get to fuckin’” whenever he pleases.

He pauses for a throaty draw of malt liquor. “I drink one of these every day,” he says. “Ain’t got no choice. I was raised in a liquor store. I was drinking half-price whiskey by the time I was 13.”

“St. Louis, man. They got that big old Mississippi River. You don’t want to get throwed in there, man. That motherfucka goes on and on and on. They got pythons bigger than motherfuckin’ boa constrictors that’ll eat yo’ ass. They got catfish bigger than yo’ ass.” He belches. “They got whales bigger than that building,” he points at a ten-story edifice. “They got sharks … .”

Magic Napoleon consumes 24 ounces of 211 in three gulps, then tosses the can onto the bricks and stomps it to shreds. I’ve already finished and thrown my can out. “That’s money you throwing away,” he says, digging after it.

Just then, a particularly gnarled bum staggers toward us, carrying an empty 40, his skin soaked through with creosote. Magic Napoleon’s eyes flash. “Gotta go, man,” he says. And he does.