“One does what one must to make a living,” he went on, with eyes closed to show how the burden of paying the grocer and the milkman had forced him into artistic compromise. “I would luff to do Dracula again, but…” he pointed to the cracked gray ceiling a few feet above his head, “to do it right. Ah, I know so much more now my friends, so much more.”

“Hell,” said a short Chinese vampire with a disappointing lack of accent and sympathy, “the only things you’ve played for five years are mad doctors who get torn up in the last reel.”

“Dying,” said Lugosi with a shake of his head, “for me is a living.”

It was a punch line he had surely delivered before, but it brought no smiles from this group. Lugosi cast a secret look of exasperation at me. They weren’t going for his best material, and he wanted to be rescued, but I wasn’t ready to leave yet. I gurgled some Pepsi from my bottle, shifted on my coffin, and scooped up a handful of Saltines with my free hand.

We were in the lair of the Dark Knights of Transylvania, not very far below a fake-adobe neighborhood movie theater in Los Angeles in January of 1942. Both the theater and the neighborhood were rotting rapidly around this quintet of black-clad dreamers drooling over the memory of a ten-year-old movie, trying to savor the fantasy of evil immortality while the proof of the bankruptcy of that fantasy stood before them in the decaying form of a worn-out Hungarian actor who had seen better days and better cigars.

If they had bothered to look at me, which they didn’t, the Dark Knights of Transylvania would have seen further evidence of the mortality of the human body. In almost forty-five years of being unable to make up my mind about what I planned to be when I grew up, I had picked up a hopelessly flat nose, a face that had been polite to too many punches, two bullet scars (three if you wanted to count the exit wound of one of them), and a large but as yet still finite number of lacerations caused by gun butts, broken bottles, assorted pieces of wood, an unopened jar of Jeris hair tonic, and such worldly weapons as knives and brass knuckles.