Death brings out the worst in people. Not that I thought Guy’s family would be nice people under different circumstances, but I did think they might be less horrible. Jeffer’s family, who’d I’d known for years and loved, turned on me in the end. I didn’t live with Jeffer for the last six months of his life. I stayed on my friend Robert’s sofa for some of that time before getting my own apartment. Jeffer’s family had trouble understanding why we were no longer together, and I didn’t have the heart to give them a complete explanation.

Before I knew it, before we’d cleaned his things out of what had been and should have remained my house, his family was threatening me. Saying they’d challenge the will on the basis that the loving relationship it described had ended, that I’d moved out and abandoned him to die alone. It wasn’t like that; a lot was left out. I couldn’t face the prospect of going to court, though, hoping to enforce a will that was a risky proposition under the best of circumstances. We weren’t a married couple, after all, and the wrong judge—and there were many wrong judges—the wrong judge could decide I was entitled to none of it. And that would mean I’d be left with nothing more than legal fees and memories.

So I made a deal with them. I kept the video store—which Jeffer was minimally involved in, anyway—and split the proceeds from the sale of the house. That left me with an income and a rainy day lump of cash.

Of course there were things in the house I’d wanted. Things that were mine, things that were ours. A particular chair, a lamp, a picture, a photograph album that was mostly me and my family. At the last minute they wouldn’t let me have them. So I spent nearly a week driving through the alley behind the house to see what they might have thrown away and finding a fair number of treasures.

I was standing next to the Sentra about to get in as I thought that. Then I looked down the street and about a hundred feet away. There was the alley behind Guy’s building. Getting into my car, I tossed the videos onto the passenger seat, started the engine and pulled a quick U-ie. When I got to the end of the alley, I slowed. I didn’t want Guy’s sister to see what I was about to do. She wasn’t there, though, so I zipped down the alley.

Guy’s building was halfway down. When I was right next to the green metal dumpster for his building, I parked. Sitting on the ground next to it were the two boxes of photos Cindy had carried out. It looked like she was trying to save herself the energy of actually tossing them into the bin.

I jumped out of the Sentra, opened the trunk and quickly loaded in the two boxes. There was at least one more box in the apartment. I wondered if I should drive around the block a few times to see if Cindy would bring it out, but just then she came out into the alley carrying the third box. I slammed my trunk shut. The look on her face said she wasn’t likely to give me that box any time soon.

I walked around and started to climb into the car.

“Hey, that’s stealing,” she said, grabbing the driver’s door.

“No, it’s garbage picking. That’s something else entirely.” I grabbed the door away from her and shut it.

“I’m going to call the police,” she yelled.

“Go ahead!” I yelled back. And then pulled away.

I wasn’t afraid she’d call the police. For one thing, I was sure the LAPD was still overwhelmed. Yes, the riot was over. No, they had not solved all the crimes connected with it. I really doubted they’d come out if she complained I’d stolen something she’d thrown away.

As I drove back to Pinx, I was exhilarated. I had no idea what I’d do with the two boxes of photos. I didn’t even know if any of them were his “good” photos. I just knew it was wrong to throw so much of Guy’s life away. The photos were his life’s work and I had to save them. Oh, hell, maybe it had something to do with having lost so much of my own life. Whatever.

Parking in back of the store, I went in through the back door. The door we discouraged customers from using by putting up a sign that said EMPLOYEES ONLY. Customers still came through it, just not as many.

It was slow that day. Mondays typically were slow, but that Monday was especially dead—poor choice of words, sorry. We weren’t busy and I was surprised. I thought people might still want to stay close to home and watch a movie or two.

I decided to leave around six. Mikey had already left at four, and Carl and Denny had come in at three. They were an older couple, semi-retired, who insisted they work the same shift. I didn’t really need two people on a Monday night, but they wanted Fridays and Saturdays off so I went along with it. The two of them together equaled one great employee, just twice as expensive. Before I left, I told them they could close at nine if they wanted to. I figured they wouldn’t. They had each other to talk to, so they didn’t care if the place was empty.

When I got back to my apartment, I opened the gate, pulled into the garage and popped the trunk. I took out Guy’s two boxes and set them aside so I could reclose the gate. It was an annoying process but car theft in the neighborhood was common and the metal gate provided a bit of a deterrent.

I climbed up to the courtyard juggling the boxes. Louis and Marc were already seated at the table on the patio. Marc had changed out of his “studio” drag into a pair of shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. Louis wore an apron that said, “Fellate the Host.” I think he had it made somewhere. His personal version of “Kiss the Cook.”

“Noah! Come have dinner with us,” Louis called out. I was already heading over—I really needed a glass of wine—when he added, “Leon is coming.”

Well, I couldn’t just stop, so I kept on. Leon was a friend of theirs who I wouldn’t mind so much if I didn’t sometimes have the feeling they were trying to fix us up.

“What on earth are you carrying?” Marc asked. He was smoking a recently lit cigarette. Louis didn’t smoke and wouldn’t let Marc smoke in the apartment—a big part of why they were almost always outside.

I set the boxes down on the ground by the table.

“Do you know the camera store? The one on Vermont?”

“Guy’s Camera?” Louis asked.

“Yes.”

“Wait, who?” Marc wanted to know.

“Guy the Camera Guy. We talked to him one time at the Griffs. Tall, sexy as hell.”

“Everyone we talk to at the Griffs is tall and sexy as hell,” Marc said, then added for my benefit, “It’s like a rule. We can’t talk to anyone less attractive than we are.”

“He’s dead,” I said flatly.

“Oh, my,” said Marc.

There was an empty wine glass on the table, presumably for Leon. Louis filled it and moved it in front of me.

“What happened?” he asked.

“The second day of the riots, his store burned down with him in it. He must have thought he could protect it.”

I was very glad I hadn’t taken Mikey’s advice and attempted to protect my store. Yes, nothing had happened to Pinx, but if I’d been there, moving around, taunting the rioters, maybe it would have. You never know.

“That seems so odd,” Marc said.

“What seems odd?” I asked.

“I hope this doesn’t sound racist, but the blacks in South Central were burning businesses down. They were angry. Are angry. They don’t feel like they got justice so they’re striking out. And honestly I can’t blame them. The LAPD is hideous.” He stubbed out his cigarette in a glass ashtray. “But it’s different up here. Most of the rioters in Silver Lake were Hispanic. They’re angry, too, but not because of the police, not because they didn’t get justice. They’re angry because they’re poor. It’s more about money than race for them. That’s why they didn’t burn down as many buildings.”

I thought about what I’d seen on TV. Hispanic-looking people stealing TVs from Circuit City and sneakers from a shoe store. These were things they wanted but couldn’t afford. So why did they loot the camera store? Did they want cameras?

Louis popped back into the apartment.

“Do you really think poor people want high-end cameras?” I asked.

“To sell, sure. But why burn the building? That’s my point.” He shrugged in an exaggerated way. He was right. There wasn’t a good answer. But then was there a good answer to any of it?

Louis came back out with a tray of cheese and crackers. “They got Frederick’s of Hollywood,” he said with a smirk.

“Burned?” I asked.

“No, just looted. But can you imagine? ‘Honey I’m home from the riots. I got you some crotchless panties.’”

He started chuckling. I had to laugh, too. People stealing lingerie in the middle of a riot. What were they thinking? Maybe it wasn’t so strange that the camera store burned.

“What’s in the boxes?” Marc asked.

“Guy’s photographs.”

“What are you doing with them?”

“His family is cleaning out his apartment—”

“Already? Talk about not letting the body get cold.”

“Anyway, they were throwing them out and I just—it seemed wrong.”

Then I remembered something, well, part of something. On our date, guy had talked about how much he loved photography. How much it meant to him. He said he loved it more than any man he’d ever—

“What?” Louis had been asking me something.

“How did you know Guy?” he repeated.

“I took his class.”

“Oh, yeah. I know a lot of people who took that class,” Louis said. “Some of them were even interested in photography.”

“Well, let’s see what’s in there,” Marc said. I lifted the first box up to the table. Reaching in, I grabbed a short stack of prints and handed them to Marc, then took some for myself.

“Do you want some, Louis?”

“Sure, why not?”

I gave him a stack as well. Pulling the photos out of the box, I realized the bottom of the box was lined with film canisters, presumably holding negatives.

Beginning to go through the pictures in front of me, I immediately saw that they were in a wide range of styles. That made sense since his class covered portraiture, landscapes and journalism as distinct branches of photography. I remembered him bringing in samples of each.

My stack was mostly landscapes: Joshua Tree, Big Bear, random places in between. The shots were good, though probably not good enough to hang. Gradually they shifted over to cityscapes: Palm Springs, West Hollywood, Silver Lake at night.

“I think these are from the AB101 protest,” Louis said. He laid out some black-and-white shots of crowds taken at night.

“Those were so much fun,” Marc said. The previous fall we’d taken to the streets when the governor refused to sign a bill protecting gay rights.

“I don’t know that I’d call them fun,” I said. “Exhilarating, empowering, exciting, important—”

“All Marc really remembers is that we went with a flask of martinis,” Louis said.

“No, that isn’t it at all. I happen to think it’s fun to do important, empowering things.” Then he said, “Oh my. Look at this.”

He laid a photo out on the table. Right away I saw that it was unlike the rest. There were five men wearing Scouting-type outfits: uniforms of blue shorts and scarlet neckerchiefs. They were kicking a man who was cowering naked in front of them. Around the edges of the frame were policemen holding batons. Behind the policemen, a giant tree hung over them. It was a night shot, though carefully lit. Obviously, it was some kind of commentary on the King beating. What it meant exactly escaped me.

“Weird, but kind of powerful,” I said.

“I know. I feel like it’s supposed to mean something that I’m not really understanding,” Marc said.

“He obviously doesn’t like the LAPD,” Louis said.

“Who does?”

“What are those uniforms?” Marc asked. “If they’re supposed to be Boy Scouts they’re all wrong. I was an Eagle Scout.”

“They’re Frontier Scouts. More conservative than Boy Scouts,” Louis explained.

“More conservative than Boy Scouts? I didn’t know that was possible.”

“Where would he get all those uniforms?” I asked. People to photograph were not a problem in L.A., costuming them could be.

“He’s into uniforms, it’s his thing,” Louis said.

“How do you know that?”

“Yes, dear, how do you know that?”

“Don’t you remember, Marc? He was wearing a uniform that time we talked to him. I think he’s in some uniform fetish group.”

“Which was he wearing?” I asked. “LAPD or Frontier Scout?”

“Sheriff, I think. It was tan.”

“There’s something familiar about those photos,” Marc said. “I feel like I’ve seem them before.”

“They’re a little Mapplethorpe-ian,” Louis suggested.

“I don’t think that’s a word.”

“It is now.”

“Is that legal?” I asked. “To wear a policeman’s uniform?”

“It’s probably fine as long as you don’t arrest anyone.” Louis guessed. “Mmmm-hmmmm. I think I hit the jackpot. My stack is mostly artistic male nudes.” He finger-quoted artistic.

“Oh, let me see,” Marc said.”

“When I’m finished.”

Just then, Leon came up the stairs from the street. He was nearly forty, dyed his hair white-blond and wore a dark blue business suit. He’d opened his jacket but hadn’t bothered taking it off. It was in the low seventies and windy, which might have mattered if we weren’t sitting beneath a twelve-foot tall bird of paradise.

“What is all this?” Leon asked.

“You know the camera shop on Vermont?” Marc asked in return.

“Across from the college?”

“Yes, that one. Well it burned down with the guy who owns it inside.”

“Last Thursday,” I added.

“Noah stole these from the family.”

“I didn’t steal them. They left them in the alley.”

“So you stole them,” Leon teased.

“You can’t steal garbage. And when you leave something by the dumpster in the alley, that’s what it is. Garbage.”

Louis stood up. “Here, look at the artistic nudes while I get you a drink.”

Leon took the stack but didn’t look through it. “Oh God! It was a terrible day at work. Everyone was all out of sorts.” He did something with international film sales, I never figured out exactly what. “I have seven women working for me. I have a Korean girl who’s convinced the black girls want to kill her. The Latina hates immigrants so she blames everything on them. The black girls feel like people are blaming the riot on them, which is ridiculous. One of them is married to a plastic surgeon and lives in Brentwood for God’s sake. And the three white women are so busy trying not to offend anyone they won’t say a word.”

Louis returned with a martini for Leon. “Thank you. However did you know?”

“It was the panic and dread in your eyes.”

“You say the sweetest things.” He guzzled half his martini. “So, why did you steal Guy’s photos?”

“Stop saying steal,” I said. “I rescued them.”

“Are they that good?”

“They’re okay.”

“Okay? You’ve saved mediocre photographs for posterity. How lovely.”

Louis had gone back to looking through his pile. “Hello. I think we have a winner here.” He kept flipping through. “Oh, definitely.”

He spread about ten pictures out on the table. They were all of an attractive young man in his early twenties. The poses were provocative. In most of them he held a very impressive, very erect penis in his hand. Sometimes he used two hands.

“Oh my,” said Marc.

“At least he finishes what he starts,” Louis said, pointing at the most explosive of the photos.

“I know him,” said Leon.

“You do?” Louis raised an eyebrow.

“He’s a VJ. Has a show on that new music channel, Video Hits. Very popular.” Pointing at his obvious assets, he said, “And now we know why.”