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A pudgy vampire with a soiled black cape sat on a coffin across from me sipping a bottle of Hires Root Beer through a soggy straw. His loose fangs kept slipping, and each sip brought a sound somewhere between an asthmatic whistle and terminal pneumonia. He was fascinating, but so were the other four black-caped vampires who surrounded my client in that damp basement. My client, wearing a conservative gray suit and a fixed, uncomfortable smile, used his cigar to keep the vampires at bay, but they weren’t to be denied, especially one white-faced woman with long raven hair parted down the middle.

“But Mr. Lugosi,” she panted, “When are you going to play a vampire again?”

Lugosi shrugged enormously, playing to his rabid audience. He was almost sixty and looked every bit of it and more. His face was puffy and white, his smile a broad V. He didn’t want to be here, but since he was, he couldn’t resist the urge to perform.

“Lou-go-she,” he corrected the woman, “Bay-lah Lou-go-she, but, my dear, that is of no importance.

“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.