[3216] Orphan Andy, and Nick hide in Berkeley with Billy's help

While this is part of a larger work, I think it can be read without my needing to put much backstory here. I will offer this:

Billy is a older than Andy and Nick. He dresses expensively, and seems monied but with no visible means of support. He spends long hours reading and writing at a North Beach cafe where the regulars are mostly gay male prostitutes and thieves who work business travelers who are looking for some discrete adventure. That is where he met Andy and Nick. Billy has some sort of tacit arrangement with the cafe wherein they never hand him a bill for the coffee or the gin, but Andy supplies small packets of opium that the hustlers use to get some of their johns high. He doesn't take money for the opium. Some years ago Billy was a private investigator though he describes himself as having been a "private journalist". He quit that phase of his life but was never quite able to shake his habit for investigations...

Some of the past events mentioned in this piece are events that occur earlier in the work, a portion of which I submitted to RDR earlier.

Today's submission: two sequential, titled sections that add up to one episode in their lives:

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"Would You?" and "The Club Ladies"

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Karma critiques:

[1630] New Jersey

[1110] All These Things That I've Done

[2735] The Man in the African Mask