It turned into strange evening. (We went to the Bistro Français, next to our motel in Culver City.)

Maureen was meeting the rest of my “family” for the first time.

The restaurant had got good reviews but it was nearly empty. Should have checked it out.

Mikey‘s verdict: “French menu delivered by a Mexican short-order cook. Yucky”.

Neither Mikey nor Jamie asked Maureen any questions at all.

Mikey was guesting in a sitcom shooting at the Culver Studios. He said he had gotten to like Culver City. “Laid back, like Santa Monica must have been in the 1980’s”, he said.

The day we visited him at the studio he had walked us over to the Argentinian bakery on Main Street. I introduced them to empañadas.

Jamie knew the Cyber Addiction Center on Washington Boulevard and said he had stayed at one of the motels nearby on Sepulveda between Washington and Venice.

(Something else I didn’t know. He said he had helped out there for a while. Had he been seeking help himself?)

We wanted to save money, so we took his advice and stayed where he suggested.

A new regulation has been passed in Los Angeles insisting that male porn performers wear condoms. It’s called Measure B.

“They will just go somewhere else,” said Mikey.

I wasn’t sure if he supported Measure B or not.

Mikey was, as usual, obsessed with some news story that he wanted to turn into a film.

Last time it was the Lululemon killer, Brittany Norwood, who murdered her supervisor Jayna Murray after Murray caught her stealing some yoga pants.

“Five weapons and 300 blows. Truly astonishing. The killing must have lasted nearly ten minutes,” he’d said.

He clearly imagined this as a climactic scene. (Her defence argued she just “lost it”. Norwood got life without parole.)

Now he is fascinated by the story of Ariel Castro, whose face was everywhere this week.

Ariel Castro had abducted and held three women – Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight, and Gina DeJesus – in a white clapboard house in a run-down part of Cleveland for ten years. One of them, Amanda Berry, finally managed to force a door and call to a passer-by who made the 911 call.

“I want to see inside that house, that mind,” Mikey said. “To his neighbours Castro was just a loner who locked his chain-link fence and never used his front door, played his radio loud and didn’t let anyone past his kitchen. But he joined community cook-outs and gave rides to kids in his four-wheeler.”

“What drove him? I read he was obsessively strict with his own daughters, made them shower in their panties, wear shorts under their skirts.”

Mikey’s agent will say: “But where’s the story? Who’s the hero? It’s gotta be one of the women, surely.”

After we got back to the motel I said to Maureen I was sorry they had shown so little interest in her.

“That’s fine. It was really interesting.”

“I wonder what sort of sex life Jamie has. Perhaps I will get to know him well enough for him to talk to me someday…”