I had this great idea—we could play a game I’d heard about involving three drinks and two tabs of acid, then off we went in Raul’s dreaded new Mustang again not knowing which two had taken the acid and which one hadn’t but really starting to wonder while Raul played speed games down Sunset Boulevard for this party we’d heard about. Soon we learned it was not Raul at all who’d been left out of our little party but in fact the passenger whose name eludes me for the moment, and then “Fuck it,” we said, and gave him a tab after all. So the game had been for naught.

Columbo’s appeal to me is his effectiveness. He is a masterful detective without a gun or anything to prove. His approach is multi-faceted. He presents himself as harmless and irritating, and in this way most people are relatively less cautious around him—even criminals—and less and less cautious as they become more and more irritated by him because they want to get him out of their hair.

But after a drive there and back to our house which, although only about ten miles total, had enough close calls in those ten miles to help me believe that there was a God and that he had given me second and third chances at life all within about twenty minutes, and once we’d been indoors for a while, conversed with our other room-mates who were on their way out for somewhere one of us didn’t want to go, we, as was inevitable, turned on the television set.

Another technique he uses repeatedly is his exit and return—in this way he gives the potentially guilty person a chance to take a breath, relax and let his guard down; but that’s always the moment he’s saying “Sorry to bother you again. Just one last thing for the records, purely routine I assure you…” As often as he uses this, indeed to the point of being comical, it is to his advantage to use it that often because again and again it works.

But first, of course, there was the awkward moment when people are around who suspect you’re on drugs but for some reason can’t be bothered to ask, so leaving you to establish it in your own good time. After I’d been massaging the doorway for what could have been minutes, I’m not really sure (while said room-mates watched with interest), someone finally asked: “Barnaby, are you on mushrooms or something?”

“Well, acid,” I said.

“Yeah, I thought your eyes looked weird. How much did you take?”

“Plenty,” and then I thought it was strange that they all broke out laughing at that point. “Really strange,” I thought. “I’ve got to get out of here!”

Even his crooked eye is a weapon. It tends to make his suspects uneasy during conversation, and Columbo always engages people as directly as possible, so all things considered one might eventually grow desperate to be finished with him, and one might then be prepared to say almost anything to get rid of him—even the truth—at which point Columbo has won his battle.

Soon after the show ended we were back in the Mustang again.

L.S.D. has a way of making each moment as it passes seem strangely significant, however meaningless those moments may be, and knowing this, it took several episodes afterward to believe with certainty something of importance had happened that fateful evening full of near fatalities—I’d found a modern hero.