To read Part I, click here. But just to fill you in, I'm at a Lakers game with my friend, Jacob, and we're both starving.

I have several friends who hold season tickets to the Lakers and every one of them now keeps only about ten games for himself, selling off the remaining thirty games at cost or, in the case of the Lakers being playoff-bound or facing a marquee opponent, for a tidy profit. When my friend Taylor used to take me to Lakers games, back in the Shaq glory days, we had a deal. In return for his extra floor seat, I would handle the driving and cover the food and drinks. Unfortunately for me, Taylor drinks like a soccer hooligan--one of the reasons we are friends, no doubt--so the bill for getting enough alcohol to get us both drunk and to wash down two orders of garlic fries would top out at around $100. I'm not sure how we arrived at this arrangement, but over time, the chance to go to a "free" Lakers game got too expensive. Once or twice, we stopped off at the liquor store on the way to the game and picked up a bottle of whiskey, but clandestinely spiking up our five-dollar Pepsis between our ankles amid the glare of the floor lights and the roving eye of the JumboTron proved more hassle than it was worth.

The only way to really motivate a Laker fan....free shit.

But on this night I smuggled in no outside treats. I was at the mercy of what the Staples Center had to offer. It was several minutes into the first quarter when Jacob emerged from his internal weed trance with an observation.

"There are a lot of strippers here," he said flatly.

"No, those are the Laker Girls."

At the first timeout or thereabouts, the lovely Laker Girls are sprung from their cages and flitter onto the court for the first of many high-energy routines carefully and lustfully crafted to keep us from having to stare at a staid clutch of very tall men in warm-ups huddled around another very tall man with a clipboard.

"Maybe they're more like biker chicks," Jacob said, amending his earlier observation. An aggressively unglamorous image of Dikes on Bikes from the Gay Pride Parade rumbled through my brain and mercifully exited. I gazed back at the court. In their shiny black short-shorts and matching, skin-tight tops, the sirens of the Staples Center were far hotter than any woman on the back of a motorcycle ever, but I saw his point. These ladies were exceptionally tarted up this evening. I looked around at my fellow Laker fans---affluent, apathetic and popping pieces of Staples-made California rolls into the mouths of their bored children and buxom second wives. These men were used to repressing the lower classes, not having sex with them. The Laker Girls represent the unattainable, the girls from the other side of the tracks, the dirty chicks you want to fuck backstage, but can't bring home for Thanksgiving.

At a Clippers game, however, the entire model is reversed. The same seats cost half as much. The fans are blue collar and used to losing, just like their team. But their version of the Laker Girls, the wanly-named Clippers Spirit, also dress in the unattainable archetype--not black jeans and rocker skin-tight T-shirts--those girls live in the trailer next door. At Clippers games, the cheerleaders hit the court in cute little field hockey skirts, knee socks and tied-off white oxfords. No less hot, in that private school sort of way--and equally out of reach to the poor kid pumping gas at the Chevron.

Curiously though, even hilariously, there is something currently taking place at Lakers games that makes these affluent, apathetic fans lose their fucking minds. It is a promotion. If the Lakers win the game, but manage to hold their opponents to less than 100 points, all fans in attendance get...are you ready?...two free tacos! Make that a coupon for two free tacos--Jack-in-the-Box tacos, no less, the ones that are smaller than a harmonica and taste like fried packets of steer gristle. When it gets towards the end of the fourth quarter and the stipulations for the giveaway look like a possibility, you'd think the Lakers were about to win the championship. LA fans, notorious for passivity, coming late and leaving early, go absolutely bonkers at the prospect of two crappy tacos dangled in their faces. Not since Derek Fisher's miracle three-pointer with .4 seconds to play have I heard rich people screaming with such enthusiasm.

Tacos, bitch!

The whole revelation depressed me and amused me at the same time. I looked at the game clock. Nearly four minutes remained in the first quarter of a tight game. My buzz was wearing off. I sucked down the last of my beer and let the foamy dregs slide back down the edge of the cup and thought about the food options available outside.

"I'm gonna get some food, what would you like?" I asked Jacob.

"I'll come with you."

We bounded down the aisle and were out at the concession stand before the horn sounded to resume the game. In the end, dinner was a couple of hot dogs.

"And maybe some peanuts," Jacob asked. The woman brought a throw pillow of unshelled peanuts to the register and Jacob shuttered. "Never mind," he said.

"What's wrong?"

"There's no where to put the shells."

"Throw'em on the floor."

Now you must understand, I have way too many Dodger games under my belt to even give a moment's pause at leaving a thick carpet of husked peanut carcasses in my wake after a game.

"If they didn't want you to throw them on the floor, they wouldn't sell them in shells," I continued.

Jacob just looked at me. He was trying his best to be one of the boys, but what I was suggesting was something straight out of a drunken pirates' den. He had to draw the line somewhere.

We sat glued in our seats for the remainder of the game, munching hot dogs and stuffing our discarded shells into the sludgy foam of an empty beer cup.

It turned out to be one of the best Laker games I've ever seen. And one of the tidiest.

I wasn't sure Jacob had enjoyed it that much, though. He cheered when everyone else did, but mostly just smiled and hunkered down in his seat, his knit ski cap pulled tightly down on his head. It wasn't until we were back at the car, having B-lined past the crowds who haven't yet learned how to negotiate their way around the new Nokia Center building next to Staples, that Jacob turned to me, true excitement in his eyes for the first time, and said, "So when are we coming back?"