My Dark Places

My mind was functioning normally. I played memory games to test-fire it. I memorized magazine ads and slogans on milk cartons. I was building mind muscle to fight potential insanity.

I went insane once. It could happen again.

I couldn’t let the fear go. I fed on it all day every day. I didn’t analyze why I drove myself to the point of brain malfunction. I addressed the problem as a physical phenomenon.

My brain felt like an external appendage. My lifelong plaything was in no way indigenous to me. It was a specimen in a bottle. I was a doctor poking it with a stick.

I knew that booze, drugs and my tenuous abstention from them caused my brain burnout. My rational side told me that. My secondary response derived straight from guilt. God punished me for mentally fucking my mother.

I believed it. My fantasy was just that transgressive and worthy of divine intervention. I tortured myself with the concept. I exhumed the midwestern Protestant ethic my mother tried to outrun—and used it for self- flagellation.

My new mental kick was mental self-preservation. I did mental tricks to keep my mind limber. It fed my fear more than it buttressed my confidence.

My lung abscess healed completely. I checked out of the hospital and cut a deal with God.

I told him I wouldn’t drink or pop inhalers. I told him I wouldn’t steal. All I wanted was my mind back for keeps.

The deal jelled.

I went back to Lloyd’s roof. I didn’t drink or pop inhalers or steal. God kept my mind in sound working order.

The fear stayed.

I knew it could happen again. I understood the preposterous aspect of all divine contracts. Booze and inhaler residue could lurk in my cells. My brain wires could sputter and disconnect without warning. My brain could blow tomorrow or in the year 2000.

Fear kept me sober. Fear taught me no moral lessons. My days ran long and sweaty and anxious. I sold my plasma at a skid-row blood bank and lived off ten dollars a week. I haunted libraries and read crime novels. I memorized whole passages to keep my mind running strong.

A guy in Lloyd’s building worked as a golf caddy. He told me it was good tax-free money. You could work or not work as you pleased. Hillcrest Country Club was high-class. The members tossed you some good coin.

The gay brought me to Hillcrest. I knew I just got lucky.

It was a prestigious Jewish club south of Century City. The golf course was hilly and deep green. The caddies congregated in a “caddy shack.” They drank, played cards and told obscene stories. Drunks, dopers and compulsive gamblers ruled the shack. I knew I’d fit in.

Caddy jobs were called “loops.” Caddies were also called “loopers.” I knew jackshit about golf. The caddy master told me I’d learn.

I started out packing one bag only. I stumbled through my first dozen loops and moved to two-bag duty. The bags weren’t that heavy. Eighteen holes of golf ran four hours. The standard two-bag fee was 20 dollars. It was good 1975 money.

I worked Hillcrest six days a week. I made good daily pay and got myself a room at the Westwood Hotel. The place was equidistant to Hillcrest and the Bel-Air, Brentwood and Los Angeles country clubs. Loopers rented most of the rooms. The place was a caddy shack adjunct.

Looping took over my life. The rituals deflected my fear and eased it into a fadeout.

I loved the golf course. It was a perfectly self-contained green world. Caddy work was mentally undemanding. I let my mind wander and earned a living simultaneously.

The milieu stimulated me. I invented back stories for Hillcrest members while I walked beside them, and ran gag riffs on lowlife loopers. The culture clash of wealthy Jews and caddies with one foot in the gutter was a constant laugh riot. I made friends with a smart young caddy going to college part-time. We discussed the Hillcrest membership and the caddy experience endlessly.

I spent time with a diverse bunch of people. I listened to them and learned how to talk to them. Hillcrest felt like some kind of way station en route to the real world.

People told me stories. I took a master class in country-club lore. I heard tales of self-made men who clawed their way out of the shtetl and tales of rich drunks who succumbed to caddy life. The golf course was a picaresque education.

Most of the loopers smoked weed. Weed didn’t scare me like booze and inhalers did. I kissed off four sober months with some Thai Stick.

It was goooood. It was the best shit I’d ever smoked. I started buying it and smoking it all day every day.

I figured it wouldn’t fuck up my lungs or shut down my brain. It wouldn’t spark incestuous fantasies and piss God off. It was the manageable and controllable drug of the 1970s.

So I rationalized.

I smoked weed for a year and a half. It was goooood—but not great. It was like trying to reach the moon in a Volkswagen.

I didn’t drink or take inhalers. I sucked down marijuana and lived as a more subtle full-time fantasist.

I took my fantasies outdoors. I took them to Hillcrest and other golf courses at night. I hopped the fence at L.A. Country Club and fantasy-walked the north course for hours.

I played with my Hillcrest cast of characters and worked them into a crime story. I worked in an alcoholic hero. He hailed from the sad edge of Hancock Park. He nursed a lifelong obsession with the Black Dahlia case.