I worked in the Club Mecca torch and classical music. I worked in the DTs. My hero wanted to find a woman and love her to death.
My 18-year fantasy backlog telescoped into this one story. I began to see that it was a novel.
I got fired from Hillcrest. A member’s son mouthed off to me in front of a good-looking woman. I decked him in full view of the putting green. A security guard escorted me off the premises.
I was bombed on weed. Weed hit me unpredictably.
I got a caddy gig at Bel-Air Country Club. The members and loopers there were just as seductive as the Hillcrest crew. The golf course was even more beautiful.
I stayed bombed at Bel-Air. I bought a tape player for my room and spent hours jacked up on weed and the German Romantic composers. I roamed golf courses at night and wrestled with that one emerging story.
Lloyd moved into the Westwood Hotel. He was off of booze and hard dope and on marijuana maintenance himself. He was flirting with the notion of
I lied.
I was almost 30. I wanted to do things. I wasn’t stealing. I wasn’t lusting for my mother. I had my brain back on permanent loan from God or other cosmic sources. I did not hear voices. I was not as fucked-up as I used to be.
And I was not a civilized human being.
Marijuana maintenance filled me out physically. I ate a lot, lugged golf bags and cranked hundreds of daily push-ups. I was big, strong and hulking. I had beady brown eyes and wore bead-enhancing wire-rimmed glasses. I was stoned all the time. I looked like a crazy man consumed by interior monologue. Strangers found me disturbing.
Women found me scary. I tried to pick a few women up in bookstores and frightened the shit out of them. I knew I came off desperate and socially unkempt. My hygiene was markedly substandard.
I was hungry. I wanted love and sex. I wanted to give my mental stories to the world.
I knew I couldn’t have those things in my current condition. I had to renounce all forms of dope. I couldn’t drink. I couldn’t steal. I couldn’t lie. I had to be a locked-down, uptight, pucker-assed motherfucker. I had to repudiate my old life. I had to build a new life from the sheer desiccated force of my old one.
I liked the concept. It appealed to my extremist nature. I liked the self-immolation aspect. I liked the air of total apostasy.
I danced with the concept for weeks. It blitzed my storytelling drive and soured my taste for dope. I wanted to change my whole life.
Lloyd cleaned up in AA. He told me total abstinence was better than booze and dope at its best. I believed him. He was always smarter and stronger and more resourceful than me.
I followed his lead. I said “Fuck it” and shrugged off my old life.
AA was wild. The late-’70s scene was craaaaaazy. It was redemption and sex and God and big stupid pratfalls. It was my sentimental education and road back to the world.
I met a lot of people who’d lived my life with their own variations. I heard stories that topped mine for sheer horror. I made friends. I learned moral precepts and developed a plainly expressed faith in God that was no more complex and just as heartfelt as a kid in Sunday school’s.
My initial entry hurt. AA meetings taxed me. The people talked ambiguous juju. I only stuck around to hold hands with women during the Lord’s Prayer.
The women magnetized me and kept me coming back. I returned “one day at a time” for some hand holding. Lust and my apostolic will kept me sober.
AA did a subtle job on me. The literature critiqued alcoholism and drug addiction brilliantly. I saw that I carried one strain of a common plague. My story was banal in that context. Only a few incidental details made me unique. The critique gave AA principles a strong moral kick. I found them wholly credible and trusted in their efficacy.
The principles won me over. The people made me capitulate.
I got tight with some guys. I unclenched around women and cut my ego loose at AA lecterns. I became an accomplished public speaker fast. My self-destructive exhibitionism turned around full-circle.
Westside AA swung hard. The demographic makeup was young, white and horny. Booze and dope were out. Sex was in. The Westside mandate was Stay sober, trust God and fuck.
People went to “Hot Tub Fever” after meetings. A guy threw sober wife-swapping parties. Men and women met at meetings and got married in Vegas two hours later. Nude pool parties reigned. Women hit on men blatantly. Annie “Wild Thing” B. flashed her breasts at Kenny’s Deli after every Thursday-night Ohio Street meeting.
I got laid. I went through one-, two- and three-night stands and wrenching stabs at hard-line monogamy. I let detoxing smack addicts crash on my floor while I boogied to late dates at Hot Tub Fever. I made 300 a week at the golf course and spent most of it on women. I picked up junkie prostitutes, took them to AA meetings and fed them the Black Dahlia story to scare them out of hooking. It was a frenetic, often joyous profligacy.
I lived out most of my dope-fueled sex dreams sober.
The real world eclipsed my fantasy world. My one persistent fantasy was that story I knew was a novel.
It haunted me. It invaded my thoughts at strange times. I didn’t know if I had the stones to write it. I was enjoying a season of comfort. I didn’t know that I was running from old things.
My mother was 20 years dead. My father was dead 13. I dreamed about him. I never dreamed about her.
My new life was long on fervor and short on retrospection. I knew I abandoned my father and hastened his death and paid the debt off in increments. My mother was something else.
I knew her only in shame and loathing. I plundered her in a fever dream and denied my own message of
