It was in Hollywood that I met Dave.
I was weaving down Sunset Boulevard one night, drunk, desultory, and alone. Very much alone. My first wife had taken my kid back East—and no blame for that. She was sick of the way it was.
I'd spent the afternoon at an address in Beverly Hills where you could do what you pleased.
I'd spent the evening at a gambling place up on the hillside, sprinkling my money around and my IOUs—with a bunch of other writers, directors, junior producers, and picture girls. You'd know their names if I told you and the hell with that.
Up on the hill above the canyon at the Casa Crap.
Up there among the carbolic mountains—the near knees—the far, white peaks with snow on their nasty heads. Down below, the spot where God sat on the seventh day, and—in the big, flat print of His behind—Los Angeles. Ninety square miles of costume jewelry, Technicolor starshine, neon and sodium and all other colored gases, signboards with fifty-foot women in ten-foot brassières and men smoking four-foot pipes, boulevards under the palms and cloverleaf intersections with the billion paired headlights streaming and swirling, bungalow courts and drugstores, pool halls and bingo parlors, buses and trolley cars, acacias and roses and pepper trees, open markets with fruit piled in metaphysical polyhedrons, and the fog rolling in on the thin, chilly, sting-sinus air of California.
You can keep it.
I'd spent all my money and cashed a few IOUs to impress the girls.
The girls.
I'd played Mr. Bones with the bright young writers who go out there for the girls—searching amongst the girls in skirts for the girl that's their soul—Medea, Medusa and Circe, Sappho and daughter Eve, Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, Urania—and Aglaia and Euphrosyne, too—and Lilith—searching for her on the wrong coast—all evening, a badminton of wisecracks, battledore and shuttlecock with the soulless prizes going to the heads that stayed clear the longest, the pocketbooks that were the deepest, the tallest gold lettering on office doors, and never a Muse or a Grace in the joint.