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The women were my mother transmogrified.
    The Fugitive
slammed my imagination. Mass-market noir— Tuesday nights at 10:00. Counterpoint to my nutty life and weird public life ascendant.
    My dad had a stroke on 11/1/63. I came home from school. I found him weeping and babbling. He was streaked with his own feces and urine.
    His condition horrified and repulsed me. I saw his death as my abandonment and my own death decades hence. I started prepping for life solo. I started shutting him out.
    He spent three weeks at the VA Hospital. His condition and survival prospects improved. I ditched school every day. I bike-looped L.A. I swiped nudist magazines. I visited my dad. I watched episodes of
The Fugitive.
They ticked time to the JFK hit. I recall the plotlines and the guest-star women still.
    My dad split the VA on hit day. Jack’s death and the attendant hoo-ha bored him. Ditto for me. Fuck Jack. We were Republicans and Protestants. Jack took his orders from Rome. The fruit cop almost nabbed Kimble that Tuesday. Patricia Crowley’s red hair beamed in black-and-white.
    MY DAD RETRIEVED IT. My dad blew it anew. I distanced myself. I sabotaged out of his grasp.
    He resumed smoking. He resurrected his high-salt/high-fat diet. I ditched school most days. I flunked the 11th grade. I bike-roamed. I watched
The Fugitive
and read crime novels. I brain-screened crime fantasies. I eyeballed rich girls and their fortyish moms throughout Hancock Park.
    Obsession suited me. My
self-
obsession blinded me to extraneous social trends. America mourned Jack the K. It was fodder for my Nazi shtick and no more. LBJ goosed the Vietnam troop count. I stumped for nuclear war. A store cop detained me for shoplifting. My dad had a heart attack as I sweated custody. The Jack-hit aftermath metastasized. Conspiracy talk bubbled up. My feelers perked. I dug the inherent mystery. I brain-screened Dallas scenarios for Doc Kimble. Jackie Kennedy was June Harding for the poor.
    The blur heightened. School became a nonendurable drag. I was seventeen. I was white. “Free” would make it the trifecta. I stepped up my Nazi antics. I got suspended from class for a week. My dad started calling me “you kraut cocksucker.” I painted swastikas on the dog’s dish. My dad wore a Jewish beanie to torment me.
    I returned to school. I juiced the escape process. The Folk Song Club met. I regaled and disrupted with a pro-Nazi tune and a chorus of the “Horst Wessel Lied.”
    They expelled me. It was midweek in mid-March of 1965. I walked south on Fairfax. I’ve got the details memorized.
    The smell outside Canter’s Deli. School kids sneaking cigarettes. The old Jews headed for shul.
    I hitched home on Beverly Boulevard. I felt airless and scared. I got a jolt of destiny. High-school dropouts were fucked. I’d better become a great writer fast.
    THE NOTION HELD. I stalled the work. My wacked-out education continued.
    Future writers hide inside books and snort up the craft by enjoyment. They read and learn structure and style. Their curiosity points them to subject matter. They read to titillate and edify. They scratch the itch to see life revealed. They swing on an I-can-do-this/I-can’t-do-this tether. The novel form awes them. The soapbox aspect entices. A sense of potential accomplishment looms. The novel is autobiography mislabeled. The novel avenges sand kicked in the face and larger and more longstanding trauma. The novel enraptures career losers with justifying visions of self. The novel itemizes and encapsulates experience and contains it within a worldview. The novel takes abstraction and turns it to dramatic incident. The novel makes incident specific and loftily abstract. The novel explicates moral concerns to the novelist himself and reveals them through his dramaturgical choices. The novel bestows a huge ego on the novelist and jerks him to humility concurrent. The novel is a big fucking endeavor. The