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goddamn cats, motoring the earth in my mother’s worthless red Honda shitbox. Getting away from Point Dume was my only priority. The car job was my way out.
    “Okay, JD,” Max said, “be here tomorrow at seven forty-five A.M . The Saturday sales meeting starts at eight o’clock. Rhett Butler is our new GM as of yesterday. You’ll meet him tomorrow morning. Rhett has to okay you and then you’re hired, but that’s only a formality. All the sales people are usually hired by me.”
    “Rhett Butler?” I asked. “As in Gone With the Wind Rhett Butler?”
    Max was grinning. “Not exactly. You’ll see tomorrow.”
    WHAT I WOULD learn the following morning was that Len Sherman Toyota was in the middle of an upper-management housecleaning. This was something my AA pal Woody had neglected to tell me, probably because it had just happened the day before. The old co-manager of Sherman—Arthur Sherman, the nephew of the guy who started the company—and the finance guy and the former GM had been summarily dumped two days earlier.
    Max had worked for Rhett Butler at another dealership, so he was not axed with the others. Apparently, abrupt purges of this kind were fairly common in the car business in Santa Monica. Heads rolled regularly up and down the boulevard and whole staffs were often replaced over a weekend. Rhett Butler and his ninja team of management hard-asses had gotten a reputation for traveling from dealership to dealership over the last several years, increasing sales by twenty-five to fifty percent wherever they went. To me, this stuff was right out of a Louis L’Amour cowboy novel: the new sheriff is brought to town to root out the deadbeats and restore order and big bucks to the dealership. Me and the rest of the used-car sales staff would find out about Rhett Butler the following morning—the hard way.
    After filling out employment forms, I spent the next hour with Max. He showed me their eighty-car inventory of used vehicles and described the commission structure. There was no medical insurance and no paid vacations. This was the L.A. car business.
    For me the odd, coincidental part about working a sales job at Sherman Toyota in Santa Monica turned out to be the car dealership’s proximity to St. Monica Catholic High School, near Reed Park. My old high school was only a couple of blocks away. I was back where I’d left off twenty-five years before. At St. Mo’s I had spent my high school life being disciplined and harassed by the diabolical and violent Brothers of Saint Patrick, the meanest sons of bitches to ever put on black robes and attain green-card status.
    I knew the entire neighborhood like the back of my hand: the flooring shops and the bathroom wholesalers on Lincoln Boulevard, the massage parlors, the fast-food restaurants, even Reed Park itself, where as a ninth grader I had ditched wood shop at eleven A.M . every day with my pal Bobby Waco to smoke in the grandstand of the tennis courts. It was there that me and Bobby had received our first blow jobs for five bucks each from one of the drunken transient women who slept in the park every night.
    Now, here I was, at forty-four years old, back exactly where I’d begun.

FOUR
    A s I was returning to Mom’s place in Malibu after the interview, driving up the Coast Highway, the northbound traffic was thick but moving pretty well and my head-thumping was only moderate. I was sipping from my third Starbucks double latte of the day, holding the cardboard cup between my legs as I alternately sipped and smoked, congratulating myself on getting a new job and a fresh start. I was determined to do well.
    On the cassette player in Mom’s car I was listening to one of my favorite blues songs, an old Jimmy Reed number, “Me and My Baby in a ’60 Ford.”
    If I did okay at the car sales job, if things worked out okay, in a few weeks I might be able to afford to rent my own apartment on the West Side of L.A. and attend normal, non-movie-star,