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more than sixteen, was covered with broken eggs. An even younger girl had mean-looking electrical clips dangling from her nipples. Then an entire page of close-ups of a woman with two closed, swollen eyes and a split lip.
    It was Nana.
    "Maybe we could all go out together," Toby was saying cheerfully in the kitchen. "Me and Nana and you and your bartender. Go to a movie or a late dinner or something. How does that sound?"
    I closed the album and put the fan magazines back on top of it. I went to the door and through it, without slowing down, without trying to collect the rest of my seven hundred and fifty dollars. I didn't need it any more.
    And I certainly didn't need Toby Vane. I didn't need anybody whose idea of an electric personality was an alternating current between Jack Armstrong and Vlad the Impaler. Smile or no smile, he was a sick boy.
    I lost my way twice trying to get out of the canyon and up to the Pacific Coast Highway. By the time I finally reached it, it was ten o'clock. I drove south like Mario Andretti, but the holiday traffic was a series of Gordian knots and it was after eleven when I finally got to McGinty's of Malibu. Roxanne was gone.
    I'd missed the fireworks, too.

2 - Syndication
    The fifth of July had a delayed case of the June glooms: dull and flat and gray, courtesy of low-hanging clouds that had slid in overnight to lower the ceiling and the spirits of everyone stuck under it. At eight-thirty in the morning the day looked as bright as it was likely to get. I was sitting with my chin on one hand, muffled and depressed from Toby Vane's cocaine, staring at a dark screen that had nothing on it but two characters that blinked in a bright, bilious green. This is what it said:
    A>.
    I'd been looking at A> for what seemed like months, wondering what was supposed to come next. So far, what had come next was frustration, surfing a wave of nostalgia for the user-chummy old Apple I'd given away.
    A stack of fat books stood next to the computer. They were written in a language somewhere between beginning English and advanced Dada. The index to the one on top, the open one, said that the chapter called "Getting Started" began on page 92. I slapped it shut and hit one of the computer's keys at random, and the damn thing beeped at me. My blood pressure tripled. I found myself standing up with my fists clenched, took two breaths, and wandered over to say good morning to Hansel and Gretel, my parakeets. They ignored me. I ignored me too and climbed out onto the sundeck.
    Topanga Canyon folded itself away toward the horizon.
    In front of me, hidden by the hills to the northwest, was the Pacific; to the southeast was L.A. Below me was the thinnest of thin air. Someday, probably while I'm sleeping, the house I live in will fall into the canyon, where I fervently hope it will crush the heavy-metal drummer who pounds away, day and night, some six hundred feet below. Until then, the house just leans over the edge, a creaking testimonial to the resilience of seventy-year-old wood.
    Mine is probably the oldest and certainly the worst-built house in the canyon. At one time, it was also the most remote. It was so remote that the death of its original owner, an unskilled hermit who'd slapped it together in the century's teens out of odds and ends and sheer hermetic rage, wasn't discovered until his mummified body was found hanging from the living room rafter almost a decade after he'd tied the knot in his final necktie. As far as anyone knew, he'd been driven to toss his good-bye kiss at the world by nothing more profound than the sight of Old Topanga Canyon Boulevard being paved beneath him.
    Beneath the diluted daylight on the deck, I stretched. Joints popped. Kids' joints didn't pop. I guessed I wasn't a kid any more.
    A hungry hawk sliced through the sky above me, and I realized I was lying down. It felt too early to lie down. It also felt too late to get up. Given the fact that I had a mild case of the post-coke