We escaped from the wilderness and drove around, and the world was Alice and Wonderful and I was exceptional in my driving abilities, as mushrooms or acid will sometimes do to you, sharpening your nerves like pencil tips and allowing you to absorb a broader spectrum of wave frequency and translating extradimensional phenomena, like Einstein as a young boy running behind a ray of light with a butterfly net. We went to Moonatchies, an after-hours club, and Jackie was now my friend. She had seen that part of me that was really me, even if it was bathed in a tangerine glow. We leaned down and sang the songs right out of the jukebox and tossed back shots of ouzo and sambuca and lemon gin, consuming the devil’s food of our lovely alcoholic youth.

Soon we were back downtown in the rooming-house bars that opened at six, where you could play darts and smell the ancient rotting linoleum and the pink dissolving urinal cakes and the burnt beer sausages while the old men stared at you through yellow hound-dog eyes and the swindled memory of the thing not done. Then the sun was melting and spreading upward, and I specifically did not mention the clouds, which were altostratus, I recall, or lenticular, to be more exact, and as dark as the cap on a sad day before it’s lifted to reveal a single vision that says life is worth living; but you cannot know this, because hardship is the key ingredient in the formula that makes life worth living, which seems impossible but is nevertheless a fact, and is the reason why rich boys become drunks and nice girls find themselves with mean boys and people whose bright futures are entirely in order come down with chronic insomnia or incurable hiccups or merciless diseases of the mucous membranes or rare and undiagnosable conditions of the blood or the nervous system, or they quit med school altogether and move to New York City and become porno addicts.

We had coffee in the pale brown dawn of a plastic breakfast house, then went to my third-floor apartment on Pine Avenue, across from the elementary school. We finished the beer in the fridge while Jackie looked curiously at my books and studied me out of all four corners of her eyes. The sun was a wavering cellophane disk, like harmless artificial firelight, and the schoolchildren were sprinting to class in a euphoric roar at the sound of the eight o’clock bell. I left my glamorous young friends alone in my living room, where I kept a futon rolled up for guests, and went to bed wondering about that voice on the other end of the phone, and about the magic act of alcohol: how it can make all your problems disappear, except when they reappear there are twice as many, but then voilà! a few drinks and they are vanished again until one day you wake up trapped like the victim of an elaborate outhouse prank.

I did not hear my guests, only the shouting of the children across the street. Later Timmy told me Jackie had whipped off her blouse and they had ravished each other in the wavering cellophane light, amid the euphoric babble of the schoolchildren, and I laughed and was appreciative, as if they were my grandchildren come down to visit me from the golden lakes of Saskatchewan and had stolen all the animal cookies out of the cupboard while my dentures foamed in a pickle jar full of apple vinegar.

From then on, Jackie was my friend in the way that one becomes a friend only through the special filter of South American tree fungi and arcane knowledge of clouds and orange-medium observation of UFOs. And I didn’t screw up her drink orders anymore, either. She always came with a smile to my end of the bar. She sparkled at me, melted and lifted and discombobulated me. We could talk about anything. But she and Timmy were an item, dazzling and inseparable, the Barbie and Ken of the rust belt, with white teeth and sexy kitten livers.

Meanwhile, I continued my gloomy appointments with Venus, like lessons in how to become fully cynical about love. I quit my lessons time and again but kept going back. Venus always took me back. She wanted me to learn as well as she had learned. I had about two days with her that were actually pleasant, and I couldn’t forget those two days any more than someone playing a slot machine for two straight years could forget finally lining up the lemons and hitting a single jackpot for forty-two dollars: I was sitting on the balcony of her apartment by myself, under the shade of the great elm, and she put her head out the door and asked if I wanted lunch. The tilt of her head and the softness of her voice and the gentleness in her eyes were enough altogether for me to say, Yes, I’d love lunch. And all the time she was making those salami sandwiches I was happy in the way that those who are loved and taken care of by those who love them are happy, even if she didn’t put onions or enough mustard on the sandwich, and even if two days later she didn’t come home from the bar until the next morning and then told me lies so that I had to find out the long and hard way what I already knew. Frank the bartender. Eddie the old lover.

Then my mother separated from my father, and I realized there was no point in staying around there pouring drinks into my brain and arguing with death and trying to please death and make death wear a pretty hat — she never wore hats. I said, So long, death. She was surprised to see me go. I think she thought I would come running back, as I had so many times before.

I went home to San Diego and found my father sitting on the big gold couch in a forest-fire darkness. He had lost not only his wife but about thirty pounds. He had given up hope. He was watching Gilligan’s Island. I wasn’t much good for anything myself, but I took my old room and we kept each other company. We watched the hummingbirds and cut the grass. We commiserated philosophically in the darkness and had coffee and bacon for breakfast and drank blue glow-in-the-dark martinis at the corner lounge like old cricket players in pre-electric war-torn Africa. He was quiet and full of hard work and wonder; I was cynical and lethargic and charcoal-hearted. My father was a simple man. It wasn’t hard to figure out his equation for happiness. He had been happy for twenty-eight years and now she was gone.

It was at this point that the pattern of my life became clear: Love was desire followed by foolishness, then the sound of my heart breaking like a stained-glass window. Love, for whatever bizarre and backward reason, would always be the cause of suffering. Venus was only one more in a long line of mathematical proofs of this. It was time to give it up. So I did.

And then Jackie called. She was in town. She knew I was living with my father, so she had gone through the phone book and dialed all the listings with my last name until she found me. Can we get together? she said.

This was a little hard for me to comprehend: Jackie had come three thousand miles to the desert to visit me? I couldn’t help but ponder the implications.

When? I said.

Right now, she said. Can you? I’m just here for a week.

And so I showered and dressed in a daze, put on my red bartender’s shirt, and drove out to the Radisson Hotel in Mission Valley. I met her coming out the door in the sunshine and bent spontaneously to kiss her. She went up on her toes to meet me and I touched her waist and little green tendrils sprouted from the charcoal lump of my heart. Come meet my father, she said.

Her father was Joe, the iron-haired businessman with Mafia ties. Joe drove a big new silver Continental, knew where Jimmy Hoffa was buried, did card tricks, played seven-handicap golf, and bullied the room-service waiters. His motto was: “Act second-class and you get treated second-class.” He had a sharp business acumen and looked down upon the unsuccessful. A bundle of hundred-dollar bills appeared out of his front pocket and he stripped them off and bought admission wherever he was not invited. Joe didn’t think much of me, did not trust me with his cocktail-waitress daughter. He was dressing for a golf game. He gave me the narrow eyes, the stiff questions, boy-taking-out-daughter questions.

Then off he went golfing, and off his daughter and I went drinking, though she was still nineteen and not old enough to drink legally in California. I had a new truck, no radio, but a Walkman and two headsets. I showed her the city, my city, my beautiful city. We had a drink along the shore. I explained the breaking of the waves. We watched the sun set, then went to a Japanese restaurant, where we had octopus and hot little jars of sake. Then more sake. Then a little more sake. The sake lit the candles in our eyes, filled us with a giggling hot octopus heat. She was soft and radiant like the luck of the sun. I asked about Timmy the Handsome Bartender, and it was Oh, well and Say-la-vee and a little flourish of the palm and a yawn and a neat slice of the eye.

We drove along the golden-barred harbor, then out to Ballast Point, where we were wrapped and subdued in a pork-chop-and-pineapple-smelling fog. I brought her back dutifully to the hotel at ten, had a stiff drink with Joe, who was a drinker, too, a too-much drinker, like all the boys his daughter liked, a hearty flames-in-the-cheeks pirate of a drinker. I asked him questions about golf. He guessed what number I would pick between one and five and won two dollars off me. Then he told me all about the eleventh and fourteenth holes at Torrey Pines. We stayed up late with a bottle of Crown Royal Canadian, shrinking under time-compressed and chrome-reflected light. Joe took a liking to me: Daughter home by ten and sympathy for golf, even if I didn’t play. Not afraid to lose a few bucks in a friendly game of cards either. I didn’t leave the hotel until four that morning.

Jackie and I went to Sea World the next day. Sea World is thirty dollars to see fish jumping into the air to the whistled commands of dictatorial ethologists, but I could have sat in a bus depot with her and been happy. We bought draft beer as soon as the first window opened and sang that pop-silly song that was all over the radio at the time, “Wake Me Up before You Go-Go,” and wandered among the white-legged tourists, who clapped ecstatically whenever the fish jumped into the air. We caught the killer-whale show at two, and as we watched Shamu leap, she took my arm. Oh, Lord, maybe it’s not just my knowledge of clouds and good hand-eye coordination, I thought. Then Shamu plunged and sent a wave of water splashing over the glass retaining wall, soaking everyone in the first three rows.

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