Still, all those years ago, I made the bad call and did what my father demanded. I packed up my life in Sequoia. The wrench of saying goodbye to Bernadette was huge. She knew I was in love with her. She told me on our last night together that the reason I was getting emotional was because I was just seeing her for six hours a week of passion and companionship – and that we had no day-to-day life.

‘When you do start making that day-to-day life with someone you’re going to find out just how boring it can be … even though everyone’s going to convince you to do the day-to-day. Because they’ve all entrapped themselves … and why should you escape?’

On the long bus ride back to LA I knew that I was about to let myself be talked into a life I didn’t want … but also didn’t know how to sidestep.

Bing. A new fare. Westwood. Fuck. It was now 3.33 p.m. That moment when LA becomes as blocked and coagulated as that artery to my left ventricle that needed a stent … and which I was able to have taken care of when I still had company health insurance. Silver Lake to Westwood was going to be forty minutes at this time. I wanted a fare somewhat closer. But I saw that the Westwood client was heading south to Van Nuys. A fare that would be worth $31. So it was worth the long trek in traffic.

I am a fifty-six-year-old man working sixty- to seventy-hour weeks and making on average eleven dollars an hour. I am expendable. I have a family to support, bills to pay. Eleven dollars an hour is just above minimum wage. Better known as: nothing.

But earning nothing these days is better than earning absolutely nothing.

four

A LUCKY BREAK. Driving down Sunset I got a job picking up a woman at a spa in Silver Lake. The spa was called The Now. Located in a stretch of Sunset where everything smells like tech and television money. Boutiques where a shirt costs $250. Vintage furniture shops with all this original mid-century stuff at crazed prices. A tattoo parlor which caters to cash-heavy hipsters who think nothing of adding indelible after indelible image to their skin. The usual upscale coffee joints where everyone has a flat white and a piercing and a MacBook with a screenplay they are never going to get produced. And this spa – all white and Zen design – where you can get your muscles de-stressed by paying one hundred dollars for forty-five minutes.