I need a cigarette at least once an hour. This involves stopping and finding some corner of wherever I am at a given moment where I will not be called out as a walking health violation for smoking. Despite the perma-smog, the dense car fumes intermingling with the endless blue above, being seen with a lit cigarette on a sidewalk in LA can land you in a shitstorm of self-righteousness. Lighting up near any sort of outdoor cafe or restaurant is also a serious no-no. Even smoking across the street from a playground is something akin to a hanging offense.

So I tend to choose side streets and vacant lots in which to suck down my hourly American Spirit (since they stopped making Viceroys some years ago). I tell myself that this brand is less lethal than the non-organic brands, though my daughter Klara recently sent me links to about six articles saying that American Spirit were as dangerous as any other cigarette. ‘It’s a dumb habit, Poppa, and I don’t want you to die.’ Klara. My precious little girl. My tough-minded, super-smart daughter. Twenty-four. Always up front with her opinions. An original take on everything from the moment she started in middle school. Always in trouble with teachers for not playing by the rules – and questioning the system all the time. Always in trouble with her mother for not being the good little convent schoolgirl that she’d groomed her to be. Always knowing she could come to me with her questions, doubts, rages … and I would not just hear her out, but also didn’t take it the wrong way when she exploded in my direction. Maybe because, after a life of jumping out of the way of conflict, disagreement, I was often amazed and simultaneously unnerved by Klara’s ability to wade into an argument and fight her corner; her ferocious sense of right versus wrong; her refusal to be cowed by what she called ‘the system’. Recently I found myself wondering: did I so admire her independence because that was something I could never find in myself?

The Now Spa. 3329 Sunset. A hard place to loiter – as cops moved you off if you waited outside this address for more than thirty seconds … and the fine was $315 if the guy in uniform decided to be a prick and give you a ticket. $315. That was sometimes all I earned in a week. So you had to park around the corner, a residential street with a high-end candle shop – $68 for some French hunk of scented wax – and some designer chocolate joint with its beautifully handwritten cards next to artful cubed piles of their product, telling you about cacao percentages and the ginger they used and how it had been harvested for them in some Peruvian rainforest.