Because there was his mother. God bless her, but she was still around and suffering from what she wouldn’t get diagnosis or treatment for. Ever remained convinced she was bipolar and a narcissist. She just claimed life’s unhappiness and drank her way through. The result, either way, was just disinterest.

And either way tomorrow was Lomita Nairn day, and at that moment he wanted her to hear his words of love.

And only her.

To be the first one, with this moment of illumination. Would the lights stay on? Should he tell her he was mental? He felt a pang of hunger, but didn’t have the courage to rejoin the In-N-Out Burger line.

Chapter Sixteen

Sushi.

Simple, no car drive-thru involved, hopefully no line of any kind, and a straightforward process of ordering, and sake. God bless sake, but he didn’t bless the sake drinker. At least not in the morning.

He drove then, slowly, very slowly to a little sushi bar in Beverly Hills, Shiki on Canon Drive.

It was empty. Fine. It often was, not a good advertisement but he found the food to be delicious.

He always sat at the counter in a sushi bar, he supposed in memory of his father, who first introduced him to the food. When his father first came to Los Angeles in 1980, having decided to change completely his style of painting, and life, coming, like so many before him, for the light. He had stayed at the Chateau Marmont Hotel, in the days before there was a restaurant in the evening, and he would go around the corner to a ramshackle building known as the Imperial Gardens – now a nightclub that was forever changing ownership, but was currently painted a hideous shade of pink, and called, he supposed appropriately, Pink Taco.

There, in the old days, his father would sit at the bar and the food would arrive without ordering, then at the end of the night he and the chef, with whom he had struck up this silent rapport, would relocate to another room; it was a building of many rooms, closed off by dusty old curtains, and no one ever asked what went on behind some of the curtains. It was owned and run by an unsmiling old Japanese lady, with, one imagined, a ruthless control, and there they would sit with a bottle of vodka and play, at the now old-fashioned Pac-Man tables, getting pleasantly inebriated or totally trashed depending on mood and who was winning.

So Ever always sat at the bar and tried, not always successfully, to create a relationship with the chef, to get suggestions of the delicacies of the day. A sushi bar is the one place that lends itself to eating alone. You have no self-consciousness about being Billy-no-mates, it just feels a perfectly natural thing to do. He felt at home. Comfortable.