My parents moved us all to Southern California in the early 1960s, my mother for a new teaching position and my father for a job in an assembly plant, and so by the time I was a teenager it felt like home. Nonetheless, the old memories of my early childhood in Placer County, amidst the scattered dry oak forests of Auburn and Newcastle, sometimes called to me with a strange and persistent song positively luminous with nostalgia: golden hills and ghost pines and cold clear creek water on hot summer days. The place felt, to my memory, too perfect somehow, too vigorous in its beauty and innocence, and so, when I returned to Alhambra after the war to discover that I simply could not reenter the old routines nor offer myself up to the judgment of my parents, both hawks who could not, despite their care for me, separate their politics from the grim reality that sat before them at the kitchen table, I began once again to ponder my quiet childhood memories of Placer County. It was but a day’s bus ride up the interstate from my then–Southern California locale.

The larger and perhaps more immediate problem was the dope habit I had developed overseas, a habit I was desperate to hide from my parents and from myself and which may have placed as much stress on them as it did on me, as they likely had no idea why I swung between being utterly out of my mind with nervous fear and nodding off to a furtive, exhausted sleep. What I wanted more than anything was to be somewhere that felt safe and from which I might isolate myself and my demons and try to scramble up out of the cloud of white vinegar-tinged smoke that seemed to wrap itself around me like a snake, this while the dull reverberations of The Huntley-Brinkley Report murmured through the bedroom wall from Channel 4. Good night, David; good night, Chet.