Chapter 4

Public bathrooms, gym steam rooms, local bars, anywhere men congregated, I found relief. One night, I picked up a hitchhiker and had him blow me while I careened through the Los Padres Mountains in my old pickup. Those roads on the best days are perilous; at night, they are downright treacherous. How many times we nearly went off the road into the dark depths of the forest I couldn’t count. I wanted to die. I came when we emerged on the other side of the mountain and the Pacific Ocean spread like a black wasteland. I’d barely rolled to a stop before the terrified hitchhiker jumped out.

My diet consisted of barely cooked steaks and muddy beer. Nothing about that time was pretty or decent. The mirror in my bathroom revealed not a man, but a demon—lean, raging, and unbearably wounded.

One day when I woke up in my own bed, a rare occurrence in itself, my mother stood over me. It’d been weeks since we’d spoken.

“I bought a ticket.” She sat beside me.