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The Pritchetts’ kitchen ceiling and walls were so thickly coated with airborne bacon fat and dander that the faux-quilted LORD BLESS THIS MESS! wallpaper pattern was no longer visible. The floor fat was considerably thinner and cleaner, except at the edges, where tufts of goo sloped halfway up the wainscotting.

“What are you writing?” Dolphin’s back. Looking at the ceiling.

“I’m just editing, those letters I was telling you about.”

“Oh, yeah — Schechner’s celebrity whatevers,” says Dolphin. “How’s my urine?”

I scrutinize the bag. “Straw yellow. How’s the hallucinating?”

To accomplished semioticians and weekend syntax-dabblers alike, it might seem that the parking in this garage was intended more for the use of a paying tenant’s ’67 Volvo than for the rogue ’75 Mercury found inexplicably docked in my space at the end of a long night’s work.

The severity of such a minor crime swelled considerably due to the lack of alternatives: This was over on Laurel Avenue, a block up from Sunset, sort of West Hollywood adjacent, before you go up into Laurel Canyon, over by the DGA, just up the road from the Laugh Factory, in a neighborhood that has no name and less street parking.

Joe squealed with delight as Maria ran around the playground as fast as she could, careful to avoid the trees. All the uninflatable children and nannies pointed and gasped. It was the most wonderful thing they’d ever seen. They wished that they, too, could be inflatable.

“I decided what I’m gonna do,” Hank announced at the breakfast table.

“What’s that, Hank?” said his mother, Charlotte.

“I’m gonna commit suicide with a job!” said Hank.

“Well, well, well,” said his father, Eugene. “Looks like Hank here’s finally growin’ up!”

Directly across the furrowthare, shakeless Dante Friedmantle and Morley Gritzcock lampshaded their Cowfang collars and moonsprawled upside Teabagnu’s doorsill to sunwatch the southern plasmafoe, spitting smoke and blowing anti-Shew puppers through the traffic just to buntickle Limerick Crane’s eargoat.

Colleen gives me a clean overcoat for the journey.

Otherwise they won’t let me in.

The footbridge is on its last legs.

I always wanted to be a hero.

At the bottom of the staircase, my older brother and 20 or so commie pinko hippie mad-scientist friends listen to Fred Astaire, Spike Jones and Thelonious Monk in the red-brick firelight, smoking the devil’s weed and the Lord’s tobacco in sprawled beanbag chairs, playing pool and Ping-Pong on cheap warped tables. Drinking beer, Fresca and IGA grape juice. Later they’ll make popcorn, rev up the 16mm projector and watch old Fleischer, Iwerks and Tex Avery cartoons.

Morlock Willowseed sold his nuts

to his favorite talk show for 15 bucks

and a pass to see the next show’s taping

for which, a-bleeding and a-gaping

He stood in line.

Curtis often worked through the night, with the door closed, and I could hang out and do whatever I wanted — mostly write and draw in my notebook at the kitchen table, drinking heavenly Pasquini espresso and smoking top-quality cannabis indica, a combination that, contrary to all the prohibitionist propaganda, affects many people quite positively.

In fact, there was only one thing that Serious Johnson could not tolerate, and that was people bringing Starbucks cups into his restaurant.

“I’ll kill them, is what I’ll do,” said Johnson, who generally didn’t. “Fucking Starbucks-heads. Fucking robots.”

Grandpa Red was no one’s grandfather and had never raised a single red hair. He was only 36 years old, and at birth had been named Stanley, but when he was 15, after his grandparents were killed by something falling from the sky, he began calling himself Grandpa Red.

Today is Day 90 . . . 

May, for her part, was an equal pleasure to behold. With a head like a bag of creamed spinach to which random swipes of orange lipstick had been applied, and a predilection for greasy, translucent floral frocks permeated with cheap white wine and cigarette smoke, no gorilla suit was required.

Neither house nor shack nor nightmare but an unpleasant coadaptation of all three, maybe. Or a boxcar derailed from someone’s very, very bad dream, airlifted and dropped into the forested hillside. The first visit was on purpose. The door opened, instantly converting a possible rental into a visit with the mutilated undead.

(In which I recount my most recent vacation as a single 1,200-word sentence. This was lived in 1989, written in 2001, and is still the most recent vacation I’ve had.)

. . . around 4:30, down to Café Intermezzo on Telegraph, where the radio played pre-game for the World Series that was just about to start across the bay at Candlestick Park, until the room rumbled softly and the girl in front of me turned around and said “I’m from Colorado! That was my first earthquake!” and then the room got serious, jumped a few feet in the air and landed hard and jumped again, up and down and all over town and a few screamed as we headed out into the street, waiting for the windows to burst along Telegraph, watching the surreality of towering steel light posts bending like fishing poles in two or three directions at once, and then it got quiet until something exploded — a chemical factory — maybe a quarter-mile away so we went back inside and listened to the radio announcing that a chunk of the Bay Bridge had collapsed, that the Marina District was thrashed and burning, that the Nimitz interchange in Oakland had just collapsed, too, flattening untold dozens or hundreds of victims and there was nothing . . .