Only there was a backlash against me. I couldn’t find work, not that I was qualified for anything except shooting yellow people from atop brown trees between green fronds. Sure, I’d worked in garages as a high school kid and was a pretty good pick-up mechanic, certainly qualified to pump gas and learn on the job. But nobody was interested, not even where Williams used to work as a mechanic, and it wasn’t like they didn’t have an opening.

By the way, I had nothing to do with my wife after that. At this point I didn’t want to kill her any more than I wanted to fuck her (though fuck her and kill her had flashed through my mind as an option, on reflection not a terribly good one) and she divorced me. Hey, she had grounds.

The first week I was in that little two-room shithole, my old man came out from Ohio and looked me up. We’d had a pretty good relationship over the years; I’d lettered in swimming in high school and that had pleased him (he’d been an athlete in college). I maintained a B average and I didn’t get any girls pregnant, which was the very definition of a good kid. He was out of town on business a lot, so we weren’t maybe as close as some fathers and sons. But we didn’t hate each other, like a lot of my friends and their dads.

He’d hit a bad slump around 1967 in his business-he had a little real estate agency-and that had made putting me through college a non-starter. He advised me to enlist and then I’d have Uncle Sam’s help with college, and that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Anyway, he knew about the trouble I’d been in, even though it didn’t hit the national press, and came to see me with a very special message: “Don’t come home.” He would have been cool with it, but my stepmother (a wealthy widow he’d snagged who’d made his business worries go away) had found me off-putting even before I started kicking jacks out.

“You’re a man,” he’d said. “You understand about women.”

I almost said, Why don’t you reflect on my current situation, Dad, and see if you still think I understand about women. But I didn’t.