But what there was, he found. He started drinking his cold beers for breakfast. He found that a joint or two made the afternoon pass in a pleasant torpor, and that high-stake poker games gave him his balls back, win or lose. Mostly it was lose.

And he found the women. None of her friends, thank God, or her competitors, but the would-be starlets and country-western singers who found him witty and handsome and who were content with afternoons.

She heard about them, of course-Los Angeles is a small big town-and she felt surprised and a little ashamed that she was relieved. She didn’t find him witty, his handsomeness didn’t travel well, as they say, and she was too busy in the afternoons to try to think of things for him to do.

He was good with the baby, though, always that. Always sweet with his little cowboy. Worried about him growing up “in this atmosphere,” as he always called it, to her annoyance. Worried about his values. Talked about how they should get a little ranch somewhere, go there summers, teach the boy to ride and rope, let him breathe some fresh air for a change. All while Harley was drinking more and smoking more dope.

He got disgusted with himself, finally. Woke up one morning, put the cork in the bottle, gave his stash away to a local surf bum, told the dollies adios, and asked her to leave with him. Sell this play toy house on the beach, get that ranch, do some honest work, and live a real life.

She told him that her life was quite real, thank you very much, but if he felt that’s what he had to do, he had better go do it. The marriage was pretty much over by that point anyway.

What wasn’t over-what’s never over-was the fact that Harley McCall had a child, a son, whom he loved more than he loved anything. More than the open prairie, more than the blue sky, more than his freedom. And so the greatest joy of his life was also its tragedy-he was shackled to the hated LA by a chain of love, by the every-other-weekend and one-month-in-the-summer visitation the judge had awarded him, like it was some kind of game show, which it kind of was.