Ironically, now that they weren’t married anymore, Anne could reach down the status ladder and find him some work. She got him a gig as a stunt cowboy for one of the studio’s tours. So, twenty-five times a week, real-life cowboy Harley McCall put on a black hat and vest, stood behind the railings of a saloon facade, fired his blank six-shooter at the sheriff, got shot, and tumbled down onto the grain sacks of a wagon conveniently parked below. All to the delight of the tourists watching from a grandstand.

It was boring, humiliating, low-paying work, but it paid the rent on a little bungalow in Venice and put gas in the pickup for the every-other-weekend drive to Malibu to pick up his son.

He tried to stick it out, he really did, but then one day he got shot by the sheriff, grabbed his chest with one hand, teetered at the edge of the balcony, and lifted the middle finger of his right hand in a pointed gesture at the sheriff. He managed to hold it there about halfway down to the grain sacks, but the tourists in the grandstands were not impressed, and he got fired.

It was one cruddy job after another after that, each shorter lived than the last. His cowboy sweetness turned as stale and bitter as the gas fumes that hung over the Sunset Strip. He started getting edgy and then mean. He quit more jobs than he was fired from, each time taking away another resentment along with his last day’s pay. He took offense at almost anything, adding more and more items to the lengthening list of things he “just wouldn’t take from any man.”

It was a wonder Harley could even stand up straight, he was carrying so many grudges. Film producers, film critics, studio executives, executives in general, landlords, bankers, bill collectors, cops, grocery store owners, bar owners, women, Jews, blacks, Mexicans, Koreans, whores, kikes, niggers, spies, and gooks-they had all combined to make his life hell and keep him from raising his son the way a man should raise his son.