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because the system fucked him. For a long time, I was on his side. I worked at High Times and wrote articles about legalization and the best head shops in the country. Whereas other young writers were out doing their internships at Vogue and Vanity Fair , I was celebrating 4:20, the international pot-smoking hour, with aging hippies and hemp dealers named Dolphin. I believed in the romanticism of drugs and the lifestyle we once led, before the cars were taken and the suitcases were emptied, and the only reason we survived was because my grandmother had the foresight to steal $20,000 my father had hidden in her couch during one of his drunken stupors. She was terrified to do it; she cringed every time he would come over and sit on that same couch, but she knew one day it would just be my mom and me, and no amount of half-hearted promises from a convicted felon would be able to pay our bills. Growing up I knew very little of the dark side of my father. All I knew was I wanted to be a Desperado too.
     
    But things change. I went home to Dallas to cease my own drunken stupors, and I discovered that not all cowboys have to live on the range. Not all cowboys need to gamble their lives away in order to prove they have lived. Because by my second month in Dallas I met someone who showed me that true cowboys work hard to be there for their families; they fight hard to protect what they love, and live hard not because they don’t care but because they care so damn much. By my second month I met Louise, and Louise changed everything.
     
    Louise is the type of woman who traditionally would have intimidated me. She wore tall Tony Lama cowboy boots and wild fringe jackets and had a tattoo of the Virgin of Guadalupe covering her entire back. But I was so desperate for help, I was willing to sacrifice my fear, and so I complimented the belt she was wearing the first night I saw her at a meeting, and we became quick friends. Louise is fifteen years older than me and, at the time, had two years of sobriety, and I was willing to believe anything she said. She became my first sponsor, and when she told me that we could do anything as long as we were sober, I believed her.
     
    Which is why, nearly three years and one crazy relapse later, I sit excitedly in the passenger seat of Siren’s car, waiting at LAX to pick up the woman who meant so much to me. We are driving up to Oxnard to stay with Louise’s oldest friends. Since the eighties, she has run with the same crowd, which still includes her friend Ivan, a former dope dealer, John Knight, a violent alcoholic/speed freak, and Teresa Tall, the quintessential restaurant-owning drunk. Within the space of two years, and all pretty close to their fortieth birthdays, they got sober and have been since.
     
    When I first moved back to L.A., I was pretty much on my own. Sure, I had my old friends, but my old friends still stayed up until 10:00 a.m. in the morning, searching for their own lost fathers in unlimited booze and hazy talk. After my brief relapse with them, it just didn’t mesh so well with sober life. So instead, I borrowed Louise’s posse.
     
    I turn around to where Louise sits in the backseat. “Someone I like is going to be there,” I tell her.
     
    “Who?” she asks with her slight Texan lilt.
     
    “Maybe you know him. Jimmy Voltage?”
     
    She thinks. Her nose slides up a bit because she does that when she thinks. “I think I’ve heard of him. He’s some aging hipster from Silver Lake, right?”
     
    I laugh, “Yeah, I guess. Except, he’s not that old.”
     
    Jimmy Voltage is thirty-nine and an electrician, hence the nickname. He has been sober for three years and has a twenty-year-old son. Louise isn’t wrong. He is a bit of a hipster, with his glitter motorcycle helmet and a studded belt that actually has the word “Voltage” beaded on the back. He is tall, with haunting shoulders, an easy laugh and an even easier smile.
     
    I met him the previous summer at a