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the harbor. Vote Republican.
    Then another thought came to my mind: Are you becoming what you’ve always hated? And then the answer came:
    Shit, you don’t have any real money anyhow. Why not play around with this thing for laughs? We went on drinking, celebrating something.

9

    So, there I was over 65 years old, looking for my first house. I remembered how my father had virtually mortgaged his whole life to buy a house. He had told me, “Look, I’ll pay for one house in my lifetime and when I die you’ll get that house and then in your lifetime you’ll pay for a house and when you die you’ll leave those houses to your son. That’ll make two houses. Then your son will...”
    The whole process seemed terribly slow to me: house by house, death by death. Ten generations, ten houses. Then it would take just one person to gamble all those houses away, or burn them down with a match and then run down the street with his balls in a fruit-picker’s pail.
    Now I was looking for a house I really didn’t want and I was going to write a screenplay I really didn’t want to write. I was beginning to lose control and I realized it but I seemed unable to reverse the process.
    The first realtor we stopped at was in Santa Monica. It was called TwentySecond Century Housing. Now, that was modern.
    Sarah and I got out of the car and walked in. There was a young fellow at the desk, bow tie, nice striped shirt, red suspenders. He looked hip. He was shuffling papers at his desk. He stopped and looked up.
    “Can I help you?”
    “We want to buy a house,” I said.
    The young fellow just turned his head to one side and kept looking away. A minute went past. Two minutes.
    “Let’s go,” I said to Sarah.
    We got back into the car and I started the engine.
    “What was all that about?” Sarah asked.
    “He didn’t want to do business with us. He took a reading and he thought we were indigent, worthless. He thought we would waste his time.”
    “But it’s not true.”
    “Maybe not, but the whole thing made me feel as if I was covered with slime.”
    I drove the car along, hardly knowing where I was going.
    Somehow, that had hurt. Of course, I was hungover and I needed a shave and I always wore clothing that somehow didn’t seem to fit me quite right and maybe all the years of poverty had just given me a certain look. But I didn’t think it was wise to judge a man from the outside like that. I would much rather judge a man on the way he acted and spoke.
    “Christ,” I laughed, “maybe nobody will sell us a house!”
    “The man was a fool,” said Sarah.
    “TwentySecond Century Housing is one of the largest real estate chains in the state.”
    “The man was a fool,” Sarah repeated.
    I still felt diminished. Maybe I was a jerk-off of some kind. All I knew how to do was to type—sometimes.
    Then we were in a hilly area driving along.
    “Where are we?” I asked.
    “Topanga Canyon,” Sarah answered.
    “This place looks fucked.”
    “It’s all right except for floods and fires and burned-out-neohippy types.”
    Then I saw the sign: APES HAVEN. It was a bar. I pulled up alongside and we got out. There was a cluster of bikes outside. Sometimes called hogs.
    We went in. It was damn near full. Fellows in leather jackets. Fellows wearing dirty scarfs. Some of the fellows had scabs on their faces. Others had beards that didn’t grow quite right. Most of the eyes were pale blue and round and listless. They sat very still as if they had been there for weeks.
    We found a couple of stools.
    “Two beers,” I said, “anything in a bottle.”
    The barkeep trotted off.
    The beers came back and Sarah and I had a hit.
    Then I noticed a face thrust forward along the bar looking at us. It was a very fat round face, a touch imbecilic. It was a young man and his hair and his beard were a dirty red, but his eyebrows were pure white. His lower lip hung down as if an invisible weight were pulling at it, the lip was twisted and you saw the