They wave at me, their eyes cheery slits. I’m not surprised to see Meuenchau and Coombs just where I left them: sitting in Meuenchau’s old pickup truck, smoking homegrown and listening to Leon Russell under the pepper tree. Many owners have not made much effort, despite rocketing California real-estate prices, to keep their properties from becoming eyesores. Thrown up in a hurry back in 1957, the houses remind me of the tacky little cottages on miniature-golf courses.

The neighborhood hasn’t changed much: small, drafty, suburban, ranch-style homes, the Southwestern motif drawn out to the point of absurdity with split-rail fences, wagon wheels, dangling branding irons, and varnished cow skulls. But that seems gutless to me, even more gutless than coming home to live with my parents. Even though I’m confident of my talent, I suspect that I should’ve finished school, gotten a degree, woven some sort of safety net, just in case the novel doesn’t pan out, just in case I am a sham. I just want to finish up the novel about the redneck chiropractor with the crystal ball, sell it, make a little cash, and start doing the talk-show circuit. Seems the one thing I learned in college is that college is not for me. Ten years later, dead broke, I come back to the old neighborhood to live with my parents for a few months - and to write, I tell people. And then, as if God really loves me, crank vanishes from my neighborhood - and no one misses it. I vow never to do it again (“Never again, never again,” the chant of the meth-head), but do it eight or nine more times. It takes three days to weather the hangover - the most desiccated and noxiously enervated state I’ve ever experienced. But then comes the drip, drip, drip, that bitter, alkaloid savor the meth user learns to associate with pleasure, and I wander around grinding my teeth and feeling like Bruce Lee grafted onto Aldous Huxley for about twelve hours. I am certain I will sneeze blood all over the curtains, that I’ve done permanent damage. I try not to cry, the burning pain is so terrible. Whiffing something straight up your nose into your brain seems a violation of human dignity, and crank looks nasty, like ant poison and pulverized glass all chopped up on that mirror. He calls it “crank,” like a car part or a grouchy old man. My neighbor, a divorced mechanic who invites kids in and pours them draft beer to increase drug sales and his chances with the girls, offers me my first taste of methamphetamine at age fifteen.

Super slow crack back meth