n L.A. we got great tans but in terrible trouble. Unfortunately, I can’t remember how.

My memory is a confused blur of Scott and William and Frank and cocaine and the cops who pulled the van over on the Sunset Strip.

I was driving.

I don’t remember what I said to them. Then I was lying on the sidewalk in a pool of my own blood staring up at palm trees (gentle fronds) as the cruiser pulled away.

William was standing over me and he picked my drivers license (expired in the state of Ohio a few years back) up off the sidewalk where the cops had left it, shook the blood off it, and helped me gather my robes and limp to the van.

Inside the van were Scott and Harvey Keitel doing lines off the record cover of the soundtrack of the movie Grease. I requested champagne.

Excuse me man, for I am bleeding. Lighten up my soul a little bit, the leeches upon me. I have given the last crust of my body to ferry with these lads across the cracked, wasted unknown of this land. Through a constant consumption of the holy fumes of lab alcohol did I come forth beneath these dazzling palm trees along this Sunset Strip to be rudely pummeled like a spike into this concrete terrain. Or maybe it was ecstasy with Jello Biafra and Flea. In a Mercedes limo, screaming along beneath stars, stellar stars. Life is so strange, destination Unknown.

Remember those glass birds filled with red fluid which, when exposed to heat, would repeatedly dip their heads as if drinking?

I remember red nightsticks coming down again and again like that.

On me.

So, I thought, nowadays cops have a web-browser in their car, and when they run your plates, they also search the web. And that’s how they knew I was unknown and learned I was a psychedelics enthusiast and cult leader. So that’s how.

Defenders of the streets, the streets of Santa Barbara.