1982

23 years old. I finally learned how to drive this year, after buying my Mom's old car.

My Punk Rock girlfriend dumped me, and seems like this was the last time it ever happened to me, to my immense relief. This was my last boyish romance, and signalled the end of my callow youth. While I was whining about being dumped, Richard Wachter told me a few things that stuck with me forever about being a man. I listened to Cocktail Jazz and Bossa Nova, thanks to the voluminous record collection of Richard Wachter. I moved in with him for a while around this time in his apartment in Lafayette Square.

I'm still doing design and production for the Metro on the side, because the artistic freedom of the higher-class sensibility of the Metro is more to my taste than the commercial, journalistic look of the Riverfront Times. Richard, who has a very complicated social life thanks to his popularity with women, suffers a severe cramp in his bachelor lifestyle thanks to me hanging around, and so I moved in with Killian, a mutual friend of ours.

Killian and I end up being intimate, which was fun for a while. I was still mooning around thinking of my Punk Rock girlfriend. I was reading Proust and identifying with the theme of insane jealousy a little too much.

Sick of St. Louis after the break up of my band and tired of my dead-end job at the Riverfront Times, I decide to move to Los Angeles with Don Green. We load up all of our stuff in his VW beetle and head out to LA. We total the car just outside of Springfield MO, however, and have to load all of our stuff onto a Greyhound bus and have a miserable ride the rest of the way to LA.

Once in LA we move in an apartment in Seal Beach with his girlfriend Alissa Feinberg, the ex-Oui Oui Twin, and start looking for work. I'm flabbergasted at the immensity of LA, and the lack of public transportation, and figure out that it's going to be a lot harder than I thought to get a job out there.

At Thanksgiving I fly up to San Francisco to visit my dad and my Grandma Virginia finds a job in the want ads for me doing production work for the weekly inserts of the JCPenney stores of the Bay area.

Hello, L.A.!