[...] I am a headliner, a highroller. Peter Sennet did it. Freddie Giles and Ronnie Templeton did it. Jack Conn – he did it. They all live in California now. They have all bled out of the ordinary world. They all have new houses, new wives, new tans, new rugs. In V8 Hyenas and haunchy drophead Acapulcos they cruise the road-margined seas, gunning to the medical zone for their daily DNA boosters and plasma rethinks. Twice or three times a month they wing out for a long weekend on Thousand Island, a world that time forgot, down in the sea of joy. Everyone thinks that this will soon happen to me. Me, I don’t see it somehow. I have a sharp sense of my life being in the balance. I may never look back, or I may never recover. I tell you, I am terrified, I am fucking terrified. [...]