The trouble happened because I was bored. At the time, I was twenty-eight days sober. I was spending my nights playing Internet backgammon. I had been going to AA meetings for twenty years, ever since college. I like AA meetings. Every few years, I try drinking again. Or, rather, drinking tries me. And so I go crawling back to AA. Or at least I should. This last go-round, I was skipping meetings and just staying home and, like I said, playing Internet backgammon.
I was also reading a lot of crime fiction and private detective fiction, writers like Hammett, Goodis, Chandler , Thompson. The usual suspects, as it were. Since my own life was so dull, I needed the charge that came from their books—the danger, the violence, the despair.
I also had a few checks for movie work coming in down the road. By my economic standards it was a flush time. I had even paid my taxes early, at the end of March—it was now mid-April—and I was just trying to stay sober and keep a low profile in my own little life. Overall, I was being pretty reclusive.
I only talked to a few people, primarily my parents, who are retired and live in Florida and who call me every day. My father is eighty-two and my mother is seventy-five.
I have to love them now as best I can. One night a week, I did leave the apartment to go see this girl. It was nice. Bored with backgammon and bored with reading and bored with being sober and bored with myself and bored with being alive. It was a fantasy, a crazed notion, but I gotit into my head that I wanted to play at being a private detective.
