After the yard sale, Dad drove his Granada up the Pacific Coast Highway, with no destination in mind except to head north, with hopes he’d left a town that could no longer kick the shit out of him. But the town had one more indignity in mind before letting him get away. As soon as he picked up a hitchhiker outside of Malibu, he knew he’d made a terrible mistake. The passenger was “a total crazy person,” he wrote to me from Oregon, “with one false eye that stared straight ahead and one crazed eye of a man who would kill.”
