I've always landed on my feet in Santa Barbara; what happens when I stay is another matter entirely. But on these sober drives to a noisy house on the beach, I had been a resident of the Gold Coast for less than two months, albeit for the third time.

The second sojourn began two years earlier, as a flight from a brutal Phoenix summer, my heart palpitations vanishing as soon as I saw the beach, then returning predictably - and with a giddy vengeance - as I awoke early one fog-bound June morning and untwisted the top from a bottle of Coors, in what would be my first in a governing stream for something like the two-thousandth straight day. I kept my promise to Marcus that I would return to Arizona as soon as the summer session at UC Santa Barbara had ended. But we both knew I'd be back.

The first was as a freshman, Marcus and I having fled together, establishing a pattern of retreat that haunts him even today, wherever he is. I've heard rumors of some cannery rig almost to the Aleutian Islands, where the money is so good, even he could pay off his MasterCard balance in a year of double-shifts. I have a hard time imagining those flaccid-white hands slitting endless bellies of Alaskan king salmon in the ecliptic blackness to pay off some banker in New York he's never before met, even if he is a slave to his primitive Calvinist instincts; but penance is a fearful motivator, and I've never been privy to its persuasion.

John Patrick "Paddy" O'Hearn understood, in a nerveless way. "Agoraphobia," he nodded, reaching for the CD's remote-changer that seemed to function like unto a morphine pump: Click (changing tastes slightly to St. Dominic's Preview): another shot into the audio lobe. "That would be the perfect environment," he said. "Pitch-black twenty-two hours a day; sleep during the daylight hours, then back into the cannery at night. Your friend is very clever. What brought it on?" he wondered, looking more than a little like Howard Hughes before the Old Aviator fixed the lever for his final descent. He raised himself slightly on the musty sofa to peel open a tin of smoked oysters that lay on a folding card table.

I recoiled at the scent and wondered if I really wanted to get into it again. For more than four years, Marcus and I had been sparring partners in some strange shadowbox, feigning and fending, and hurting from blows both real and imagined. The last time I saw him, after I got out of a Scottsdale rehab facility, he was holed up in a condo his parents had bought for him near Phoenix: a two-bedroom, two-bath villa at Squaw Peak, with a swimming pool perched atop a grand promontory - a salve for the blistering summer, though I doubt he ever used it: He would have had to walk outside.

Paddy nodded, a thin stream of oyster-juice trickling into a grizzled, gun-metal beard. "Do you think you could bring me some coffee on Wednesday?" he asked. "About half a pound of that Irish Creme we both like. I'll grind it myself." Then he reached for his wallet and handed me a twenty-dollar bill. "And some clam chowder. If you remember."

I nodded and tucked the bill into my wallet. As I stood up to leave, I handed the old man a mass of dot-matrix paper, which was still perforated at the seams. "Let me know what you think," I said. I asked him if he wanted the curtains opened, but he seemed not to hear me, and so I left the house, the fog hanging over Santa Barbara as it always did in June, festering like a damp, dirty gauze. It was the kind of day that made me feel like drinking.

I drove into Isla Vista, to a wood-paneled sandwich shop called Grandma Gertie's, where I had once spent a year's-worth of Thursday evenings challenging a drunk driving violation. When I finally went into rehab a couple years later, I was proud to say that I had beaten a House where, at ninety-nine cents a pitcher - when a man spends ten bucks, stays for three hours, and doesn't eat - the odds are not long in his favor.

I was drinking nothing stronger than Pepsi this time around, whiling away a gloomy afternoon just staring into a television perched high on a shelf in one corner of the shop, at the finely-oiled hitting machine that appeared to be Hector Camacho beating away on a hapless Bobby Chacon when a black man limped into the shop. The owner instantly, almost viscerally, made move for the low, swinging door behind the counter."

"Getouttahere, Preston!" he spluttered.

Preston backed up a few steps and tipped his knit beret. "Mon, iss okay. I's jess comin' to see m' friend." The Jamaican turned and eyed me, lowering his head in a short nod.

I had met Preston in adjacent Dogshit Park several years earlier, after the drugs had run dry in the dorms, and the brave and desperate were forced to take a Walk on the Wild Side, as it were. For his troubles, I remember giving him a $5 "finder's fee," and walked back to Francisco Torres dormitory with a small bag of magic mushrooms. Preston and I had asked very few questions of each other that day, and still I felt I had everything about him I needed to know.