From Club Sandwich to Club Paradise

Thank God moviemaking is so slow and boring and repetitious. Otherwise, it would be a totally enviable way to make a living: hanging out in the best places in the world, bathed in the adulation of strangers, getting more zeros at the end of pay checks than most of us manage to dream about. As Peter O'Toole says, "I get paid the fabulous sums for the bloody waiting; the acting I do for the fun of it." Even when it's going well, moviemaking moves at the pace of primordial ooze.

I'm standing on a beach a few miles from Port Antonio, Jamaica, watching the filming of Club Paradise; these thoughts come to mind while I watch director Harold Ramis at work. It's midday in May, hotter than hell, humidity hanging like layers of lead plate.

The shot involves Cool Runnins, the Club Paradise bus, named for a Rastafarian phrase meaning everything's going smoothly, is cool, which, of course, it never is at Club Paradise, this being a post-teen beach comedy starring O'Toole, Robin Williams and Jimmy Cliff---his first movie since The Harder They Come---and also featuring Twiggy, Adolph Caesar (who died before the film's release), Joe Flaherty, Andrea Martin, Steve Kampmann, Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, Mary Gross, Robin Duke, Joanna Cassidy and Brian Doyle-Murray, (Continued on page 126) Club Paradise (continued from page 104) who co-wrote the final script with Ramis. With an original sound track by Cliff and a crossed-palm-tree logo for the T-shirt trade, this one, as they say, looks like it can't miss.

•

Over on the beach in a far corner of the cove, a wind machine is filling a silky red-and-yellow parasail. The stunt crew is working on Andrea Martin's broken-rope parasailing scene, in which she lands in the palm trees. In that scene, Bill Morrisey is Andrea Martin. He's a sandymustached stunt man from Orlando, who will wear a dark wig and will be seen from a distance. The crew is having a problem with the sometimes prevailing wind. The wind-machine-and-powerboat combo is getting Morrisey up from the beach, but once he's up above the rocky bluff, the wind wants to blow him down against the rocks. I saw one try where he barely missed scraping his ass or worse as he soared low over the point. He told me he preferred jumping out of airplanes.

Skinny, shirtless British assistant directors are running all over the place, twoway radios in hand spitting static at them, riding herd like sheep dogs, getting things and people to be where they belong under ever-shifting conditions.

The whole crew is British, somehow cheaper than an American crew because they're shooting in Jamaica but also, by general consent, better than any other crews. Lee Brothers Electric, the sparks, out of London, are legendary. They'll go on location anywhere without blinking an eye. The Green Hell of Bolivia, from which no one has ever come back alive? You got it, guv.

The amount of detail, the convergence of energy, thousands of man-hours' worth, that go into getting 90 minutes of comedy is absolutely mind-boggling. The company has taken over an entire resort for office space, for instance. The draftsmen, art department, transportation people, assistants to the assistants, all have as offices duplex resort suites with little kitchens and views of the landscaped grounds. They so dried up the local vehicle pool, they had to persuade the local dealer selling LAATs---an Eastern-bloc auto that makes old Russian jokes live again---to turn out all the new cars in his showroom on lease to the movie company. On the far side of Port Antonio, they've turned a big warehouse into a carpentry shop---from which this whole funky-but-nice fake beach resort has been built. They're even rebuilding and spiffing up the downtown square a bit, to make it look, I guess, more authentically Caribbean---repairing reality one more time.

•

This $19,000,000 activity is all the stranger to me because none of it would be happening if Chris Miller and I hadn't had a terrible time at a Club Med in 1979. He was recovering from oral surgery, I from a divorce, and he suggested we go to the swinging Club Med on Guadeloupe. We were wildly out of place, at least ten years older than everybody else, a group tending toward young nurses and boy execs on their first tropical vacations.

It was awful, like being trapped in a singles bar for a week.

When we got back, Chris and I decided to write a humor piece about it, at the very least, to vent our spleen and, more important, to write off the trip for the IRS. We sat in my living room tossing ideas around for a couple of hours, getting deeper and deeper into libel and slander. Then we both had the same flash: This would make a great movie. And so was born Club Sandwich.

Chris, along with Doug Kenney and Harold Ramis, had been one of the writers of Animal House. Doug had since formed a production company with Michael Shamberg, who's producer on Club Paradise, and Alan Greisman, who's executive producer. They had a deal with 20th Century Fox and were looking for properties. So Chris went out to Hollywood to pitch Club Sandwich. And then, wonder of wonders, they said yes---we had a deal.

Chris now refers to this project as his Vietnam. Neither of us, at the time, it turned out, really knew how to write a screenplay. I had never written one before, and Chris had co-written only one---huge success though it was. And while all three of them had split the writing of Animal House, Chris's deepest contribution had been his life. The whole thing started from his real-life experiences at Dartmouth. It had been mainly Harold who supplied the structure, put all their funny ideas into some pleasing order. And it was the absence of structure that did Chris and me in (though Chris, braver than I, has stuck with screenwriting, learned his lessons well and become very good at it, indeed).

We worked on the screenplay for more than a year, daily sinking deeper and deeper into the quagmire. Don't misunderstand. We wrote some very funny stuff, but none of it hung together. We had lots of shiny ornaments but no Christmas tree.

Among our main characters in the first draft of this beach comedy was a creature from outer space, taking a vacation tour of this part of the universe. Like a giant, friendly mop, the alien had many tentacles and six eyes on stalks and had learned English by listening to Henry Kissinger tapes. "Vell? Volleybowl, anyvone?" He was sweet---rather, it was. Another character was Sol the Shark, the actual one from Jaws, now wearing gold chains and visiting Club Sandwich to get away from the phonies in Hollywood. There was a time warp in that one, too, with a samurai warrior suddenly appearing on the nude beach. Our main characters were a hapless pair of Sixties-vintage dope dealers named Woodstock Nathan and Fillmore West, who were trying to hide out from the law in this square, awful resort. We were hoping for John Belushi for Woodstock---that's how long ago this was.

Our producers, including Doug, weren't exactly thrilled by this draft; and in retrospect, it's hard to blame them. They brought us out to Hollywood in June 1980 and put us up in suites at the Château Marmont for a month of meetings and rewrites. They explained that movie audiences are young and that the only people interested in old hippies are other old hippies.

For me, it was heady stuff: in the 20th Century Fox parking lot seeing a $70,000 Porsche with the vanity plate rerite. Meeting Mel Brooks's desk---Mel was out at the time. Sitting two tables away from foxy Fox president Sherry Lansing at lunch. Getting tips on reverse California roll from Starsky himself at the Imperial Gardens sushi bar on Sunset. Drinking at the Whiskey with Doug and Brian Doyle-Murray and John Candy. Sitting behind his eminence Father Guido Sarducci at an early rough-cut screening of Caddyshack, which Harold and Doug were just finishing, a pre-cleaned-up Chevy Chase sitting nearby looking puffy and zoned. On and on. One afternoon in Beverly Hills, I saw the back of what looked like a dry cleaner's (continued on page 152) Club Paradise (continued from page 126) van open, and out stepped Burt Lancaster, wearing a suit. I swear. This was a long way from my usual haunts and pursuits.

Meanwhile, Doug was falling apart. His attention span was getting shorter and shorter. Weird-looking characters in restaurants would hand him vials of coke under tables. The only objects in the living room of his new Laurel Canyon house were a couch and a big green garbage bag full of top-notch Hawaiian dope. One morning at a nine-o'clock meeting at Fox, we all watched amazed as Doug paced like a trapped cat until his coke connection arrived, laying a ridge of it literally from elbow to wrist and snorting it all up, then smiling for the first time that day. And this was our producer. In fact, he wanted to direct Club Sandwich.

Even in this condition, Doug was usually smarter about things than the rest of us put together. That's what did him in, I think. As P. J. O'Rourke wrote in a Lampoon memorial to Doug, he was just too smart for his own good. You got the feeling he saw all the implications of everything, all the time, and couldn't shut it off, or could do so only through the most extreme derangement of the senses.

Doug's advice to us on the rewrite, repeated often enough that we came to believe him, was, "Follow your own worst instincts!" This we interpreted to mean do whatever pleased us most, despite the other producers', Shamberg and Greisman, repeated pleas that we bring it back to earth, make it less surreal. Doug agreed that the alien had to go---mainly because it would be too expensive to build and manipulate. He suggested that we replace it with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the rights to whose much simpler suit the studio already owned. It sounded good to us.

So in the new, improved, saner, toned-down version, the Creature from the Black Lagoon was one of the main love interests. We came up with an evil island dictator named Moussakka, so tough that when he accidentally stuck his hard-on into a fan, the fan broke. And a group of fake Rasta-farians we called Palookas, who worshiped Joe. And an island restaurant called The Mangled Parrot, specializing in the local cuisine vivant---in one scene, a loving couple are holding hands and dreaming over dinner, only to find that certain parts of it, covered with sauce, begin to hop off their plates and across the restaurant floor. There was a handsome, goofy Frenchman who did ventriloquism with his dick to impress girls and, in a true Chris Miller touch, one scene ended as a projectile gob of come hit a light bulb and blew it out. It would have been a classic.

Hey, call us irresponsible.

Then, late in August, Doug fell or jumped off that cliff in Hawaii. The joke went around that he had fallen accidentally while looking for a good place to jump. Harold told me he visited the spot afterward and that it wasn't a likely candidate for a place to jump, more a crumbly steep hill than a nice, dramatic cliff. Harold also said that Doug had been uncomfortable with all the money he'd made, would sometimes go around randomly telling strangers he was rich, tipping car schleppers $100 a pop, like that. Harold said that island was one where tourists flashing rolls were sometimes not seen alive again. And a rumor that made the rounds was that he'd stumbled onto some secret dope fields and was killed by the growers. Doug's death, like his life, seemed ambiguous, complex.

Chris and I were hard at work in a country house near Woodstock, New York, when we got the news. Chris was devastated. I hadn't known Doug very well, but I felt gut-punched, too. He was to be buried in Connecticut. I drove Chris to the funeral, one of the saddest and strangest days of my life---many of the funniest people in the country gathered red-eyed and tearful and choking back sobs on a sunny hillside as they planted what was left of Doug.

It seemed an incidental loss that Club Sandwich was now a goner, too. That autumn, Chris and I finished our second draft, but our hearts weren't in it. All along, Shamberg and Greisman had been begging for realism, characters the audience could cuddle up to---a host of things we had been either unable or unwilling to provide.

So after a decent interval, they said, "Thanks, guys," and handed it over to two other writers, and the project became Club Paradise---the title shift alone a fairly reliable indicator of the attitudinal shift that was going on. These other guys---whose names I have resolutely refused to remember---wrote it twice more.

Then, in March 1985, Harold sent Chris and me copies of the final version of the script. The note attached to mine read, "David---This is Island Jack, six years from Club Sandwich. I hope you will like it and that you'll consider visiting us in Jamaica while we're shooting. There's even some extra work in it for you, if you're up to it. Hope you like it. All the best, Harold."

This may be the place to mention that Harold and I used to work together on this very magazine. I was the first full-time Party Jokes Editor, and when I began going batty and asked that I either be given something else to do or be fired, they hired Harold as the second full-time Party Jokes Editor. We were never buddies, but we worked in the same small office for a couple of years as junior editors terrorized by the same senior editors and got along OK.

Reading Harold and Brian's script---their second version, bringing the number of writers and drafts to six each in six years---reminded me again why I'd fled back to regular writing, with its many fewer zeros. Theirs was so much sleeker than any script I could ever do. It had formal elegance, was seamless, economical, graceful, smooth---and funny. Its humming structure made our earlier attempts seem like a friendly Frankenstein monster lurching along with bolts in its neck.

It, like the movie, was comedy made by grownups.

•

Most of the cast and crew were staying at the Marbella Club on Dragon Bay, six miles outside Port Antonio. The setting is ridiculously beautiful, a pale-yellow-and-white-stucco Spanish Riviera-style resort of villas and courtyards arranged in a pleasing jumble on a hillside overlooking a perfect cookie-cutter lagoon, whose clear, extraordinary water is seven shades of blue and green all at once. There's a fresh-water pool on a wide lawn facing the sea and a private beach protected by a reef. Simply hard to beat.

The Sunday night I arrived, tables with white-linen tablecloths, set for dinner, were arranged in an outdoor courtyard around a fountain centerpiece. It was that time of gloaming, a sprinkle of early stars in a violet sky, candles lit inside curving, clear hurricane lamps on all the tables, just swell.

I was sitting, happy to be there after a long day's journey from Chicago, feeling better and better. I mean, Jesus, I recognized Jimmy Cliff there, standing against a white-stucco wall, the fucking Jimmy Cliff, wearing a classy red-leather jockey's cap, checking it out, smiling like a friendly imp from Shakespeare. Cool runnins, if ever it did exist. This was a big one for me. I mean, you know, movie stars are OK, but that was Jimmy Cliff over there, not 30 feet away. I took another sip of my Red Stripe. Dis already be all right, mon.

Then, wobbly, running and squealing with delight, scooting among the tables, came a little kid pursued by none other than Robin Williams, with a happy grin on his own face, playing I'm gonna get you with his two-year-old son through the maze of the candlelit tables. They roughly described a simple polygon around the tables and then were gone. It just added to the sweet, placid feeling of the evening.

And then, a few minutes later, I saw Harold and Shamberg. Both had their tired, oversunned daughters in tow, taking them home to get ready for bed.

Thus do creatures of the Sixties move into power in Hollywood, it struck me, with an egalitarian leftover-hippie edge, even as they become the new comedy moguls and hang out in places like this and drink Montrachet with their freshly caught langouste and talk about real estate. It was the new Hollywood establishment, comedy division, congealing before my very eyes. And sliding smoothly into grownupdom. And this is how they live---camping for months at one of the most pleasant beach resorts in the Caribbean, with their wives and husbands and kids and friends along, and they call it work. I felt like Robin Leach for a week.

But I had no inkling of the extent of this G-ratedness until the next morning, as I was on my way to breakfast in the Colonial-great-house-style dining room facing the lagoon. Everywhere I looked, there were kids and moms and nannies.

It was New Baby Boom Central.

I especially liked one morning in midweek, a rainy day at movie camp.

Walking into the dining room for breakfast, I discovered that the covered porch had been converted into the rainy-day games center for the tots and their various caretakers---while up in the dining room, most of the cast were sitting around, drinking coffee, also waiting for the sun to come out and playing their own rainy-day games.

Robin Williams' large, bearded assistant was calling out questions from a Genus version of Trivial Pursuit. Joe Flaherty, Mary Gross, Robin Duke, Rick Moranis, Twiggy, Eugene Levy, Williams and a few others were shouting out answers and cracking wise over the questions. If it weren't for all the household faces, it could have been a summer-house rainy day on Cape Cod or Fire Island or somewhere along the Lake Michigan shore.

A card came up: "Which of the Mackenzie brothers wore the ear muffs?"

Well, one of the Mackenzie brothers was sitting there.

A little later: "Who played an ax murderess on Mork & Mindy?"

And, of course, Mork was right there, too.

As Flaherty's Count Floyd would say, "Pretty scary, eh, keeds?"

Then, twitchy with nervous energy, Williams popped up from his seat and looked out at the lawn, commencing to harangue in an ironworker voice one of the peacocks strutting there: "C'mon, be a man! Get out of that drag and make something of yourself, like your mother and I have prayed and dreamed you would! Eddie, come to your senses, boy!"

This was about as wild and crazy as it got. There will be no bizarre ganja parties among the stars reported here. I didn't smell a whiff of the stuff all week, and not one single person offered to sell me any. What's this country coming to, anyway?

And everyone was working these long days in the heat---7:30 calls, wrapping the day around six, then dailies from 6:30 to seven or so, then a quick cleanup and dinner---so by ten o'clock, everybody was worn out, your faithful parasite included. This is the Eighties. We're not partying, we're all working our asses off, making it---though, of course, some of us are just working our asses off.

It sure was different from the shooting of Animal House in Eugene, Oregon, back in the autumn of 1977, under gloomy skies the few days I was there. Chris had invited me out to watch, and it was hard to tell where the movie left off in the afternoon and real life set in at night, except the drugs were better at night. I vaguely remember one night a bunch of the cast crammed into one Spartan little Rodeway Inn room, watching some big fight on TV. Even John Vernon, dread Dean Wormer, was there, hanging out. It's vague because of the fat joints that kept circulating and circulating. And the night after that, Chris and Doug and D-Day and Karen Allen and I and a couple of others spent most of the evening in one of those cinder-block rooms, listening to tapes of greasy old R&B, some of us passing a joint now and then, drinking beer and shooting the shit and hanging out, the way decent people should.

•

One afternoon, I managed to overhear some killing-time improv between Williams and Levy. Gross and Duke---who seem to be real-life buddies, just as they are in the movie---and Moranis were also nearby.

For no noticeable reason, Williams broke into a blue magic act.

"See these little ropes?" he said to Levy. "Now they're gone---and if you look in your pants, you'll find them tied around your Penis. Isn't that amazing? And I believe you had a watch? You'll find that up your ass!"

Levy mimed removing it and gingerly holding it up. "Yes," he said, going into John Cameron Swayze, "it takes a licking and goes on ticking!"

"Oh, no," groaned Gross.

Then Williams did his John Cameron Swayze, conjuring a tub of water and the growl of an Evinrude as he tossed in the watch and cranked the outboard. He told us how he saw this on live TV, and the watch disintegrated or something; they couldn't find it. Then, pushing the fantasy: "Yes, we took our next Timex to a leather bar on the Lower West Side. And after 15 guys------"

Gross groaned again.

•

During lunch break one day, I had a long talk with Harold, sitting at one of the tables in the semi-open-air Club Paradise lounge over frosty Red Stripes. I hadn't seen him for years, but as far as I could tell, he hadn't changed very much---he still had his easy, relaxed manner, and a great deal of consideration. The week I was there, people of all sorts---from O'Toole and Williams and the rest of the stars to the grizzled, experienced crew and new assistants recruited from Port Antonio---kept volunteering how good Harold was to work for, many of the old hands saying this location had the best vibes of any they'd ever been on. Being in the prettiest part of Jamaica didn't hurt, certainly. But Harold, and a little of that leftover-hippie thing, also helped. When he and his wife, Anne, lived in Chicago, they had a pad that was Seriously Sixties, and I think Harold still carries the best of those attitudes around with him---rich and famous though he is these days.

Harold has his own style of cool runnins. Certainly, he doesn't take himself too seriously. He said that he'd had no real directing experience before Caddyshack, that the studio basically handed him and Doug $10,000,000 and said, "Go, guys." Starting out on that one, he told me, that constant semismile on his face, he didn't even know what the assistant directors did. When I asked why he thought Ghostbusters, for which he was co-writer and costar, had succeeded so hugely, he said, after thinking a moment, that it was because it wasn't dirty. Parents would come up to him, thanking him for making a movie their kids liked that neither was pornographic nor incited them to revolution. And his capsule comment on Club Paradise was that it had long been his dream to make a movie where nothing blew up at the end.

•

But the one with the coolest runnins by far is Peter O'Toole.

He wasn't working the week I was there, he had his own rented villa by the sea, in toward Port Antonio, so had been nowhere in evidence. But in my capacity as Announced Journalist, I tried to convince Don Levy, the publicist, that I absolutely had to talk with O'Toole or the story would fail utterly. It wasn't exactly true, and we all knew it, but O'Toole graciously agreed to come down to the set one afternoon and talk with me.

Kids again.

I got my first live glimpse of O'Toole as he sat in the shade of the lunch tent, laughing with a young, pretty local woman and her cute, roly-poly baby. O'Toole leaned toward the infant and comically growled at him like some fierce beast, the actor's elegantly wasted face lighting up each time the baby squealed with delight.

When Don introduced me, O'Toole said, "Let's piss off to my beach shack to talk." We took this to mean his fake beach bungalow on the set. He said just a second---and headed off at a good clip down the beach to say something to Harold, who was hanging out down the beach with Flaherty (he told me quite seriously that it was seeing Lawrence of Arabia that made him want to become an actor) and Steve Kampmann and some others. Just as everyone likes Harold, they are openly in awe of Peter O'Toole---Harold, Williams, the lot. And well they should be. Marching down the beach there was Lawrence and Lord Jim and all the rest.

It turned out the beach shack he meant was his villa. We would go there and have tea. I was to ride with him and Don would follow in his car. I've been chasing around the great and the near-great for 15 years as a journalist, but I still felt nervous and a little giddy.

I needn't have. O'Toole has been around so long---he characterized himself to me as the Old Man of Locations---that he has seen everything and everyone before, including me, and still finds the Vanity Fair tremendously amusing. Of all the people imported to make this movie, O'Toole seemed most comfortable, naturally friendly, easily at home with the local Jamaicans. To the ulcer-inducing horror of the head of Warner Bros., since he might get hurt and, God forbid, screw up the shooting schedule, O'Toole tried out for and made a serious Port Antonio cricket team, making him both the only white person on it and the oldest by ten years--- and, of course, the only international star. As we walked toward his car on the set, he stopped for some cricket chitchat with a few of the Jamaican police.

On our way up the hill, the cricket continued. O'Toole said he first heard of the West Indies and Jamaica in 1948, in a calypso song about cricket that was popular in England---and proceeded to sing me a bit of it as we rattled up the road. At the top, he stopped for some more cricket chitchat, and then we were off on the main road to his place. He had been horseback riding a lot, he said, both at a coco-palm plantation by the sea and on trails up in the hills---where he had been visiting the Maroons who live up there, a semimysterious separatist group descended from runaway slaves, who claim the island is theirs and want it back.

His villa was spectacular, right on the water, with its own little crescent of private beach. Soon we were served tea by the housekeeper, and O'Toole, with a little prodding, told one wonderful story after another.

For instance, about the time they were shooting Lord Jim on the Mekong Delta, and the Vietnam war started up right around them. He said they woke up one morning and there were four dead Americans outside the compound, and the company got out of there as fast as they could---ruining the picture in the process, he felt.

When pressed, he said that of all his movies, Lawrence was the one that mattered most to him---that to him it was the masterpiece, was the one. And, incidentally, that Lawrence was also the worst location he'd ever been on.

But my favorites were two stories about the shooting of What's New Pussycat?, with Peter Sellers. The cast was living in the hotel where the last part of the movie takes place. Naming no names but indicating that the other person in the story was one of the several beautiful female stars of the movie, he began, "Well, I was climbing out of a window. I couldn't go up, so I went down---and found myself in the bedroom of this woman, who was lying there nude in bed. I began to make my apologies, but she said, 'No, don't go'---and hurried into the bathroom. I thought she was after a robe or something. But in a minute, she came back, still quite naked--- but wearing her false eyelashes!"

The thought of it makes him laugh to this day. And he never did explain why he was climbing out of a window in the first place---a master storyteller's touch, I thought.

The other story involves how he recalls the invention of Inspector Clouseau. Working at the hotel as the desk clerk was a young Spanish guy whose English wasn't as good as he thought it was. Also, small misfortunes kept happening to him. He'd pick up a telephone and the bottom would fall out. And then he'd try to look cool, as if nothing had happened. O'Toole said that Sellers picked up on this and used the clerk for the model of the Clouseau character. He also played the desk clerk in the movie, and in one scene was required to give an inventory of who was doing what to whom in which suites. "There are two boy scouts and their scoutmaster in the Marie Antoinette Suite, and in the Napoleon Suite, there is a man sheeting on his wife---"

"Cut. That's cheating. Ch... ch!"

"Yes, there is a man sheeting on his wife...."

•

After dinner the last night I was there, I found myself stretched out on one of the beach chairs, staring up into the sky, wondering what I thought of it all. The complacent moon, one day past full, rose through the trees, coming up over the blue-black presence of the mountains, behind an inky, fat cloud, lighting the cloud's ragged edge like neon sculpture of the chiaroscuro school.

I sat there, staring up at the real stars, with my last Red Stripe. To get a token writing credit and a few of those zeros would send the hound, who's been gaining on me lately, howling in painful retreat. And, naturally, that would be a relief. But then again, I've sort of gotten used to having him yapping there on my heels, and, you know, I've read Bleak House, and the ever-elusive possible payoff seems like Jarndyce & Jarndyce Revisited---even though Chris's and my Club Med stumblings did set this whole big wheel turning.

Was it possible that I didn't care? Or rather that a few of me did---my Dagwood family man and my Sammy Glick among them---but the 12 or so others of us just didn't give much of a shit? Apparently so.

Even though I wished the company well, I felt fairly remote from the movie they were making here, funny and successful though it will be. But it is sensible grownup comedy, and there is no tentacled alien or Creature from the Black Lagoon in it---not one single character of another species, you know? It was a large reminder that the world had changed. I liked the family G-ratedness of this new grownupdom all around---the joys of kids finally being discovered by a generation that had tried almost everything else first as a substitute for such corn-ball pleasures. And the fact that those of us who are left seem to be gaining our balance at last, all of us slightly safer and duller survivors who flirted with the edge but made it safely back to center.

I sat there watching the rising moon seem to electrocute a fat, dark cloud, missing old friends, and knew it was time to go back home.

"Our main characters were Sixties-vintage dope dealers named Woodstock Nathan and Fillmore West."