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there was that night he worked until eleven thirty as a bar-back at that random three-story bar on mission beach in san diego where he didn’t know anybody and no one knew him, just running up and down the stairs carrying ice and bottles and kegs being ignored by the staff and the customers and rather than go home to that tiny apartment with the jack in the boxes wrappers on the floor and the cockroaches and the stale smell of isolation and loneliness, he decided to get in his car, crank up that stone temple pilots song that always felt like a road trip and make his way north up the four-o-five through the tangle of los angeles to the grapevine, to 1-5 the main artery of california and keep the needle at a steady one hundred ten, eyes open for the looming lights in the darkness that would try and slow him down, hoping to make oakland by dawn, the city shimmering across the bay and onto the richmond bridge up to novato where they would still be sleeping after a long friday night, the dog on a bed, bottles on the countertops, and the tattered mat that read welcome home.