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Upon meeting Mr. Miller he greeted me with a diabolical gleam in his eyes that promised a guarantee that I was going to regret every second of my knowing him. MY TIME WITH HENRY MILLER
Purple, blue, and bruised was the hue that suffused over my skin as the duties of the bright white sunlight was now exchanging station with that of twilight. Standing on the corner of Fairfax and Melrose as the heat of that hot July day slowly slipped away, I was quick to dodge the reflections of every driver’s hopes and dreams as they ricocheted off the melting asphalt. They on their way to nowhere and I uncertain of whence I came. One thing was sure though, I was in way over my head. Way over my head! As these thoughts spring to my mind, afford me the luxury of your patience if you would to divagate only so momentarily in effort that you shall understand whence my hyperbolic extrapolations come. Allow me this if for no other reason than only to further my own understanding of this friendship. For indeed I believe its purpose shall be served.
Such it was like for so many others who find school unfulfilling as it invariably constricts and constrains your aspirations and beats your spirit into submission, I too had dropped out of school at the onset of my ninth grade. They were only to glad to be rid of me since I was of no use to their budget owing to my constant absenteeism. Not long after that, I had bumped in to a friend of mine who I’d gone to elementary school with. He had been living in his car after apparently being kicked out of his mother’s house for refusing to go to school as well, choosing rather to stay home and play his guitar twenty hours a day. Having no ambition whatsoever to spend such time learning to play an instrument yet desiring all the fruits and rewards such discipline and hard work yield should fame favor you on the world’s stage, I decided to do what anybody does when challenged by a lack of talent or an inextirpable laziness. Be the singer of a band. No small task when you have no guitar or drum set to hide behind as a hundred pairs of eyes are staring at you expecting you to entertain them or else face the brutality their beating doth bring should you fail to deliver.
Upon deciding that his complicity be the only prerequisite I needed as a vehicle for me to go to Hollywood, I soon replaced what he surely imagined to be vagaries and idle promises on my part, with obtruding depictions of grandeur and promises of moon struck madness which was sure to include sybaritism and saturnalia. Agreeing with me, as my sapid appeal and guarantee surfeited the gluttony of a dreamer, we with nothing more than our arrogance and youthful confidence plotted our designs and set course our destinies for Hesperian nights.
Coming home to find me loading up a duffle bag, my mother inquired as to where I was going. “Hollywood”, I fearlessly told her as I packed my bag. Wishing me much luck and fortune she new better than to try to dissuade me. Her reasoning being, “If I don’t discourage him, he’ll be home a lot sooner!” Giving her one last kiss and a hug for good measure we said our goodbyes with the understanding that the next time we saw each other it would either be through a glass window or in Elysium. Never one to darken my illusions, she no doubt knew like I did that I neither had the passion nor the patience to indebt myself to this whimsical fantasy but it would get me out of Texas and on the road to the rest of my life. However difficult or heartrending a parent finds the inevitability of a fledgling’s flight from the nest, certain is the solace that her instruction on the dynamics of flight and navigation will always in the end lead them back to her should he find the winds too strong for his ambition.
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We had been there a year already when I turned eighteen. As I shed my seventeenth year the need for my senses and reasoning to conflate into one omniscient faculty for the sole sake of my self preservation became painfully apparent. I began to surmise that the simple delights for the aesthetics of life that each disparate sense upheld separately for me were no longer possible in this specious orchard called Paradise where the appearance, flavor, or delicacies of its golden apples belied its true nature and qualities so long ago verboten. As I took assessment of these streets and the mirage it reflected I began to understand only too well that it would offer no refuge, respite, or mercy to anybody who mistakenly or unsuspectingly tried to grasp the promises this land of plausibility promised without burying their delusions first. Their wrangling and anchoring of them instead would only validate the certainty that all will be lost as this place suffered no fools. Less visible to the inexperienced eye is a shade of green you bring with you upon your arrival that only begins to take on a callused muscle tone after you’ve been there a while. When most people are all ready back on their way home after six months whether due to a lack of tenacity, disillusionment, or victimization, you’ve only just begun to not let the unbelievable affect you so as not to attract the attention of the sharks that swim in the same sea as you. Weakness has an alluring scent that can waft from you that will always mark you as bait should your mistake of display fall upon their gaze. These streets aren’t paved with gold. On the contrary, they’re paved with many a stranger’s blood that is unable to be removed or forgotten through ablutions. And the soles of your feet shall forever remain stained with the color of heartbreak for as long as you walk this earth. In as much as what one may take for defeat, many however know by possession what is also to be had in this valley as the joys that the highest peaks of conquest hold are as near as the former’s dale of sorrows. And with each comes its own repining plaint to bemoan or victorious ode to sing.
“Be careful My Love, those oncoming cars have a funny way of waking you up once they slam into you”, a voice soothed my alarm as someone pulled me back on to the curb so as not to get hit by an oncoming car that was headed straight towards me. Grasping my elbow, aided by her touch, I was immediately reminded of the echoes I would chase to a place beyond the colors that dutifully illuminated the rainbows in my childhood. That reminiscent voice that sounded so familiar to me I thought upon hearing it. That ancient voice where down crystalline staircases, past lethargic forests that emptied into rivers of darkness, I would often follow a soporific voice in both my dreams and ever too often waking nightmares. The painful days of my youth mollified only by the delirium of day dreaming. The hopeful escape that would one day surely come was the panacea I was addicted to. “Daydreaming will only get you killed here”, said she who admonished me with a gentleness I had never known before. Interrupting my pilgrimage back to my earliest days, I remember the portent that was also to be descried by what she said as it verily carried with it a message and a double meaning only those with the scars of experience due this place could decipher. The code to it I then lacked though I would soon decode after a thousand wasted days. As I slowly turned around to see from where this comely angel emanated from my head began to swirl as the residual heat of that sweltering day suddenly paralyzed me and left me unable to so much as produce a response much less any semblance of composure. “What’s the matter? Devil got your tongue?” she asked me in all her southern charm wherein only the refinement of generations past could affect or produce such grace. “No! Thank you!!! Yes. I mean yeah! I mean, I don’t know what I mean!” I desperately muttered. A merci of her gaze, she looked at me with an askew eroticism similar to one of those worn by a Degas sculpture. A deportment that showed both the nubile ballerina’s innocence and its inherited insouciance, sharing with it the luxury afforded only by children and at the same time all the impish imperfections childhood looses with the falling of bloom’s petals. “Did you hear me?” she curiously asked. “I guess I was thinking of something. Thanks for rescuing me.” I uttered unintelligibly now transfixed on her beatitude. As she noticed full well what effect her proximity was having on me she purposelessly now took a step closer to me. Standing in front of me I could feel her scent caressing my entire being. Only but an inch away now she whispered softly “You’re welcome!” As she said this, her tone of voice enveloped me in the warmth of her femininity I could only up until now ever have hoped or imagined myself to be enrobed in by a woman. As my heart began to beat fortissimo I was unable to utter a single word. Silently I stood there trembling waiting for her to respond or say something all the while hoping that a building would explode so as to ease the suffering that the violence of silence was at once excruciating on me. Taking the lead, as I was obviously discomposed, she then asked me how old I was with a cynicism that resembled that of the patina Rossetti’s muse always wore no doubt in part to the impatience his idiosyncrasies charged her with. Trembling with excitement, yet at a loss as to converse with a woman of such feyness, I remarked “I’m 25. Yeah! 25! Why?” I repeated with my signatory confidence as I began to regain my equanimity hoping that my inexperience wouldn’t estrange her to me. My fear being that my overeager puerility would belie my professed age. As we stood on the corner I remember her coyly staring into my eyes with a wildly quixotic beauty I was unsure how to gauge thinking all the while that my aplomp cockiness had surely won her over. Held in reverie, I heard nothing as the neon tracers of fleeting emotions whizzed by us honking and churlishly sputtering along the busy avenue until the hiemal muliebrity of her voice woke me out of the daze I was suddenly caught in. “Ahh, that’s too bad! I was hoping you were 17 or 18”, she impassively said raising my anxiety. “In fact, I was hoping I could take you out for drinks and then take you home and make love to you all weekend long. But you’re too old for me!” Falling into her masterful trap I innocently exclaimed “I’m 18. I swear I’m 18!!!” I exclaimed nervously as a boy does when trying to explain the reasons why his hand was caught in the cookie jar. Freezing me with the most louring look I’d ever been exposed to, I desperately sallied one final supplicating attempt to change her impression of me before I resigned myself to the utter feeling of abject humiliation and regret I was sure to feel should she walk away from me for the rest of eternity. Turning her back to me as she waited for the light to turn so she could cross the street, with my head to the ground and talking to her back, I emphatically whispered “I’m 18.” “I’m only eighteen to be honest with you!” I blurted out once again as if my first entreaty had fallen on deaf ears. Turning around to face me, she then scolded me with a resolute finality barking “No!” aloud for all to hear. 
“What you are is a liar! And I don’t like liars!!!” she cried with an unfeigned elegance unlike any of the garishness I was used to from the actresses and models who populated the city. As the light turned green she left me standing there like a man who’s just gazed at the face of Medusa without the aid of a shield’s reflection and is thus morphed into a statue of marble forlornness. Giving short chase to her as she crossed the street I imploringly shouted, “For what it’s worth, I’m not a liar but I would lie to you again if I thought it was the only way to be near you for even a second.” Upon hearing my petition for a second chance, at which I hoped she would turn around and say “Hold on a second, let’s start over again,” she walked out of my life forever. Such are the whimsies of youth as they encounter the splendors of afflatus in its personification of someone that holds such fey and numinous attraction. Heartbroken, I was sincere in my offering of gratitude as up until now my stay in Hollywood had been marked only by cold and isolating hardships as well as the rigors of discipline my new found career as an up and coming rockstar demanded. Offering no such forgiveness with even the slightest glance or twist of her head, she walked off into the evening that had suddenly fallen on my loneliness. Unwilling to move from the spot I was affixed to until I could no longer see her, I then began to maunder about the town as madly in love with her as is a lion with the sun soaked plains of the Serengeti. To speak to you of how young I was, Hollywood was no place to be in love for a young man like myself. I was far too recklessly adventurous and full of romantic sentimentality for the place. It held far too many narcissistic delusions for someone with my disposition and temperament. Ones of which I couldn’t afford to be led astray by owing to my excessiveness and lack of any self control or moderation what so ever. But as is always the case, we never want that which we already have but that which we don’t. In my case, the bliss of my ignorance and innocence I beheld would soon be exchanged for the folly of a sadistic wisdom one foolishly thinks with it comes an understanding of the arcane. But as I was going to find out, the price for that which I wanted…I would continue to pay for the rest of my life.
Months soon faded away in which not one day passed without the thought of her enslaving my every word and action. She became the Muse that every aspiring artist longs for. She became the inspiration that you spend days thinking about. Days you spend becoming better at what you do, not for yourself the impetus that drives your ambition but for the sole sake of pleasing her. Whether she recognizes, validates, or even dismisses your realization by more of her divine inspiration or physical contact matters little if any. It only serves to reaffirm your belief that the sole reason of your entire existence is to perpetuate and propagate the fidelity and continued devotion of her station, being, that for you, it is entirely self serving, even if illusory. It is regarded by everything you encompass to be your honor and duty so as to further her office and continue to worship her deity until the end of time. It is the indefeasible fact that she is the breath you breathe, and the totality of the love you live by. Living by this code I began to reassure myself that she could be anywhere and everywhere in the city. More than just that, she could be waiting for me! Looking for me as well, I superciliously convinced myself. Sure enough, like the certainty of a fool who not knowing when to walk away always and inevitably enmeshes himself in some inextricable and perilous mishap does, I soon resigned myself to the fact that I would see her again save by default a new Muse should favor me and replace her. Following my despondent emotions, and yet again not choosing wisely and even less on my best interest’s behalf as my record often reflected, soon I could be seen chasing her shadow across the city anywhere I thought I was sure I would find her. Into every window I peered, atop every building that owned a terrace I looked, and on every street I passed. Into every parked car, or taxi that passed me, I looked for the Muse who had taken my virginity and left me but with only a memory of my deflowering. As I searched far and wide, high and low, Mnemosyne herself took pity on me, singing lamenting songs for me as she helped me search my memories for the woman I would soon enough touch and cherish. This I assured myself again and again as I wondered the Cimmerian landscape only to see the object of my affection and devotion vanish every time I drew near what I thought to be her light as I knew was so near at hand. Unbeknownst to her she had opened a world to me in which I had no idea existed. As I knew she could show me more worlds and plains to look from, I offered self sacrifices and prayers to the Goddess of Love if only to allow me one more glimpse of her so as to quench this unrequited love. So painful was my longing that my endeavors to complete even the simplest of tasks went unfinished. How I dreamt of her eyes. What hid behind those eyes I spent hours pondering. So painful where the mysteries that hid behind those oceanic blue eyes that I longed to unravel them, albeit not yet sagacious enough to fully well understand that the ramifications of such a precarious wish could put me in the same maelstrom she was probably shipwrecked from. That she was only certain of where she’d been I was sure of. Where she was going I knew better than to want to know. As time went by and my search yielded no results I began to realize that sunshine always followed rain. I pacified myself agreeing that it was for the best that I never saw her again. How gullible our innocence is as it readily believes the lies we tell ourselves as a defense to protect our ideal against the possibility of it being shattered and against the bitterness that such a defeat leaves us with.
As midnight approached on a redolent Tuesday night, my guitar player and I we’re at the end of another fruitless day as we could find no drummer or bass player charitable enough to give us an audition. Holding office outside The Central on Sunset I phoned our answering machine to see if we had any messages. Another diurnal ritual was the feeling of utter dejection and relentless woe upon never having any messages for us at the end of a long and arduous day. To be certain, calloused skin is not formed overnight but after many layers of hardship, rejection, and disappointments have been laid leaving a stratified thickness impenetrable of anything its surface protects yet easily pierced by the most delicate prick of a thorn. “So there you are? I’ve been looking all over for you!!!” Upon hearing the voice that had haunted me for so many prodigal days I was once again immediately seized by the warmth of her voice. Though it felt like a thousand lifetimes had passed since our first encounter had hung me in a suspension of time, a thousand lifetimes of love or despair I would not forestall any further. Escape she would not without knowing the contents of my heart this time. This time I would declare the feelings that had for so long eluded both her and me I thought. Even in the face of probable rejection and assured humiliation, I was determined to tell her just how I felt. No longer would I allow for her absence to mar me, to torture me as I had all but become useless by now. As I summoned the courage to speak she moved in closer and took hold of my rapidly weakening constitution. “The devil got your tongue again?...I’m going to have to talk to him about letting you have it back…but if your going to lie to me again maybe we should let him hold on to it for awhile longer.” Nearly collapsing from the weight of her words all I could say was, “I’m sorry”. Imploringly I asked her with my eyes to forgive my trespasses hoping that she would forgive the folly of my youth and fear that I had displayed her upon our first meeting. Taking her pensive smile as a momentary allowance of my contrition by her, I wasted no time responding to her. But as I began to ask her a question I was interrupted by her putting her index finger to my lips as if to silence me. “Have you been looking for me?” she asked devilishly. “My whole life” I sighed, completely giving way to my emotions. “Are you going to waste any more of our time?” she asked inquisitively. Recalling my lack of action the last time she was in my grasp I quickly gathered myself and boldly replied, “Never again.” “Good! Then come with me and tell your friend you’ll see him later!” she ordered. Taken aback as much as I was by her brazen command, my guitar player simply nodded and walked away, no doubt congratulating me on what he merely considered a more than mediocre one night stand. Ahh, the fragrance of sin incarnate, many a times the only perks Hollywood offers to we penurious disciples of the craft which we accept whole heartedly as much as we welcome the laurels and accolades of the success we strive for. He was mistaken though, as much as I would soon be as she would be no one night stand. 
No, she was to become the very incarnate representation of what I would measure every woman up to for years to come. She would come to apotheosize the very essence of my ideal, the corporeity of a divine manifestation long sought after, as much as she would come to embody perfection in a world mine own that knew of no limitations or any restrictions that were adhered to or bound by any constraints of the mind. Only my heart would be dictated by the precepts of which she would soon consign to it. My life thus was just beginning after so many years of longing to be alive in a world of shadows and doubt. As we walked to her car I began to sweat with excitement in anticipation of what possibilities may lay ahead for me as her realized existence represented the very object of my life’s desire. Stinging my eyes, emanating from my every pore, the beads of passion and concupiscence that rolled down my face instantly evaporated upon falling to the ground like sins that dissipate after a suitor has gratified his desires at any cost. Less the suitor, more a mendicant, the cost would in the end far outweigh the price at which point I wasn’t sure just who would end up paying for it. I had no experience in matters such as these and even less means to offer. However, undaunted, I was fully willing and ready to account for what I knew would inevitably change my life forever. As we drove away to her sanctum sanctorium, she was to become My Everything and I didn’t even know her name yet.
Four seasons of translucent purity had passed since that night on Sunset that changed me and my entire life forever. “Do you trust me?” she asked with a mournful look on her face. As she asked me this I couldn’t help but think that this night would be the last one that we would spend together. Already perceiving the sadness that my physiognomy betrayed, she gently looked at me as she had so often done when confronted by my uncertainty in regards me being unsure as to how to assuage my anxiety or emotions thus never dealt with. Always accompanied by some form of physical reassurance like the running of her fingers gently across my face, it was a look that calmed me like a soft humid night always does in late autumn as my fear of winter’s harshness most always brings with it a feeling of loss. Sabrina was ten years my senior and every bit the woman her sapphirine eyes showed in their assiduous plights of renascence. They were surrounded by an orchid white complexion beholding to features that seemed to be delicately laid by the most fragile of hands. Her tacitly articulate mien spoke of a past you knew better than to ask for the truth from. For you would only be disheartened at the candor of her confessed peccadilloes she probably justified her life by. Behind her porcelain skin, hid a little girl that she never had the chance to be, except when in the company of me or whomever preceded me or would surely soon proceed me, much to my chagrin. Sabrina had that curse of beauty that forever confined her to a world of the highest bidders. Beautiful to a fault was her rarefied being, and urbane was her refinement. To be said, pure was her sentiment. To try to describe it would only prove my lack of erudition in life as well as love. An inherited grace and manners she owned denoted entrance to the most secret of worlds most were unable to access much less ever return from again as she had no doubt traded all that she was for all that she was ever going to be. None the less, the inner beauty of which enfettered me to her was the source from which such rarity and afflatus came from. This is what I thought in her presence, out of her reach, and beyond my hold of her evanescence. The fealty I was charged with would leave me a changed man for the rest of my days. And it is thus that has remained singed and scarred on my heart ever since that July day. Beyond rarified and esoteric further, was the beauty of tragedy she carried with her that can only be found extant today along the ancient corridor where histories vitreous frescoes remind us of the frailty of our own humanity. Not in the Grecian tradition, but tragic in the modern day sense of our human theater where we are all just skeletons whose nakedness serves us none by which we seek to bare our souls. Her character and personality did neither show to be false the old soul whose only vestiges of innocence remained locked away in the deepest recesses of her heart and mind where no one was privy too nor would they ever be. As it were, we had come to a routine of such that she, totally unthreatened and disarmed by me, and always in complete control, allowed herself a sort of respite from the trappings of her world. It was here, just beneath the surface of our reality did she allow herself selfless little moments that she indulged in. It was her lot to take care of people, somehow including me she must have thought, and she was in no way embittered, disillusioned, or disconcerted by it. Often I remember a selfish little thought she would relish or a smile of joy that would beam across her face as she would look upon me happily feeling that she was needed and loved by somebody. Not by reasons of her physical beauty but by reason of all that inherently compromised her. To be loved for who she was and not desired for what she was. Thinking me to be asleep or distracted by her love when totally alone with each other, she would allow herself to be temporarily transported back to her days when she had real dreams and aspirations. To those days we all miss but seldom have the road or accessibility to traverse back on. How I loved her then and still love her today. Much to the annoyance of my band which my guitar player and I formed, I passed my every waking hour that Sabrina’s mysterious “schedule” allowed with her. Knowing her to be the mistress of some movie or music mogul never bothered me to be honest. The fact that I knew I belonged to her as they no doubt felt by their spent fortunes on her that she belonged to them made my love for her stronger. In fact I was only too eager to spend their money on equipment for my band or drink their expensive bottles of wine and eat the food that their money bought. She loved the idea too I think. As if it were some sort of revenge on them for whatever their effrontery or offense may have been. Owing to her beauty I knew this to be true as I had already seen on many occasion the way she managed herself and her affairs whether while receiving a phone call, or while we were all alone, or in public and she was dealing with admirers. How many of Hollywood’s Elite would have paid to gain her favors and attention I often wondered as it soothed my fragile ego and in some way reinforced my youthful insecurities. She knew however, that it was all fleeting and the window was closing fast upon her though. Every decision and second counted as her time and youth would be soon be gone too. Careful never to ask any questions about what I had already precociously understood, I simply went along gratefully taking the time she gave me. I had passed my every waking hour away from the real world in her arms. I was her unshattered ideal that she since childhood had never known because of poverty and the demands it puts on beauty. It was her only chance to live in a world of glass that was unbreakable for the time she spent in it. Sabrina was the type of woman that would give you the world if only one didn’t ask anything of her. This I knew only too well, for like her, I also shared that same quality. The moment I was to ask anything of her, I knew she would disappear from me forever like the sound of yesterday’s laughter. Showering me with unremitting kisses, children’s gifts of gold, her ruefescent lips slowly began to part as if she were afraid to tell me the intention of her heart’s contents. “There’s someone I want you to meet,” she said to me one afternoon as I lay in her bed watching her get dressed with her meticulous feminine acumen. “I want to marry you!!” I replied seriously. “Oh my little Dervish! Please don’t bore me again with your insecurities! Besides, I thought I got rid of them all for you!” she smiled back at me reprovingly. “Who, I barked! Who do you want me to meet? Your boyfriend!!!” I retorted jealously as I was sometimes wont to do when I suspected her of one of her imminent trysts and my jealousy escaped me. “And you say you want to marry me…silly little boy! Never mind, I’ve changed my mind. Boyfriend he says…Huh!” she continued thinking aloud to herself as if I wasn’t there. “Who do you want me to meet…your parents?” I naively asked, forgetting for the moment that I was just one of her projects and would never know much more about her other than her name or the idiosyncratic quirks she couldn’t hide. Such was the stark reality of it. I couldn’t afford to be so naïve as to think that she was continuing on with me for the sake of love or destiny as I so thought. Such were the makings of her mind I thought. “His name is Henry Miller,” she said with a churlish little smile on her face as if pleased to stick daggers in me. “I don’t want to meet this Miller guy or anybody else for that matter! I just want to know you!” I stammered back poutingly. “I want you to go and see him, he’s got something for you.” she said with a maternal tone in her voice that was unknown to me until now. “What is it? Why do you want me to go and see him Sabrina?” I asked her suspiciously. “Because I can’t take you where you want to go that’s why Baby! Neither can you my little dervish,” she said as she sat down beside me and touched my face with her hand. The sudden realization of her gestures and her tone of voice shook me at my core as I now understood that I would indeed never see her again. Our time had come. “I’m never going to see you again am I Sabrina?” I uttered in disbelief as the one tear that rolled down her cheek punctuated my inquiry. “No Baby, you won’t.” she sighed sadly as if she had already began to regret what she knew she had to do. “I don’t want you to be sad about it,” she pensively said as if she had not quite expected for our sojourn to bear any residual sentiment. “I’m so in love with you…I’ll never ever love another woman again!” I said unable to bear it. “But I want you to. Please do. Do it for me…If you love me the way you say you do, then love somebody the way I love you!” she said softly.. Looking at the sincerity of her crushing words I tried to get up and run as I was always wont to do in situations that seemed so chaotically close to driving me insane as I was too emotionally underdeveloped to deal with such matters as these. She was caught unawares but therein proceeded to authoritatively take command of her self and her emotions again as she always had to be in total control of everything and every emotion around her. Reckless she wasn’t but she knew she had ventured too far out this time. Offering escape for both of us I immediately sprang to my feet so as to leave. “Where are you going…come here my Love? Don’t run from this! This is the beauty of love…the beauty of …” “Tragedy!!!” I suddenly interjected as I began to grow impatient with her. “No!” she remarked fiercely. “This isn’t what love is all about even though you think you know everything. Believe me when I tell you that you don’t! Maybe someday you will, but right now you don’t. Love isn’t your selfishness! This, right here, this, what you feel, with me, right here, right now…what I feel for you! Don’t run from this…please. You may not understand now, but some day you will. I know you’re mad, and confused, but someday you’ll understand why I have to do this. Okay…” Unable to so much as move from the spot I was standing in as I gazed deep into the sanctity of her eyes all I could seem to say in response to her heart that seemed to be bleeding in empty places was, “Where are you going?…will I ever be able to see you again or contact you?” “No, my little dervish, and don’t ask me anything else. Please don’t waste this moment we have together on your selfishness.” “You’re right, I don’t understand, but there’s nothing I can say or do is there?” I quietly asked, full of rage at my manqué and our impending estrangement. “No My Love, there isn’t.” she answered all the while turning away to avoid my heartbreak. “I miss you already…my Aphrodite.” I thus said and to this day call any woman I meet that holds my attention for more than a second by the same name. Twenty years later as I had predicted, I compare every woman I meet by her standards. To this day I’ve never been in love like I was with Sabrina. My guess however is, if such a day does arrive I will never be able to call her by that name or memory again. So much has she impacted my life that I wouldn’t betray her memory by replacing her with such a profanation. “Now, I want you to promise me something. Promise me you will ask everyone you meet if they know Henry Miller or how to contact him until you find him!” she ordered finding escape from what she felt and had no doubt been faced with in the past. “That’s pretty vague!” said I with a hint of resentment already finding its way into me. “You’re pretty vague but you’re here aren’t you!!!” she snapped back at me as if to reprimand me for not taking her seriously. Catching herself she apologetically said, “I mean, that’s why I want you to find him. Let’s not waste any more time on this foolishness, let us instead enjoy ourselves. Together as friends do My Love.” I promised her I would find him far into the night as we spent our last night together. As Night rested her weary eyes, our laughter became more faint late into the night as we both conversed and played like innocent children in Her bosom before we too became weary and tired. 
The morning however brought with it loud cries of tomorrow as a black dawn arose for me…I never saw her again.
In truth, I was so hurt and mad at her for leaving that in all my selfishness I refused to ask anybody who this man was. Nor did I want to find him fearing that he too had shared the fruits of such a gift. Moments with her that I hoped she’d only shared with me. A man’s mind can be filled such thoughts, presumptuousness, and habitual resentment that its power to penetrate, manipulate, or even tear the toughest fabric of his reasoning incapacitates even the best of us by the sway such a woman holds over a man. Only now have I come to the understanding that it was the only way she knew how to share her feelings with me in regards how much she really cared for me. Not by the offering of her physical pleasures as others in her past thought of as the ultimate reward, but by delivery of her unadulterated soul that showed her to me in ways only she knew how to. Far reaching was the damage in her life that numbed her to the simplest of pleasures or even personal needs. She cared for me more, aside from the trivialities of everyday needs, by pointing me in the direction of my true love at a time when even I didn’t know what that true love was, nor where it lay. Knowing that I had no direction or idea whatsoever in regards to what I was doing or where I was going, she knew I wouldn’t understand until she had gone. I often think that it is indeed perhaps the very reason why she parted herself from me. Perhaps I’ve often thought this to be the sign by which truly proved her love for me. She knew what I was looking for even when I myself didn’t. And she understood how stubborn and sensitive I was. Her reasoning being that she knew I would never look for him, yet if I was as predictable as every other man she had known, she knew that I would look for him only in the attempt to contact her. If anything she knew, she knew that by this I would forever remember her and the time we spent together. She was right.
Hoping that she would return, after many days she didn’t. Weeks went by and nothing. Months replaced heartache and repining as it was apparent she was gone. Much to my bands contentment with our mutual distraction now apparently gone for good, I soon began to slowly readjust myself to the boredom and hand to mouth reality I had temporarily abandoned owing to her presence. As I was again merely driftwood on a forlorn brook of ennui, I had wandered in to an esoteric bookstore in Venice one autumn day when someone seemingly screamed my name. Turning around to see who it was that was yelling my name, I found myself confused and disoriented. “I could have sworn someone just yelled my name out,” I said to myself under my breath as I looked around nervously. “Yes, yes, someone did call your name Boy!” an old Armenian or Romanian gypsy clothed woman said to me. “Who said it?” I asked as a bolt of fear raced through my entire body. “Listen closely you’ll hear it,” she softly said glaring into my eyes while clutching my hand like a mother does a frightened child when the sound of thunder startles him. “Yes, yes, listen, listen close”, she said again with a murderous look on her face this time that scared the hell out of me. “I heard it again,” I said suspiciously the first time, now terrified the second time. Looking around I saw Moliere, De Maupassant, Machiavelli…Milton…Miller, Melville…Miller. Sexus by Henry Miller…Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller…Nexus, Plexus, The Black Book…all by Henry Miller. Shocked, I immediately thought of Sabrina. Could this be who she meant? Sure she knew of my growing affection for the reading of novels but I did this purely out of necessity in regards my need to understand the construction of rhyme, verse, and meter for songwriting. “That will be twenty dollars!!!” snorted the old gypsy woman who was taking advantage of my shell shocked confusion. “What?” I asked feeling nowhere in time. “That will be twenty dollars…for the reading,” snarled rapaciously the old gypsy woman interrupting my thoughts. “Huh!” I muttered. “Do you know Sabrina?” I asked as I tried to gain my composure. “Give me ten dollars and I won’t make a scene!” she demanded with a look that promised me a thorough stabbing if I didn’t comply. Truth be told, I was terrified by this raving bitch. She had a look of murder and the smell of rancid death and Feta cheese on her. Reaching into my pocket I pulled out the last six bucks and threw it away from me like someone who’s about to get bit by a dog does a piece of food in hopes the attacking dog will spare him. As I threw the money and the spare change on the floor I pleaded, “Don’t hurt me lady that’s all I got!!!” Snatching up the money from the ground she howled with laughter. Screaming in a fit of laughter, she cried as tears rolled down her face thinking that was the funniest thing she’d ever heard. Choking on her tears like a crazed Dionysian votary, she replied “Your palm says you will be rich and famous one day!” and scurried out of the store like a trapped rat does when a door opens unexpectedly and the sight of darkness offers quick escape.
Unlike so many other times that I had left Sabrina to only end up analyzing every word, phrase, or gesture she either articulated or implied, I left knowing full well without the need for such explanations that what she left for me to chance she could offer me no advice or umbrage from this time as she always most certainly did in every other situation. Upon meeting Mr. Miller he greeted me with a diabolical gleam in his eyes that promised a guarantee that I was going to regret every second of my knowing him. I should say, it imparted with it the promise of a cynical secret he was about to share with me. It was a look as if by which he himself knew Parousia itself was near and he was hand picking me to embark with him on one last Life fueled lunatic binge until God himself, tired of our gluttonous mockery, expulsed us from His Kingdom and threw us head first-right down into the pit of Hell where The Devil himself would surely give us eternal lodgings on the 3rd circle with the rest of the reprobates.
As he began to speak I eagerly listened to what he had to say as I had never quite met anybody like him. He began to speak to me in a tongue I’d not heard before. Though he spoke proper English it was a version of the English language I was at once unfamiliar with. Speciously simple was its design on the outside. Intricately woven and complect was it on the inside with an involute pattern and style of vernacular, turgid verbiage, varied jargon, aphasiac parlance, and fulgurant verbigeration to say the least. Leaping off his tongue, conflated together with foreign dialects and linguistics was a vocabulary no one I had ever known used much less had ever spoken to me with. His plenary command of the language was as impressive as was the multitude of colors and adjectival spectrums he used to paint pictures and stroke his landscapes with that I easily grasped the scape or idea he was referring to. Not only of an objective and material world, but painted also were self portraits of his promethean mind and of man’s fragile psyche. He used ancient ruminations blended with his never ending peregrinations, or sometimes graphically nefarious depictions, and self deprecating drawings of the subjective world inside himself to relay what he was trying to articulate, confess, or repent. Forever trying to bridge his voice with that of the world’s was this man who loved to live and lived to love as painful or disillusioning as it may have been for him at times. His perseverance and signatory resilience shone through each page as he illustrated every thought, word, nightmare, doubt, longing, disappointment, and memory with a visual compliment or a vituperative harangue. Through his endless expatiations, one learned of the incommensurable wealth he had acquired throughout his life by both literary and corporeal experiences and explorations a youth like me could only one day aspire to partake in. His speech in all it’s simplicity belied a framework of fearless thought and eccentricity wonderfully constructed upon a foundation of clinically excise logic, cognitive alacrity, and painstaking erudition. His education, which was entirely self-taught, as I would later come to realize, would be a model which I would strive to emulate for as long as thought itself would be possible for me. Consequently, it was here that my long time indignation for institutional academia was forever cemented as I had long scorned the off the shelf education one buys so cheaply for oneself so to as obscenely mask his or her own inadequacies and fear of living in man’s own self made social realm. Raw life in its rarest form is what I sought, and sought for without the luxury of a safety net as Miller so fearlessly did. The literary risk he took to deny the purpose of writing in so much as to strive to live in the world of imagination and daring opened the possibilities that yet to be lived life had to offer me. So complete and thorough was he on everything and anything that a learned man would blush of embarrassment should his indolence be exposed by Miller’s discipline. On anything or any one subject, no matter how specialized or ridiculous he may have thought it, he had something to say about it to anyone. Whether they brought up a book, an artist, a trade, a skill, an aberrance of thought, a theory, a philosophy, or the subject of whoring, he would commence to expound and educate you on it. With a Hugonian or Tolstoyan stamina did he convey the entire evolution, history, and future of any topic he expounded on as if he were the subject’s paid spokesperson. No matter how ill informed, which he never was, or how wrong others may have deemed him to be, it was his passion for life and his continued devotion to the evolution of man, mind, and the arts that justified his right to comment on it. He knew a lot about everything and he wanted you to know it. And he didn’t just know it to inflate his ego, or elevate a seemingly low opinion of self worth he may have expressed at times in order to facilitate a favorable opinion on us, on the contrary, he knew and spoke about it because I believe he was really that curious and fascinated by everything around him and in the world. He wanted to know the inner workings of every mind, man, invention, machine, character, religion, addiction, custom, value, ethic, culture, theory, and habit. Be it analytical, biological, behavioural, emotive, anthropological, anatomical, architectural, or artistic. Conveyed either vulgarly or with a gentilesse, depending on his mood, current station, and fragility of emotions, he often relayed his ideas erratically, harriedly, irrationally, and as if possessed by one of his deifications of yore. At other times he spoke a million miles per hour and made complete sense only to leave you at a loss for words or knowledge. So quietly content he often was at other times that he merely aphorized subtly and succinctly, but never, never, never, complacently and never sententiously. He would never claim anything more than being a lover of life as there would never be enough world for he to cloy his appetence with. His rapacious appetite sparked in me a nescient and sapid flavor for every culture, religion, credence, belief, ritual, philosophy, theology, and possibility whether arcane or bourgeois. As I was beginning to experience and taste many new experiences in my life at this time, I began to discover that the moods and the stirs of the ferril emotions that began to affect me had also affected him at times in his life. He always said exactly what was on his mind, never to hold anything back, mask or hide his true intention, motivation, or desire. Any ulterior motive he may have harbored was unbeknownst to him I could surmise by his candor. Even the demons that haunted him throughout his life were like those uninvited guests who always seemingly arrive at the most inopportune moment however you’re always unable to turn them away. In the end favoring their company over your guests you so openly welcomed in your home. Through him, and these talks with him, I’ve come to know first hand that there is nothing more painful than regret. A malady I refuse to allow to root deep in my soul. 
Diurnally I must battle this despondent malaise that suffers even the stoutest of constitutions in light of the fact that I have never fully been able to successfully defeat the omnipotence its powers can sometimes subjugate me with. Yes, from him I began to learn that it was a big, big, world out there, and I hadn’t even scratched the surface of knowledge and sapience in regards to just how big and mysterious it could all possibly be. Of all the possibilities now afforded me by my baptism, I cared neither for where life would now take me, nor how I would get there. Free were my hands now devoid of any lingering baggage other than the memories that whizzed by my head intermittently like fireflies whose life and light fade as vespertine bids good night to one and all who came to worship Aurora as she slept. Out of the ashes, the life I was now being born into left me no recourse other than to flame the remnants still glowing with the desire to now begin to live and rise. I wanted to begin my life by living.
Left all alone now, as I felt as isolated from Hollywood and the real world as I never imagined I could be, my only lee was my new found friend. For protection from my emotions, and guidance as to how to reason with my own limited understanding, I turned to Miller for everything. After parting ways with Sabrina and my capability to be a fully functioning denizen of my present situation, my connections with the real world had since become strained. Avoiding it altogether entirely couldn’t possibly have had any further repercussions than the alienation and drudgery I was already feeling. Diving head first into my friendship with him instead, as I have always done with people much to my regret in the past, I quickly came to the realization that our temperaments were a match made in heaven. I too was as moody, mercurial, sensitive, brooding and often just as scandalous a son of a bitch as was he. Dismissing everybody and everything around me as a waste of time, accusing them instead of their complicity in an aesthetic holocaust perpetrated on me and humanity, I now began to spend all my time with Miller as to escape the heartache I now felt by the loss of Sabrina and my life as I had known it. To be sure, this man changed my life to this extent. How I missed her the more he spoke about his trysts here or there, in this country or that country, with this woman or that woman. Upon expounding on the virtues of indolence and sheer laziness, on his delight for prostitutes, highballs, and demented friends, the distraction of his affairs afforded me comfort in the sense of future possibilities and bouts of imminent madness. Sensing my loss, Miller said to me one day, “The Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn is where I shall take you my young proselyte. It’s here where you shall learn to dream in color and live in the bliss of the subjectivism of your desire!” We traveled to coasts whose sun burnt waves kissed the beaches relentlessly as we basked in the Sun King’s rays anticipating sybaritic and concupiscent incontinence off the coast of Orion. His lust for life, sex, food, art, books, and discovery encouraged me to turn my hesitation and fear into a powerful current of creativity. At a time when I was full of hate and rage, confusion and forlornness, his love for all peoples and cultures mitigated my restlessness and in turn began to extenuate my prejudices. How much I remember being in a hurry to go nowhere. To go nowhere simply to endeavor to escape from the nullity no nepenthe could ever obtund the effects of. As we wandered aimlessly through his life’s history and the people in it, his respect for every one of them including their biological, genetic, and inherited penchants, predispositions, psychological ticks, and predilections led me through a world I simply could never have navigated on my own should fortune even have favored me with the discovery of it alone. His voice echoed as his tones and inflections bespoke of his aspirations and incessant manqué through cosmological labyrinths and recessed darkness that hides in every man’s heart and mind that he had once visited and where he told me I would one day have to traverse if I were ever to fully experience what this journey of life meant to me. A reckoning of my life, heart, mind, soul, and body on the world’s stage, where in the audience therein would only be one in attendance. With it would come the stage fright of the actor as he peers at himself from the distance wherein it screams of a violence only those familiar with the deafening silence loneliness and lack of purpose brings with it as he endeavors to deliver his performance before the curtain falls. Eagerly I listened to him as he told me story after story, heartache after heartbreak. As I now spent all my free time with him, there was never any order to his random and disparate lessons. Past Winter’s clutches, and into the embracing arms of Spring, together we blissfully hibernated in the Tropics where we would drink late, late into the night, talking about everything from Socrates to Leautremont to Bosch to falling in love. We cussed, drank, read, wrote, spoke, argued, cried, and obtrusively forced our passions on one another one hundred miles per hour. Like myself, I believed he loved the masochistic idea of always being in love with life. Whether be he in love with a woman, a book, an artist, a corned beef sandwich, or a snifter of Cognac, he was as helpless a romantic as he was a hopeless sentimentalist. The pain it brings with it is the intoxicant we’re seemingly addicted to one would think. Finding beauty in everything, whether it be sexual violence or the disembowelment of our own character daily only to reconstruct it diurnally as we wait for the object of our love to validate our emotional constructs. I longed to someday take part in this demented Dionysian sexual imagery and orgiastic frenzy of life so to also harness the complete uncertainty and absurdity of it all. Of life…Love what you do and all that your life or craft entails he told me over, and over again, so as to engrain it upon my memory. Though some felt him selfish, course, lecherous, and userous, he was as generous to me as he was no doubt anathematized by most. He graciously shared the knowledge with me which was to love what I do to no end in spite of any reward, goal, or external exaltations and praise that most expect in life. By expecting he said, was where the war would be lost without so much as a battle yet to be fought he reminded me. Time, as well as your life, moves so fast here that in order to see anything or anybody, whether it be matter, fluidity, lives, ideas or illusions, one must look ahead and lead it, less all that’s left are tracers of what once was and what it will never really be. If you have ever seen a burning comet that the galaxy has no more use for, you will understand what it means not to stay ahead of it. As fast as it travels, faster than that is what’s left of your life as it disappears like a comet’s tail once the journey you embarked on evanesces from the face of the earth.
Winding through the spectrum of Sexus, Nexus, and Plexus he allowed me to look through his rosy colored glasses to view his rosy crucifixion. He offered to show me the world with all its beauty and darkness through the eyes of a lover who found no fault with any thing except his own inability to overcome the crushing reality of his failures, shortcomings, and longings. To at least have his dreams and ambitions was all that really mattered in the end I always thought. For there was nothing I felt he abhorred and loured more. The only blame a man had right to was with his own lack of curiosity, laziness, and loyalty to one’s self in a world in which it was the Heaven that all roads lead away from. I was in awe of how much he loved life and what he knew was in it. I also came to understand how hard a man can be on himself in regards to fulfilling the destiny paved by the road of his prescience. I saw first hand how a man cannot endure his own impatience as to the uncertainty of whether one would ever be able to in fact fulfill it. And there was no one I’ve ever met who was harder on him than he himself. Reading Henry Miller I‘m faced with the unequivocal certainty that there’s never been any better time for anything than right now. Perhaps more categoric than that was the immediacy of the aesthete’s moment that awoke in me the bond that such men hold along with every other tortured, amputated, gnashed, and beaten man of the world that faces each new dawn with naught less than courage each and every day despite any obstacles that the fear of the unknown and the yet to be discovered brings. He introduced me to the people who had sought the same wealth of bliss as he did and those who battled the same inimical uncertainties that I do. People who knew that the only fear we have is the nullity of what not embracing this means. Knowing that by exposing his soul would bring both he and I closer to it, he introduced me to his loves, women, and friends. Neurotics and neurasthenics like Rimbaud. Celine. Cendrars. Picasso, Baudelaire, and Gerard Du Nerval. They instantly became the objects of my affection as did Henry’s I imagine upon their first meeting. Sharing many of the same pains and longings as he did, their mutual affinity towards each other was merely matter of fact. And of course the many women that crossed Miller’s path soon befriended me as well as he taught me the virtues of treating every woman as if they were the only woman on this earth. Whether they were whores, housewives, princesses, actresses, waitresses, or his lovers, he treated them individually like they were the only one woman that he had ever loved. His adoration even if vulgar, distorted respect even if misplaced, and unadulterated love for women mirrored my own and drew the curtains open on the insecurities and jealousies that so often infringed on and hindered my relationships with woman. His respect and devotion to the sanctity of femininity and the muliebrity of a woman was profound and nay unquestionable. The way that he spoke to them, berated and belittled them, caressed them, loved them, looked at them, all spoke of a love that I’d never known before. Dare I say not even with Sabrina. Though I suspected this due only to my youth and inexperience, I would soon devote myself to being a zealous cenobite of its feminine theocracy. Strolling about the city as we would often do in the early hours of the a.m., I soon discovered a man inside me who like Miller, was never afraid to walk out his front door every morning. He had the courage to do so in spite of the realization that it would no doubt break his heart as much as it would his spirit. I would slavishly listen to his erotic and hurried sentences that paralleled so many aspects of my life at the time. The scattered and random thoughts of convictions, beliefs, and ideas that all raced hodge podge in my mind trying to find the finish line before the race itself killed me first. I often wondered at times what it would be like to believe. To believe again, I thought in anything or anybody that could confirm all the imaginings I had without the distorted fingerprints that were already beginning to leave signs of its besmirched presence. As he relayed his history at The Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company I began to wonder if I too would have to be employed by such a company as a form of penance before my life would take meaning and the pursuit of endless satisfaction would tattoo my body. Its sin to remain forever inked on my skin so as to remind me of the price I’d paid. How I remember spending countless hours and days dreaming of the day when I would come to find not the unrealistic idea of happiness as so many of us tend to attribute the pursuit and meaning of life to, but of a mere contentment that would find me at the end of it all. I would give myself up to the abandon of the world. More importantly, to the unfettering abandon of myself. In the end I think he never shared many of his predecessors thoughts as to the absurdity of it all, but instead rather to the poet’s idea of eternal possibilities of everything and anything. I too, I decided, would make the most of it in spite of knowing or never fully knowing this. In some of my deepest darkest hours during the last few years of my teens, it was Henry that pulled and yanked me out of the gehenna I was in. It was this man Henry Miller who gave me the fortitude and instruction to take what I had and turn it into a fortune where anyone who crossed my path could profit from my wealth of living. Daring me to look deep in to my own soul and dance the dance of flames with my nightmares that played and wreaked havoc on my young constitution all the day and night, Miller fearlessly showed me the only way to come to terms with them was to befriend them as he had done for so many painfully lonely and discordant years. I don’t think he had any more control on them than I did however. But to be so able to show us them in spite of his hardships due to the rigors of his sometimes crushing reality and own introverted loneliness was something I much admired in him. And as he bared his heart for everyone to see, he gave me the courage to be adventurous with my senses, my mind, my love affairs, and my life. In gratitude to Miller, the only thing I truly still love anymore is the freedom of words and of all the endless possibilities life offers us each and every day. He taught me how great it was to be alive with all the possibilities it offers in taste, touch, sense, smell, sight, thought, hurt, love and hope. His point, it would only be me who stood to lose everything and all that I didn’t yet have by not embracing the world and taking advantage of all that life encompasses and has to offer. Despite the feeling that the world can sometimes be a cold, harsh, and lonely place, he taught me to fill my hole, my void, and my life, with the art, beauty, and love I had to offer the world as much as it had to offer me. To be open to everybody’s ideas and feelings, so as to not negate life itself is what I took greedily from this man. I thank him for everything he had to give. For giving us himself entirely, the wealth of his contribution can never be measured by materialistic or monetary value. A friend of mine who knew Henry only by his own limitations as a man told me the other day that Miller must be read with a grain of salt as if his evaluation alone was enough to discredit or dismiss Miller as a quack job or raving lunatic on one of his tangents. I however only dismiss this friend by knowing what he’ll miss and what he shall never gain by his association with Miller. Miller’s ideas suited only Miller, not mine nor my friends as each one of us has to go through our own Sexus, Nexus, and Plexus to find our Big Sur. To leave it up to Miller or anyone else would be reckless and irresponsible of us. For he wasn’t crazy, he simply followed no rules and lived on a fault line in which any shift could easily promote cataclysmic results for himself. But that he knew it and still walked that line leaves much for me to be desired. As it were, it was also he, who began to subtly instruct me on the actual technique of his authorship. 
It was Miller who would teach me how to craft sentences together without the pomp of a writer who shows only his lack of craft, as well as his insecurities and indolence as a thinker. Miller taught me this for which I will never be able to thank him enough for. For the first time in my life, he allowed me to see through my own eyes. Showing me how to see something for what it was really worth. For in order to see everything and all that exists, one must also peer beneath the comfortable veneer of our hidden prejudices, preconceived ideas, notions, beliefs, and values to find the truth. The only absolute one has in his life is the exposed and naked truth we adhere to and live our lives by. He taught me to strip life of everything and look into its inner core, into the eye of the storm, no matter how frightening that confrontation may be. And if need be, and only after this has been done, can one then redesign, rebuild, and repaint it in order to justify the means to an end and the sum of its parts. He taught me texture, and how to layer and stratify my sensitivity and innermost desires on my pages without cheapening my emotions or risking the loss of the sentiment. With the brush, his strokes, whether they be swift and concise or long and pining, he taught me to paint the canvas with not only words but with the archaic and etymological balance and harmony this craft demands. He encouraged me to take every path courageously and bravely without ever questioning to what end my decision may lead me. In the end the journey meant nothing if you never lived a moment of it. What good was being somebody if you were filled with nothing? What purpose the treasure trove if its contents be the worthless baubles and trinkets of a lifetime that held not even the purpose of preserving its histrionics. Tarnished, no longer wanted, or even purposeless would the treasures and memories be would they not. As masterful his prescience on the certainty of the uncertainty of life, he had as well an uncanny ability to analyze, and size up someone in a split second. Taking in to account that psychology in his day was just in its earliest stages of development and theory, he could cut you to a quick and lacerate you, whip you, scourge you, and flagellate you with his caustically biting and sardonic humor. An ability I will tell you that requires years of knowledge and the aggrandizement of experiences in order to acquire its lissome skill.
As he laid his soul out for one and all to love or flay, his contribution to our lives is impossible to explain or put into words. Tell me where you will also find the words, the language, the breadth, and the promethean desire to live, love, endure, inspire, and electrify your life with the same current that propelled this man through his journey of life. The joy he derived, way down deep within himself, selfishly you must ask yourself, command yourself if need be to tell me your guiltiest pleasure, to find your voice, and your courage, and I shall tell you mine. Yes, as I have said, my friend Miller changed my life forever as much as Sabrina did. As she tragically believed her life to be sacrificed for those she was charged the care of, she knew I would end up to be just another lost soul in that wayward glass utopia. More than just introduce me to a new friend, she had sent me my own Virgil to guide me through what she knew would be the adventure I’d been looking for my whole life. Knowing I had no direction of which I could speak of at the time, I could never quite descry whether she befriended me that day as a matter of duty or out of a sense of maternal pity. It doesn’t really matter any more though. There’s another season coming now and with it all the new colors that replace those that have started to fade. As autumn approaches, I shall never forget the time I spent in Hollywood with Sabrina and my friend Henry Miller.