I met him in West Hollywood and we went to dinner. He gave me a few hundred dollars when we parted ways, we never even did anything that night. The next day he called and asked me to go to the desert with him, he said he had some business in Palm Springs and he would pay to have me for the whole weekend. When he went inside the gas station I found his wallet in the car’s console and went through it to see if the name he had given me was real. Behind the gas station mountains rose. We ate dinner at the casino and he gave me two thousand dollars a couple of days later when he dropped me off at the hotel I told him I was living at. After he drove away I walked a few blocks to my car where I was actually living. There was an earthquake in the pacific that day, the radio said the currents along the coast would be dangerous. I walked under orange lights down Venice Blvd and the ocean was roaring. I sat on the sand drinking from a bottle of wine and making cuts into my arm with a razor blade I had pulled out of a box cutter. In front of me the water was darker than the sky. Bleeding into the ocean, salt cat tonguing the cuts on my arms. I walked deeper until waves were over my head and I could not hear Los Angeles behind me anymore. The world dropped away at the edge. I could travel here forever if I wanted. The ways that you find care and comfort from those least giving of it when you have nothing is some kind of grace and after sometime I came back to Oklahoma.