The winter dorm dance came a week later, a fraught affair at best. The girls from a neighboring boarding school, in this case from Vermont.

The dorm was buzzing with pent-up energy after the test, and some of my usual Upper friends decided to hit town to celebrate.

Thanksgiving break began after morning classes on that Wednesday. Most boys who lived close enough went home for the long weekend.

I won’t bore you with what our Headmaster had to say when he took the podium, but suffice it to say he claimed Kennedy as one of our own. Nothing profound or emotional, just bolstering the myth of our preparatory school system’s supremacy.

I am standing in a meadow at the edge of a forest, wondering how the ocean can possibly be sending surges of white water up into the grass, when a half-man, half-rabbit darts past me and heads into the trees. I follow.

As I lay in semi-darkness in the Cedars-Sinai cath lab, waiting for the Versed cocktail to take full effect before a stent was snaked up my femoral artery, I noticed my cardiologist through a window in the observation room; he was engaged in an intense conversation with two doctors I didn’t know. Then he came out and stood over me.

If you haven’t read any of my prior posts, I came from a family of great wealth financially, but poverty-stricken emotionally. My brothers and cousins and I had to scramble—and compete—for the few crumbs of affection that fell from the table.

Sidney and Frances Brody, my aunt and uncle on my father’s side, were a constant, if distant, part of my upbringing.

After having been tossed from the AFI’s directing program for backing the wrong side in a palace coup, I moved on to screenwriting to attempt to make a living.

A raw wind roars through a New England forest under a leaden sky, stripping the last leaves from their branches and sending them skittering across a lonely country road.

When I was six, I made up a game which I played almost every day: I would drive my bike out from our family’s estate to a hidden spot between a wall of eucalyptus trees and a neighbor’s ivy-covered fence.

My first sight of the beach was after climbing a grassy dune that rose above a small, wooded campsite, and it took my breath away.

Taking a train from Paris, I arrived in La Rochelle, an old fishing town on the coast of western France, in August of 1965. I was there to stay with a local family and improve my French, a subject I was not exactly acing back at Exeter.

In late October, 1964, my brother and I were surprised by an unannounced visit to the prep school we attended, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. It turned out not to be a very pleasant surprise.

So, what was a reasonably intelligent, fairly typical nineteen year-old doing in therapy? Let’s go back three months to find out.

I was home for a weekend at my mom’s California ranch-style house high above the Sepulveda Pass, across the 405 from where the Getty Center now sits. I was fortunate to live in the pool house, detached from the main house, so I had privacy. Or so I thought.

I’m standing in a light drizzle, thumb out, on the shoulder of the Berkeley highway…