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…