 High Bridge Audio presents Clan Destin by James Elroy, read by William Roberts, prologue. During the dark cold winter of 1951, I worked Wilshire Patrol, played a lot of golf, and sought out the company of lonely women for one night stands. Nostalgia victimizes the unknowing by instilling in them a desire for a simplicity and innocence they can never achieve. The fifties weren't a more innocent time. The dark salience that governed life today were there then, only they were harder to find. That was why I was a cop, and why I chased women. Golf was no more than an island of purity, something I did exceedingly well. I could drive a golf ball three hundred yards. Golf was breathtaking cleanliness and simplicity. My patrol partner was Wacky Walker. He was five years my senior, with the same amount of time in the department. We first bumped into each other in the muster room of Wilshire Station, each of us lugging a golf bag. We both broke into huge grins and knew each other instantly, and completely. With Wacky it was poetry, wonder, and golf. With me it was women, wonder, and golf. Wonder meant the same thing to both of us, the job, the streets, the people, and the mutable ethos of we who had to deal daily with drunks, hopheads, gunsles, weeny waggers, hookers, reefer smokers, burglars, and the unnamed lonely detritus of the human race. We became the closest of friends, and later partners on Daywatch. The Daywatch commander, Lieutenant William Beckworth, was a golf fanatic and hopeless ball-beater. When he heard I shot scratch he had me put on Daywatch in exchange for lessons, it was a fair trade. But Beckworth was unteachable. I could wrap the lieutenant around my little finger. I even had him caddying for me on Saturday mornings when I hustled games at country clubs and municipal courses, so it was easy to get Wacky bumped off Nightwatch and assigned to Days with the two of us as partners, which took us deeper. Herbert Lawton Walker was thirty-two years old, death obsessed, and an alcoholic. He was a genuine hero, a World War II recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, which he was awarded for wiping out two machine gun nests full of japs on Saipan. He could have gotten any job he wanted. Insurance companies were deluging him with offers when he went touring for war bonds, but he opted for the Los Angeles Police Department, a blue suit, a gun, and the wonder. Of course, as a juice head, his perception of the wonder was somewhat predicated on the amount of booze he consumed. I was his watchdog, denying the sauce to him in the mornings and regulating his intake until our tour ended and we returned to the station. In the early evenings, before I went out looking for women, Wacky and I would belt a few at his apartment and discuss the wonder, or talk about the war I had avoided and he made his name in. Wacky was convinced that killing the fifteen japs on Saipan had made him a wonder addict and that the key to wonder was in death. I disagreed. We argued. I told him life was good. We agreed. We are the sworn protectors of life, I said. But the key is in death, Freddie, he said. Can't you see that? If you ever have to kill, you'll know. We always came to that stalemate. When that happened, Wacky would lead me to the door, shake my hand warmly, and retire back to his living room to drink and write poetry. Leaving me, Frederick Upton Underhill, twenty-six-year-old outsized crew cut cop on his doorstep, contemplating nightfall and neon and what I could do about it in what I would later know to be the last season of my youth. That season was to become a rite of passage composed of many false starts and erroneous conclusions. I was to blunder love and call it many different things. I was to savor the amenities of life on the make and feel last surges of callow power. I was… All complete. Ready to continue?