All I think about is work, which must make me a workaholic. I used to have an imagination doing deliveries. Those times were traumatic. I wasn’t making much money (not that I am now either), and I drove all day and night through Los Angeles, with a two-hour break in between, which in some years I devoted to meditation and writing. Sometimes the dispatchers would send me downtown to pick up nine-hundred-dollar food deliveries and deliver them to one of the companies in the skyscrapers. I get a panic attack just remembering. If you’ve ever been to downtown Los Angeles, you would recall the one-way streets of Figueroa, Hope, and Grand, and how, if you missed the address, you would have to start all over again.

I went through panic attacks on the road.

One time, I’d come home at around 9:30 p.m. from another shift and smoked a bowl of potent weed and took a shot of whiskey when I was smoking every day. My dispatcher, who was also my boss, sent an order to my phone for a sushi restaurant. The order was huge, and the tip was over fifty dollars, and I was already high, so I panicked. I couldn’t tell him I couldn’t drive there. It was the end of the shift, and the other drivers had gone home. I could’ve gotten in trouble if I rejected the order, and I couldn’t tell him I was stoned, so I decided to drive to the sushi restaurant. A cop could’ve pulled me over and tested me for drugs. Now that they can do that somehow, I would’ve been fucked.

I made it there okay and entered the restaurant high as hell. My eyes must’ve looked like two fireball candies. I was paranoid. It felt as if the customers were looking at me. I was so high, and I had to stand in there and wait for them to make the sushi rolls, and the restaurant was filled to capacity on a Friday night. Did I mention it was raining? There was nowhere to sit and try to relax, so I stood near the sushi bar for about twenty minutes and waited for them to finish the job. When they did, I grabbed the sushi bags and got the hell out of there. (Actually, I used bags of my own. The restaurant owners were too cheap to afford plastic bags. Anyway, I bagged everything and left.)

It was a dangerous trip up Laurel Canyon to a house in the hills on a stormy night, where the road curved like a sidewinder, and I had to be careful turning and looking out for cars speeding down the opposite lane to my left with their bright white headlights making me temporarily blind. Somehow I dropped the food off safely to the customer who’d ordered sushi that late at night and drove back down the winding road.

I forgot how I got home, which usually happened when I was high. I was the character from the movie Memento who forgot everything with no short-term memory, so he had to write everything he’d experienced to recall what happened. That was me on weed. I don’t smoke it now, but my memory is evasive. I forget a thought from a minute or so ago, so I sit and try to recollect it. Some of them are important, so I should probably write them down as well, but I never carry a notepad, and my phone is too complicated to sort through. By the time I get to the note app, I forget what notes I was supposed to take.

So that was one story of when I was doing deliveries in Los Angeles. I’ll write a book someday on my experiences doing that job, just not now. I’m not ready. I’m working on other stuff. Sometime in the future, like with my month in rehab and the hospital in Pasadena, I’ll get to it. Unlike those nightmares I lived through as a delivery driver, I took notes at rehab every day and kept them in my closet somewhere, and I’ll take them out in a few years.