I got out of the service the second time and showed up on my father's doorstep. I didn't have any place else to go.

I had the GI Bill this time, but hadn't saved any money. I needed to work for a year and save up enough to go to Florida State.

I got a job at a computer factory in Palm Beach Gardens--RCA/EDP--and rented an apartment on Singer Island.

The Barking Dog Company.

I think Charles Willeford lived out on Singer Island when he was going to Palm Beach Junior College, and edited the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.

He and I were at the junior college at the same time, but didn't know each other, and I hadn't read any of his books, then.

Willeford set Sideswipe on Singer Island, in part. He had Hoke Moseley managing the Pelicano Arms for his father after he, Hoke, had his nervous breakdown. I had Art Brew living in the Pelicano Arms in some book or other. Hoke's father owned a hardware store in Riviera Beach.

I later found out that Frederick Exley was living in a hotel on Singer Island and writing Pages From a Cold Island when I was living there, but I didn't meet him, and hadn't read A Fan's Notes yet.

Exley's three autobiographical books and Willeford's two autobiographies and several novels (and a screenplay, and a book of poems, and short stories, and reviews of mysteries in the Miami Herald, and a book about getting his hemorrhoids cut out, and a book of criticism, New Forms of Ugly: The Immobilized Hero in Modern Fiction), are among my favorite books.

So I was young and single with a job and a car and I had my first bachelor apartment out on Swinging Singer Island, with its beautiful wide beach (it was up-current of Palm Beach Inlet, which acted like a groin, and contributed to sand build-up), the young girls in their bikinis playing volleyball and drinking beer.

It was enough to make a man horny. The sexual revolution was going on, don't you know.

I was, at the sexual revolution, as Grace Metalious was, in Peyton Place. A wallflower. Or as Robert Gover was in Gifford, Florida, the all-black town outside Vero Beach: the Poor Boy at the Party.

(Hoke's ex-wife married a black major league pitcher whose California baseball team spring-trained in Vero Beach.)

John D. MacArthur owned a dairy out west of West Palm Beach. In fact, he owned a lot of land out there. He owned Palm Beach Gardens, where the RCA plant was, and a PGA golf course.

He also owned the Colonnades Hotel on Singer Island.

The hotel had a discotheque on the ground floor, or in the basement, where the volleyball-playing, beer-drinking young girls went, and I walked over there on weekends, a couple of times, to see what was happening.

Well, people were dancing, to loud music, and drinking, and I went in, but I couldn't make heads or tails of what was going on.

I couldn't make sense of why people would listen to music like that.

It was like a psychological experiment, to see how much pain people could withstand.

It was Charlie Parker in Hell.

Ives Dairy, in Ojus, was sold to real estate developers.

My grandfather, A. E. Cason, Sr., was related to the family that owned Ives Dairy.

He came in for a chunk of change.

He gave $5,000 to Van Jr., $5,000 to my dad, and $1,000 to each of the grandchildren.

I used my share to enroll at the Big University, FSU.

I was going to finish college. And become a writer.

I was going to finish college, get married, and become a writer.

Probably, I would find my soul-mate at FSU.