October the seventh is my birthday.

October the sixth has become a far more resonant anniversary, believe you me.

On October 6, 1985, thirty nine years ago this morning, along with Cochise, the model for Raul, I boarded PEOPLE’S EXPRESS and left my life as a boy from New York City behind.

My only recollection of the flight is of some leisure suited twat singing, over and over again, Sinatra’s miserable “LA is my lady…”

I left the city for two reasons.

One, and of least significance, was the weather was beginning to devour my soul. The oppressive humidity of a New York Summer, and the numbing draining frigidity of a New York Winter were beating the living shit out of me.

But the real and most truly relevant reason was fear, anxiety, desperation and acceptance of the simple fact that, despite the general acclaim my recent work had generated, I had really only reached a bare fifth, perhaps a fourth, of the audience with that work.

To be clear, I had no prospects—and, as much as I might have resented it at the time, I understood, both intellectually and instinctually, having come up through fandom and after a decade and a half as a professional, that I was never going to be more than a cult figure in the comic book business.

And to be clear again, this is neither self-deprecation nor false modesty. I knew, and know, how good I’d become. And I also knew that didn’t mean shit in the context of the business that was my livelihood, and yes, of course, my life.

I didn’t exactly expect to live to or past fifty, to be honest. And it's worth noting that I grew up on welfare, and so I knew precisely what poverty looked like.

That said, you can’t count out the roulette wheel of biology. There was always the chance that I’d live to be as old as I am today. I had no desire to live my last days on Social Security and cat food casseroles.

Thanks to AMERICAN FLAGG! and the generosity of FIRST COMICS, I was debt free, having emerged from the financial hole created by my repeated foolishness of working for Byron Preiss.

I had lucked into a ridiculously low insider’s price for my apartment, so I owned real estate, one thousand feet on the fourteenth floor, to be exact.

I was zeroed out, so to speak, and now it was time to move forward. That said, I had no idea what I could do in New York to get my shit together—but I had created some mild and, to be honest, ultimately fleeting, interest in me in Hollywood.

My decision to move to California, then, was motivated most specifically by an attempt to set my finances into some sort of order, and to see to it that I had a potential future devoid of those casseroles.

I had, I might add, every expectation that I would crash and burn, and be back in the city in two, maybe three years, seeking another plan, another route, another potentiality.

Now, thirty nine years later, I remain that bipolar character, a Californian always presumed to be on only temporary leave from New York City.

I have never believed in luck, but I have to admit that I have been incredibly lucky, living a charmed and blessed life…just not necessarily the luck I might have wished for, nor the charms and blessings I might have chosen.

Separate and distinct from the settling of my life into some kind of security, these past thirty nine years in the west have schooled me radically, and forged character out of a barren inner landscape once incapable of happiness in anything other than the most banal and cynical pleasure based narcissism.

And I have lived well past fifty, and I have achieved my goals of being a drain on no system. I have finally learned, after so many failures, how to be married, and happily so.

And speaking to that idea, that happiness.

Even in times not as dark, perilous and threatening as our world has become, there are days when contentment is often the best the world can provide.

I learned a long time ago, in those first few years in Los Angeles, that unbridled ecstasy was a dangerous choice for me. So yes, contentment, a well-tempered joy, has been my salvation.

Could this have been achieved had I stayed in New York City? Possibly, but not likely. And one of the things that supports that doubt is that bipolar/bicoastal character I allude to above.

I left Los Angeles—never “my lady,” by the way—some twenty-two years ago, and now live in a small beach town an hour and a half north of that sprawl. I went native, in every visible way, but I can never conceal my origins nor disguise who I am.

I am most certainly a Californian…and yet I remain a New Yorker on leave, permanent perhaps, but a New Yorker nonetheless.

Stay well, and, of course, trust me on this. 

As ever, I remain, Howard Victor Chaykin…a Prince. Of, it is to be sure, the City.