My Friend the Holy Man  The quest for heaven as a scaled-back
dream  Illustration by Hadley Hooper  AS A FRIEND, PAT WAS AT
THE TOP OF HIS game two years ago, when I was recovering from
knee surgery and he visited me every night for nearly a month,
which is how people get nostalgic for disasters. Even in Long
Beach he was the only one in our circle whose life was scaled-
back enough that he'd want to visit an injured friend ("Hey! You
awake?"), plus it got him the use of my car.  Plus he was
responding to the spiritual opportunity of being around someone
else's life at low ebb. Two men sitting around collapsed and
looking robbed, like in a desert-island cartoon. Those were the
good times. He was his heaviest ever, maybe 250 pounds and
depressed about it, stirring Thai food inside its carton with a
chopstick until it was time for him to struggle up from the big
reading chair. But before it got that late, plenty of other
people would arrive, only nominally to see me -- Kathi (who
called him "Holy Man") to talk a