Hah, god hes a jerk!

Thanks! Yes you get to feel his insecurities, his stiffness issued from vulnerability, vulnerability issued from being a man with a sense of right and wrong trying to survive in a world of sharks, and from being pulled out of his normal environment into a mystical and aberrant universe.

It's somewhere between fascinating and heartbreaking how, at the point where he's half-delirious from blood loss and falls under the illusion that the bus meant to take him away from San Diego, to safety, was actually the bus that had brought him there in the morning, so in that point when moments of his stay in San Diego collide into each other and mix with the local Fiesta into a hallucinatory ballet, his only thought is still to find the object of his grudge and exert his retribution upon him. A retribution that is mostly silly, which people from outside his story call either unpatriotic or absurdly cheap, but which is his own way of tying the loose threads from the story of his dead friend. Which is now his own story.

I wouldn't quite call him my favourite noir character, but I sure have a hard time thinking of another guy like him. Any ideas?

there's a highway that is curling up like smoke above his shoulder