Those Were the Days, or Maybe NotWalter Serpa, the narrator of Empty Heads, Full Bottles, grew up in California during the 1950s and 1960s. The often nostalgic or romanticized view of this era as providing postwar prosperity, stable nuclear families, and safe, welcoming neighborhoods represented merely a myth for some people coming of age. Though these years did, in many ways, mark simpler times for Walter, they were also shadowed...