The first couple years, I did a bunch of gigs with groups like the Salvation Army and Goodwill, but I found out I don’t really have the temperament for charity work, especially religious charity work. I decided to try more white-collar stuff—March of Dimes, CARE—but that was just boring, plus I’m even worse at office politics than I am at charity. So then I thought, getting back to basics, maybe what I needed was something with a more disciplinarian bent to it.
Law enforcement?
Yeah. But there I had a different problem: to become a cop, or a prison guard, or even a parole officer, you need to pass a background check, and there were things in my history—like that meltdown on my thirtieth birthday—that made that a deal-breaker. About the best I could do was a job as a security guard, and protecting the inventory at some department store didn’t really count as good works in my book.
So as time wore on, my thirties started looking more and more like my twenties: lots of pointless, dead-end jobs. And then I was thirty-five, and thirty-six, and forty was just up ahead, and Phil didn’t have any more suggestions for me.
And then one day I bumped into my old pal Moon. I hadn’t seen her in twenty years, but this one day I was feeling nostalgic and decided to go back to the Haight, to the street where we grew up. I was standing in front of the lot where the community garden used to be—it had been paved and turned into a skateboard rink—when Moon came along, dragging a pair of kids with her.
She looked great. Young and skinny, not like someone who’d been through two pregnancies. Meanwhile I was definitely the worse for wear, so it took her a minute to recognize me, but when she finally did she gave me this big hug and introduced me to the brood. Then—like this wasn’t depressing enough already—she told me that she and her husband had started their own consulting firm and were pulling down six figures a year working from home. So I came back with this story about how I’d been in the Peace Corps, and if I seemed a little run down it was because I’d spent the last decade fighting AIDS in Africa. Then she had to go, so I gave her a fake e-mail address and told her to keep in touch.
And I was on my way home when I passed by this pay phone, and just on impulse I picked up the receiver. There was no dial tone, but the phone wasn’t dead—it was an open line. “Hello?” I said. There was no answer, but still it felt like someone was listening at the other end, so I said, “If you’re ever planning to call me back, do it soon.”
The next day, I got a jury-duty summons in the mail. I’d gotten calls to jury duty before, and I was about due for another, so it could have been a coincidence. But maybe not…and either way, I figured this was an opportunity to do some good in the world, exactly what I’d been looking for.
It was an arson-murder trial. This guy Julius Deeds, reputed gangster, found out his girlfriend was cheating on him and threw a gasoline bomb into her living room in the middle of the night. She escaped through the back door of the house, but she left three kids upstairs and none of them made it out.
So I was in the jury pool for this, and I was pretty psyched, until it dawned on me that I’d met the defendant before. He’d been at my dealer’s place the last time I went to make a buy.
That’s your drug dealer?
Yeah. Guy named Ganesh.
May I ask what kind of drugs?
The usual kind. Pot of course, speed, Valium, coke on special occasions, acid when I needed a cheap vacation. I know that probably sounds like a lot, but at that point in my life I had it under control.
Anyhow, the last time I’d gone to see Ganesh, about a month before the jury call, he’d come to the door looking scared. Now Ganesh was always a little shaky. He’d studied to be an oncologist before flunking out of med school, and I’m guessing he had a failure mantra playing 24/7 in his head: “I was supposed to be curing cancer, instead I’m one bad day away from doing twenty years in Leavenworth.” This time, though, he wasn’t just nervous, he was sick with fear, ashen with it, like he’d just come from watching his twin get autopsied.