Actually, though, I only ever got one job from the Help Wanteds: waiting tables at a greasy spoon over by Boston City Hospital. I reported to the address on Washington Street without expectation and filled out an application at the faux Fifties counter. I was so accustomed by then to thinking of myself as unemployable that I was shocked when the manager, a rheumy-eyed drunk with a thinning white pompadour, hired me on the spot for the breakfast shift. He told me to come back in the morning, and then he didn’t seem sure who I was when I tapped on the locked glass door at 5:45 a.m.—still half-dreaming but ready to work the six to two-thirty. Recession, a lack of ambition, and vague artistic leanings had stranded me in a low-grade bohemian funk, and it felt good to have somewhere to be for a change. My bicycle commute—through banks of vaporous streetlight, past the wet sidewalks and dark doorways of the deserted pre-dawn South End—felt spooky and glamorous, like I’d fetched up in a strange city.
