I should know, because I’m the one who made it. Having nothing better to do, I volunteered for this job. In a state of desperation, an emotional nadir that I would later come to think of as a gift, I wandered into this ramshackle white building and took a seat in one of the eighty metal folding chairs. A woman with thick black hair stood up on the dais. I couldn’t glean how old she was, only that her life had obviously been long. “We need a coffee-maker for Thursday nights,” she said in a gruff voice, as though already annoyed. “It is a minimum-three-month commitment. Does anyone want to volunteer?” I don’t know if it was an overachiever’s reflex or a deus ex machina, but to say I raised my hand implies an agency that simply wasn’t there at the time. Looking around, I guessed about a hundred people were gathered in the small A-frame building, what might, in a simpler time, have been a one-room schoolhouse. Everyone in the hall was either skin-and-bones scrawny or grotesquely obese, and not a single face was smiling.
What do You think about With Or Without You: A Memoir?
