A boy doing chores. Feeding the dogs. Mowing the lawn. Chucking dog poop over the neighbor’s fence and spending the next weekend pulling weeds as punishment. 

***

Freshman year of high school. Removing stained mattresses from the basement of a Tenderloin apartment building. Scraping, washing, spackling, sanding, and painting walls. Two coats. Tossing cherries from the rooftop as cars passed by on Jones Street. Bonus points for convertibles.  

***

Sophomore year. Bussing dishes and hustling between the dining room and kitchen. Leaning over customers to clear their plates, sweat dripping off his forehead. Drops seemed to fall in slow motion. He pretended not to notice. Enjoyed free cannelloni and cheeseburgers after work – and underage drinking with the older waitresses. 

***

Summer after high school. Scooping live bait for fishermen at Pier 45D. “Don’t give us the dead ones,” they said. Had to quit after crushing his foot under a 1,400-pound pallet of frozen anchovies. “No broken bones,” said the doctor at the Chinese hospital. 

***

College years. Hustling for cars as a parking attendant at a downtown office building. Misusing the vertical conveyor system to get to the cars faster, his feet dangling in the open space below — it would have been a four-story drop. Drinking VSOP and 7UP with coworkers while waiting for the swing shift to clock out. Surprised there weren’t more collisions.  

***

Grad school. Sorting and delivering mail at a large corporate law firm. Taking long lunches with the receptionist who liked the fancy milkshake cocktails at the sushi place around the corner. Learned a few months after quitting that the firm was shot up by a disgruntled former client. Pettit & Martin. 101 California. At a time when workplace shootings shocked us.   

***

Later in grad school. Doing odd jobs for a professor of medieval literature who was more than twenty years into a do-it-yourself home renovation project. Four wire-haired dachshunds at his side. Spent one afternoon counting roof tiles on a nearby building slated for demolition. “Count them carefully,” said the professor as he handed over the high-powered binoculars. “We need to get those suckers before they’re gone forever.”   

***

Post-graduation. First full-time job. Summarizing stories from newspapers and trade journals. Barron’s, Wall Street Journal, Pulp & Paper Canada. Women’s Wear Daily. An endless list. Managing and training others to do the same, including in the Philippines, where the staff called him Forrest Gump because of his haircut.

***

Next job. Writing videogame manuals, even though the software wasn’t always ready. Like the time he belted a homerun in an alpha version of Triple Play Baseball and watched as the batter’s upper body hovered over the plate while his legs circled the bases. 

***

The man’s a writer for hire now – ghostwriter, game writer, travel writer, anything writer. Have laptop, will travel. He sits at his desk, wondering what’s next.