I haven't the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.

We would pass the afternoon at Ya Ya's table, eating stringy boiled meat served with spinach pie. The food tasted as though it had been cooked weeks beforehand and left to age in a musty trunk. Her meals had been marinated in something dank and foreign and were cooked not in pots and pans, but in the same blackened kettles used by witches. Once we'd been served, she performed an epic version of grace. Delivered in both Greek and broken English, it involved tears and excessive hand-wringing and came off sounding less like a prayer than a spell.

This was an America conceived by Soviet propaganda chiefs, a brutal landscape inhabited by hopeless, motor-mouthed simpletons, drifting from a bad place to somewhere even worse. If you're lucky, people on the bus will wake you in order to borrow a cigarette. The man occupying the window seat is likely to introduce himself with the line “What the hell are you staring at?”

(...)

I thought of those people on the bus, going from one shitty place to the next, expecting nothing to change but the landscape. Soon I'd be sitting beside them, sharing my potato chips and thinking of them as my kind of crowd.

Lisa and I groaned, cursing our stupidity. Once again we'd been duped. There was nothing worse than spending an afternoon on a golf course. We knew what was in store for us and understood that the next few hours would pass like days or maybe even weeks. Our watches would yawn, the minute and hour hands joining each other in a series of periodic naps.

(...)

Seeing the [golf] pros in person was no more interesting than eating an ice-cold hamburger.

Every clue was italicized with a burst of surging trumpets, and under questioning, the suspects snapped like toothpicks, buckling in less time than it took to soft-boil an egg.

“That,” the chief counselor said, “is what happens to people who play around.” If this was the punishment for a boy and a girl, I felt certain the penalty for two boys somehow involved barbed wire, a team of donkeys, and the nearest volcano.

Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable down-swing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you'll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common.

I'd been at the plant for three weeks when Curly invited me to his trailer for a drink. He lived just outside Hood River in a double-wide he shared with his mother, a woman he often spoke about. "I told Mother what you said about Dorothy's mouth looking like a gunshot wound and, Lord, she just about bust a gut, she was laughing so hard. She is one funny lady, my mother. Nothing tickles her funny bone better than a knock-knock joke. You know any good sidesplitters?"

Desperate as I was for company, I understood that I was clearly dealing with a loser. Management seemed the perfect career for a person like Curly. I could easily picture him in a short-sleeved shirt, the pocket lined with pens. Someone would ask him to check the time cards and he'd probably say something goofy like "Okey-dokey, artichokey." I'd tried to straighten him out, but there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.

These people were the only contact I had outside of the men and women who picked me up hitchhiking back and forth to work every day. I'd arrive at the shop, listen to Christian radio, get blessed out by Jon and blessed back in by his visiting friends and neighbors. It was like being sent to a foreign country to be immersed in a language that somehow, over time, became your own.

“Peace be with you, brethren.” “You know what they say in John thirteen.” “The King is coming!” I fought it like crazy, but my only alternative was talking to nobody. I'd tried that already and had wound up lecturing to cows until the farmer told me I was ruining their digestion.

I found the ad in a community booster paper. "Sharp, experienced go-getter wanted to strip/refinish woodwork. Enthusiasm a must." I had spent years refinishing, first in Raleigh and then again in Chicago. I always vowed I'd never do it again, but that's the problem with having a skill: once you swear off it, you know you're stuck with it forever. All work seems designed to kill you, but refinishing is tailor-made to provide a long and painful death. The chemical strippers are sold in metal cans picturing a skull and crossbones, and the list of ingredients reads like a who's who in the world of cancer-causing agents. These strippers will eat through plastic buckets, rubber gloves, and nylon brushes. One is advised to wear a respirator but I rejected it, as the cumbersome mask tended to interfere with my smoking.