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By Root 673 0

and the leather of my carpentry apron on the backseat. For a few miles the day was too bright and real and I blinked at it from the dream I’d cast myself in with the two old ladies and the young man and all those blackberries. Then I was on the back roads heading west. Instead of playing the radio, hunting for that one good song, I drove along in silence. On both sides of the road were woods, but today, for the first time, I saw them as individual trees, each one different from the one beside it or in front of it or behind it. One was as bent with age and weight as an old man, another as thin and straight as a young girl, one pine, the other maple or elm or oak, and the sun seemed to shine on each sprouting leaf, on each needle, on the black telephone lines sweeping from pole to pole, on the veined creosote at their bases, on each pebble at the side of the road, each broken piece of asphalt, each diamond of broken glass from a smashed bottle or cracked mirror or discarded compact from a woman I would never meet. And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I’d lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and writing—even writing badly—had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay this awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.

SOMETIME LATER I gave Pop and Peggy a copy of my story, “Blackberries.” Pop read it first, then Peggy. She said, “Writing’s hard, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

Pop said the story started to make him feel something. Then he said, “I had a hunch you were going to do this.”

“What?”

“Write.”

“I didn’t.”

“I know, but I did.”

I nodded again. There was a change in the air, a shift in winds, and I wasn’t sure any of this was a good thing.

“You should tend bar.”

“Why?”

“It’s a great job for a writer. You can write in the morning and work at night.”

But I wasn’t a writer. He was a writer. I didn’t want to be a writer. I just knew I had to write.

“It’s a good job for a graduate student, too. You’ll need some pocket money working on that Ph.D.”

It was strange to hear him offering such fatherly advice, but I knew he was right and I took it.

That summer he paid my way to the American Academy of Bartending in South Boston. It was in the same neighborhoods where my sister was raped, but I felt at home among the row houses and tin-sided apartment buildings, the overflowing dumpster beside the pool hall across from the barroom and sub shop and gas station where a black man in a greasy winter coat stood all day under the sun beside the shopping cart that held his life.

The bartending school was on the second floor above an Italian grocery and an Irish pub. It was a long damp room, and it held four bars the students were supposed to practice on. The carpet was a flattened orange shag, the walls fake white paneling between smudged windows looking out over the street. The instructor was from the same generation as Tony Pavone. He had a thick Dorchester accent and wore glasses with black frames, his graying hair combed back with Vitalis. During class, he wore a white shirt and a black bow tie and vest, its worn hem rubbing along the belt of his pants as he talked with his hands. He was from a time and place I knew nothing about, and over the next few days he taught five or six of us how to mix martinis and Manhattans, Brandy Alexanders, sidecars, and Rob Roys. He taught us how to open bottles of wine and how to pull a draft off the tap. He suggested we keep a lighter in our pocket in case a customer wanted to smoke, and he gave us a lecture on doing things right. Especially when it came to watching the till.

“You people are the money handlers for the whole operation, you understand? So be honest and don’t tell no jokes when you’re makin’ change, all right?”

He made me think of resorts and casinos, all-night joints where Cadillac convertibles were parked under palm trees in a soft blue light. He made me think vaguely of organized crime.

At the end of the week