Was this her way of telling me that she took on board what I told her? Is that why she acknowledged (without a thank you) the fact that I got her to her class on time? I checked my watch; I checked my GPS for the next pickup. I was four minutes away and not scheduled to arrive for eight minutes. I turned off the ignition, I got out of my car. I felt shaky. I felt vulnerable. I felt small … and needed a break from the endless confinement of the driver’s seat. I wondered: is this my destiny for years to come? Day after day of traffic and automobile hustling and dealing with people who often looked on me as a nobody; their momentary chauffeur to be ignored or abused and hardly ever tipped or thanked for his work? ‘Gotta keep food on the table,’ my dad used to say when he had to miss one of my Little League games to work an overtime shift. That was my daily catechism; the way I told myself that doing this job was worth the sixty- to seventy-hour weeks. Because it kept food on the table and 80 percent of our bills paid. But I had no time for life now. I worked. I slept. I took one day off every two weeks and fretted about losing the hundred bucks (if I was lucky and worked to the max) that I might have reaped for the day. I had to drive nine hours to make what that young woman just spent for sixty minutes of kneading her tensed muscles. I hated myself when I thought this way. I was giving in to envy and the sense that life had dealt me a bad hand. Which is why – lighting up my third American Spirit of my shift – I thought back to myself atop one of those electrical poles with no responsibility to anyone but myself; the view from on high of massive trees and snow-dappled peaks and little in the way of human interference in the vista ahead. My sole obligation was to get down off that pole without causing harm to myself. I could have told Papa: ‘I’m staying atop of this pole … I’m making my life elsewhere and the way I want to do it.’ Instead I buckled. Electrical Engineering. Why did I ever end up doing that?

‘Hey, fella, why are you trying to get yourself into trouble?’

The voice belonged to a UCLA campus cop. A big guy, Irish face, name-tagged O’Shaughnessy, walking toward me, looking seriously pissed off. Immediately I dropped the cigarette to the ground and stubbed it out with my shoe.

‘We are a non-smoking campus,’ he told me. ‘And we also especially don’t like folks who smoke and litter – so how about picking up that butt?’

I did as ordered. I told him I was sorry.