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A Hotplate, a Chair, and a Bed …
Only a few months past twenty-one, I received my col-lege diploma and rushed forth to conquer the world. The world turned out to be larger, more complex and sillier than I had imagined; I decided to settle for conquering just a little section of it all for myself. At that tender age, I had worked as a stock boy, a grocery store clerk, a state park forest ranger, a drummer in a rock band, a guitarist in a rock band, and in the politics of the civil rights move-ment. I had somehow managed to win three creative writing awards, two from the Atlantic Monthly, and had sold a few of my paintings to people who obviously had no con-ception of good art. The only problem was that I was broke, busted, flat, penniless.
Of course I got married immediately. Dear Reader, she was intelligent, creative, warm, sexy, had quiet, darting dark eyes that took everything in like universal magnets. What else could I do?
I had been trained as a teacher of English, and my first job was in a small Pennsylvania coal mining town which fell into the fabled Appalachian Poverty Belt (because all the coal was gone, but the miners were not). I worked under the Federal Poverty Program for damned little money. The only house available to rent in this metropolis of a thousand citizens was a seven room monstrosity which con-sumed a week’s pay in rent and another week’s pay in fuel oil. We moved in with just a bed (which was a used studio couch, really), a chair for each of us (second hand kitchen chairs), and a hotplate. Hugh Hefner wouldn’t have called it luxurious, but it was home to us.
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