All my life, I have been more comfortable among the poor. Among those who know how to get by because they've never been able to afford much more than that. That's who I grew up understanding. It's whom I felt I understood, and whom I felt less-judged by. This would be the place to insert notes about living in a tent, an adobe house, fixer-uppers, welfare housing. But you've read those tales of mine by now and I can only find so many different ways to talk about them. My family did, as the 80s rolled around, try to maintain some kind of strange grip on the glorious apex of middle class suburbia (and never a more hellish world have I seen), but no longer than we tried at the urban Miami Beach route, or the rural New York scenario, for sure.

I'll never stop being amazed at how when you have so little money, the notion of it can grow so large in your life. I didn't understand how it could be good for you to not get everything you want. Or that there was a lot to be gained in situations where you were forced to think of a way out, rather than purchase one. Nah, at the time it just sucked to always be lacking, feel lacking. I lived, inseparable, from the shame of being poor. Maybe that's why to this day, I'm not quite at ease in polished, perfumed, pretentious places. Or maybe because those places too often lend themselves to the profligation of polished, perfumed, pretentious words and notions.

I bring up these class issues because I've done a small amount of moving back and forth between a couple worlds. Actually, I've done this in a few different ways. But economically, I've walked some interesting divides. And I guess I've been doing some thinking about that. I've alluded to the Postcard Town, where I moved a few years after graduating my second college. This was one of the ways I traveled that divide. That town, and the school, itself.

When I was accepted to NYU it was something I never imagined. And I mean that literally. I never imagined I would ever go to a school that cost so much money, or boast such alumnus, or command such respect (all these things are relative, please no es bickerando). When, later, I moved to the Postcard Town from Kensington, Brooklyn, it really threw a lot of things at me to think about. You don't realize how much things stick to your self-image. You end up in clothes or a setting that conflicts with this image...what does it mean?

Even after getting a degree from a ritzy university, I identify with laborers. Even though people have been telling me I was an "artist" all my life, and I know that is true. Yet, I drive by a roofing crew and I feel like I should hustle back to the site before too much time goes by. As if I escaped on a long coffee break, 13 years ago. Someone will catch me drawing soon, and we know what that means.

I know what it's like to make your living that way. To breathe in the fumes, to wear out the bones, to sweat and lift until you are sure you can't lift one more. And then to go on for another hour. And then another day. And then another five years. Of course the worst part is that you imagine it will be forever. Maybe it will be.

I was digging the proverbial ditch at 15, some type of maniac holding Rolling Stone interviews of himself in his own mind as he went about straining his tiny frame trying to keep up with the man-sized crew. Even then, with the delusions of grandeur. Running over song lyrics, writing song lyrics, mentally scratching out, imagining a rearranging of one or another short stories in my mind, keeping a dialogue alive through the long hours. Cursing the roots that ran, wirelike, across the gash in the earth I was trying to open with my shovel.

I remember an early farm job well. At one point while digging a trench for pipe, I grew extremely bored and when my shovel became wedged under a tough root, put all my weight on the handle until it snapped. I somehow figured that the farmer who had assigned me to this mind-numbing work would have to put me on a different job. But he just pointed me to a shed where there were about seven more identical shovels. That was one of many jobs that had—somewhere on the premises—a secret shack with an endless rack of shovels.

It was a tough day. I stopped in to the general store for cigarettes. Marlboros were 1.05 a pack. I asked for one, and the guy behind the counter told me he needed I.D. Of course I didn't have I.D., and if I had, it would have just shown that I was 15. I had no means to convince them it would be legal to sell me cigarettes. Of course, I probably looked about 12, as I've never looked anywhere close to my age.

As I said, the day was an especially bad one. Not only had the truth of the Shack of Seven Shovels begun to edge its fingers around the root clusters in my mind, implicating all kinds of fractal outcomes in the rest of the time-space continuum, but after a long, painful day of labor, my ride home had crapped out and home was 13 miles away. It was going to be a very long walk, and I really wanted those cigarettes. The fellow behind the counter was working his after-school job and he just wanted to finish his shift.

"I worked all day," I finally said to him. "Now I am going to walk thirteen miles home. I think I'm old enough to smoke."

There was but the slightest pause before Counter Guy reached up and grabbed a pack of Marlboro, which he then set down in front of me, and which I immediately picked up with my dirty, grateful claw of a hand. (Note. My hand is not deformed. But it tends to feel clawlike when deprived of nicotine. At least it used to. I don't smoke anymore.) It is a gathering of moments like this in my days that have done nothing to dispel the idea that my life, with all its trials and tribulations and triumphs, is nothing more than a long, elaborate sort of play or television show in which the most cinematic moments are to be expected, and even encouraged by all players.

How did I end up doing unskilled labor for so long? It was the easiest way to avoid jumping through hoops. I fucking hate hoops. Even health benefits, a couple more bucks an hour, and the neighborhood's applause won't get me interested in hoop-jumping. I could tell you ten stories about times I've walked away from them, even if only to head straight into traffic. If it was traffic of my choosing, it was usually worth it. I'd rather spend five years in the recycling room sorting sticky beer cans and reciting unwritten poetry to myself than fill my ears with the praise of fools, or accept their degradation or spiritual runoff as addendum to my paycheck. I have never relied upon social standing to boost up my feelings of worth. (I could not have!) I rely upon the words I share with myself. The thoughts I discover myself. These secret, nonsensical letters. I rely on the papers nobody sees, unbidden, unacceptable decrees.

Of course I knew that I could do well in school if it were ever an issue. Everyone knew that. It's why the principal asked me to tapdance read the newspaper in first grade, it's why they skipped me over fourth grade. It's why they put me in the "Star" group when I moved to upstate NY. How funny. Seven-Star, Eight-Star, Nine-Star. Finally, I asked to be lowered into the regular ninth grade. It would mean they would expect less of me. That was a fantasy. THEY always expected lots from me. They did not let me into the non-"star" group. I just kept movin' along, dragging my 50s averages with me. I didn't care nothin' about Stars.

Over the years, I was told once or twice by my mother that she had been a real Smartass in High School, but that they couldn't touch her because she got straight As. And that's who she was consistently and up until she graduated a year early as the school's Valedictorian and headed off to UCLA from Queens. I was similar, but with a twist: I was a real Smartass, and got terrible grades. Most of the time. At least after seventh grade or so. Once in a while, when something caught my eye, I would get an A. It made the administration crazy. They didn't really know what to do with me, and the principal (always spell it with a "Pal" at the end!) personally and privately made the strong suggestion that I leave the school when I turned 16. I offered the idea later as if it were my own. I felt it had a lot of merit.

Meanwhile, I looked to my textbooks and tests and saw lines and xerox grit and shiny fibrous pulp. Words wasted. poor stories and noise and corrupted truths. I was strange to my friends, always wanting to cut away the skin of our comraderie and unearth what was hidden in our silences. I made an outcast of myself from more than one group like this. Asking odd, untimely questions that pointed in potentially unsettling directions. Existential lockpicks popping up in a bowl of potato chips at a keg party. Unexcited, careful queries that could drown out a stereo turned up to ten by laying down right between the beats. I didn't know what to make of it all, and mostly I wondered if other people felt the same. I wasn't trying to unsettle anyone. But I did.

There were one or two people here and there that called themselves friends. They probably kept me saner than they could know just by existing.

Back at school, I stopped reciting empty promises, empty phrases, empty passages—like "the Pledge." I began to write more and more in my own notebooks, pose questions. Less homework. There were no answers. I was dangerously close to discovering this, and would, within weeks. It would cause a lot of trouble for me. Or at least my reaction to that would.

I disregarded the chanting. And soon, I completely disregarded school. I was trapped there but they could not have my heart. Nor my seriousness, nor my respect. They had nothing of worth to teach me. And I realized that words could not set me free, and that no matter how I fashioned them, they would only lead to more questions. I lost automatic awe for fancy talkers like myself. And the seed of doubt in the might of the spoken word was planted in my mind at the same time I used the tool to nurture that seed.

Finally, I took my words back from the school altogether. I would not entertain the exams as if they pointed the way to a higher ground. I would no longer engage the questions—they spoke of nothing of interest to me. I filled in my own insensible and irrelevant answers to quizzes, gave my Math teacher bursts of poetry. They sent me to a Shrink.

I quit legally and finally, on my sixteenth birthday. I think everyone was glad for the most part. I was clearly an unstable element in that setting, and made everyone a bit uncomfortable. My mom and legaladoptedfather said they thought I'd be happier out of there.

The funny part is that a bully who had been hassling me pretty much since I came to the school a few years earlier called me on the telephone when he heard that I was going to quit soon. He thought he was responsible for my decision. He was concerned and wanted me to stay in school. This was a boy that I became friends with and moved in with for a short time after leaving my own home at fifteen.

You can never tell where you'll find your friends. Maybe a good reason to treat your enemies with respect.

I've written that last part out a hundred times in a hundred different stories. The part about leaving school the first time. The poems, the suspensions, the psychiatrist, the questions. It's almost right, I've almost got it right.

You have to make money to eat. So I did my best.

Until I was almost 30, my working life had been composed mostly of labor. Some types more skilled than others. But often, straight labor. Labor involved the least amount of personal presentation. You didn't have to hold anything up except your arms. It would have made a lot of sense if I hadn't always been so tiny. I remember struggling in pain to not let my wheelbarrow (bundle/box/stack/pile/sod/shingles/rocks/wall, etc) tip over a hundred times. If you are the smallest guy, you really have to work very hard to be accepted in outfits like that. Dropping your load will not be received the same as if a big person drops theirs.

The second time I left school, I had gone back to college the same year as my graduating class in High School. After a year of majoring in Commercial Art/Photography, I left. I had majored in Commercial Art because that's what people told me I'd do my entire life. Be An Artist. For most of the time, I'd resisted that. Because how did they know?

I left school about the time we began learning studio work, faking bubbles (soap injected) in hot coffee, (glass) ice cubes in cold drinks, (gluey) milk in a cereal bowl. About the time I realized that an Art major wasn't about "art" as I saw Art. But I've always been very romantic. When I was younger, you can add impatient to that. I didn't see the value of staying for "the degree." I lost faith in what I was learning. I probably didn't have much for it to begin with. "School" was just the Thing to do. I was not convinced.

I left without formally withdrawing. I'd been offered a job yanking pallets around for $7.25/hr in a cosmetics factory. One day I started driving to the factory instead of the college.

At all these jobs I held for the next decade or so, language did little for you. Unlike your peers or teachers in college, none of my future coworkers—Ray-ray the dope-fiend; Keev the crackhead, Scott the drunk, Eddie the pillhead (and yes, most laborers I knew were on something to make the hours go by and there's always lot of drinking and such in construction from what I've seen)—nobody really cared if you knew language and could speak it well. You were in the same place as they were. Unless you couldn't keep up with carrying your share of bricks, or felt, or shingle, or the wheelbarrow load. If you swung your big vocabulary around or spoke the Queen's English with nary a faltr'in step, you might feel a different reaction than were you to do that in Polite, Elite, Upper-crustian White society (where it will always impress). Language is still a power, and regardless of a different view of perfect and well-hung locution, it will still intimidate. I didn't know that yet. But the result would most likely be derision. Perhaps even a nifty little "smartass" label or something, alienate you. And those skills that once nailed you a scholarship grant, or your picture in the display case in the SBS hallway, now would only alienate you or get you a busted lip if you pushed it too far.

If you liked to talk, you learned to keep your mouth shut when possible. There were a lot of "Man's men" among these types, these blue collar, physical workers. In the outfits I found, some were Rednecks and some where just small-town White guys. Many were beer-swillin', simple-talking Tough Guys. Tough Guys are not always (though sometimes) Dumb Guys. They may often be Uneducated Guys, but as animals who scrap, any male will instinctively understand the power wielded against him, even if he cannot combat it in kind. How each person who thinks of themselves as "tough" will react to that language is, of course, an unknown. I threw words around and often didn't understand the weight of them a lot of the time. Sometimes I learned the hard way. I usually prefer to learn the hard way.

We come back from that original circle on the asphalt in first grade. Where I first learned how to box someone with a verbal quickness. Because the dance had changed again. I said earlier that the lumps were worth it. Or I thought it. Because they were. The lumps or the bruises or the punishments—they faded. But the Idea of what you had said lasted. The Idea of how you had not backed down lasted. There's a lesson you can take a lot of places.

But the thing is, things had changed. Now the boys had grown large. And their hands had grown so much heavier. Getting hit in the head the right way could end the movie. Now the stones picked up in a scuffle were larger. They seemed to zero in on you like they could smell your soft spots. There were no teachers to weed out the kids who brought knives. Now, people sometimes died under a dirty bug light in the parking lot of a small bar. Stabbed in their very heart over shit that wouldn't make any sense the next day.

You learned what "cool" was in that world. Just as in jail, you learned to adapt. Just as in the 'hab. Just as in the Street. Just as in halls of NYU. Some things overlap. You can take the street lessons into NYU, you can take the years of menial labor into NYU. I don't know exactly how much the college degree will apply back out in world not validated by those things that validate the college in the first place. It's very hard, of course, to lay down such a definite statement, though we do love them so. It all depends on your course of study, eh? In my view, all actual learning imparts truths that can be applied elsewhere. Maybe some learning applies in more places. I don't know. I can't afford a survey.

I remember when studying cinematography, chromatography, visible light spectrum, etc I came across the answer to a question a friend had posed years earlier, while we had been raking out a road. It was one of many hot days circling a man-made lake, on a road that wound around a portion of the ashram. We did lots of landscaping, digging, wheelbarrowing, watering.

When I think back to to jobs like this I get very fond of them in my mind. I remember the hours spent zenlike, holding a hose of constantly running water on a hill. Moving only every minute or so, after watering each tree that dotted the slope, making the same motions as I fed the roots with the stream. The sounds of nature around me for eight hours at least. And my thoughts running wild in all the silence. I guess that's the problem, though, with the fond memory. It's not exactly real. Only when you look back. When you are actually there, you suddenly wish you were driving down an open road. Or home, painting a man on a slope watering trees.

My friend had asked me, "Why is the sky Blue?" And even though in my 20-something years, I had spent many hours gazing at the sky or pondering shades of blue in pigment, I had no answer for him. Even though I could draw a terrifying Blue Man, or a shining, dripping, world of blue water, I could only shrug, scowl, and laugh that day. I had no answer for such a Why.

However, after attending a school that costs 30K a year or so, I can tell you why the sky is blue. I can tell you in terms of light waves, the visible spectrum, and the behavior of particular wavelengths. But first you have to give me a nickel. Right? Maybe even a dime. It's worth money, now.

In every walk of life, there is a Legend. And if you want to move smooth, you learn it. If you want to learn the hard way, you breeze in and, without checking your side mirrors or your exits, try to impose your own.

In time, I found that "Cool" was rarely someone talking a mile a minute and using an expansive, unpredictable, and esoteric vocabulary. The rules had changed. Now, it was too often someone who said very little...agreed with the important things...once in a while disagreed for a display of independence, and then once in a great while, dropped a verbal gem. Maybe a creative insult of someone. Maybe a made-up word that referenced a private joke. In the world I'm speaking of, being Cool was more centered around conformity, working, fighting, fucking, and using/drinking. Language was not Power. Power was someone who got laid when they wanted. It was someone who always had money for the weekend. It was someone who had a good-working vehicle, and a fat client list, or the next Winter's work all lined up by the end of this Spring. If you tried to work Language as a Power in those situations, what could you hope to achieve? To worry the boss over what you might get up to once you got too bored with sweatin' like a lug? To stand out like some kind of bookworm freak? Nah. You knew better than that. Most of the time. And sometimes you just couldn't help being who you were.

I was 18 and drinking on the railroad tracks with Eddie, this older cat. I had met him through my girlfriend, who was three years older than me. I used the word "animosity" while chilling with a beer. Talkin' bout how there Used to Be Some Between Us or maybe that I Don't Want Any Between Them and I...something. It made Eddie laugh.

"Animosity," he said, turning the word over with some delight. "Whats 'at mean?"

"Oh," I said, silently cursing myself for letting it slip, "it just means bad feelings, a grudge. You know, resentment...'n shit."

"Yeah, animosity." he said, his eyes narrowing with a mischievous smile. He took a sip from his beer and his eyes followed the train as it pulled out of the yard and headed toward the mountain and away from the small town. Whoooooosh. "I like that."

He would laugh and repeat this word with a dramatic and reenacted joy every time we would meet in the future. "Hey! Animosity! Animosity, man!"

I liked Eddie.

I spent years in the grunt-filled world of hanging wallpaper, carrying dirt, pushing brooms, stacking boxes, digging ditches, hauling rock, sanding wood, painting wood, gathering trash, hammering shingle; living up to the rigorous demands put on the laborer, for the wage paid to the laborer, being looked at and thought of the way we look at them and think of them. I might not be done with such work. I'm still strong. Personally, I get to missing the work after a while. I get to missing it just bad enough to do a little. Then I remember I only want to write a story about a cat who farms the land, carries his water from the well, and hews everything out of ash and black walnut—not actually be him.

Regardless of what job I've taken or discipline I've studied or what way I've tried to force myself to act, they've been there. These words. Crawling along the edge of the frame like ants. I open my mouth and they escape me. They zoom into tape recorders, tumble into quiet circles of dirt in the driveway, fly from my lips and into newspaper clippings, books, and pages of light; into tender ears, around half eaten pears; into nests of hot, tangled hair; they march into a stifled pre-sentencing air, cavort in the court under a judge's tense glare; slide with a sigh into glue-rimmed envelopes, blow to bits in cul-de-sacs carved out of nothing but wind and memory....

In the past, I haven't thought enough about them, but who does of a gift they've had as long as their own hands? And who does not misuse such a gift before coming to understand its true value?

Many pages would unpeel from my calender before I would do the thinking I'd need to do to find the safety I thought all those words could bring me. By then, my well-sharpened weapons would have come back upon me with force—like arrows shot up toward the face of God which must eventually forget their fury and return to the archer.