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teens. One rejection and I was through with theater.
    The only thing, the only lifeline, was this: putting words down on paper. So while my mother played the piano, and later while my daughter sang in the children’s choir or took piano lessons, I settled down to wait somewhere with a book or with a pen and a notebook, and my mind left the building.

SEVEN
    AUTUMN 2000
    It only takes me a year to lose my teaching job. Not that I really lose it. I was hired as an instructor, a full-time untenured position, to teach creative writing and composition classes. I applied for the tenure-track creative writing position, which was unfilled at the time. After a series of interviews, they gave it to a guy who did not have the creative publications or awards that I had.
    They tell me I can still keep the instructor position and teach four composition classes a term while the new guy teaches the creative writing classes I just taught. Fuck that, I think.
    It’s not exactly like what happened to my mother when she graduated from Yale. There was a teaching job open at the University of Miami in Ohio, and the dean of the school of music at Yale recommended my mother for the position. She applied and received a letter back saying, “Your qualifications are certainly impressive, but you can understand that we want a man.”
    My mother never did work full time at a university. She taught at a public high school for a few years to try to help my stepfather get through law school. That didn’t work out so well, and she was glad to dump the job as soon as she could.
    So I will be like my mother in that regard, I guess. I’ll do a little this and a little that and create some sort of a living out of it. Hank is not happy about my plan.

    It turns out that this is a good year for me not to have a full-time gig, anyway, for this is the year that I am finally going to get my mother to stop nagging me. I am going to see if I can get my hepatitis C cured.
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    Sometime in the 1970s I contracted hepatitis C—most likely in a shooting gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. By the 1980s I had cleaned up my life, and I thought I was pretty much rid of my past. But around 1990 I realized I had an adverse reaction to even the smallest amounts of alcohol. It was easy enough to quit drinking, but a few years later I became desperately fatigued on a regular basis as the disease, which had lain dormant for a couple of decades, began kicking up its heels.
    So now that I am on Hank’s insurance, I contact a leading specialist in the treatment of hepatitis C, and we schedule a liver biopsy. The biopsy hurts like hell, but when the nurse asks me if I want something for the pain, I tell her, “No, ‘something for the pain’ is what got me into this mess in the first place.”
    After the biopsy, the doctor tells me I will have to give myself shots of interferon three times a week for six months. He says there are side effects to the treatment, including and especially depression. The alternative is that I will likely develop liver cancer.
    I do my first shot at the doctor’s office so that they can make sure I am doing it correctly. I pinch the skin on my thigh and jab the needle in.
    â€œYou’ll probably experience some flu-like symptoms,” the doctor’s assistant tells me.
    I take Emmy to her choir rehearsal that night—the first one of the season—and join the other parents for the annual meeting in the fellowship hall. Suddenly, as we’re sitting there listening to the kids perform their new songs, I begin to shake uncontrollably.
    Oh, this doesn’t look good, I think. How can I get Emmy out
of here and go home? I slip out of the meeting through a back door and stand outside, shivering in the August heat. I begin to sing James Brown’s “I Feel Good” to convince myself I am okay. Finally the interminable meeting ends and Emmy comes out and finds me.
    â€œAre you