EXCERPT FROM BUDDING PROSPECTS:

        I've always been a quitter.  I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band.  Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team.  I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams.  I got married, separated, divorced.  Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat.  I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston.  When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school.  She got pregnant.  I quit town.  About the only thing I didn't give up on was the summer camp.
        Let me tell you about it.
        Two years ago I was living alone.  I woke alone, flossed my teeth alone, worked at odd jobs, ate take-out burritos, read the newspaper and dressed for bed alone.  The universe had temporarily pulled in its boundaries, and I was learning to adjust to them.  I was thirty-one.  I sat at the lunch counter with men of fifty-one, sixty-one, eighty-one, slurped tomato-rice soup and watched the waitress.  Sometimes I had dinner with friends, shot pool, went to the aquarium, danced to a pulsing Latino beat in close, atramental clubs; sometimes I felt like a bearded ascetic contemplating the stones of the desert.
        On this particular night--it was in late February--I stayed in.  I was reading, absorbed in an assault on K2 by a team of Japanese mountaineers, my lungs constricting in the thin burning air, the deadly sting of wind-lashed ice in my face, when the record--Le Sacre du Printemps--caught in the groove with a gnashing squeal as if a stageful of naiads, dryads and spandex satyrs had simultaneously gone lame.  I looked up from my book.  Rain knocked at the windows like a smirking voyeur, small sounds reverberated through the house--the clank of the regfrigerator closing down, the sigh of the heat starting up--the fire crackled ominously round a nail in a charred two-by-four.  At that instant, as if on cue, the buzzer sounded.  I gave the tube a rueful glance--zombies in white-face drifted across the screen, masticating bratwurstlike strings of human intestine--put down my book, cinched the terrycloth robe round my waist, and ambled to the head of the stairs.  Insistent, the buzzer blatted again.

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