I saw so many of my friends on their way to becoming dropouts from the human family, I wanted to see something good happen to them. They were getting married and beginning to have babies. Ahead of them were the rounds of jobs and bills my father had gone through. It was almost like being on an urban plantation, a kind of modern-day sharecropping. You worked hard, brought in your crop, and you were always in debt to the landholder.
