This budget, inventively composed, has so far roughly corresponded to reality. In March my outlay was $158.23; in April, $155.09. On an annual basis, these figures round off to $1880—still a healthy $268.83 below my basic income. In May I stopped keeping score, because I now know at least two ways to augment my income with minimal effort. At the Cutter Laboratories, 10th and F Streets, I passed a cursory physical and began selling two pints of my plasma a week—the limit—for $6 a pint. This source could add $624 to my annual income. But I found the 90-minute sessions, luring which time I was affixed to a needle, utterly boring, and I stopped. In any case, this supplemental income source would have dried up shortly: Cutter accepts no plasma from donors sixty or older. A friend of mine with a pickup truck introduced me to the salvage value of aluminum beverage cans. Three times a week he makes his collections from the back alleys of bars and apartment complexes and delivers them to the Industrial Metal and Salvage Company on 27th Street in East San Diego. This moonlighting (he is employed) earns him $60 to $80 a week at the present rate for scrap aluminum: 17 a pound (22 12-oz. beer cans to the pound). He cut me in on this enterprise, keeping 60 percent of the take for himself (it is, after all, his truck). But since most of the collecting was done after midnight and is arduous, I tired of the relationship and severed it. If I ever care to return to scavenging, I am assured an extra $1248 a year—my 40 percent share of the gross. In this admittedly more positive approach to poverty, I searched for the sense of challenge and achievement, of response to adversity, without which I was no different, really, from the old men waiting for death on a Horton Plaza bench. I had discovered some truths, possibly important, given a certain negative attitude of mind. One was that I could exist on less than $180 a month, though not well, and that, with little effort, I could amplify that income. Another was that I could still pass, in masquerade, back into the sort of life I once took for granted, when all the institutions of upper middle-class life in the suburbs meant something, when they stood like an unassailable palisade, protecting the present and the future too. But where was the satisfaction? My petty victories, reported to Earl, met with indifference. He was not interested. Why would he be?

I surveyed the texture of my new approach. Free lunches. Cut-rate bus tickets. Retail discounts. Methodical-and tedious-tours of the thrift shops in quest of shorts and T-shirts, items in such low supply and high demand that one has to arrive at the thrift shop long before it opens, to join a cluster of earlier birds. I was in a Burger King when the thought that had been nagging me through the months of wearing poverty like the king's new cloak leaped to the front of my consciousness. I was sipping what turned out to be my last free lemonade. It is no trouble to get one. With patience, and by never standing twice in the same line, one separately acquires a paper cup of ice water, sugar, and lemon slices ("For my iced tea, please; you forgot") and combines these ingredients in a booth. Suddenly the drink turned bitter on my tongue. Suddenly the full weight of my predicament pressed on my shoulders. I was trying to be someone I was not; I was trying not to be who I was—and I had no idea who I was. The young, perhaps, can repudiate the empty values and possessions of their parents, can stand with composure in the welfare line, can milk the establishment with an easy conscience and a light heart, can strip themselves to the bone and look for new meanings, being blind to the old. Perhaps. But can I? I was the establishment. And when I turned my back on it, I turned my back on belonging; I canceled my membership in every club I knew. On my travels, what could I write in the line on the immigration form requesting my fixed address? My occupation? Where were my keys, those reassuring reminders that I owned things others wanted to steal? What was the true price of a lemonade concocted covertly? That night I drank more than a month's quota of beer and the next morning made an appointment with a $60-an-hour psychiatrist who specializes in the chemical treatment of depression. His name had come to me from a woman about my age whom I had met through a mutual acquaintance and who had been raised by the same psychiatrist from a black pit deeper than mine. With the exception of this common emotional problem, our circumstances are polar extremes. She lives in what San Diegans call the North County, in a community indistinguishable from the one I once inhabited in New York. Her value system, for the most part, is the one I had disdained by the years of expatriation and, in San Diego, by looking for pride in cadged glasses of lemonade. Her income is more than enough to insulate her from the threat of indigence—or any condition remotely near it. Out of respect for my own indigence, the psychiatrist enlisted me in a free program investigating a new, unmarketed, antidepressant drug. Its effect was immediate and dramatic for about a month. My depression vanished as if by magic. But for every action there is a reaction, and depression—or what I took to be depression—closed in again. From a new perspective, that of a man who had experienced chemically induced elation, I re-examined the distant and the recent past. The process was excruciatingly painful. I recognized my attempt to embrace poverty as a foolish attempt to conceal reality. I saw the dropout suburbanite, splashing in his pool, polishing his two cars, as a man living in a state of procaine-induced happiness. I abhorred both roles as no-win games.