 Somehow during those hot months I made the transition from nutrition worker to volunteer at the Marin County Economic Opportunity Council Multi-Service Center and by fall its only paid worker. I was kind of like a lab experiment. If I could make it out of poverty, it would symbolize everything they were trying to do. So we had this building in  the middle of San Anselmo where we had meetings and free clothes and manned a resource phone line. We even had a big town meeting to organize the community. Behind the scenes, I had a boyfriend named Nation who wore lavender-tinted sunglasses, drove a Jaguar, had the same long blond hair I did, and dealt cocaine (which neither he nor I used) out of a very nice apartment. I met him when he came to check out the community center one day. And I began to drink more.
|