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Beethoven concertos and excels in field hockey? Done. You want a rocket-propelled grenade and an old-fashioned? Done. I mean, the place never let you down. It was Disney World for adults.
    When we got to the Zone, the guy’s eyes got big in my rearview mirror. “This’ll do?” I said. He nodded. “This is good.”
    It was a $5 fare and he tipped me $5. I’d walked twenty bags up ten flights of stairs for an old lady and been handed a twenty-five-cent tip, so $5 got my attention. As he got out, I asked the guy what he did for a living. That was my personal form of career counseling. If I got someone in the back of my cab who looked like he was interesting and who threw money around like it was confetti, I asked him what his job was.
    “I’m a merchant mariner,” he said.
    I nodded. “What’s that?”
    “Well, we carry cargo in ships.”
    “Sounds exciting.”
    Which it didn’t. What sounded exciting is pulling into a port at ten thirty in the morning and going to a place like the Combat Zone with a pocketful of cash and the nicest leather jacket in Boston, looking for a good time all by himself.
    As he was walking into some strip joint, I yelled after him, “Hey, how do you get into that?”
    The guy had probably been at sea for three months and he really didn’t want to spend any more time talking to a male college dropout. “Here,” he said, and he handed me a card with the address of a seaman’s school in Baltimore. Then he was gone.
    I wrote the school but never heard back. I forgot about it until my brother Michael came back to Boston and showed up at a keg party I was hosting in my apartment. He was at theMassachusetts Maritime Academy down in Buzzards Bay, and he gave it a glowing review. “It’s not bad,” he said, over a plastic cup of frosty cold Falstaff beer. “They don’t shave your head. It’s not really a military academy, there are not really any uniforms, there’s not a lot of discipline and when you get out, you can stay home six months out of the year.” I was working two jobs, making $220 a week, and I was ready for something new. I’d always liked Jack Kerouac and the idea of traveling the world looked better after every shift hauling prostitutes and businessmen around Boston. My neighbors Mrs. Paulson and Mr. Muracco worked hard and were instrumental in getting me accepted at the Academy, and my high school varsity basketball coach wrote a letter to the coach there recommending me. A few months later, I was in. I couldn’t wait to go.
    I drove to the campus in my VW bus, nearly cross-eyed with a massive hangover from a final blowout my friends had thrown the night before. I rolled in feeling like John Belushi after an all-night toga party. The MMA’s campus is tiny, a group of maybe six dorms, a training ship, a few classroom buildings, an administration center, and a library. When I first saw it, I thought, This doesn’t look too bad. And the admiral who greeted us was very polite, especially to the parents. “Today you lost your boy,” he said at one point. “When we return him to you, he’ll be a man.”
    When the last parents’ car had cleared the parking lot, the instructors turned and started screaming at us. We weren’t these bright young men to be cherished anymore. We were “youngies,” and youngies were worth about as much as spit on pavement. The instructors screamed at us as they herdedus into a barbershop to get our heads shaved and screamed at us while they marched at double-time all over the campus before ending the day by screaming at us for no reason at all. The MMA turned out to be a true-blue military school where they broke you down before they built you into a merchant seaman. I had to give it to my brother. He’d gotten me good.
    We went through a year of constant hazing. There was an admiral called Shakey who was supposedly in charge of the academy, but the upperclassmen ran the school. You’d be walking down the hall and a three-striper—a