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articulate your situation to the world.
    Steady Ray writes:
    3 June 1964
    Dear Jonathan,
    I called your father yesterday to find out if he had made arrangements for you to get back. He feels strongly that it would be better for you to stay in Florida or perhaps go to South America or Hong Kong. He says he could get you a job in Hong Kong through a friend. Your father said that the sheriffs in four counties are looking for you, in connection with your car. I believe the charges have to do with permitting an unlicensed person to operate and the unpaid insurance. Your father said he lost his own license for three weeks over it and has paid $95 in parking tickets. He still does not have the car back and is not very happy about the situation. The Florida authorities notified the Massachusetts authorities and you will not be able to get a license here.
    Next point: you always have more trouble when you are in Boston. You are not able to handle alcohol, and living with your friends here will not help if you want to change.
    Finally, your father is selling his house, he hopes within a few days, and he will not be able to provide a home for you.
    This is a summary of what your father said. He may well be right that your best bet is to get a job in Florida or Hong Kong. I think he will help you if you decide to stay there, but he will not help you if you come back.
    He thinks:
    These letters are classics. I will include them in my prison novel. Every letter I receive while doing time will become part of my novel. I will write one word after another and then follow them like a rope out of my cell. Like a chain. Follow the chain of words back to my life.

the time of your life
    The Pine Street Inn occupies an entire city block in Boston’s South End. When it moved here in the early 1980s the neighborhood was verging on derelict, even though it’s minutes from downtown. White flight in the ’60s and ’70s, combined with an economic practice known as “red-lining,” where certain sections of the city (read: black ) were deemed not worthy of investment by the banks, left every third building vacant. The building that became Pine Street is a landmark, a replica of a Sienese tower, marking the entrance into Boston as you drive north on I-93. The tower was used by firemen for a hundred years to practice jumping from a burning building into a net below. Then it became a shelter.
    Across from Pine Street, across East Berkeley, looms the Medieval Manor, which describes itself as a “theatre-restaurant.” It opened, coincidentally, the same year the Pine Street Inn moved from its original location, on the real Pine Street, to this abandoned fire station on Harrison Avenue. The Medieval Manor, in its brochure, invites one to “step back hundreds of years into a bawdy, rollicking romp through the Middle Ages.” You sit at long tables as “guests of the king,” while “the minstrel, jester, oaf and wenches respond to the Lord of the Manor’s every whim.” While taking in the fun you are offered a “sumptuous, seven-course banquet, eaten without fork, knife, or spoon.” The Medieval Manor promises to be “the time of your life.” Occasionally, when dinner is being served at Pine Street, a well-dressed party of four appears at our front door, obviously having taken a wrong turn. They ask, timidly, if this is the Medieval Manor, and sometimes I say yes , and direct them inside.

chet’s last call
    Most have been in one war or another—Vietnam, mostly—for some it’s true and some just believe it’s true. Many have been married, many have been in prison. One man speaks through a hole in his throat. Several are blind, many deaf or near deaf. The junkies have holes in their arms that won’t heal. A cotton wick needs to be inserted daily, to drain the pus, and most days they forget to have it done. The epileptics need their meds or they seize—if they drink on their meds they seize worse. Men come through the door with limps and