But the wait got long. When I left Berkeley after five years, my destiny still hadn’t kicked in yet, and suddenly it didn’t seem so smart that I hadn’t studied anything useful. To survive, I ended up doing what the starving artists did, taking jobs that even a high-school dropout could get: waitress, pizza-delivery girl, liquor-store clerk…Name an occupation with no entry qualifications and no future, and I probably tried it at least once.

So I was poor, and living in one shitty apartment after another, but I was young, and having fun—too much fun, sometimes—and I still felt like I was covered. And then one day I turned around and I was thirty years old. And like I say, my destiny, I never thought about it that explicitly, but on milestone birthdays, you do think about things, and the day I turned thirty it occurred to me that it had been a really long time since I’d seen the coin. I decided I needed to see it, to hold it in my hand and remind myself, you know, omnes mundum facimus, we all make the world, whatever the hell that meant.

But I couldn’t find it. I trashed my apartment looking for it. And it was no surprise—I’d moved so many times, it was a wonder I hadn’t lost more stuff—but I was still very upset. So I went out and got really fucked up, and to make a long story short, my birthday ended with cops and an ambulance ride.

Afterwards, Phil came to see me, and we had a long heart-to-heart about what I was going to do with my life. I’d never told him about the coin, or the voice on the phone, or any of the rest of it, but he talked like he knew: “You don’t need an engraved invitation to do good works in the world, Jane,” he said. “You want to do them, you just go out and do them.” Which, once I got done gagging, actually made a lot of sense to me. So that kind of became the theme of my early thirties.

Good works?

Well, attempted good works. Turns out it’s not as easy as it sounds.

The first couple years, I did a bunch of gigs with groups like the Salvation Army and Goodwill, but I found out I don’t really have the temperament for charity work, especially religious charity work. I decided to try more white-collar stuff—March of Dimes, CARE—but that was just boring, plus I’m even worse at office politics than I am at charity. So then I thought, getting back to basics, maybe what I needed was something with a more disciplinarian bent to it.

Law enforcement?

Yeah. But there I had a different problem: to become a cop, or a prison guard, or even a parole officer, you need to pass a background check, and there were things in my history—like that meltdown on my thirtieth birthday—that made that a deal-breaker. About the best I could do was a job as a security guard, and protecting the inventory at some department store didn’t really count as good works in my book.

So as time wore on, my thirties started looking more and more like my twenties: lots of pointless, dead-end jobs. And then I was thirty-five, and thirty-six, and forty was just up ahead, and Phil didn’t have any more suggestions for me.

And then one day I bumped into my old pal Moon. I hadn’t seen her in twenty years, but this one day I was feeling nostalgic and decided to go back to the Haight, to the street where we grew up. I was standing in front of the lot where the community garden used to be—it had been paved and turned into a skateboard rink—when Moon came along, dragging a pair of kids with her.

She looked great. Young and skinny, not like someone who’d been through two pregnancies. Meanwhile I was definitely the worse for wear, so it took her a minute to recognize me, but when she finally did she gave me this big hug and introduced me to the brood. Then—like this wasn’t depressing enough already—she told me that she and her husband had started their own consulting firm and were pulling down six figures a year working from home. So I came back with this story about how I’d been in the Peace Corps, and if I seemed a little run down it was because I’d spent the last decade fighting AIDS in Africa. Then she had to go, so I gave her a fake e-mail address and told her to keep in touch.

And I was on my way home when I passed by this pay phone, and just on impulse I picked up the receiver. There was no dial tone, but the phone wasn’t dead—it was an open line. “Hello?” I said. There was no answer, but still it felt like someone was listening at the other end, so I said, “If you’re ever planning to call me back, do it soon.”

The next day, I got a jury-duty summons in the mail. I’d gotten calls to jury duty before, and I was about due for another, so it could have been a coincidence. But maybe not…and either way, I figured this was an opportunity to do some good in the world, exactly what I’d been looking for.

It was an arson-murder trial. This guy Julius Deeds, reputed gangster, found out his girlfriend was cheating on him and threw a gasoline bomb into her living room in the middle of the night. She escaped through the back door of the house, but she left three kids upstairs and none of them made it out.

So I was in the jury pool for this, and I was pretty psyched, until it dawned on me that I’d met the defendant before. He’d been at my dealer’s place the last time I went to make a buy.

That’s your drug dealer?

Yeah. Guy named Ganesh.

May I ask what kind of drugs?

The usual kind. Pot of course, speed, Valium, coke on special occasions, acid when I needed a cheap vacation. I know that probably sounds like a lot, but at that point in my life I had it under control.

Anyhow, the last time I’d gone to see Ganesh, about a month before the jury call, he’d come to the door looking scared. Now Ganesh was always a little shaky. He’d studied to be an oncologist before flunking out of med school, and I’m guessing he had a failure mantra playing 24/7 in his head: “I was supposed to be curing cancer, instead I’m one bad day away from doing twenty years in Leavenworth.” This time, though, he wasn’t just nervous, he was sick with fear, ashen with it, like he’d just come from watching his twin get autopsied.

“I can’t see you right now, Jane,” he said, and started to shut the door on me. Then the door jerked open again, and this giant ape of a guy stepped up behind Ganesh and belly-bumped him so hard he nearly fell on his face.

“Hi there, Jane,” the ape said, grabbing Ganesh by the back of the neck to steady him. “What brings you here?”

I kept my voice casual: “Just dropping by to say hi.”

“Oh yeah?” He looked down at Ganesh, turning him like a can whose label he wanted to read. “You sure about that? Because Ganesh here, he likes to sell things to people—he’s not so good about paying bills, but he likes to sell. You sure you didn’t come to do some shopping, Jane?”

“No, really…I’m just here to say hi. But if you guys are busy…”

“Yeah, we kind of are…” He started dragging Ganesh back inside. “So come back later. Much.”

I hadn’t seen or heard from Ganesh since, and I naturally assumed the worst.

I hadn’t seen Julius Deeds since, either. His lawyer had him cleaned up for the trial, but King Kong with a haircut is still King Kong, so I should have recognized him right off the bat. But I was so gung-ho to get on the jury, I spent my first half hour in the courtroom focused on the juror questionnaire. It wasn’t until I got done bullshitting my way through that and handed it in that I noticed Deeds staring at me, trying to work out where he knew me from.

We both got it at the same time. Then he smiled, like Christmas just came early, and all my good intentions went straight out the window. I started hoping three things in quick succession: one, that I didn’t get picked for the jury after all, two, that Deeds hadn’t made bail, and three, that if he had made bail, Ganesh was either dead or out of the country, because Ganesh knew where I lived.