Right from the first day, I was earning enough in tips to be able to rent a room. The customers, out of respect or fear of my height, never hesitated to put their hands in their pockets. My efficiency did the rest. My landlady lived in a house that was much too big for a woman on her own, at the corner of two dull streets that seemed to have no other purpose than to intersect. The concrete posts supporting the building made it look as if it was leaning forward, ready to fall at the first shake. All the rooms must have been occupied once, I could sense it. Family members dying, leaving, running away, whatever, had emptied it and the only one left was this wrinkled old woman who spent her mornings setting her hair. She had nobody to please except herself. The smell of scorched hair that came out of the few rooms she’d kept for herself caught you by the throat whenever you knocked at her door to collect your mail or pay the week’s rent. She liked me from the start, after I told her I was pumping gas to work my way through college. My blue nylon shirt must have made a good impression. The first time we met, I was disturbed by her physical resemblance to my grandmother. She was the kind of woman who would have taken a husband and had children just for the pleasure of seeing them take off one by one, tired of the obsessive tidiness she must have inflicted on them. She rented three two-room apartments with kitchen for a more than reasonable price. The probation officer came to see me without warning after a month. I couldn’t show him any pay slips, so I suggested he could just stand on the sidewalk opposite the gas station to check I was really working there. He was eager to know if I was living independently of my mother. I reassured him on that point but worried him too because, apart from him, nobody else was keeping an eye on me. He reminded me that I wasn’t allowed to leave the state, and that the slightest infringement would lead to the withdrawal of my parole. “Where would I go? You think I’d leave the climate here in California to be a snowman in Alaska?” I could see there was something on his mind. He searched the apartment thoroughly in search of alcohol or drugs and then asked me, just when I was least expecting it, if I was all right. I told him I was, and that simple reply he somehow turned into whole paragraph, which he wrote on a sheet of paper in his file in tiny handwriting, carefully hiding it from me. The guy was about as open as a snake trying to pass its scales off as a sleeping bag. I sensed something enormous behind his lawman’s veneer, the kind of burden you can never free yourself of. It was his job to provide a barrier against the triggers that lead to bad actions, and every twitch of his face or his fingers betrayed the fact that he was both repelled and attracted by that situation. I knew a lot about perverts, he could see that in my eyes, and for a split second the roles were reversed, but he quickly regained the upper hand, telling me I shouldn’t expect him to forget who I was. He even got his revenge by bringing forward the dates when I had to check in with him.