If you have ever gone through a toll booth, you know that your relationship to the person in the booth is not the most intimate you'll ever have. It is one of life's frequent non-encounters: You hand over some money; you might get change; you drive off.
Late one morning in 1984, I drove toward a booth on the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge and heard loud music. Inside, the man was dancing.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"I'm having a party," he said.
Months later I found him again, still dancing. "I remember you," he said. "I'm still having the same party."
I asked about the other toll booth workers. He pointed down the row. "What do they look like to you?"
"Toll booths," I replied.
"No imagination!" he exclaimed. "Vertical coffins." He explained: "At 8:30 every morning, live people get in. Then they die for eight hours. At 4:30, like Lazarus from the dead, they reemerge and go home."
I was amazed by his mythology about the job. "Why is it different for you?" I asked.
"I'm going to be a dancer someday," he said, pointing to the administration building. "My bosses are in there, and they're paying for my training."
Sixteen people dead on the job, and the seventeenth, in precisely the same situation, figures out a way to live. He saw not boredom, but a "corner office" with views of the Golden Gate and Berkeley hills. "Half the Western world vacations here," he said, "and I just stroll in every day and practice dancing."