What came back specifically and vividly was the comic-book shop in New Jersey that my brother took me to soon after he’d gotten his driver’s license. It was forty miles outside of the city and housed in a converted depository that still said A & J TOMATOES from back when everything was farmland. 

The year the bus drivers went on strike in Pittsburgh I was twenty-three and living on the edge of the city in a neighborhood that was on the verge of becoming a ghetto. I had just been fired from