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. I have been through every one of the 17 toll booths on the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge on thousands of occasions, and never had an exchange worth remembering with anybody.
Late one morning in 1984, headed for lunch in San Francisco, I drove toward one of the booths. I heard loud music. It sounded like a party, or a Michael Jackson concert. I looked around. No other cars with their windows open. No sound trucks. I looked at the toll booth. Inside it, the man was dancing.
" What are you doing?" I asked.
" I'm having a party," he said.
" What about the rest of these people?" I looked over at other booths; nothing moving there.
" They're not invited."
I had a dozen other questions for him, but somebody in a big hurry to get somewhere started punching his horn behind me and I drove off. But I made a note to myself: Find this guy again. There's something in his eye that says there's magic in his toll booth.
Months later I did find him again, still with the loud music, still having a party.
Again I asked," What are you doing?"
He said," I remember you from the last time. I'm still dancing. I'm having the same party."
I said," Look. What about the rest of the people"
He said. " Stop. What do those look like to you?" He pointed down the row of toll booths.
" They look like tool booths."
" Nooooo imagination!"
I said," Okay, I give up. What do they look like to you?"
He said," Vertical coffins."
" What are you talking about?"
" I can prove it. 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. For eight hours, brain is on hold, dead on the job. Going through the motions."
I was amazed. This guy had developed a philosophy, a mythology about his job. I could not help asking the next question:" Why is it different for you? You're having a good time."
He looked at me. " I knew you were going to ask that," he said. " I'm going to be a dancer someday." He pointed 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. That man was having a party where you and I would probably not last three days. The boredom! He and I did have lunch later, and he said," I don't understand why anybody would think my job is boring. I have a corner office, glass on all sides. I can see the Golden Gate, San Francisco, the Berkeley hills; half the Western world vacations here and I just stroll in every day and practice dancing."
