Right, you could get quite full at my restaurant; you just had to order
all of the courses to do so, but yeah. I managed other people's
restaurants for a while. I managed other people's restaurants, I was
fascinated by the restaurant industry, I did that as a part of working
my way through Wisconsin, I did that until my mother died, and then I
decided that I needed to get out of the restaurant industry, I was
burned out, because it is twenty-four seven. And at the time, I said, I
think I was reading what's his name—Oh my god, I can't even remember his
name anymore—I was reading a book that was talking about what had
happened in terms of segregation and integration, It was talking about
how we were re-segregating ourselves, we were talking about particularly
around UMass where people of color and white people were not
even—wouldn't be in the same vicinities of each other—and I decided that
I would—that I had not been in the South to live since it desegregated,
I had no clue as to what life in the South was like. I had long believed
that the South had a greater shot of achieving full integration than did
the North because at least there were relationships or contact, but I
wanted to see. So, I decided, it was a decision to either come back here
or to go to Wisconsin, to go back to Wisconsin, which was where I had a
really—for some reason, I never really, as much as I loved it, I never
found a niche in a Northeast, Boston was just not, I couldn't, I didn't
find a niche with the African American community in the Northeast
because, for my perception, I
Page 69 was not willing to
pretend that I was not educated, that I wasn't a member and I didn't fit
in there. The gay community in Boston is very segregated—