In time the four years I had available to be at Harvard came to an end, and my aid and scholarships ran out and I had to leave.  I dare say without the pressure of graduating and getting grades and so on a university life is utopia, at least for someone like me.  I could go talk to really informed people, listen to lectures and take courses, all in the morning, and then have a job in the afternoon and evening that the university arranged, or at least provided a listing service for.

You have to picture me leaving Harvard.  No future that I could see, no longer any religious belief, overweight, and a fairly heavy smoker (I had picked it up in the process of leaving the Jehovah's Witnesses -- they don't make it easy).  I did have a nest egg set aside from my college work, since my living expenses had been nil and I am frugal and not interested in most of the things young people waste money on.  So I set out for home to visit my folks and give them a chance to air their frustrations about me and to do what they could to encourage me (I owed them at least that).

Depression runs in our family, and has haunted my mother's side, and I didn't escape it, and got seriously depressed.  One of the techniques I then knew was to find something not impossible but difficult to achieve, and achieve it, so I could rebuild myself, and so I determined to lose weight and to stop smoking.  Fear of gaining weight had kept me smoking so I decided to achieve these I had to do the two simultaneously.  I did.  I stopped both cigarettes and food cold turkey (they are both addictions -- a week or so of fasting and the body's addiction mechanisms are just as strong with food as with nicotine).  All I consumed was nutrient pills and water with a touch of vinegar.

(I digress here about depression -- there is a bushel of techniques available for managing it, and people who tend to this need to learn them, but they don't work dependably and never permanently.  One must by all means do whatever if one is suicidal, but in the end medication is the only way to go, and finding the right medication today is not too difficult.  Of course back then this was not available.)

So I stopped smoking (good) and fasted (bad).  At the time I did not know the consequences of rapid weight loss from fasting (my gall stones remind me of this every now and then, as I have yo-yo'd like that a dozen or more times in my life).  Then I went back to the Boston area and set about getting a job.  Well, someone with four years of a high-prestige college but no degree is basically unemployable.  The prestige college over-qualifies one for anything that doesn't require a degree and the absence of the degree disqualifies one for everything else.

One good thing is that I typed extremely well (I had made a lot of money on the side typing graduate theses -- I was fast and accurate -- wish I still were but word processors have spoiled me).  So after a couple weeks of frustration I went into a clerical employment agency and presented myself as a typist, and after taking the agency's typing test they agreed.  Now of course back then typing was done almost entirely by women, but I did get a job in a union-trucker-oriented outfit typing motor freight tariffs.  It was tedious work doing mostly boilerplate (if this kind of work still exists it has to have been automated by now) that required speed and absolute accuracy, and I did well enough and made enough money to get a nearby apartment with some roommates and begin living.

As one would expect being male typists, the place was a nest of gay guys, mostly too effeminate for my taste but at least I fit in and easily found roommates.  Now I was thin and young and probably handsome, at least to many guys' taste, and before long a world of sexual opportunity that I had never imagined might exist opened itself up, limited only by my willingness and stamina.