The Third Personality: A Novel (32)

RALEIGH, North Carolina - Tom Mendelson sighed, put down the unwelcome letter from Castine, Maine and grabbed his baseball glove. He then ambled out the door of his one-bedroom apartment.

His tiny apartment was located out in the sticks off of Capitol Boulevard in north Raleigh: as in, North Carolina, of all places!

It just seemed so surreal at times. Here he was, working as an electric pallet jack operator-slash-warehouse receiving clerk for a computer board manufacturer - without benefits, and being paid through a temporary employment agency. For $7.50/hour!

If Tom ever saw that Delta Airlines ticket agent he'd run into in southern Maine - the one who'd told him without blinking an eye that, hands-down, the single best East Coast location for jobs (particularly for "older" workers, like Tom) was in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina (which turned out to be two totally separate and unrelated cities, more than 15 miles apart…) - …if Tom ever ran into that guy again, well: He'd say something foul.


It wasn't that Raleigh was such a bad place, per se (even though it was hardly a mecca for pro sports or entertainment; but, then, neither was Maine). It was that it felt so foreign.

For starters, it was completely landlocked, except for some lakes as you headed further north toward the Virginia state line; and Tom was an oceans kind of guy. Secondly, the accents - the nasal twang: the "Thank yoo!'s" young cash register girls always said to you as you walked out the door of their establishments - made him either laugh or cringe, depending on his mood. And then there were the foreboding differences in politics … at least from what Tom was used to in South Florida and Maine. Raleigh, word had it, was the most openly liberal city in North Carolina, if one could believe that; yet "liberal" or not, he found the politics in Raleigh very Southern Baptist, very Pro Tobacco, very white - and very This-is-God's-country, a phrase he'd heard voiced a lot.