Queenan remembers taking the opportunity to read during late night shifts at a bubble gum factory. "I would volunteer to climb up into an overhead funnel and scour it, which the older ... full-time employees were loath to do," he wrote. "Some of them feared heights; all of them feared ladders. Once ensconced in my stainless-steel crow's nest 鈥� whose filth or cleanliness no one down below was in any position to verify 鈥� I would stir up a bit of a ruckus every so often, creating the impression that I was getting on with the housecleaning job, and then settle in amidst the sugar and the debris and read F. Scott Fitzgerald all night."
