You may listen to Sedaris read this selection: RealAudio 2.0, 14.4.

THE DAY AFTER GRADUATING FROM COLLEGE, I found fifty dollars in the foyer of my Chicago apartment building.... It occurred to me then that if I played my cards right, I might never have to find a job. People lost things all the time. They left class rings on the sinks of public bathrooms and dropped gem-studded earrings at the doors of the opera house. My job was to keep my eyes open and find these things. I didn't want to become one of those coots who combed the beaches of Lake Michigan with a metal detector, but if I paid attention and used my head, I might never have to work again.

The following afternoon...I found twelve cents and an unopened tin of breath mints. Figuring in my previous fifty dollars, that amounted to an average of twenty-five dollars and six cents per day, which was still a decent wage.

The next morning I discovered two pennies and a comb matted with short curly hairs. The day after that I found a peanut. It was then that I started to worry.

I have known people who can quit one job and find another in less time than it takes to quarter a fryer. Regardless of their experience, these people exude charm and confidence. The charm is something they were either born with or had beaten into them at an early age, but what gives them their confidence is the knowledge that someone like me has also filed an application. Mine is a history of almosts. I can type, but only with one finger, and have never touched a computer except to clean it. I never learned to drive, which eliminates delivery work and narrows my prospects to jobs located on or near the bus line. I can sort of hammer things together but have an ingrained fear of electric saws, riding lawn mowers, and any motorized equipment louder or more violent than a vacuum cleaner.... I lack the size and bulk to be a guard and the aggression necessary for store detectives, crossing guards, and elementary schoolteachers. Years ago I had waited on tables, but it was the sort of restaurant where customers considered the phrase "Have a good day" to be an acceptable tip....

When luck was with me I tended to stumble into jobs, none of which were the type to hand out tax statements at the end of the year. People gave me money and I spent it. As a result, I seemed to have fallen through some sort of crack. You needed certain things to secure a real job, and the longer you went without them, the harder it was to convince people of your worth. Why can't you work a cash register or operate a forklift? How is it you've reached the age of thirty and still have no verifiable employment record? Why are you sweating so, and what force compels you to obsessively activate your cigarette lighter throughout the course of this interview? These questions were never spoken but rather were implied every time a manager turned my application face down on his desk.

I leafed through the Art Institute's outdated employment notebook, and page by page it mocked my newly acquired diploma. Most of the listings called for someone who could paint a mural or enamel a map of Normandy onto a medallion the size of a quarter. I had no business applying for any of these jobs or even attending the Art Institute in the first place, but that's the beauty of an art school: as long as you can pay the tuition, they will never, even in the gentlest way, suggest that you have no talent. I was ready to pack it in when I came across the number of a woman who wanted her apartment painted. Bingo. I had plenty of experience there. If anything, I was considered too meticulous a painter. As long as she supplied the ladder and I could carry the paint on the bus, I figured I was set.

The woman began by telling me she had always painted the apartment herself. "But I'm old now. It hurts my hands to massage my husband's feet, let alone lift a heavy brush over my head. Yes, sir, I'm old. Withered and weak as a kitten. I'm an old, old woman." She spoke as if this were something that had come upon her with no prior notice. "All the sudden my back gives out, I'm short of breath, and some days I can't see more than two feet in front of my face."

This was sounding better all the time.

Naked is published by Little, Brown and Company and is available at many local bookstores.

Sedaris on Midmorning