I got my first job when I was fourteen, ringing bells for the Salvation Army, a job that combined just about everything I hated: standing for hours in frigid weather, asking strangers for money, and grinding, mind-numbing boredom. I thought constantly of quitting, but the thrill of earning my own money kept me going. I did love getting paid, licking my thumb and flipping through a stack of cash, smelling the rich odor of old bills, my wallet heavy and fat in my pants pocket.

For a short time, I felt rich. I bought many Star Wars action figures, model planes, an electric race track, pounds of candy bars, tape cassettes and movie tickets. I spent half of one paycheck on a Sony Walkman, sleek and futuristic. When I wasn't spending money I was thinking about spending it. So I kept ringing bells hour after hour, shifting from foot to foot, humiliated and bored out of my mind.

This was the Winter of 1984, a two years after my family moved onto a mountaintop southeast of Fayetteville. We'd been living on that five wooded acres without electricity or running water ever since I turned 12, building a house with scraps and castoff lumber, relying on food stamps after my father's back gave out and he could no longer work. Living on the hill had started as an adventure, an extended camping trip, but by the time I was in 9th grade I was tired of living as if the apocalypse had come and gone.

With a houseful of boys with ravenous appetites, my mother took a job sorting clothes at the Salvation Army Thrift Store.

What many people don't know is that the Salvation Army is primarily a church, but one that uses military organization and nomenclature, so instead of preachers, there are commanding officers. Instead of a deacon, a Corps Sergeant Major, and so on. The man running the Fayetteville corps was a Captain, a big, barrel-chested man with a bowl of thick blonde hair on his head. Everybody called him Captain Jensen.

Captain Jensen had a son, Tim, who was my age, and it wasn't long before we became friends. Often as I could arrange it, I spent the night at the Jensen's house in Fayetteville. While my parents and brothers sat around a wood stove back home, the walls flickering with light from oil lamps, I'd be watching cable television in a house with central air and a refrigerator full of food. The Jensen's had stacks of sodas in their cabinets and bags of chips and cookies lying around unopened; in our house my brothers and I devoured everything that came through the door. Tim seemed to own every Star Wars action figure and every toy, from the Mos Eisely Creature Cantina to the Ewok Village playset. He also had an Atari system along with a caseful of games. After a big dinner at the dining table with Tim and his parents, I would have my first hot shower in weeks and then he and I would unroll sleeping bags in the living room and stay up late watching HBO or playing Atari, drinking can after can of soda. Once Tim fell asleep, I'd stay awake for hours, wired on caffeine, playing Space Invaders or flipping through channels in search of nudity or explosions. At some point deep in the night I'd turn off the television and lie awake in the dark, listening to the heater kick on and off, imagining my parents were dead and I'd been adopted by the Jensen's. After a time, these fantasies left me so sick with guilt and self-loathing I'd wake up the next morning certain something terrible had happened while I was away, that I would come home to burned-out rubble, my family gone forever.

The first night I worked ringing bells, Tim's father picked me up at my house in the country and dropped me off at the K-Mart on College Avenue just before two in the afternoon. He told me he'd be back at ten, that I should leave my kettle with customer service when I took my bathroom and dinner breaks. Then he helped me set up the kettle stand and drove off.

It was about thirty degrees, a clear day. I zipped up my coat and started ringing the bell.

For eight hours I stood shivering in the cold, clanging that little bell. It was a busy night, and one after another customers streamed inside and back out a little while later, whole families I'd see come and go with carts overflowing, old men in fur-lined caps, women with shopping lists, couples holding hands, scruffy men in filthy shirts and camouflage ball caps, many children and babies and several of my junior high classmates, including the beautiful and lanky Leia Richards. In all, hundreds of customers every hour, some who stopped to say a word about the weather and drop change into the kettle, others who pretended I was invisible and hurried in adjusting their watches or fussing over their kids. Many called out Merry Christmas. Others said nothing, dropping coins or cash into the kettle like an admission fee.

How strange a thing it was to stand there as these people approached the store, their minds already on their purchases, their desires. It didn't take long to realize my job was to make them feel guilty.

Philosophers and psychologists agree that time is pliable, variable in speed. Like the wind-chill factor, what matters to us is how something seems. Try holding your hand over a flame to see how long five seconds can be, or take a professional massage and watch sixty minutes roll past. After a while, in part because of this unpleasant tension I felt between the shoppers and me, those eight-hour shifts ringing bells seemed to last three days.

To get through the boredom and cold of those long nights I started going places in my head, telling myself stories, making up songs about the shoppers passing by, rhymes I sang under my breath in time with the ringing bell. Another trick was to imagine each swing of my arm launched tiny, heat-seeking missiles at shoppers and passing cars, as if I were playing an video arcade game with the entire parking lot as my screen. Other times I simply watched the sky darken, counting stars and thinking about the cosmos, my future, or how I would spend my next paycheck.

Some nights were very cold. After twenty minutes I'd be chilled, my toes and fingers aching. I started taking extra bathroom breaks to run air from the hand dryer into my gloves to warm them.

By my third week ringing bells, the nights grew colder and my unauthorized breaks got longer and longer. Eventually, I wouldn't go back outside for hours, wandering the K-Mart instead, walking aisle by aisle and pawing over merchandise. I can't explain how marvelous the place seemed to me, then. Understand for a poor kid raised in the woods without television even a small-town K-Mart can exceed the scope of his knowledge and desire. It was all new, all fantastic. I read car magazines and comics from the racks, examined the fish tanks, learning the names of exotic freshwater species. I compared specs of the rifles behind glass and hefted boxes of ammunition in my hand. I fiddled with display stereo systems and dug through crates of jumbled cassette tapes. I bought nachos and hot chocolate and called dial-a-prayer on the pay phone for an excuse to make a call.

Spending so much time in the store put a dent in my donations. One night I took in so little money Captain Jensen drove home in a sour mood, dropping unfriendly hints about employees keeping their hands out of the kettle. Next time I saw Tim, he said his dad didn't want me sleeping over anymore. A week before Christmas I got the flu and quit.

These days, when I find myself shopping near Christmastime and hear the tinkling of a bell, I think back to my first job with a measure of shame. For one thing, I never considered where those donations were going. After all, the Salvation Army does a lot of good in the world, paying electricity bills for the poor, housing the homeless, serving coffee and food during emergencies. And in the commercialized, craven and soulless landscape of the American Christmas Season, the red kettle is a lonely and scorned symbol of true charity. There is something noble and defiant about reminding people of their obligation to others.

But I worked the job only to satiate my desire for candy and frivolities. And what is worse, it never occurred to me that I might share my earnings, even help out with living costs at home. My mother's job brought in little, and some months my parents couldn't even afford the small escrow payment for our five acres. With five kids in the home, keeping food in the cabinets was always an issue. There were the couple hundred dollars of food stamps each month, but after one shopping trip, most of it would be gone and the rest of the month would be tight again.

I remind myself that I was young, that perhaps I should not expect myself to have overcome so early the selfishness common to all children of loving parents, the never-questioned certainty that my parent's only job and only ambition is to provide for me and therefore what was mine was mine alone. They certainly never asked for the money and likely would not have accepted it--they had heard what my teachers said about my potential; they knew I would be the one to leave their world for something better--but what galls me is that I never thought to offer.

Now, more than twenty years later, middle class and educated, the abandonment of my family complete and irreversible, I hear the ringing bell and wish I had made better choices, wish I'd found a better reason to stand those cold and slow-gone hours.