THE LAST DAYS OF THE BUSBOY BIKERS is Book 1 in the series The Vitality of Seeing Life.

After high school graduation, and before starting college, David Martel was persuaded by his best friend to work with him at The Hungry Coyote Café which serves families by day and refugees from bars and strip clubs by night.

David experiences quirky cooks, bossy waitresses, lazy busboys, snooty customers, and misadventures with the Busboy Bikers. His love life seems to improve with a sassy theatre snack-bar attendant, but when he works his first night shift, she arrives amid raucous fanfare in a company of exotic strippers. Then his college of choice claims not to have his paperwork for the Fall Semester, and aware that the Vietnam draft is increasing, he struggles to sort everything out before he is drafted or is compelled financially to work with the only job skill he has until the Spring Semester begins.

SUMMER DEPARTURES is Book 2 in the series The Vitality of Seeing Life.

At the end of a post-grad week in a Newport Beach cottage, David Martel’s college friends are leaving for professional careers, as is his girlfriend who surprises with a gleefully delivered humiliating goodbye. Not so David, who’s dozen applications for an editing or writing job have yet to produce interviews.

Strong-willed women abound with comedic overtones as an impromptu backyard tryst is interrupted by a vacuum cleaner salesman, a going-away party for a former girlfriend where he is the only guest and his college degree is mocked by her high-school dropout brother who lives off vulnerable women, and when taken in hand by a wildly impulsive rock and roll beauty, he finds himself along for the ride until she ultimately moves on and up, but along the way her confidences gives him insight into what is beneath the glam and glitter, and of his own rightful place in life.

The job rejections trickle in, and a reunion with his successful college friends causes him to realize he must take his fate in hand if he is to achieve his dream of professional writer.