A Boston Globe reporter spent eight nights as a licensed cabbie in Boston to get a “driver’s side view of Boston’s taxi industry,” which mostly consists of immigrants struggling to get by.

Laboring 12 to 24 hours a day as independent contractors, without job protections or benefits, they will endure shifts of public service and private indignities, outsized risk and systemic exploitation.

Many will be cheated by their taxi owners and customers. They will confront hazards more potent than potholes: violent crime, distracted and impaired drivers, and their own debilitating fatigue.

South Circular Road, Dublin, Ireland; August 1999-June 2000; My share: 375 Euros/month
When the cab driver dropped me off at my new home, he warned me about the neighborhood. “Oh, no, love, you don’t want to live here,” he said. “It’s not safe.” He pointed down the road to Dolphin’s Barn, rough and drug-ridden. I was 20, nervous, and excited. I asked if he thought I’d be okay. “Oh, love, I’d move if I were you,” he replied. I’m glad I didn’t. I shared the narrow house for 11 months with an Italian guy named Corrado who played the organ at the church down the street, and got perfumed love letters from a girl in Hungary; a German heartthrob named Jens who is the only person I know who looked good in leather pants, and two French guys, Christian, a broody smoker of Gauloises who gave up on trying to learn English, and Benj, fussy and rigid, who made a cleaning schedule for all of us to maintain, and cooked cassoulets that bubbled in the pot for hours. We had family dinners once a week. At the first one, all of us strangers, we talked about the stereotypes of each housemate’s home country. What they say about leaving a place in order to know it turns out to be true.

Baltimore Ave, Philadelphia, Pa.; September 2000-May 2001; My share: $600/month
I shared this off-campus row house with six others during my senior year of college, including the Irish boyfriend I brought back to the U.S. with me. It was a good block to live in, and was away from the buttoned-up soon-to-be investment bankers that dominated the college where I went and mostly hated. I logged a lot of hours on the stoop. Late in the spring, closing in on graduating, I sat on the stoop with a housemate in the early mornings, and watched the Amoroso’s bread trucks drive by as they made their roll deliveries for all the steak and cheese subs in the city. We went to bed those mornings when the light shifted to gray.

Memorial Drive, Cambridge, Mass.; November 2001-June 2002 $0/month
After graduating, I lived at my grandmother’s sixth floor apartment in Cambridge. It looked over the Charles River, which curved below her balcony and the Boston skyline some miles away. There was a garbage chute. It was not a comfortable time (I was dumb, young and looking for jobs), nor was it a comfortable place to live in—in the sense of being surrounded by objects that were not my own. There were rules. The beds, for example, were not for lovemaking.

Sunset Street, Mission Hill, Boston, Mass.; June 2002-August 2002; My share: $525/month
The summer I started working, I sublet a room in Mission Hill with a couple whose names I don’t remember and a music theorist named Kyle who came from the South and was gentle and strange and drank for three days straight, while pacing in his room, talking to himself, listening to Smashing Pumpkins and Eric Satie. We watched The Seventh Seal together and, on moving out, he handed me a letter which was filled with kindness and concern, and made me grateful. I came home from work and drank tea, sweating in my bedroom while the sun went down behind the buildings.

Hillside Street, Mission Hill, Boston, Mass.; September 2002-December 2003; My share: $325/month
It started out as a post-college dream: A big, old beautiful house with a swing on the front porch, and flowers and vines that spread and wrapped. A huge kitchen, a dishwasher!, a back porch, a living room with huge windows, long drapes, a sweeping staircase. A friend of a friend lived there, he and five others, seven of us all told. I had the smallest room, tiny, with a dormer window. Some of the original roommates moved out, new ones arrived, dynamics changed. Things soured when I found out that one of the housemates, a grad student at the Harvard School of Public Health, had been taping sexual encounters with unknowing women and holding screenings for the rest of the guys in the house.

Memorial Drive, Cambridge, Mass.; January 2004-March 2004 $0/month
I was back at my grandmother’s for a stretch of strange months after fleeing Mission Hill. I don’t remember when the front door of the building was locked, and you had to be let in by the doorperson, but I do remember coming home often, late, and drunk, and standing in front of the sliding door, knocking to wake up the doorman, who was asleep in his chair at the desk.

Amory Street, Cambridge, Mass.; April 2004-September 2008; My share: $700/month
I moved in with my greatest friend Jenny. The two-bedroom place just outside Inman Square was on the first floor of a typical Boston triple decker. The rhinoceros of a landlady lived with her cowering husband on the third floor, and her screaming tirades could be heard even in the winter with the windows closed. Jenny and I laughed a lot of the time, had short, spontaneous dance parties which were a specific joy, and went out together every Monday night. I sat on the toilet while Jenny showered, and vice-versa, and we’d chat about our days in the steam. We called it a Boston marriage and made a pact that some day, if we end up widowed, we will share a home again which will involve secret underground tunnels.

Eldridge Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan, N.Y.; October 2008-January 2009; My share: $900/month
My young brother Sam, a senior in college, had a vacant room in his apartment. I rented it out for some winter months, desperate and scared, with a mattress on the floor, having quit my job of seven years, and having no idea what was next. His other roommate, a high-end cocktail waitress, came clomping home in high-heeled boots at five or six in the morning, and I loathed her the only way you can when someone wakes you up again and again in a time when sleep does not come easy.

Pembroke Street, Somerville, Mass.; April 2009-June 2010 $1,150/month
This was on the third floor of a crumbling old Victorian with slanting ceilings and good breezes. I loved this apartment, and had it all to myself. A professional jazz pianist from France lived below me—the music trickled up the stairs, and it was a pleasure to hear him practice. I ran into him on the porch one afternoon. His wife had had a baby just days before, and he looked tired. I told him congratulations, and asked how it was going. He shook his head and said, “It is difficult. The baby, it looks like a rodent.”

Putnam Avenue, Cambridge, Mass.; June 2010-now; My share: $625
I share this small one-bedroom with my partner Jonah in Cambridgeport, near the river, near Central Square and all the ne’er-do-wells, near Harvard Square, and just across the BU Bridge from Fenway Park. We cook meals, and talk about moving, but it’s hard to leave: There are parks and good neighbors, and we can walk most places that we need and like. Our rent is low for this part of town, and we can’t afford to live in a bigger place around here. It feels like the first home of any real permanence of my grown-up life, a small place with plumbing troubles and bright walls and good smells. There is the sense, already, that once we do leave, this place will be looked back on as favorite and best.

Nina MacLaughlin lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She’s working on a book about leaving journalism to be a carpenter to be published by W.W. Norton.

Tyler Street, Boston, Mass. $450
This place always smelled like chicken fingers, and we had an ex-con with gangrene in his ankle who slept on our couch. My entire stay—from the day my terrified mom dropped off my record collection to the unceremonious and not-entirely-explained eviction notice—was a depraved vacation between novelty shop jobs during that whole post-9/11-malaise phase we all went through. There were lots of Wild Irish Rose, Twin Peaks on VHS and a roommate who saved the ass-end of all his King Cobra forties in the fridge for days when he was broke. Even though it was a particularly cold winter, the hookers would be out most nights walking the icy sidewalks in the last chunk of Chinatown still known as the Combat Zone. Let’s just say it was a perfectly romantic and destitute stopover, but not exactly a place you wanted to live for very long no matter how big your Bukowski-Burroughs-Bangs boner is. Mine was huge.

Ellingwood Street, Boston, Mass. $400
The turnover rate at this swanky hillside art school flophouse was pretty steep: eight roommates in my 10 months there, plus all of the hook-ups, friends, friends of friends and bands sleeping on the floor who were friends of the friends’ friends. I was managing a shop at a tourist mall named Wacky Planet/Lefty World. The money was sort of okay, and I was living pretty large for a rudderless college dropout—lots of mid-priced booze, first pressing Cramps records and expensive tofu. It was pretty ideal until a subletter—who was planning to “sneak into Cuba on a freight train”, mind you—stole all my stuff. Things got weird after that. Then the Leftorium closed (just like in “When Flanders Failed”), and it was time for me to skip town. How I chose to move from the bustling metropolis of Boston to the creepy, sleepy college town of Murfreesboro, Tenn. is a convoluted story (there’s moonshine, cat poop and a Magnetic Fields show all in there, somewhere), but it came highly recommended by an anarcho-punk bass player who slept on our floor once.

Chamberlain Avenue, Murfreesboro, Tenn. $325
I am a master of foresight and good planning, and I’ve based major life changes on worse things than the opinion of anarcho-carnies. In 2003, I decided to go back to school to study music business and journalism. Because if you’re going to pick one dying industry to major in, you might as well back it up with an industry that’s in even worse shape and move halfway across the continent to do it. The apartment, a janky screened porch/attic combo that probably shouldn’t have been an apartment, was spartan and serviceable but, most importantly, my own. I’d had enough of communal living for a while. I couldn’t find work, my savings dried up and I was living on white rice and black coffee. On one of my last nights there, I watched a tornado rip the roof off a gas station from my bedroom—ill-advised for sure, but definitely one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. And, yes, I know how dangerous that was, I swear, but it’s not like the rest of the apartment was safer in the storm.

Fairview Avenue, Murfreesboro, Tenn. $250
“Those harlots, those trollops, those sluts in their pants!” This was how my neighbor, Euda Ann, greeted Mandi, my wife, the first time she ever came over for dinner. Eventually we’d realize that sitting in the dark, rocking back and forth on her porch swing screaming about sinners was Euda Ann’s thing, but it was freaky at first. Local legend said she had killed an abusive husband in the late ’60s and spent a few years in an asylum getting electroshock therapy. It was difficult not to believe—toothless, wild-eyed with an deep country accent, Euda Ann was like the serial-killer matriarch from Central Casting. In reality, she was a nice lady with a lot of problems—her son confirmed the electroshock, I didn’t ask if she stabbed the shit out of his dad—but I’m still shocked that Mandi ever agreed to a second date.

Fairview Avenue (Part II), Murfreesboro, Tenn. $250
Eventually Mandi, who didn’t “live” with me, technically, and didn’t play music, and Linwood, my roommate/bandmate, and I got sick of living next to Deliverance and decided to upgrade our crazy neighbors. So we added a roommate, another bandmate, Rick, and moved a block over to where all the tenants were musicians, and where band practices, house shows and general debauchery could rage until the wee hours. It was essentially the Greek Row of art-rocker anti-frats, and we lived in an almost-squalid pile of equipment, records and empty beer cans against a back drop of Z-grade movies and free jazz. Again, I’m not entirely sure why Mandi stuck around.

N. Spring Street, Murfreesboro, Tenn. $225
The first apartment Mandi and I shared together sans Linwood was a total shit-show. Our neighbor Sandy, another toothless old townie with supertanker sized issues, would shit in her pants and sit on the porch of our triplex, just drinking Coke and eating ice cream while waiting for someone to tell her that she shit her pants. And she wore the same sweatpants every day, which, eww. The apartment itself was a poorly-split house with disintegrating drop-ceiling (a stack of Hustlers from ’84 fell through once), a salmon-colored living room with evergreen carpeting, and this mysterious black ooze that dripped out of the breaker box. Right after graduation, Mandi got a job in the city, and I followed suit. We bounced with a quickness…

Norway Terrace, Nashville, Tenn. (Free? A little bit of my soul?)
…and we moved in with her mother, who bought a brand new Doberman-Rottweiler puppy the day we moved in. New roommates and new puppies are a great combination. That puppy loved me and would show it’s love by urinating on me at every opportunity. Oh, hi puppy, nice to see y…eww. Good morning, puppy! Yes I’ll snuggle, you make the bed so…ick, warm. Fuck it, I needed to change my shoes anyway. The dog was a spazz of epic proportions. I did a lot of laundry, and used a lot of paper towels. Mandi and I found our own place in record time. I’m not what sure happened to the dog, but I’m pretty sure she’s pissing on another family now. Or she might have been put down—nobody really liked that dog except for me.

Blair Blvd, Nashville, Tenn. $800 split down the middle
This was 500 square feet of mid-century modern love! In the previous two moves, Mandi and I had managed to jettison most of our possessions. Do you really need much more than a bed, a TV and record collection? This place seemed huge and empty for a long time, even though it was, for all intents and purposes, pretty tiny. Mandi and I tied the knot that fall. It was a low-key Frankenstein-themed event. We eventually acquired a few things: a dining room table! A desk! A cat! But I also lost my cushy corporate music gig, and started freelance music writing full-time, so that ground to a halt real fucking fast. Our neighbors were crazy, but not too crazy (the bipolar Counting Crows fan was kind of annoying) and the neighborhood was great, but the lure of more space and less rent was too hard to pass up.

Norway Terrace, Nashville, Tenn. $760 split 50/50
So we’re back at the MIL’s crib. We really don’t need this much space, and living on a cul-de-sac is weird, but there’s no real complaints here. I find myself mumbling a Descendents “I want to be stereotyped/I want to be classified” mantra every time I pull in the driveway, because that’s what aging punk rockers who suddenly find themselves in suburbia do, I guess. The plan had always been to escape the suburbs, but I’ve also never been good at sticking to plans and it seems to have worked out for the best. It’s a working class neighborhood with a lot of immigrants and lots of good, cheap food, and an unspoken agreement that listening to your stereo really loud with your windows down is a-okay. We had square footage to fill so we, like good little suburbanites, bought Mandi a cheap drum set and started a band. We’re loud and bad, but the neighbors don’t seem to mind as long as we wrap up practice at a reasonable hour.

Sean L. Maloney doesn’t play guitar that well. But his wife can’t really play drums, so it works out alright.