Working Titles

Working Titles: Memoir of an American Hustler is the true story of one man’s life told through sixty-six different jobs, stitched together across six decades of labor, hustles, and survival. From mowing lawns in Baltimore as a twelve-year-old to serving cocktails in tuxedo tails at the Belvedere Hotel, from scraping fish guts at Lexington Market to owning a café, from slinging beers as a bartender to hauling gasoline in a fuel tanker, Peter Belz has done it all. Some jobs lasted years, others only a few days, but every one left a mark.

This is not a neat career path, and it is not a book about climbing a ladder. It is about falling off scaffolds, patching together bridges from scraps, reinventing yourself over and over just to make rent, and discovering what it really means to survive by any means necessary. Belz’s story is raw, unfiltered, sometimes darkly funny, sometimes heartbreaking, and always honest. It is less a résumé than a demolition site-chaotic, messy, and full of grit.

Along the way, readers meet the unforgettable cast of characters who populated those jobs: eccentric coworkers, shady bosses, drunk regulars, hard-edged truckers, even a decorated British war veteran who once handed Belz a handwritten poem over cocktails. The memoir doesn’t shy away from darker chapters either-addiction, recovery, and the moments when everything seemed ready to collapse. Through it all, humor, stubbornness, and sheer motion kept him moving forward.

Working Titles is for anyone who has ever wondered what it looks like to piece together a life shift by shift, paycheck by paycheck, when one job is never enough and one path never exists. It is a book for readers of Studs Terkel’s Working, Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, or anyone who has lived through the hustle of blue-collar survival. It is a testament to grit, humor, resilience, and the strange mosaic of American work.

This memoir is not a celebration of jobs, but a witness statement to the reality of hustling through them. With sixty-six roles spanning everything from janitor to insurance agent, deli counter man to liquor rep, musician to truck driver, Belz reveals how a lifetime of labor can add up to something more than survival-it can add up to a story worth telling.