1

My Aunt Edith called me and said her brother, my Uncle Lou, was dead and I should send her $1000 to pay for half his burial expense since he jumped off his hotel roof a couple of days after we met for the first time and she knows I must’ve done something to cause it, but after I hung up without saying anything I thought back to my conversation with Uncle Lou and think I figured out what I’d said that caused him to jump but I never told my Aunt or sent her any money.

2

I kept threatening to run away from home and one day my mother walked into the living room and handed me a bag lunch, my gym bag with a change of clothes, and a $5 bill. “Have a good life,” she said. I stayed away for three weeks and figured I taught her a lesson. I showed up home and after showering first, I came downstairs expecting some love, but she silently handed me another bagged lunch and a $1 bill and opened the front door so I took my 12-year-old ass out on the road again.

3

 I awoke dreading my day of showing an obnoxious family houses again when I knew they were really gathering free decorating tips and had no intention of buying. I told my manager who said I had to do it anyway. I shower, shaved, coffeed, and backed my car out of the garage but the moat I always dreamed of having stopped me from getting to work and I didn’t know how to put down the bridge.

4

I was sitting on a tall chair mid-court judging an all-Orthodox rabbi badminton tournament. Every time I called a shuttlecock out of bounds, or a double racket hit, the two-man rabbi team would run over to my chair, with their black hats and suits shiny from wear, and argue about my call. I never understood them because they were speaking Spanish and I don’t.

5

When I go to bed with a fever I see myself leaping from the second floor to the first floor landing but I wake up mid-air each time and I’m sitting on the first-floor landing.

6

When I was ten years old, we lived in a garden apartment which mirrored the one next door. I went to bathe and there was a hole over the rim of my tub going all the way through to our neighbor’s tub. I watched the mother taking a shower, washclothing her breasts and between her legs and she yelled at me to scoot or she’d tell my mother. I didn’t scoot and she didn’t tell my mother that night or the next three before it was fixed.

7

A friend and I took a train from Connecticut to New York. I spotted my only rich relatives near Rockefeller Center and crossed the street to say hello. My great uncle, great aunt, and their bratty kid all said they didn’t know who I was. I mentioned my mother’s name as well as my grandfather’s who was my great aunt’s brother and others in the family and they knew them but hustled my ragamuffin ass away. I told my mother when I got home and she said I was making it up, but I was so insistent she called and they said no, I never approached them, but they were at Rockefeller center that day and time. To this day I don’t know if I approached them or not.

8

My brother says he’s special because he can dream in color and I can’t so I told him I can dream in 3-D even though it’s in black and white. He says I’m lying and I tell him to prove it.