Yesterday I thought for an ecstatic ten minutes that I had won $500 dollars.

A long time ago, two months maybe, I'd bought for two dollars one of those scratch-off Lotto games; I must have just gotten fired or something, because I remember  asking the clerk on duty at one of the four stores at which I must have bought it what game yielded the highest percentage of rewards. She told me the Bingo game: fifteen cards, three caller cards, and a half decent chance of winning something that would justify the two dollars spent on the thing.

I'd forgotten how to play Bingo. Except in nursing homes, where, as a part of my job, I was forced to--forced to help the old patients find the right number on their cards. I was on automatic, and my timing, inevitably off. I'd be thinking off into the distance and through the stinking glass: Mrs. Doherty has done number two and needs changing stat, Mr. Chenault probably hasn't had his genitalia inspected--sorry: that part of the job was only slightly more enjoyable than the Bingo one--since seven-thirty in the morning by the smell of him, and Miss Crotty is tuning up in the corner, her dementias awake and turning toward rage. Miss Crotty is a pain in the ass--looks like a chicken and fights like one too.

I read the obits. Two of these three have passed on. I do not work as a nurse's aid any more. My last experience in that capacity left me with a second rectum, and with that, a whole new set of choices. I do not work at all, but need to start again, because not working makes me fat.

I do poorly without money in my pocket, though: money, regardless of how little, and it is always little, lets me ride the big waves back to a point at which possibilities were more real than reality itself and no one wanted of me anything. Once, I was about six, seven years old, and with my mother and her mother Georgia in the Cincinnati airport. I had this little white purse, and in that, a packet of tissue, some kind of taffy, and maybe fifty cents. Though I do not recall the purpose of this excursion, nor whom we were to pick up and escort there, I was hotly aware that I had things to say, and questions to ask, and that the ad-ults were not listening. They talked of mutual friends from their church, and it sounded like some kind of Chinese.

 My eyesight was already going on me, though I did not recognise that fact. I assumed that everyone could not see their blackboards, that the cornfields and sweeping electric wire seen out the window as my father drove us from Pennsylvania to Kentucky were a blurry mess. All this left me with a great horror of getting lost--none of my rescuers appreciated that no I did not see the exit sign, or this sign or that one over there. When my mother and her own informed me that they were going to buy us all sodas, and that I was to remain on the bench where I was sitting, I looked at them. No I would not get up and look around; I would get lost, and lost was something that terrified me, more completely than could any bunch of bullies or crazy neighborhood drunks ever could.

They got up for sodas, having left me nothing to read, no puzzles to hold to my face, putting those down only to fill in answers. So I looked in my little white plastic purse and manipulated its contents. Fingered my fortune of fifty cents. And it was with that that I can remember my first impulse to get up, despite my many fears, and run away. Would fifty cents buy me a plane ticket? I had no idea. But I felt flush, and it was that feeling that kept me seated, demure, on the bench flanked by fake plants with fake soil in real-seeming urns. The vexatious ad-ults, with their strange interests and even stranger languages to express those, had nothing on me and my couple of quarters.

The years of reality, life-on-life's terms, that have intervened, have done little to appease that sense that enough money--and I was the sole arbiter of this--would trump anything the world could throw at me. I am presently in the process of a forced move, one that I must complete by Wednesday. (To explain this would involve exposing one of my two rectii, so I'll pass on that and move on along.) I wanted to drink: I'd recently disinterred from its secret hideyhole a seventy-seven dollar guvm't check. Petty cash from the nation's po-lice, but more than enough for me. I could buy some beer and watch television and fall to sleep quickly and hard. I know that this is true. But every place I tried--there was some serious thumbing involved--turned me down for reasons I didn't comprehend and more to the point, did not want to. I just wanted that cool, fresh green--given the year I've had to date, seventy-seven dollars was quite satisfactory.

My AA acquaintences, Gum Dave in particular, had been rather flippant about my situation. G D had promised me twenty-five--ostensibly for trazadone--and had then shrugged his shoulders and explained how his client had not paid him for some kind of HVAC work, but would on Monday, today, and not to sweat it. Not to sweat it if only for the reason I couldn't change it. At this point, the world had money. Fetuses and clones alike, loaded, flush with that sweet Hawaiian sinse, itself finely threaded with deep fuchsia and green, and hard to duplicate should anyone care to try.

Oh, I was such a muddling mess. In order to put a different spin on my sorrow, I jumped into packing/cleaning with both feet. Made two pots of coffee and drank them one after the other, and then I was rolling. After some time at this, I found it a good idea to take a break. That's where the Bingo cards came in. There were instructions on the back telling the buyer how to play, and since instructions in general confuse me, I had initially scratched off two or three of those. I'd thought of seeking to exchange that game for two others, even though the winning pots looked better than Brangelina ever could. When I resumed this, I forced myself to go another round with the instructions, and this time, found them not Chinese at all. Coin in hand, I scratched off the caller's card, one of these for each five games, fifteen games in all. Surely I had a decent chance of winning something--as it emerged, five hundred bucks, courtesy of an X-formation. I was looking forward to Christmas.

Excitement, and those factors that drive it, can do unexpected things to some people: me, it scrambled my damaged brain further. After I had  misplaced the just-found card in my bedroom, and then located it again, I motored smugly, glutes pumping, up Vur-Sales Road, to the store at which I'd first bought the thing. Thrust it smugly at the teenaged clerk's face. She did something with it, ran it through a slot at the base of the register, and turned to me. "Not a winner," is what she said.

Both humiliated and certain that a mistake had been made, I took it to the store adjacent, a Bengali-run BP. Handed it to the man, and he does the same thing as the Speedway girl, and tells me somewhat apologetically, that I'm a loser. ("No shit" seemed like the thing for me to say, but I didn't say it, for the man didn't exactly say the word "loser". He just parrotted what the first clerk said.) One card, two judgements. Not a winner. So I asked the guy for a pen, if he had one, and bent over the counter to proof my choices. And what I found was some interesting booty, for I had done that thing that can throw the most gifted SAT taker: I'd marked the puzzles with the wrong card. I do't know how I did this, and do not want to do it again. And still I had no money.

That's changed, a little. I'm out of time. Will elaborate, if I can work up the steam now to care.-