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docked Queen Mary in Los Angeles, beef-log sample giver at Swiss Colony, and waitress on the graveyard shift at a coffee shop in San Diego when I was seventeen. I remember that one in particular because of the night a drunk reached up and pinched my nipple through my uniform while I poured him a cup of coffee. Nearby sat the owner of a mid-scale Mexican restaurant located down the street. He regularly stopped in for eggs and an English muffin after his place closed for the night. His restaurant had regular hours and a better clientele, so I approached him and asked for a job, figuring a healthier environment would do me some good. His response was to tell me I was lucky to have the job I had, which caused me to become more angry at him than I was at the nipple-pinching dickwit, because it’s a fathomless insult to tell an idealistic teenager she is “lucky” to make a living that includes having to tolerate being pawed by wasted pigs. In response to his remark, I sat the coffee pot down on his omelet, took off my apron, and left.
    In keeping with the curse of financial foolery I inherited from my parents, I spent the money I made during this period on rounds of margaritas for my friends and dates at the Del Mar racetrack. My recently divorced mother bought a sleek Datsun 260Z, even though she couldn’t drive it because she had broken her left foot while hang gliding in Mexico a month earlier. She could have used that moneyas a down payment on the beachfront condo we were renting at the time, but sixty thousand dollars was “laughably expensive” for a place with only two bedrooms, she said. Today that place is worth half a million.
    These days I still lack knowledge of what to do with money other than pay bills and buy more rounds, but lately I’ve been having a hankering for “holdings,” even though I’m not sure I know what those are. I dream of owning a home of my own. I mean that literally too. In my dreams I’m always checking out houses, assessing their cabinets and ceiling height, their “curb appeal.” None of them are ever right, and I hate it when I have those dreams. I wish I would find a fucking house, even if it’s just in my head, but I keep moving from empty house to empty house and all of them are somehow off, like the view to the beach is blocked or the street out front is too busy or there are no doors . God, I hate those dreams, which always make me feel like I’ll always be homeless.
    But then that feeling fades and eventually I’ll start dreaming different dreams, like I’ll start thinking maybe I can pull it off, this homeownership thing. Maybe I could clean up my credit, save some money, and one day actually own a home of my own. Maybe I will, after all, outlive a gypsy fortune-teller’s recent assessment of me: “You have no trouble acquiring money,” she said as she peered into my palm, “you just have trouble keeping it.” Then she charged me twenty-five dollars.



Eight Naked Strangers
    Recently I was staring at eight naked strangers. One of them was so deeply tanned I’d taken to calling her “Suitcase Face,” another had a body like a pail of paste, another had tits so fake she could use them to caulk bathtub tile. And the men were really laughable. One had a gut so big it hung down low enough to cover up all his naughty bits, and another had no ass at all, just this weird concavity where his butt should have been.
    They were splayed out by the pool, marinating themselves in sunlight like sacrifices offered up to the cancer gods. I hope they didn’t see me up there gawking at them through my window, appreciating one of the perks of scoring a room that overlooked the hotel sundeck on a rare sweltering day in Switzerland. “How did that lady live to be a hundred?” I asked myself, eyeing a wizened twig whose skin had baked into beef jerky. Surely, with all that sun exposure, she’d have grown a sarcomatous tumor the size of a Siamese twin bynow. But then I realized she