The $89,000 in my Checking Account . . .

I am sitting here, alone in my sparse bedroom, looking at the balance in my checking account.

It’s $89,000.

It’s not mine. More than $55,000 belongs to the Federal Government. The rest, about $35,000, goes to the State of California. Capital Gains, unmet by the discount for moving away and leasing my house for four years.

I needed the money, to survive. A part of my San Francisco life had come to an end, but not quite as long as I held onto the house. Now, it’s gone. I purchased the loft in 1995. About $250,000. Sold it for $995,000. Powerful investment, you say?

Not so much. I looked up how hard it would be to move to Ireland this morning. A bit hard, unless I had a job. Perhaps I could go onto an Irish Dating Site and meet someone, be whisked away to a grey-with-cool-mold and ivy covered castle perched on a cliff above the sea . . . Too Heathcliff.

Two things hurt my feelings this morning.

I loved my 30 years in San Francisco. And, while the move was a good idea at the moment, the selling is not so bad.  I didn’t end up in broke Oklahoma or Kansas [these places have become third world with Republicans in charge . . . ]

Republicans. Their new leader has not paid taxes since God threw the unworthy into the sea. He will lower taxes for those richer than Satan himself, all hot and groping with stringy fingers. He didn’t win the most votes. But, this doesn’t do me or the people I care about, any good.

This hurts. I would rather give the money to help people get educated . . . those steel workers, coal miners who only know how to dig the dirty stuff out of the ground. I’d send them to school to learn something  21st century . . . as fossil fuels are not going to last forever. And how much steel can you push in one day, as opposed to installing solar panels?  Or learning a new language? Or opening your own business?

I would rather give the money to set up wellness clinics, keep people healthy, as we are all about the loose the affordability of healthcare. Over the past 18 months, I didn’t have to pay for a mammogram, annual checkup, colonoscopy, about $3000 per year extra . . . but gone when Affordable becomes “Pay for it, you sucker.” If Social Security had been ‘private’ in 2008, we would all be poorer than peons in Mexico.

I would rather set up a quiet place, on a cliff overlooking the sea . . . which I would have, if $89,000 were to be mine. I would purchase. I would pay taxes. I would support a community and, best of all, give back.

Now, all I have to give is a link to places that have been set up to help people cope with the end-of-democracy as we know it . . .

I’m laughing. And will be until 2018, when – gerrymandering and voter suppression aside – we might have a chance to get America back from a disaster worse than what the Bush Depression left us with in 2008.

I’m laughing and want to shake Obama’s hand for pulling us out, in spite of Republican opposition from the first night of his inauguration. Obama didn’t go far enough, but I want to thank him anyway.

I am laughing as I shredded all my credit cards. I owe not a penny. I urge you to do the same, as the regulations set up to protect consumers from bank fraud and worse, this regulations will disappear faster than Affordable Healthcare.

Now, it will take some time to find the right pen – a fountain pen loaded with charcoal ink that stays on your hands for about a week after you’ve spilled it on the back of the checkbook.

Then off to the mailbox. Which one? The one down by the sea, not far from a little house that I could have put a down payment on, and finished my novel in the little office with a view.

Oh stop, I can write here. In my little room. Stay tuned.

Uber La Bohème.

I have two categories for early Sunday morning Uber fares:  Uber of Shame and Uber of Fame. I try to avoid Ubering in the wee hours so I don’t have to play Shame vs Fame roulette. Last Sunday, fear of scraping the bottom of my bank account overcame the voice of common sense: “Don’t turn that thing on. Wait until noon. Give them a chance to shower.”

It’s the end of the month. Roulette won. I activated Uber Driver at 7:47 am Sunday. Ping! Wendy needs a ride.

The fare was up the hill, in a half-baked gated community. No little house with a uniformed guard and clipboard – just a gate and a call box. Wendy hadn’t texted the code to me by the time I arrived. I had to call.

“Hello.” A low whisper, the don’t-wake-up-the-baby-kind.

“Hi, Wendy. This is Jean. Your Uber driver. I need the code for the gate to get in so I can pick you up.”

“There’s a gate?”

“I should have texted,” Now, I’m whispering.

“No, it’s all good . . . ”  I could hear a man’s voice, close to the phone.

A car cut in front of me, the gates opened. “Hey, Wendy! A car just went through the gates. I’m sneaking in.”

One minute later I pulled into a driveway and parked facing three garage doors. I waited four minutes then began to worry. Was it the right house? Had she been strangled?  Just as I was about to call again, the center garage door began to rise.

Like an exhibition at an exotic car convention, the door slid upward revealing the rear of a black Mercedes Maybach 600. A couple was embracing by the driver’s side door. The woman was barefoot, on her toes, holding her sandals in her left hand. Her right arm was resting across his shoulders, her fingers digging into a crop of black curls.

I’ve played this scene. It’s not an ordinary goodbye. It’s a new category of goodbye – for one, an aloha; for another, simply good, bye-bye. If it’s aloha on both sides, it’s magic.

Wendy turned and nodded to me. I gave her the thumbs up. It was like browsing the Bodice Ripping novel section at Barnes and Noble.

She extricated her arm from beneath the curls, then headed toward me. He took a step, touched her shoulder, she turned and they embraced again. Before he kissed her, he peered around her, pointed to me and said something. I couldn’t read his lips, or hear him.

Seconds later, Wendy was in the rear seat. “Let’s get out of here. Thank god you’re here. I’ve been trying to get Uber since 7:30 am . . . before he woke up. But he did and wants to fix me coffee. Wants to fix me breakfast. I don’t want breakfast. Where am I? It’s pretty here. I just want to go home.”

We headed up to I5. I could hear her iPhone message ringtone. Little train whistles.

“Oh god, he’s texting me. Oh god. He’s Italian. I’m Italian. Where am I? I went out last night with my pals. He was with his pals. Somehow, we all ended up at his house. Then, everyone left, except me. Nothing happened, except for the tour of the indoor pool, the paddle ball court, the five bedrooms and pool hall. Oh god, he’s texting me again. Did I tell you he’s Italian? I’m Italian. All Italians talk with hands and eyes, but he yells. I’m loud, but he yells. Didn’t you hear what he told you?”

“He wanted you to know that nothing happened. And, that you are to get me home safely.”

My universal mother thing kicked in. “I think you’ve got a live one.”

“A LOUD one. He yells. ‘Why are you going?’ ‘I could fix breakfast for you.’ ‘Don’t you want some coffee?’ ‘Please don’t go.’ I can’t listen to all that yelling.”

“Maybe he’s deaf. Or, has wax in his ears?”

“No. It’s his voice. Now, what? Oh, here’s another text. He wants to know if we’re still on for dinner on Tuesday.”

We were almost to her house. I turned off PCH and headed up one of those 45-degree Laguna hills. “Are you going to dinner with him?”

“Maybe. Right now, I just want to go home.”

The mother thing again: “Wendy, I’ll bet your the only woman who has ever jumped up, called Uber and left him on a Sunday morning. You’ve hit him in the male-ego-furry parts.”

One more thing: “If you do go out on Tuesday, I suggest a restaurant with the acoustics of the Hollywood Bowl.”

PS. I now have a new category: Uber La Bohème.

What Happens in Vegas . . .

My rider flew down the steps, his body taught and lanky, bicep muscles poking out from below the sleeves of his T-shirt.

Obviously it wasn’t Marge, the name on the Uber ping.

He slid into the shotgun seat and pulled a cold bottle of Bud Light from his backpack.

My best mother voice: “You’re not going to open that, are you?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, dearie. Spoil such a lovely lovely lovely Uber lady. Why would I? See, it’s between me legs, it is. Safe and sound. Why would you worry?”

Oh, there were so many ways to answer that, but I never got the chance.

“Name’s Kai, from Sydney. You know, Sidney? Of course you do. I’m on a quest, my dear, a quest to capture the woman of my dreams.”

Said woman was 25 miles north of the coast, deep within the bowels of Coto de Caza, through the portals of Aliso Viejo. An address on Shady Hollow Lane.

“Shady Hollow Lane, straight out of Brothers Grimm, I say. Ever heard of it, Shady Lane? My princess, in a tower, and me a professional personal trainer. It was fate, that I would train to gain the strength to climb to rescue her. Did I tell you I’m an actor? People don’t believe me, but I’m rather famous in Australia. Name’s Kai. My day job, my day job’s a personal trainer.”

He took a breath. Before I could ask him how his name was spelled, or what TV shows he’s been on ‘enough so that the folks don’t leave me alone in the streets of Sydney’, he started speaking again. Later, I Googled “Australian Actor Kai”. Nothing. A couple of references to a TV series from the 1999, so unless he had discovered the fountain of youth, my passenger was a bit south of the truth.

GPS found Shady Hollow. As I turned the corner, I asked him where he had met this princess, the woman of his dreams, the one he was going to marry.

“Las Vegas. Three days ago. Did I tell you she’s the most beautiful woman in the world?”

I stopped the car at the bottom of the steps. He peered up, through the thick bougainvillea, as if tuning his X-ray vision.

He slowly opened the car door, inhaled deeply, as if he were about to dive to the bottom of the Great Barrier Reef, then turned back toward me and raised the beer bottle into the air. A toast.

“Here’s to you, Uber lady. G’day, g’day,”

He took the steps two at a time, up to the condo’s front door. Like a helicopter parent lingering outside the gym after delivering her son to the prom, I longed to stay, become that fly on the wall [or moth in the bougainvillea] to see what would happen, but my next Uber pinged.  I had another fare.

I like to imagine that Kai and his princess flew back to Sydney, their bottles of Bud Light gently vibrating side by side, in synch with the plane’s jet engines.

Maybe once, just once, what happened in Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas.