My friend’s plane is being held up on the tarmac waiting for permission to “cross the lane” for what turns out to be 90 minutes. I’m curbside but a state trooper chases me away. “I’ll go,” I tell him in all my elderly whiteness, “but first I have to know two things: how do I get to the cell lot to wait for a passenger, and where can I go to pee?” It turns out that the one and only bathroom is at a gas station that is not only at the end of this terminal road, but also on the way to the cell lot.
I’m not the only person who knows this secret and it takes me a long 10 or 15 minutes to find parking at the gas station. Once there, having had my tinkle, I loiter in the hopes that my friend will text me to circle back to the terminal to pick her up. I examine the potato chips (they don’t carry Wise, my favorite); I look at the proliferation of Slim Jim flavors and wonder what they’re made of; I fail to locate a cold drink under 99¢.
Then I realize that the real action is around the check-out clerk who is surrounded by various lottery tickets and scratch cards and all manner of money-wasters. Numerous customers who clearly have experience in these matters are calling out for “Three of number seven, two of number fifteen, and five number thirty-ones please!” It is a foreign tongue. In front of the cash register are various cards that look like a curious combination of old computer punch cards and the ballots we get to vote. I find one that only costs $1 and is titled with the appealing words: Mega Millions.
I fill it out using my birth dates and those of a best friend and hand it to the woman behind the counter who spots me as a know-nothing. “This one dollar can win you $215 million,” she tells me. I am astonished. I note her name tag – Hondo – and tell her, “If I win I will be back to give you a check for $1 million.” Although I do really mean it, she nods her head wearily and I get a hint that I’m not the first person to make this promise. And yet she’s still behind that cash register.
It is clear to me that something magical has just happened and I begin to plot what to do with the money. No, I don’t want to found and set up and manage a foundation. No, I don’t want to hire others to do it for me. I figure that I’ll get about half of the money if I take it in cash – turns out I will get $133 million – so I decide that I will identify 100 people I admire. Those who have enough to get them through life will each get $1 million. Those who are themselves in need of some old-age insurance will get $1million for themselves plus another equal sum. All will be instructed to distribute the money in a way that would do the greatest good, and to do it within a year and be done with it.
I myself will give $1 million each to Black Lives Matter, to Southall Black Sisters (London), to Code Pink, to Jewish Voice for Peace, to the Palestinian BDS movement, to SAGE (LGBT elders), to Joan Nestle’s Lesbian Herstory project, to Stan Eichner’s Disability Law Center, to the ACLU, to Reverend William Barber, to the filmmaker Campbell X, and more. The 100 other people (you know who you are) will pick their own recipients.
As for my own indulgences, I’ll get a two-bedroom – no wait – a three-bedroom penthouse rental flat with a view of the sunset, plus another two-bedroom guest flat in the same building, and then send plane tickets to all those loved ones from around the world who can’t visit me now because I have no place to put them up in my present cramped two room rental. I will pay some enthusiasts to start an indie press to publish all the non-mainstream writers, including me and Brian Broome and Donna Gottschalk, who are too often dissed by the know-nothing big presses. And then I will spend the rest of my life publishing the several books sitting on my hard drive – from an historical novel (1982) about the first Israeli draft resistance movement which started during the Israeli incursion into Lebanon to my non-fiction work about the involvement of people over 50 in alternative sexuality communities to my collection of flash fiction. And I will write a bunch more books, including the story of Lillian and Sarah from Sarah’s point of view and my political memoir.
However, a terrible error has been made. The next night, at the drawing, my numbers were not picked. I still have the ticket propped up in front of me and I’m awaiting word of a correction. With such a spiffy plan, it is surely meant to be.
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