05.20.06
“I see it showin’, Oh, the seed inside you baby. Do you feel it growin’, Are you happy knowin’ that you’re havin’ my baby…” Paul Anka
Very quickly I met the “collector”. He was, at that time, one of only a very few people in San Francisco with a license to dumpster dive. For those of you who don’t understand the term, it is a form of recycling, which involves going through other peoples’ trash. He went out every night and stored what he found in this space in the basement. It was packed full of cabinets, shelves, drawers, trunks, you name it. We were introduced, and he asked if I had ever collected anything as a child. As an older child and teen, I had collected matchbooks. He opened a drawer with thousands of unusual matchbooks. He had buttons, coins, hair clips, stamps, postcards; I can’t even begin to name the array of “stuff” he had stored there. It was like a museum full of treasure. He was a very strange character, unliked by many, but I found him fascinating and entertaining. He liked X and I, too. Most of the people there liked us. We were young and still very naive. I think there was something about our freshness that intrigued them. Anyway, the second time I ran into Collector, he asked me if he could buy my baby. I just looked at him, shocked. I explained that I didn’t have a baby, but if I did, I certainly wasn’t going to sell it. He said that he could tell by looking at me that I was pregnant, that there was an aura around pregnant women. He insisted that he was never wrong, and then begged me to sell one of them if I had twins. He had always hoped to find a live baby in one of the dumpsters, but so far had only found dead ones. He was too “eccentric” to adopt one and didn’t want to deal with the hassles of a relationship. I explained that I had a test done in Pittsburgh that came out negative. He suggested I have another one done, which I did the next day, and sure enough - I was pregnant. No wonder I was so exhausted all the time… Fyre was on the way.