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I dreamed I had just won on The Price Is Right. There was a crushing sound of applause, cheers, and whistles when my name was called. It was a deafening waterfall of clapping and screaming. I was trotting toward the stage in this pounding noise, the cheers of the studio audience, when I woke.

Laura Lipp walked into the bathroom. We stopped talking and stared. She looked like the Exorcist. She’d snuck punch from us. She was loaded.

“I’m from Apple Valley,” she said.

“We know,” everyone shouted. Sammy stood to push Laura out of the bathroom.

“But I never knew. I didn’t listen. …

Gordon went over the bridge to San Francisco alone, ate at a Vietnamese restaurant downtown that his student Romy Hall had told him about. Not that she was recommending it to him. She listed it among places she missed. The cook, she’d said, has this funny habit. After he uses them, he bangs his coo…

The lawyer had given me the phone number of child welfare, which he said might tell me the name of Jackson’s case manager, but I could only contact people with a Global Tel Link account. I wrote letters and tried not to go insane. I sent one to Eva’s old address, and one to her at her father’s addr…

They sewed sandbags on death row. Nothing else. They had six machines and they sewed sandbags for flood control. If you see a pile of sandbags along the side of a California road, they have been touched by the hands of our celebrities.

Payment is five cents an hour, minus fifty-five percent rest…