Furniture Money

Growing up I shared a prison cell bedroom with my brother. My therapist says it's best that I try to suppress those memories, so for now we can just discuss the actual room: two dressers from my dad's childhood, a dresser from my mom's house in the Bronx, a couple of desks from a dumpster/Caldor, and the finest blue shag carpeting money could buy. My brother's bed was missing a leg so we used books to hold it up. My bed had a spring sticking out of it that would stab me nightly.  Let's not forget my mother's collection of fur coats hanging in the closet in case I wanted to question my sexuality.  With such a lovely menagerie of items it makes perfect sense that my mother would bitch nonstop to her mother in law about how she needed to buy us new furniture.  At first Sybil mentioned it at a family meal, then it was every five minutes while on vacation at my grandmother's place in Florida. Finally, it was every single time my grandmother called the house.  My grandmother couldn't take it anymore so she mailed Sybil a check for $500 with a note saying I hope you buy the boys something nice.  A month after getting the check my grandmother called and asked Sybil what she bought with the money.  Sybil's response, "You can't buy anything with five hundred dollars."

She kept the money and I got a tetanus shot.