FanStory.com - A Reinvention of Myselfby estory

I remember a dream that I had as a child. In the dream I found myself alone in the house, wandering from room to room, looking for my mother and father, my sisters. On the walls their pictures seemed to stare at me as though they were pictures in some kind of museum, people who had once existed but whom you never knew. In the drawers I found old Christmas cards, decks of cards, spools of thread and envelopes. In the cabinets, dishes and glasses, spoons and forks. In the closets only board games and empty dresses and suits hanging lifeless. I looked out of the windows of the house into the backyard and the frontyard but there was nothing but grass and flowers. The car was gone. In my dream, I sat on the sofa and turned on the TV. I watched cartoons and Brady Bunch reruns for hours. I began to wonder where they had gone and if they would ever come back. I began to wonder if they had ever really been there, at all.

When I woke from the dream, I found that my family had in fact really left me. The pictures on the walls were gone, the cabinets and closets were empty, the books, records, bikes and board games were all really gone. The car was not in the driveway. There was no note on the kitchen table or the refrigerator door. I thought maybe someone would call me and sat in the living room on the sofa watching TV while I waited for the phone to ring. I watched Brady Bunch reruns, Gilligan's Island reruns, and then episodes of General Hospital and Zombie Apocolypse. All sorts of things started going through my head.

Had there been some sort of accident? Had someone gotten sick and needed to be rushed to the hospital? Had my family, in some kind of panic, with no time to think, just left in a hurry and forgotten to take me along, while I slept? What would happen to me?

Outside in the backyard I saw Mrs. Jones, our elderly neighbor, working in her garden on the other side of the fence. I went outside, ran to the fence and shouted her name. I asked her if she had any idea where my family could have gone. But she either didn't hear me or pretended not to hear me.

Out front I saw the mailman walking passed our house. I asked him if he had any idea why my family would leave me like this, or what kind of family would do this to their son. He thought for a moment. Then he said: "What did your father do for a living?" I told him all I knew was that he went to work in an office somewhere. "Well," the mailman said, smiling sarcastically, "That's not much of a clue, is it?" Then he just walked away.

I began to wonder what I should do. I thought of Pastor Muller. He had always seemed like a nice man, smiling at me and shaking my hand as I left church, thanking me for my donations and asking how I was doing. So I walked down to the church. The door was open and I went inside. The church seemed darker than it did on Sunday mornings. Very quiet. A lady came out of an office at the back of the church and asked me what I wanted. I told her I wanted to talk to Pastor Muller about something very important. She told me that Pastor Muller was busy and that I should go to the police.

The police told me I would have to file a missing persons report.

I decided that I was going to have to look for them. I went back home and packed whatever I could fit into my suitcase. I had no idea of how long this was going to take, or where the journey would take me. I started thinking I might be on my own from now on. I would need money. So I walked down to the bank and tried to cash out my bank account. The bank teller told me they could not possibly close the whole account for cash on such short notice. I would have to do with only a couple of hundred dollars. The teller counted it out for me in twenty dollar bills and I put most of it in the suitcase where I thought it might be safer. It would not be enough, of that I was sure, but I was going to have to figure it out as I went along.

I tried to think of where they might have gone and who could possibly help me if I couldn't find them. Then I remembered I had cousins in Florida. Maybe they had gone there for some reason or maybe my cousins down there would have some idea of where my family had gone or at least maybe they could help me out. I tried to think of the last time I had seen my cousins and my aunt and uncle. I thought the name Orlando sounded familiar. I didn't have enough money to fly there so I went to the train station. I asked the ticket agent for a ticket to Orlando. He said they had no trains scheduled to Orlando. The closest he could get me was Ocala.

The agent told me it would take all day to get there. I would have to sleep in my seat in coach. While I slept in my chair, someone took my suitcase with all of my clothes and the rest of my money. I got off the train in Ocala with next to nothing but what I had in my pockets. I was going to have to find someplace to stay. I had enough money in my pocket for a happy meal at McDonald's, but what would I do after that? I was going to have to make some money somehow.

A man with an Indian accent in a Dollar General store hired me to stock shelves for minimum wages. He told me I could sleep in the stock room after I finished everything he gave me to do. He told me I could eat potato chips and pretzels from the shelves if I got hungry. He would count the bags and deduct whatever I ate from my wages.

That's how I ended up working at the Dollar General off of route 301 in Ocala, Florida. I was there for some time. One day I thought I saw someone who looked like one of my cousins come into the store. I thought I recognized her from a picture I had seen back home. I introduced myself. I told her that I had come to Ocala looking for my parents and sisters and I asked her if she had heard anything about them. But she just shook her head. "You must be crazy," she said.

I was beginning to think I was never going to get out of that Dollar General store and that I might have to spend the rest of my life there when someone who came into the store offered me a job taking care of her dog. She lived in a big house, she told me, with a pool and a tennis court and a game room. I could stay in one of the guest rooms. It would be very comfortable, she said. She said she had plenty of fancy things to eat. All I had to do was feed the dog, walk the dog and clean up after the dog. The dog was a Boston Terrier.

So I went to live with Mrs. Esterhazy.

Mrs. Esterhazy told me that she came from a prominent, privilidged family in Hungary. Her ancestors had once lived in castles and they had been fabulously wealthy. She still had a good deal of money, she said. Enough to live comfortably, have a very nice car, and keep a chef, a butler, a groundskeeper and a maintanence man and a chaufeur. Now she thought I could take care of the dog. They all seemed like bright, handsome, young men. I would fit in with them, she told me. But the maintanence man told me to stay on my toes because Mrs. Esterhazy sometimes got tired of people and had them replaced. She had replaced her own husband after all, the butler told me.

After a few months I saw her fire her driver. They had an argument while playing strip poker in the kitchen with the chef and the groundskeeper. She said he had drunk up a bottle of her favorite vodka. He had been drinking up a lot of bottles, she said. And she accused him of cheating at the card game. He threw down his cards and said he didn't need her anymore and left.

That's how Mrs. Esterhazy made me her driver, as well as the man who took care of her dog.

One night she came into my room wearing lingerie. She was also wearing black stockings and high heels. She was drinking a martini. She asked me if I would help her pull off her stockings. At first I didn't know what to say. Mrs. Esterhazy was getting on in years. Her hair was grey and her face was wrinkled. She was old enough to be my mother. I was beginning to think she was a little weird. The way she ran her fingers through my hair made me feel uncomfortable. So I told her I was tired. She turned her back on me in a huff and said to me, as she walked out: "Before you go to bed, walk the dog. And pick up after her. And you know what? You can sleep out there with her too from now on."

So I put on my jacket and my hat and leashed the dog and took the dog out through the garage. The keys to the Mercedes Benz were on the keyrack in the garage so I took them off the keyrack and hung the dog leash on it in its place. I got into the Mercedes, opened the garage door, fired up the car and took off.

I kept going and going. I thought to myself, after a while, maybe I'll go all the way out to California.

Maybe I'll find what I've been looking for out there.