Julie and her husband Duke lived in the attic of an abandoned shul. They slept in coffins padded with rotting Talmuds. Downstairs the shul was filled with the debris from the New Age resurgence. No one was home when we first got there so as a favor we worked for an hour clearing the stuff out and loaded it in the back of an iron-sided tank from WWI. It sounds crazy, but this was what we were driving at the time. It was riveted with lead shot and shod with asbestos tires. 
 When we rolled up to the dump, the last train was long gone, it being last year and the tenth of Tishrei. We’d been awake for so long that we drove in circles around the Valley of Twigs until we eventually saw a geological formation in the setting sun. That's where we buried all those metaphorical bodies. It took us the rest of the night and some of those bodies weren't exactly metaphorical, but that's between the ghosts and us. 

And yeah, we were scared. The sweat wasn’t from the hard work. We got spooked every time we heard a twig snap, and there were quite a few, this being the Valley of Twigs. Every time there was a sound we jumped back into the tank shaking like hands. We whispered the mourner’s Kaddish until we worked up the nerve to get back to work. By five in the morning we had it all done: the dirt and the bodies under it. 

 Dawn broke down all over the place. 

We went back to Duke and Julie's, slept in a motorless taxi set as a garden ornament in the backyard of their live-in shul. It was better than sleeping in a coffin. The next morning we woke up to the sounds of wild birds and played a board game called Histrionics which involved passing “notes" back-and-forth across a table. We started a new phone company and named it "The Phone Company" and called the police so many times that we go arrested on charges of impersonating toilet paper. We laughed our way all the way to jail and served three consecutive one-year back-to-back sentences. When I got out, the "sixties" were nearly over and I was a judge with no sense of smell at my own parole hearing, but I had a therapy dog. I limped out of there after a lot of pomp and circumstance and the first thing I did was take a three-dollar bill into a five-dollar steakhouse. Then I went to a witch doctor and asked for something that would stand the test of time. He invited me into a typhoon and I ordered an omelet. In the weeks to follow I tried my best with various preaching circuits, but I fell in with conwomen. I worked as a day laborer, birthing baby donkeys and baking birthday cakes, but left before sunset to grease axles for a big hair band. It was all pink beaches and coconut-flavored booze. I tried my best to ignore these hooligans, but I got high about every once in a while. 

Then things started to happen. Some lesbian agrarians tried to recruit me for a new Korean War. A crumbling stone henger tried to convert me to the order of Masons and a marine tried to get me to swim the Caribbean, but I dodged draft after draft like Jesus in a Chrysler, and ended up laying face down on a circuit board for a Japanese comedy show. At one point I was jettison training underage monkeys at a shellac factory owned by Blue Tuba, a toothpaste company in Tokyo. I hosted a light bulb changing party that turned into a Viking panty raid and at a nine-course ropes course we were served coffee-flavored community college. The only weapons I had were hand grenades and that seemed like a lot of salad dressing for just a carrot, so I fought with my bare hands and clawed my way to a sidesplitting victory. 

I made it to the gates of Satan’s bakery and the only phone I found there was a coin-operated contraption with a crank. There were a hell of a lot of people waiting to use it too. I got bloodstains on the bottoms of my feet from standing around and I had to take a leak like a scallion. When I came back from the loo, guess who was holding my spot: a veal chop stuck in a washing machine. The guy behind him was a living brontosaurus and he gave me a cold. Behind him a dead bear gave me a hair-raising shock. I backed away from all of it and took the long way back to the shul where it all started. 

 When I got there, Duke was still in prison, but Julie opened the door. I stayed for a month before another draft came my way. I tried to dodge it, but this time it was coming from under a door. I just couldn’t. So, in an act of desperation, I got Julie’s neighbor Debra pregnant and we moved into a 1976 Bestos. I guess that’s better than sleeping in coffins above a vacant shul, but now I had to work as a reeling realer at the Fisher-Dunkee Circus of Circles and when I faced the music I did it with 17 children on the way. Debra was going to have Septrupletets. Julie was going to have to knit a lot of yamulkes and I would father an army of babies. 

I got so choked up about it that I got an onion stuck in my Adam's apple. I took a course in greasy juice to clear it out. Then I won the lottery so many times that I thought for sure they'd make a rule that I had to stop playing. They didn’t. You can imagine the spiritual power and the singing on television, but that's all in the past. 

I'll just wrap this up by saying this: You got to help your friends. You got to help them schlepp their psychic garbage no matter what the consequences. So, if you spend a night sleeping in a coffin full of prayer books, or you know someone that does, it’s okay, relax, you’ll wake up just like I did, rising like a phoenix with a burning feeling, rising like a brick silo hot baked into a glass rocket, rising just because. We’re all sleeping in coffins in the eyes of The Lord.