I once saw Geraldo Rivera at the Southland Mall in Hayward built right over the farmland where my grandma’s shoes would get stuck in mud and then one day she said it was getting too rough so she and her husband moved to a nice orchard town with streets named after Cherries and Walnuts and that’s where I was born in this hospital right by a Nation’s Hamburger where squirrels fought around crates in a field I rode my bike through with a fishing rod on the back so when my parents pulled up in the green truck with the camper shell there were more cars in the parking lot than usual and the Southland Mall was more important and clean and bright than last time and my dad said hey look and there was a crowd and stadium seating set up right in the middle of the mall because surprise Geraldo Rivera was doing his talk show next to the Orange Julius and my parents were in their early twenties and it was the eighties so everyone had all the time in the world for a taping in the middle of a Saturday and the four of us shared one Orange Julius until a man with a black telephone cord in his ear said we couldn’t have that and took it away which was the one thing I looked forward to all week but we thought seeing a famous person was worth it and I knew who Geraldo was because celebrities are important and you know this by seven so I was two years jumped into the gang of worshipping someone I didn’t know but knew and speaking of knowing I sat on the bleachers wondering if everyone in the universe knew about this live taping except for me because my parents had an old black and white tv with vicegrips on the channel changer but we still got Geraldo’s show and his curling moustache and Sally Jesse Raphael with huge glasses that I totally copied but mine were purple instead of red and I had them on that day thank god because we could not find Geraldo until my dad said oh he’s stumpy and my mom got mad because she was short and always stuck up for people whereas my dad couldn’t help but narrate the thought in his head like it was a fact he had to record out loud for himself like how I had to spell licorice or linoleum out loud before a spelling test but my best friend Kristen always remembered silently and I gave her eraser tops like little rubber monsters and in return she gave me the foil star on her homework and I took it home and said see mom I’m a star but there I was looking at a real star and I was still thinking about the Orange Julius as people prepped Geraldo’s rock hard black hair but the comb wouldn’t go anywhere like my grandma’s shoes in the mud and he had no expression just black eyes until they told us to all shut up and said rolling and his smile was a light switch and he introduced the Hayward-looking people on stage as real-life gangsters and I thought my dad could be onstage if my grandma didn’t move and sell the land that stretched out to the salt marshes where the Ohlone Indians lived and maybe Hayward was just bad luck like Geraldo’s mic crapping out right away and the shoot went on and on like that with one problem after another until my parents who had time to waste suddenly got up and we all walked down to visit my aunt who worked at Wilson’s Leather so she could steal leather jackets and that aunt was my celebrity my dad’s youngest sister only a decade older than me who had an easy laugh and an affinity for Cheetos and a bedroom of clothes she stepped over and a boyfriend named Lonny who drove a VW bug and when she made an appearance in our kitchen I could hardly believe she was real the lights from the stove hood bouncing off her pearly whites but she had to work instead of seeing Geraldo so she said what a bummer but remember when he opened Al Capone’s vault in that two-hour special and nothing was in it but a bunch of dirt?