Spanky's Last Supper. Crunchy Organ. Jaded Girl and Dog-Baby.
Marco McClean
First dream. I'm in a generic restaurant kitchen in a
poor seaside town. They don't make food here; they cast
little metal bas relief tokens using the lost wax method.
I'm guiltily attracted to a dead-white delicate blonde girl
with faint clouds of blue eye shadow around her eyes. It's
like airbrushed on. She goes out and brings in an eight-inch
by five-inch rectangle of jeweler's wax with a complex
pattern of knots pressed into it. This will make the
company's fortune.
Everyone goes away but the girl. She and I go into the
next room where her nervous old mother or grandmother mopes
in a stuffed chair, fiddling with something with her
fingers.
Their family lives here. It's time for dinner. About ten
poor kids file in and sit along the wall at one side of a
long table, like /Spanky and Our Gang/ imitating the Last
Supper painting.
The girl tells the old lady that we're going to get
married. The old lady is so upset she grinds her teeth and
her eyes dart around in random directions independent of
each other, and she has to grab her own knees to keep her
hands from flapping up into the air.
The girl is too young for me, eighteen or twenty at the
oldest, and I barely know her. I don't think this is
right... But she's so pretty. Maybe if I just don't say
anything things'll work out. We can go outside and talk
about it. We don't hafta get married. We can just-- I
dunno... I have trouble imagining kissing her or even
touching her.
The old lady is a hissing bomb about to explode, like
the exploding beetles fifty million years in the future in
the book /Marooned in Realtime/ by Vernor Vinge.
Things become nebulous as to what's happening when. I
mean, ordinarily I'd say the dream jumps back to when the
workers were still in the shop, and the girl lies on the bed
next to me and gives me a brass alcohol-lamp blowtorch that
I put to my lips and use to spray flame and soot into the
air over an antique Victrola on a side table, but I'm not
sure that this didn't happen before the Last Supper. It
doesn't matter.
Next dream. I'm dressed as a Catholic nun, and I'm
wandering in a hot fleamarket. I have dark glasses on, but
the parts that go over your ears are outside my black hood
and so have nothing to hook onto; the glasses keep wiggling
askew so I have to push them straight. I'm completely
freaked about how weird I must look. I'm eight feet tall.
Lu of Lu's Kitchen and I go into a roofed-over booth
where they have vacuum cleaners and, in a corner, some great
old speaker cabinets that are in perfect condition. Five
dollars! But I don't have any money, and this reminds me
that I don't have any normal clothes. If I had a few dollars
I could find a pair of pants and a shirt somewhere here and
put the pants on under the dress, take the dress off...
I straighten my glasses again and ask Lu, "How do I
look?" She laughs and says, "Terrible!"
I go down a wide aisle between booths outside and I hear
the Bob Ayers Big Band playing inside a kind of barn off to
my left. Someone's playing a cheap electronic church organ
through an amplifier-- it's turned up so loud that it
distorts and sounds great! It sounds /crunchy/. They all
stop playing and wait for the organist to fix it. They
shouldn't fix it. Why don't they like it? I don't see any of
this; I don't go inside.
I know I'm somewhere in the lawless wild-west town
that's been built on the pulverized wreckage of
post-Armageddon Sacramento.
Next dream. I've walked all the way from Sacramento to
Roseville (CA). I get off the freeway and run effortlessly
downhill at about thirty miles-per-hour down Douglas
Boulevard toward Lake Folsom. The road becomes a narrow,
dark channel in the earth. After a few miles I stop,
surprised that I'm going this way. This is the wrong way.
Where do I /want/ to go?
A girl comes by walking her baby girl like walking a
dog. I lie to her, as we walk together around a dentist's
office, that I'm dying of cancer and I wanted to do one last
funny thing, and that's why I'm dressed in this clown
burqua. She says, "I don't believe you. My friend told me
not to believe you." (I have an image of her friend as a
big-hair, overly-made-up country-&-western music fan in a
primer-gray Camaro.) The girl stops, leans against a dented
phone booth and lights a cigaret. Her baby girl heels.
I realize that my mother lives within forty miles of
where I am. I can walk there. If I run, I can be there in an
hour. But I try to run a few steps and it doesn't work the
way it did before. I can barely run above walking speed. Is
it just that this is uphill? Is that the only difference?
And I'm worried. It's the year 2200-something. Will my
mom still live in the same place? And am I being some kind
of a sissy-boy by relying on her? All I need, really, is
some pants and a shirt. Maybe a gas-station-guy's jumpsuit.
I don't remember seeing a gas station.
The girl and her dog-baby are watching me, amused, this
whole time. I wonder if my trying to run and thinking these
things has somehow made it harder for her to believe my lie
about having cancer.
Maybe she has a boyfriend with some clothes she can
steal for me before he gets home.
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