Plated Tug. "Ork! Ork!" Vacuum Disaster. Birds. Red String. Renovating the Old Gyms.
Marco McClean
First dream. In a science-fiction teevee story a rebellion
has broken down on its own. The volunteer police from other star
systems go back home. The people I identify with --neither
rebels nor police-- look into the dime-size central jewel of a
gray-black pebble studded with jewels, for advice about whether
or not to follow a tugboat-shaped spaceship that's at least half
metal-plate patches. The stone gives no advice, and the ship is
allowed to squirt away into hyperspace where it can't be
followed.
A historical document about someone named John is brought
out and read and discussed. The show moves back in time to the
feudal origins of the rebelling planet's government.
I walk around a vast bathroom's indoor swimming pool whose
short lifeguard towers are stone-castle-like art plinths.
Somehow this has something to do with a Brian Aldiss story I
read the other day, about a society where all the bright people
with any self-restraint are branded with the letter C (for
Cogitators) and put in torture camps.
Next dream. A woman gets up from sitting waiting for me, and
she comes down a concrete embankment with her /Firefly/
Inara-like little girl to watch me struggle to carry a heavy
metal trashcan of paper files into the center of an
arena/car-racetrack. A theatrical device of cables and
two-by-fours and hinges on a tall free-standing painter's
scaffold is incomplete without one last important steel cable
being attached to one two-by-four; I paw through a bag of
fasteners to decide which to use for this and I settle on a
three-inch-long U-nail that looks like Juanita's
spring-scissors.
Now I'm sitting in the back seat of a late-1960s Ford
Mustang, leaning forward around the left side of the left-front
bucket seat, idiotically pushing the U-nail against a
laptop-computer-like plastic part sticking out the side, as
though the nail is a magnetic key to make it do something. I
fold the seat back and forth and marvel at how complicated its
sliding rack and hinges and springs and everything are,
especially for forty years ago.
I drive the car from the back seat, across the arena.
The arena expands to be a residential district, then a
highway past the edge of a desert town. In an abandoned diner I
tell an American Indian woman to trust an East Indian geneticist
with her sick child's treatment.
There's something here about smugglers and a dark river with
cottonwoods and reeds.
Time passes, and I'm on the plateau above the
arena/river/desert watching with thousands of others as the
United Nations science effort /I started/ results in a skinny
and stretched-out but healthy and happy little harbor seal being
able to hop around and slap its flippers together and cry,
"Ork-ork! Ork-ork!"
But a bunch of religious bioscience-Luddite congressmen have
written letters to shoot the program down. I find copies of the
letters between rows of grapevines in a vineyard; I crumple the
letters and growl.
Even later I'm in a narrow garden alley between buildings on
Main Street in Fort Bragg (CA) near where in real life was my
paper /Memo/'s office. Harry Blythe, who used to run the
/Mendocino Commentary/, has been to the /Commentary/ (and
/Memo/) offices after years away and left again in a hurry,
strewing this alley with business records and files and papers.
I find some /Memos/ whose covers I don't recognize. /Did I make
these?/ Two issues are similar, one features /Sharp Girls/ and
the other features /Sharp Women/. They're a continuing theme,
like the string of issues that had the running joke of the Cute
Little Dog being the paper's mascot, then the Surly Little Duck,
then Black Leather Teddy. I realize that these Sharp Women
issues are from a timeline where I continued to make the paper
into this decade. I pick up all the unfamiliar issues.
Two college-age girls come into the alley and look around at
the paper trash as if this is a store and they're shopping.
Next dream. I'm traveling through a rural landscape all
built on sand. A cartoonlike abstract wheeled vehicle made of
lines and curlicues --Klee art-- represents a high-school
marching band. The gag of the cartoon is that the parts of it
that are conventional march out of it at right angles to its
direction of travel and become a regular band marching on a
normal street, like in a Norman Rockwell painting.
In a strange bedroom I vacuum flies out of the air, then
turn the vacuum cleaner hose on spiderwebs in the corners of the
room, then I'm outside a house near the sea, vacuuming plant
fuzz and aquarium gravel from the yard. The vacuum hose comes
loose and gets stuck into the wrong hole of the machine; dirt
packed into the hose spews out. I put the hose in the proper end
and the cloth bag inside chooses this moment to fail; wet dirt
bursts through it and shoot out the back of the machine. This is
happening both outside and inside the house. I use red rags to
clean the dirt off the furniture and off a thick plastic
bedspread.
My mother drives up, carelessly runs over my
now-disassembled vacuum cleaner and continues toward the edge of
the cliff-- I shout, "Push the brake! Just push the goddamn
brake!" At the last possible instant she stops the car.
I pull the flying-saucer-like upper shell of the vacuum
cleaner out of soft dirt and retrieve various bits of brass
hardware from the grass-- bolts, washers, hinges, etc.
This place is my mother's dream-only new house. She says, "I
only have twenty-four weeks," meaning that she has to move soon.
She shows me a newspaper clipping: /Hero Dogs Save Woman From
Fire/. They're various dogs my mother has had, none currently
alive. We enjoy the joke of news people always getting it wrong;
her dogs never saved her from a fire. She saved them from a fire
once.
A friend of my mother's, a tall, thin, white-haired teacher,
sings embarrassing songs in a deep bass voice. I say, "Well, I
gotta go." I look in a wrinkled metal mirror to clean the last
of the vacuum-cleaner-disaster dirt from the corners of my eyes
as I go down the house-cliff to below sea level to my old 1971
Chevy Nova. I drive away through an immigrant neighborhood of
small new white houses too close together. I'm going at walking
speed but the brakes don't work; to avoid hitting some children
I turn between two houses. I turn the key off and the car stops
wedged into a tiny back yard.
The singing man has followed me here to ask me something. I
get him to help me push the car back out onto the street and
then along the street far enough so the family in the house
won't get upset when I start the motor again.
The car is replaced by a weak moped; I get more power from
just pedaling than the motor gives.
Next dream. My stepbrother Mark and I are door-to-door
salesmen in funny fat pet-bird costumes. We come to Highway One
from a street like the one that goes by the car repair garage
near my mother's house, but this dream street is farther south,
where in real life there's a motel-- in the dream I know there
shouldn't be a street here. On the corner is a house-size
jail/aviary with giant startled-looking parrots in it. Mark
vanishes. Now I'm in my normal clothes, not a bird costume, and
I have three normal-size pet birds on my shoulders.
I go to a house where a big Mexican family of mostly girls
lives. I sit in their living room for a long time, petting their
dogs, nodding politely when they speak. (I can't understand
them.) The youngest and prettiest girl, Maya, takes me with her
to a fabric store.
Mark appears in the store and insists that I go with him
/now/ to get the (small) cage for the birds. We walk, but glide
faster than walking, to another neighborhood, still by the sea
but like where we lived in Fresno in 1968; I trail behind Mark
so I can listen to conversations between kids in the houses'
garages we're passing by. In one a boy says, "So I stuck my head
out the fuckin' window and said, /These speakers are fuckin'
lame!/" In another garage, a girl and a boy admirably calmly and
maturely discuss the girl's pregnancy.
In a private place walled off by cliffs, like where Point
Cabrillo Drive goes past the beach, but smaller, a boy from one
of the garages shows off to me a drug he has acquired-- it's an
ice-cream-cone-swirl root-beer-colored plastic lump. To take the
drug, you're supposed to heat it up on a radiator or heater
grate then break off a crumb and suck on it. I say, "How do you
know you didn't just pay fifty bucks for a piece of plastic?" He
doesn't care if it's a piece of plastic; he wanted it and he got
it.
Mark reappears and we go back to the fabric store. Where's
Maya? The store woman says the pretty girl's brothers came for
her and took her home.
Creatures (intelligent bugs? birdmen?) live in dildo-shaped
metal towers with tiny windows, on a green ridge. I ride my
bicycle on the valley road below the towers. /They won't shoot
at me. I have their sacred book, so I'm the big boss./
My dreams from Tuesday, 2006-12-26:
First dream. I and some others are on the roof of a
two-story-high metal shed on sledge runners, and we're scooting
the whole shed in tiny increments across the tracks of a vast
railroad yard by jumping forward in unison. We get to within a
hundred feet of the nearest similar shed and I go forward to the
edge of ours. A man like Scott Beach as the mayor in the
blueberry-pie-eating contest scene in /Stand By Me/ comes to
stand by me. He has a lot of bright red string spilling from his
coat pocket. I'm like, /You had that string this whole time and
we've been doing all this work to move the shed?/ I say,
"Whyncha use your string?" He gives me the string; I wrap one
end around my hand and throw the rest at the other shed. It
doesn't quite reach. /Oh, that's why./
The man loses his balance and falls over the edge! I catch
him by a single thumb and yell for help. The others come and
help me lift him back up.
Next dream. I'm walking in an industrial area. I come to a
concrete train track; it's a walking path with two deep grooves
in it for train wheels to ride in. A driverless train of
garden-cart-size boxcars comes from the left; when it reaches a
T with another track it turns right. The way to the left goes
around a grass schoolyard.
Now I'm inside one of two very old sloppily-pushed-together
sports gyms that are being renovated. I've made three
twenty-foot-high, sixty-foot-wide wall frames connected at their
ends in a Z-shape to go down one wall of each of the gyms and
reinforce the wedge-shaped divider between them. When the new
walls are widgied into place, they're a little out of line
because when I measured for them I didn't allow for the width of
the concrete footer.
Patti of Mendocino Theater Company says, "Will you come here
and look at something, please?" It's the girls' restroom in the
room divider; the new wall frame going in has taken away the
plasterboard of the old wall; Patti wants me to put up some
plywood or a blanket or something so the girls can take off
their clothes. I say, "Nobody's stopping them from taking off
their clothes," but I go looking for plywood.
I climb along the shelf that resulted from pulling down the
old inside wall of the first gym, and I climb the hidden wall
revealed here, which turns out to be just piles of stacked
bricks. /This is likely to fall on someone./ Also, holes have
been opened in the outside wall. I imagine suggesting these be
kept and made into air vents.
Time passes. After some progress, but not much, the school
is using the gyms, or at least the one on this end. A girl at
the top of bleachers calls game information into a microphone.
/I told them not to use the p.a. system yet./ Wires going into
speakers attached around the ceiling are glowing red-hot. Fire
danger.
I run around looking for the amplifiers, to turn them off.
/Forget them, just turn off the power./ Patti thanks me for
covering the wall she told me about. /I didn't, but if it's
done; you're welcome. I'm kind of busy now./ I find the breaker
box in a room in the wide end of the divider. Workmen here have
just turned off the pertinent breakers. The boss is angry;
hadn't he told them they weren't supposed to turn on /any/ power
until it had been checked out? It's a relief to hear this and
know that everyone else heard it too; now no-one will blame me
even if the speaker wires have set the building on fire. Just
get everyone out.
-end-