Head. Lesbian Tiff. Carrageenan Adventures. Art Trap. Remote-Controlled Rambler. Junkyard Politics.
Marco McClean
First dream. In dim light on a two-foot-wide strip of ocean
beach at the edge of a cliff (the ocean is atop the cliff; the
lip is the high side of the beach) I move steadily forward,
rolling what I imagine will turn out to be a baby's disembodied
head just under the surface of the sand, uncovering it more and
more as I push it along. Others are bent down behind and before
me, moving with me, interested in what will develop.
The thing is a translucent, gelatinous bag over the head of
a small man. Hmm. I'm supposed to lose interest once I know what
it is, so I stand, stretch, look around, yawn. Everyone else
stands and drifts away up and down the beach. I crouch back down
to examine the head. It's not a human head at all; it's just
some kind of seaweed thing that looks like a head.
This place and situation seem really familiar.
Vignette. Two forty-five-or-fifty-year-old women stand in
their spotless kitchen, coldly verbally snipping at each other.
This is only going to get worse; they don't know how to
de-escalate it. I take over one of them and say to the other,
"Why are we doing this? /I love you./"
Next dream. Juanita and I are in a big soft bed inside the
front bedroom of a drafty old wooden house. I'm lying on my
back, doing my radio show into one of the working prop
microphones I made for Mendocino Theater Company's 1997
production of /Talk Radio/.
I hear two men who we paid $500 to try to go to the moon
moving around in a back room. I tell the people at home about
the moon, as follows. "1969, when eight-track cartridges were
brand-new, when none of the technological [something] we take
for granted even existed, they spent five billion dollars on
captured German scientists and people who lived out in the
desert with a jeep and a barrel of water, and they produced the
Mercury and the Gemini and the Apollo programs, and they sent
several spaceships full of men to the /God damn moon/ and
brought them back safe and sound and now we hardly even fucking
/look/ at the moon anymore much less go there!" (I'm sobbing as
I speak.) "So we had a contest and offered $500 each to the ten
people who could most sincerely demonstrate their desire and
ability to go to the moon. And two of these men have returned.
They're unpacking their suitcases in the back right now... And
/I'll take that, thank you very much./" (Juanita's crumpling
and crackling a section of newspaper, making a lot of noise.) I
say, "What is /with/ you?"
She says, "Because you love that," (she flicks her finger at
the microphone) "and when are we gonna make love?"
I say to her and to the audience, "It'll hafta be after I
get finished speaking with these two brave men-- /who should
come here now and stop dicking around in the back of the
house/--" (they sheepishly peek in the bedroom door) "--and
you'll read about it all in a book called /Carrageenan
Adventures/."
(Carrageenan is a vaseline-like seaweed product used to
thicken and stabilize candy and fake milk and other processed
foods.)
Next dream. I carry Juanita in my arms like a baby as I fly
through a misty forest of immensely tall free-standing rocks. A
rock with a forty-foot-wide gray redwood tree attached to its
side looms up in our path and I curve up and up to barely pass
over it. It's bigger than a skyscraper.
In a big modern house, bored people lie around watching
sports on teevee. Still carrying Juanita I try to leave. I can't
get outside. Art sculptures stand on pedestals everywhere. I
prop Juanita over my shoulder with her arms around my neck and I
use various sculptures to smash through screen doors into other
spaces that are always still inside the house. When it finally
occurs to me to go through the floor or the ceiling to escape (I
choose the floor), Juanita wants to stay behind with people
having a party. I'm outside at the ocean at Ten Mile in the
rocks and dunes. I notice that Juanita really did stay inside.
Well, what did I expect? /I'm not going back in there to get
her./
A Columbo-like real estate cop --like from a regulatory
agency-- comes to where this house pokes out of the side of the
dunes. Will he figure out that the criminal owner has built it
to be a labyrinth/prison for flyers in the mountains a hundred
miles away? /Or will he be tricked into going inside?/
I have to decide whether to reveal myself and warn him or
let him proceed.
Next dream. In a cluster of pastel clapboard cabins in East
Caspar (CA) I start my old aqua Rambler from fifty feet behind
it by means of a remote control on a long extension cord. It's
in first gear and I can't push the clutch from back here, so it
immediately begins rolling away. I dig in my heels, try to hold
it back, but it's no use. I turn the car left around a cabin to
hang up the cable on the edge, and this works. I run around the
cabin to where the car is tilted forty-five degrees onto its
left side, its left rear wheel straining to pull it free from
the white plastic dryer-duct that the extension cord has become.
Now shut off, set down flat on the ground, emotionally
settled down, the car appeals to me to take care of it. I open
the gas tank, which is the right-rear fender, like opening a
toolbox. The aqua-enameled metal inside is bone-dry. I put an
old cotton-batting-stuffed windbreaker in the tank and squeeze
gasoline onto the windbreaker from soggy rolls of paper towels.
Inside the old Caspar schoolhouse, here a frontier-law
courtroom, a teenage comic takes the stand and does a really
funny imitation of W. Bush trying without benefit of
teleprompter or radio earpiece to justify himself.
Young kids put on a play about a college in financial
trouble. Most of the kids are unattractive and stupid, but one
twelve-year-old girl is a knockout. Short black hair, blue eyes,
good ideas, sharp, articulate. /Mary?/ /Marco?/
I say, "How can you be twelve years old?" The other kids are
impatient; they'll lose their place in the play. "Oh. Right.
Sorry."
Next dream. In the future where Earth is a cold, foggy
junkyard, three lumpy metal paper-airplane-shaped spaceships
whoosh by overhead. The first one has a progressive political
leader in it; the second one is flown by a political evil-vizier
type, and the third one is flown by an incorruptible humanoid
robot cop.
The evil vizier somehow causes the progressive politician to
crash.
The two remaining spaceships are now parked in hills of
metal junk. I'm the robot cop; I see the evil vizier poisoning
his own ship by putting a gallon of diced onions in the fuel
tank (the propped-open right-rear fender). He's trying to make
it look like someone else killed the politician and also tried
to kill him. I go directly to him --now it's a woman; the vizier
is Heather, Jasper's mother-- and I slap her on the back of the
head, turn and walk away, silently daring her to shoot me in the
back while the webcam on the dashboard in my ship sees
everything.
-end-