Radio Stunt. Bob and Ray Invent the Plow. Boxer Rebellion.
Marco McClean
First dream. There's a Mexican game show atmosphere in a
shopping mall. I agree to participate in the joke, and part of
it is that I have to do my radio show from a tourist bus trip
down the coast to San Francisco. (California is still part of
Mexico.) The song /One Night In Bangkok/ from the /Chess/ opera
plays from outside the bus and follows us along as we careen
around curves.
The bus stops before Little River to pick people up. I'm
using an old-fashioned portable phone for a microphone and
monitoring my show with a headset radio on one ear. As the bus
goes past Van Damme State Park I'm kneeling up on the floor,
using a bus seat turned backward for a desk, reading a storybook
and uncharacteristically reading past the swear words, making it
sound as though they're not even there --I try and /can't/ say
the swear words. Interesting.
The story bogs down in a flowery description of the entry
room of a 19th-century South American whorehouse, and the
/mysterious closet to the left of the door./ I think there might
be someone dead in there. A dead whore or a dead customer. Dead
horse. Could be anything.
Mitch bumps past me, going up and down the aisle, working to
pack more and more people into the bus. (This is part of the
game show joke-- by the time we get to San Francisco the bus
will be jammed solid with people.) I lose my place in the story,
explain to my radio audience about the jostling; I call for Bob
to come to the board at the station, because I started the show
at 6pm and way before 8pm both my portable phone and radio will
frizz out of range of KMFB. Bob should listen for that to happen
and then start his show early.
Next dream. In a Russian desert of hard-packed sand damp
with tar, health-food religious nuts gather to start a colony. A
woman is pissed off by the /negativity/ of a local man who
points out that this is a desert because nothing can grow here.
I give the woman a long-handled shovel. Let her find out for
herself how hard it is to make a garden paradise. She tick-ticks
at the ground with the point of the shovel and barely makes a
dent.
I'm shown an animated film of the religious people's plan,
where waxy kernels of canned corn are tossed out onto the ground
and expected to just grow.
The negative man and I josh around, performing a
Bob-and-Ray-style skit in which we reinvent the plow for these
people. I say, "Disks of some sort of metal substance." He
says, "Yeah, and they roll, or something," I say, "You pull
them." He says, "Pull them?" I say, "Through the dirt. They
cut the dirt and, you know, the seeds go inside." He croons,
"Ohhhhhh. Good idea." The religious people pay no attention to
us negative-thinking heathens. They're over there in their
church clothes praying for food to grow. They're gonna last
about two days here.
I walk through a metal shed to a city place like San
Francisco down past the airport. It's dark. An art-prodigy giant
baby like the giant baby in the movie /Spirited Away/ slashes
heavy brown paper with scissors to make wall-size paper
sculptures of three-dimensional tiger stripes. Pam from the
Whale School is here. She comes out of a thick-walled church and
admires the art; she deliberately ignores that the paper the
baby just cut up had a precious crayon drawing on the back.
Someone will be angry about that later, but let it be later; the
damage is not getting any worse. I turn the art so the crayon
side is against the church wall.
An Italian workman renovating a two-story waterfront diner
fits a plywood end-panel on the upstairs order-up counter. He's
spooned paint on the surfaces to glue, so when he pulls the
panel away to reposition it he gets a /rainbow/-- that's the
term for an abstract scene of the sun shining on cliffs and a
crayony crosshatched houseboat out on the water.
The savvy black leader and main two players of the Italian
basketball team that just bought this diner sit watching the man
work. They like what he's done here. The leader says, "Twelve
people can sit on stools there... Another ten over there..." I
say, "And there's another kitchen downstairs."
I open and shut the end-panel, interested in how the picture
stays the same even though the wet paint gets pushed all around.
/How does it work?/ If I could only shut it and leave it open at
the same time I'd see.
I push it shut very slowly with my eye right next to the
crack. Nope, no good. Close it and open it really fast? No. Tch.
Next dream. I'm coaching an exercise-boxing class in a gym.
Everyone but one girl is in on the secret of why we're /really/
meeting here. I tell the girl to go take a show and get
something to eat. I admire my own boxing gloves. (These burned
in my mother's house fire twenty-five years ago.)
Across the hall in a classroom my group has gathered all the
boxers in town --scarred, tough, serious boxers-- to enlist them
in our campaign to take boxing in the town back from the cheats
and the gangsters. A man refers to himself by his real name. An
organizer says to him, "/Frit/, I thought," reminding the man to
use his conspiracy name /Frit/." No-one likes that --they all
want credit for what they're doing; they want the bad guys to
know who they are. I say, "/Then/, I thought." All roar in
approval and team spirit. They're all so happy. I begin to feel
uneasy about this.
We go out to the parking lot to get into cars to go to the
Cow Palace and fight the gangsters. The hired driver of one of
the cars --Chakotay from /Star Trek: Voyager/-- is a boxing
manager from the old days; he recognizes one of his old
fighters. He says nothing, but it's ominous. We're in trouble--
we didn't plan far enough ahead. What if the gangsters know
we're coming? How can they /not/ know we're coming? And what if
they just shoot us? The law will be on their side no matter what
happens. The police might already be at the Cow Palace to help
them shoot us.
I sit deep in the back seat of a big 1960s car with the top
down, pressed between giant fighters who trust me to lead them
to victory. /I can still call this off./ The boxers chant about
winning, about how good it's gonna be. I slap metal chopsticks
together in rhythm and grin miserably.
/They're gonna get killed and it's my fault./
I woke up with the Three Dog Night song /Out In the Country/
playing in my head-- the part where they sing, "...because the
sun is just a bright spot in the night time..."
-end-