Reverse Aquarium. Staples. Julie at 42. Antifreeze. Hairy Scottish Fashion Plates. Sequined Elephant Girl. "Radio, You Moron! Radio, You Idiot!"
Marco McClean
First dream. Storm waves beat against a low cliff,
spattering the wall-high glass windows of three sides of an
octagonal restaurant atop the cliff. A wedding party is
dressing here. Women straighten each other's straps and
corsages; men borrow combs, put on shoes.
I see a high wave coming from the horizon, and I shout,
"Everybody out!" Half the people run out, but half don't
budge. I run around trying to get them to save themselves,
until the wave reaches us and it's too late. Shut the doors.
Water rises against the windows all around until it's over the
top of the building.
The pressure becomes too much. All the glass bursts inward
at once. I'm okay with this; it didn't seem reasonable for the
glass to last even half as long as that, against all that
water.
Next dream. I'm in a dark house in a bleak, cold-climate
country that's covered in snow and ice. I and others with me
are getting ready to make a long trip on foot. My shoes are
ruined desert boots; they've come unglued and flap open at the
toes. I find a mini-size office stapler, open it out flat and
staple the tucked-under leather to the gum-rubber sole from
inside the shoes.
I know this repair won't last long, but what else can I
do? We have to go now.
Next dream. I'm driving on a country road that's loosely
modeled on the street where I lived in seventh and eighth
grade, but it's somewhere strange, somewhere in the Midwest.
People are dressed up, walking the other way in small groups,
probably to a party. I see Julie, my girlfriend in 1976, at
the age she'd be now-- 42 or 43. (In real life, the last time
I saw her was 1984; she was on a bicycle trip down the coast
with her boyfriend and they stopped in Fort Bragg.) She looks
pretty good --a little more like a collection of truncated
pyramids than she used to, but nice, and we're happy to see
each other. I park and walk with her to the house everyone's
going to. It's my old house, but there's a ten-foot-high
cinderblock wall around it. Julie says, "They made it by
hand." She means that the people who live here not only
stacked up the blocks but made the blocks themselves out of
materials they dug from the earth, separated with shovels, and
baked in ovens they also made themselves. Wow.
Julie remembers a responsibility. We go back to my car and
I drive her to a residential area in Des Moines to set out
water for a pet dog she's minding for its absent master. We
can't get into the house, but here's a pyrex pie pan with
baked-on beans and tomato sauce. I scrub it with a lump of
stainless-steel wool. It takes a lot of scrubbing.
I say to Julie, "It wasn't all terrible, was it?" She
bursts out in raucous, happy laughter.
Next dream. It's winter. I'm in a combination
car-repair-garage/bus-station in Truckee (CA) at night. Gordon
Black is here; I tell him I'm gonna set out driving to Ohio at
seven o'clock (which is what time it is now). Gordon says in
his deep, rumbling voice, "So... what season are you going?
Absolute cold winter?" Huh? I say, "Right now. Seven o'clock."
Now that I've said it twice, I should leave without delay,
but I know that there's only water in my radiator and that
won't be good in Ohio, where it gets cold enough to
precipitate carbon dioxide right out of the air. I use a big,
round, Tupperware cake container to drain enough water so
there's room to add antifreeze.
Next dream. I'm alone in a forest-ridge cabin where
Juanita and other Music Camp people stay when they're waiting
out the time before and just after the week of camp. I use the
toilet. Flushing it backs up into it a great deal of heavy
sewage. I roll up my sleeves and use a big-city phone book as
a plunger, which works surprisingly well. There it all goes,
even the phone book.
In the main room of the cabin I stand looking through
puzzling magazines that seem to be devoted to fuzzy-focus
fashion photos of hairy Scottish surfers in kilts and
sheepskin legwarmers. /Is there big market for this stuff?/
Juanita appears behind me. I didn't hear her come in. I
say drily, "Don't do that." (Don't sneak up on me.)
She smells sewage and looks sharply toward the bathroom.
Next dream. I'm with some others who I don't look at, so I
don't know who they are, just inside the edge of a forest,
looking out into a valley where big animals are being led
through deep snow, to wait in the snow-- this is all for a
movie being made about Hannibal, the general who used
elephants to invade Rome. I'm mainly interested in one animal
driver; she's attractive in a muscular, sparkly, circusy way.
Now most of the animals are in the open wooden cars of a
train chuffing at walking speed up the valley, right to left.
One car has rhinos under tarpaulins. Several cars carry sick
and sleeping elephants that can't adapt to walking in the
cold. The girl I like moves among these elephants, adjusting
their blankets and tarps. I could be doing that.
I stride out toward the train.
Next dream. Juanita and I are in an unfamiliar car in a
spotless, freshly-painted showcase of a small town like
Healdsburg (CA); she's driving. We park near the movie
theater. In the lobby I find and show Juanita a
winking-3D-Jesus-type postcard that's a painting of a
fluorescent-red cat lying spreadeagled on a gray couch pillow.
The card's 3-D effect is only used to change color; twisting
it results in the cat going from bright red to dull brown.
I pick up a yard-long curl of grocery receipts from the
rug --the paper disintegrates into caramel-sticky slivers; I
spend the rest of our time before the movie starts, picking
the receipt bits out of my sweater. I roll the bits all up
into a ball and rub the ball off my hand inside the lip of a
trash container. /Joe Helpful./
The main part of the theater is a big club for upper-class
British people. A rich old woman in a gown and furs is shown
to her plush chair in a rectangular audience area that faces
nothing.
Somewhere else in this building I participate in a quiet
revolution in an Oriental/Italian palace throne-room. I'm an
official, like a vizier; my part in the revolution is simply
to not warn the arrogant little king that things will soon get
hot. People run through in a kaleidoscopic flurry of motion
and strip the place bare. Now what?
I wake up from sleep (still in the dream) lying the wrong
way on one of the British club's chairs that's opened out flat
like a Barcalounger, inside a car. Juanita and my mother and I
are in a drive-in audience whose cars all face away from a
giant stage decorated with 1930s heroic Nazi-era art. The
piece on the left of the stage is a twelve-foot-tall faceted
Aryan cowboy astride an attack jet, his legs dangling down
just behind the wings.
Jerkily-animated cartoons of red-orange buzz-bombs fly in
over the cars and smash up the stage.
Now Juanita, Mom and I are standing on a tiny tram-train
that's stopped in a restaurant/hotel lobby in what I know is
an endless maze of lobby-like places. Another thing I know is
that the bombs have permanently disrupted mail service and
society is doomed; it'll take a long time for everything to
fall apart, like it takes years for a fallen redwood tree to
die. My mother says, "Your grandmother had a beautiful
hairdo." I say, "She's dead, Mom."
The train starts. My mother gets off, walks behind for a
little way. I kiss her goodbye. Her train car, a square coffee
table, stays behind with her; now I'm on the last car. Somehow
Juanita, on the car in front of mine, gets away ahead of me,
going faster than the train; she disappears around a corner
into a corridor the train goes past.
I'm pulled along the walls of a carpeted lecture hall. As
I go by the rows of folding chairs I see a 100-something bill
on the rug, bend down like a polo player and snatch it up. I
look back and a man sitting near where I found the bill is
looking around, worried, patting at all his pockets. I shout,
"Did you lose a hundred?" He sees me and lights up. /Yes!
Yes!/ The people just behind him hand him more bills; he
counts them: eight! Well, seven-- with mine it's eight; all of
them!
Another man, a lowbrow thug, runs to me from elsewhere in
the audience, jumps up onto my train car and hugs up against
me, pretends he has a knife --or maybe he really has one; he
takes the 100-something bill.* He orders all the people in the
room to /see nothing/. I shove him away and say, "Radio, you
moron! Radio, you idiot!" (I'm faking that this is all on
security camera.) As my train car, now a cardboard box I'm
standing in, is pulled, sliding, out of the hall, the thug
throws the bill he took --and two more bills; everything he
had in his pocket-- in the direction of the man who lost the
money in the first place, and he stands, disgusted, looking
daggers at me, expecting to be arrested any second.
*This part of the dream likely comes from last Monday in
real life when I was in the laundromat to get my clothes and
Juanita's sheets and towels from the dryer. The table nearest
this row of dryers was littered with matchbooks whose matches
were burned all at once, wadded-up sticky labels, empty little
boxes of detergent, and quarters. I cleaned off the table and
said pleasantly to the room, which was kinetic with
Mexican-Americans and their children, "I found four quarters
here. Are they yours?" Everyone in the room shrugged
apologetically and turned away. See this in your mind. It's
obvious that none of these people made the mess or forgot and
left the quarters. /Note that half of them must have seen
them, and they hadn't taken them./
When I was finishing folding, a not-Mexican-looking man
came in, kind of an over-groomed, orangish-fake-tanned
office-manager-looking fellow; he went to the last dryer on
this end to get his clothes. I said, "I found four quarters
here. Are they yours?" I held them up. He snatched them out of
my hand (!), snorted a laugh, said, "Prob'ly not, but I'll
take 'em anyway. Thanks, /buddy/." He stuffed his clothes into
a bag and swaggered out with his nose in the air. He seemed a
lot like W. Bush on that aircraft carrier. Remember?
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