Backdrop. Boat Owner's Daughter. Tiger Tongue. Obstacles to Showering in the Car. Rocket Pass. Paint-Soaked Cop. Teevee Party.
Marco McClean
First dream. I'm in an industrial area, on a rustic oval
racetrack of crazy cowboys shooting into the air and riding
horse wagons around a lumberyard of stacks of old, gray
two-by-fours and planks. I walk along after the cowboys. Once
around the track, the race pretense is abandoned and the
cowboys use the stacks of wood as cover to shoot at each other
from.
I leave the track and walk out through the rural area
outside Escondido (CA), along a ridge with a house here and
there. I realize I've gone miles and there's no reason for me
to be here, so I turn back, but it's getting late and I'm
suddenly uncomfortable being in a strange place in my pyjamas.
Some other people in my predicament are going off the road to
the left, down the side of the ridge, I follow them. At the
bottom everything's wet sand, which indicates a tidal flood
coming in. I must warn the people up the valley.
A bored waiter is taking a break outside a restaurant that
blocks the valley. He doesn't react to my flood warning and he
won't tell me how to get in to go through the restaurant, so I
use my Swiss Army knife to cut loose a rectangle of sheetrock.
The instant I can go in this way, the waiter flicks away his
cigaret and goes in through a tiny door he was hiding by
leaning against it.
I go through a series of rooms to the last room, a wide
gallery of glassless windows looking out on a huge, indoor,
painted sea adventure-- sky, sea-floor-- where pirates in
walking-stilt boats are pretending to have a sea battle with a
monster dragon that's painted on the ceiling and the walls,
like the pirates are. When I fly out a window to participate
in this game, the rich woman in charge of the whole shebang
sends a predatory cardboard box after me. I fight it and win,
stuff the defeated box into a mass of coral on the painted
sea-floor, fly back (miles) to the windows.
When I go inside the gallery again, the rich woman is gone
and her snooty minions are angry that I don't have the class
to be more easily dispatched.
Next dream. A man is creepily jealous of everything on his
seagoing barge. I touch the dog; the man disapproves. The
man's daughter comes aboard from a small boat; I'm ordered to
stay away from her. She and I sneak around, working together
to save the cargo of tons of drywall screws from rust by
finding and picking up a few token screws and putting them
back in the single open box they originally spilled from.
We land. I walk to a Russian tent event where priests boil
samovars of water for tea. The workers who put up and maintain
the tent and gasworks are promised a soak in a hot-tub, but I
know they'll never get it. Warehouse Rep Theater director Meg
Patterson is cooking meat in a concession booth. She gives me
a paper plate of scorched sausage and chips of cloying lamb
meat.
"Do you like it?"
"No, I like it."
Next dream. I'm on a driveway off a road that goes through
dark woods. I make a /chufff!/ sound by foofing out my cheeks,
and by this power levitate a fallen aspen tree and a big dog.
I drive the tree like a car while the dog floats along behind
and to the left. /Why do I need this tree?/ I set the tree
down, rise away from it. The dog becomes a white-and-black
tiger. We fly along above the road, nuzzling at each other's
face and neck and looking around. Inside the gallery hall from
the last-dream-but-one, the tiger settles down to seriously
lick my face with its huge, flat tongue.
Original teevee Batman's Penguin, the new proprietor of
the building, is impressed by my relationship with the tiger.
He shows me around his place (he doesn't know I've been here
before). When we get to the windows, I see that the
sea-battle, the dragon, the elaborate sea-bottom, the pirate
ships and all have been painted over with white (what a shame)
to get a smooth, blank slate for the next show here, which
can't possibly be as wonderful. /I hope someone at least took
a picture./
My dreams from Wednesday morning, 2003-04-16:
First dream. I'm at a version of Sierra College that has a
field of partitioned-off swimming pools where in real life the
dorms are. I have a San Francisco Chronicle with especially
interesting stories and especially funny comics.
By one pool, KMFB station manager Bob Woelfel explains to
two only slightly overweight blonde girls about how the
schedule will trade off-- so, for example, one week I won't be
on at all (instead there'll be a Ross-Perot/Jimmy-Stewart
character talking about stocks and bonds) and the next week
I'll have to do Lindy's show from six in the morning and still
do my show starting at ten at night until six.
Bob must be just making up this stuff to tell the girls.
I go to my old Chevy Nova in the parking lot, pull the
curtains as far as they'll go, and kneel on the floor in the
front seat to get ready to take a shower inside the car. The
travel towel has poems on it in white on black (it unfolds out
of a poem book). I put liquid soap on my hands and rub my
hands around inside my shirt and under my arms.
The streetlamp near my car is fabulously bright. Night
classes let out. I lie down on the floor with my head propped
against the door to hide and wait for all the kids to get to
their cars and get out of here so I can get on with it.
The guy getting into the next car can see between the
curtains right down into my car; he sees me and is shocked!
(He thinks I'm a murder victim.) A parking lot guard kid
writes a ticket, pins it to my windshield with the wiper
blade, exaggerates his mouth movements to say through the
window, "I've written that parking lots are not for overnight
use." Annoyed, I say, "I know."
I woke up wondering why it didn't occur to me to use the
shower in the gym rather than pour pitchers of water over my
head inside my car.
Asleep again, next dream. On a green bluff an Irishman
throws a rocket-speed football pass, which Rico (who I just
found out died of cancer months ago) can't catch; the ball
bounces off his chest and bobbles past me toward the
increasingly steep edge. A Mexican man runs after it. I yell,
"Let it go!" but the man follows the ball over the edge, past
the point of no return.
In a cave, a woman's electronically garbled voice drones
on and on. I can almost but not quite be tell she's reciting
cooking recipes. It sounds like when Quicktime is out of
whack.
Next dream. Either they're here to rescue me or I'm just
in the right place at the right time to be in the exact middle
of a crossworld commando mission to Bernillo's Pizza on
Redwood Street in Fort Bragg (CA). A beweaponed
full-body-and-hood-leotard girl motions to me to duck down
between a pickup truck and the curb on what now is Laurel
Street. I lie down flat. Girl says, "Not that far down!" An
invisible shield is put around me; I imagine someone shooting
at me and not being able to hurt me, someone dropping a
grenade on me and not being able to hurt me, etc.
The commandos jump into the truck to leave. I jump in too;
now they have to take me with them.
An agent against them, a crossworld cop, chases after us.
Now the truck is a paint scaffold hanging against a
bottomless cavern's wall. The cop appears on the scaffold deck
as a horsefly drenched in white paint; he explodes like
popping popcorn to human size; he's bald here, he's coated,
saturated, streaming with white paint. He explains our rights,
as though his simply being present is enough to subdue and
arrest us, as though no-one would dare shove him off the
scaffold.
Later, in a meeting in Angelo's (my dead grandparents'
restaurant in Burbank) I blurt a non sequitur to the group
here, none of whom was on the scaffold or knows about the
paint-soaked fly-man: "Were you painting recently?"
I remember the paint-scaffold adventure as a dream, and
tell the group my dream, ending by pointing at a man who looks
like Daddy Warbucks and mock-accusing him of being the
paint-soaked cop. General merriment.
This is a hiring hall for union seamen.
Next dream. An Addams-Family-like group of funny/dangerous
space aliens invades a community of camp cabins, knocking on
doors, asking for a glass of water. One camping hippie
outsmarts them; he switches bodies with the oldest alien and
humiliates him by masturbating in time to a song playing on
teevee (the HappyTreeFriends cartoon intro), which action
produces a complex lathe-turned spiral shaft of wooden
softballs that bursts out of his pants and shoots past his
startled face. He looks at it crosseyed. /Funny./
On the hippie's teevee is a movie about trucks and cars
hurrying between this very row of camp cabins. First we're
shown live-action vehicles; then they show the same vehicles
as models going backward between model cabins.
A lot of people are stuffed into this single cabin,
watching this show. (It's the show after the
spiral-bedpost-alien story.) The broadcast day ends. People
and kids spill out into a packed-dirt parking lot to get in
their cars and leave.
Oona, at the age she was in the Whale School in the late
1980s, is unsettled by the shows she saw. She gets into the
back seat of a Volvo station wagon and her father, here the
tall, sad-eyed inmate from the movie /One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest/, leans over the back of the front seat to
envelop her in a comforting hug. Awww.
But where's my car? I walk out of the lot, turn right,
walk up a dirt road. Still no car. Tch.
I don't want to go back to the cabins.
I think of the teevee shows I saw as having been broadcast
from a propaganda plane, like the ones the army has circling
over Iraq. My point of view travels over the printer's
rosettes of a magnified newspaper image, a diagram of where
flyers and computer operators sat in the American spy plane
the Chinese knocked down two years ago.
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