Wonderful Ferret. Art College.
Marco McClean
First dream. I'm in a big one-room ground-floor apartment
on Ford Street where the old Mendocino Community School used
to be. The walls are painted glossy yellow and the door is
wide open. I have a pet ferret-like creature; it climbs around
inside my red sweater and pokes its head out. I love the
ferret; I kiss it on the nose. It's intelligent and
affectionate. It's a wonderful creature.
I teach it to fetch small objects. /Tch-tch, come here.
Bring it here. Good./
After the fun, I make sure the ferret is happy hiding in a
nest it's made under the bed and I watch a cross between
Lawrence Bullock and Jim Rote, now squatting in the doorway,
make non-functioning sculptures of fat sailboat-arrows out of
construction paper, papier-mache and string, three of them,
and set them to dry on a white wooden art-display cube.
Next dream. The same room as in the previous dream, but in
a college complex in the Midwest, is like the old Mendocino
Community School used to be, with kids and adults busy working
on their various projects, inventing, discovering things. A
girl shows me a football-size lump of /memory foam/; she says,
"You push it down." I push it flat on the table, like
flattening a big marshmallow, and when released it smoothly
inflates to be the shape of a cartoon flying saucer, complete
with landing legs and portholes in relief. I push it down
again, release it, and this time it inflates into a stubby
antenna mast with two ear-like dish antennae at the top. I
wonder if the general category of what it becomes is related
to temperature. Hmmm.
A black-haired woman from Juanita's Morris-dance troupe
insists I should rent two cars and a truck so she and I and
unspecified others can all play a game. I say, "/You/ rent the
truck [if] ya want it so badly." The woman shakes her head
and leaves. I describe this conversation to Juanita, and she's
disappointed that I'm not loosening up to the way people do
things here, but she's understanding; she knows how shy I am.
I say, "I couldn't help it. I didn't know what to do." She
says, "I know."
I go outside without really feeling outside and walk north
to a /huge/ concrete art-department building, which somehow I
don't have to enter to be inside. In one part of the building,
college students use taut electrically-heated wire to cut
two-story-high, four-foot-thick slabs from a block of
styrofoam as big as an apartment building. In a complex of
lofts, I walk between racks of assemblage art. People are
everywhere, so many, so busy. I climb part of the way down a
stairway/ladder/chute, realize this is an art drying rack and
manage to get out of it without breaking anything hanging
here.
My art is made of power-mowers. Out of all the broken
mowers here, I can't find enough parts to make one that will
actually work, and when I turn my back for a moment and look
again, someone has taken the motor from the one I've been
working on, and left a useless lattice of small,
foam-insulated water pipes in its place.
Now I'm just looking for Juanita, walking purposefully
through the place as if I own it, when I'm just a skinny
fifteen-year-old kid in a thin sweatshirt with no t-shirt
underneath and the neck-zipper pulled down to my belly. I
sweep imperiously past a seminar group and the professor says,
"We always get one like that."
There's warm mist in the air, fogging everything. /The
building is so big it makes its own weather./ Someone says,
"It's eighty-five." --But it won't be eighty-five (F) outside;
I'll be cold if I go out, and the longer I wait to go out, the
colder I'll be.
Juanita choo-choo-train-dances out from between some racks
of pottery, carrying small work; a round and balding but
offensively virile-seeming art teacher choo-choo-dances out
after her, also carrying things. They're working together. I'm
jealous. The art teacher dances around me, says, "Excuse me,
sir." I look at my shoes to grumble, "No problem," and so
lose sight of Juanita, and that's it, that was my chance; I'll
never see her again.
I resume wandering, hoping to bump into Juanita but
knowing I won't. I want to go back down the (alley? hallway?
street?) to (the dormitory in the college I went to in Iowa?
the house where I had the ferret? California? /California/.)
I woke up with a nebulous sort of generic Al Jolson song
playing in my head. (Not /California, Here I Come/).
-end-