clock chimes hourly, plays a little song; what for?
Marco McClean
Voodoo House. Special Effects Flu Doctor. Dutch-Chinese Idyll.
Space-Alien Cow-Cats from the Brown Sun) :
First dream. In a dirt-walled bunker beside a hiking trail the task is
parted-out to me to round up three or four sound effect for a man who'll
ultimately take all the credit for the sound job. It's for a play I
vaguely remember reading something about-- a sweeping saga of a
romantic, flawed, Southern family and their ancestral ranch in the
mountains and swamps of Vietnam. As I jog along a narrow, mountain trail
in search of the sound effects elements (one of which is the
/chuff-chuff/ of a rare kind of steam locomotive) I glance at and
evaluate the play's complete list of sound effects written on the
cardboard back of my yellow legal notepad. It's here I figure out that
the sound guy is doing /none of the work/ but using others like serfs.
This is one of those exclamation-marks-coming-out-of-my-head moments.
The dream skips back to where the man first gives me the task. I say, as
I did before, "I'll be back in a minute," but this time I say it
sarcastically. This time, instead of wasting an afternoon making sound
effects in a corrugated-metal-roofed shed next to the trailhead parking
lot (which I confusedly half-remember doing), I go straight out the
Vietnam mountain trail to get /all/ the sound effects myself, and to
bring in the entire job as a fait accompli. The man will be angry, and I
know he won't acknowledge or even own that he was taking advantage of me
and many others, but I don't care how he feels. I'm really good at what
I do, I'll do a really good job, and he can scream to his heart's
content at the theater company people. In fact, I hope he does; it'll
just show up what a cheater he's been and what a whiner he is.
On the trail I run up behind a slower boy who also seems to be out here
getting sound effects for a theater job. As he runs, he's reading from a
notepad. I pass him and advise him to stay aware of the precarious
trail's edge. "Be careful!"
Back in the parking lot, near the metal shed, I remember having told the
man I'd only be a minute-- it's been either twenty minutes or twenty
hours (twenty /something/, but not twenty days). I cross the lot and
look into the bunker; now it's an outhouse with a car-dashboard CD
player set into the dirt wall next to the toilet seat, where the toilet
paper roll should be. It's like a Flintstone CD player with terra cotta
peas for control buttons and a pebble for a knob. The CD slot is a long,
flat cave with a flickering NE-2 neon bulb far in the back to simulate a
Neanderthal campfire.
I wonder why I didn't burn all the sound effects onto a CD while I was
in the metal shed and had my computer. Now I'll have to put together a
reel-to-reel tape recorder from old junk just to play the sound effects.
The guy comes around for the three or four sound effects he first told
me to make for him and I just shake my head and smile. He's pissed off
that I didn't do what I said I'd do. Again, I don't care what he thinks.
/No/ amount of expensive equipment will help him now. I can do a better
job with old junk than that poseur can do with all the modern equipment
money can buy. And he knows it.
I smile at him; his nebulous face comes into focus. He's the husband of
the woman who borrowed my antique RCA microphone for her New Year's Eve
singing concert at the Company Store, but his hair is all curly and
poofed out on the sides.
Next dream. Two things are going on at once at a big family dinner being
held in the banquet hall of an old British family mansion. 1. A sleazy,
fifty-or-fifty-five-year-old man who's impeccably groomed (a
stereotypical child molester) is carrying out his murder plan involving
poison. The long-haired, stoner, surfer dude next to him at the table is
the victim. Surfer Dude drinks wine with poison in it and, as the poison
takes effect, he humiliates himself by making a burbling, chuckling
sound, owlishly leering at a man diagonally across the table, and
falling face-down, dead, into his own plate of chicken bones and peas.
2. The sleazy, fifty-year-old man --here posed wryly like an
inside-back-cover photo of Mickey Spillane-- is getting a pretty,
short-black-haired college girl drunk on wine.
She looks like a cross between actress Juliette Binoche and Hogarth
Hughes cartoon waitress mother in /The Iron Giant/, but with the haircut
of Ezri Dax from /Deep Space Nine/. After she's had three or four
glasses of wine and slurringly asks for more, he hands her a
freshly-opened bottle and watches out of the corner of his eye, nodding
Britishly to himself as she drunkenly fills her own glass to
overflowing.
In both superimposed cases, the other people know what the man's up to
and don't interfere, though one of the men at the table looks like he
doesn't like what's going on. This is all like a slightly post-WW2
black-and-white morality movie, and like a funny British horror movie I
saw once, where the main character knew there was a bomb in a clock that
would go off at midnight, the house was stuffed with clocks, and the
dinner guests were all locked in.
Now I'm in the plywood safety cage at the bottom of a construction
scaffold. This cage forms the corridor parallel to and inside the back
wall of the dining hall. The bad man leads the drunken girl out of the
dining room and into this hall as she mutters unconnected, random words
and pecks her head around like a big, drugged chicken. The good family
guy shows up as I --invisible and mostly immaterial-- try to influence
the bad man to set the girl on a couch somewhere and leave her alone.
No-one sees or hears me. The girl passes out completely, drooling
viscous spittle and pissing herself. The bad man picks her up to carry
her away to the next phase of his plan.
The good guy isn't good after all. He looks down at the carpet, jerks
his eyebrows quickly up and down; he's anticipating some pleasurable
evil. British people! They are so weird!
Much later I'm in my pyjamas in a place that feels like the lowest level
of the mansion. The formerly good guy with the eyebrows unlocks a door
and goes through to stand on the landing at the top of a flight of
cement stairs above the yawning cavern of a sub-basement. At the bottom
is a big mattress on the floor with heaps of blankets. Some of the
people I remember from dinner are getting out from under the blankets,
pulling on clothes, hitching up their belts, while others pass the guy
on the stairs, going down to remove their cloths and get /into/ the bed.
He follows down. When the bed-blankets are disturbed for an entry or
exit we see the permanent residents of the big bed-- three demented,
sexually insatiable women, one of whom is the girl I saw captured! Her
formerly short, neatly combed hair has grown in long, tangled and thick
and, as well as a demented person can, she seems to have comfortably
settled in to her new life here as a brainwashed sex slave.
There'll be no rescuing her now. She would only be unhappy until allowed
to return to the sub-basement. Tch.
I think about how these people don't seem to be worrying about venereal
disease, and I realize that it might actually have been in the forefront
of their minds when planning all this. They're all clean and healthy and
they only capture clean and healthy girls, so they can't catch anything.
Vignette. A doctor's office suite of cubicles with soft-white plastic
walls takes up a corner of a big, well-lit metal warehouse. Inside, a
1940's-looking doctor is operating on someone in one cubicle when he
suddenly becomes nauseous. He has the flu. He runs through the offices
trying to keep from throwing up and disappears through the bathroom's
swinging door. Another doctor, disgusted with the behavior of his
colleague, says to me, "/You/ take his appointment." He doesn't know
the first doctor is sick; he thinks he just ran away to hide from an
obese, jiggling, urine-smelling woman in a ballooning, foodstained,
flower-print dress who's just come into the waiting-room cubicle. She's
the woman from the laundromat in Cotati yesterday-- the one who barked
at the college kid who got too close to her staked-out washers and
dryers and her mountain of wet clothes (including children's clothes).
In the dream the doctor thinks of her as hypochondriac and a nuisance.
Meanwhile, the headless person in the operating cubicle is sleeping,
bleeding to death through the green sheets. It seems a shame, though the
person is just a practice doll. The blood comes from gallon juice jugs
inside the slightly open metal cabinet under the operating table;
they're kept pressurized with a bicycle pump that leans against the
corner of the cabinet. Vinyl tubes go from the pump to the jugs and lead
blood into and through the underside of the doll to the various places
where bleeding is required.
I wonder if Joe Jones made this doll. (Joe makes special effects for
Dark Age Pictures, a student slasher-film production company.)
(www.darkagepictures.com)
Next dream. I'm lazily kayaking around a breezy lake, which is an
oval-shaped wide place in a Dutch canal in ancient China. Some others
are boating in low, flat rowboats, and some in very short outrigger
canoes. There's one big, pretty, squarish sailboat. I feel as if I'm in
a Dutch oil-painting, very peaceful and brightly colored; everything
nearby is sharp as a razor and distance is shown not by things getting
fuzzy but in the palette-knife resolution diminishing (the pointillist
half-moons of color get bigger for distance).
The Emperor arrives in a boat linked with several others in line, all of
them decorated with flowers and scarves like parade floats. All boats
line up to go through the raised culvert under the stone bridge at the
outlet of the lake, letting the Emperor and his roped-together train of
boats have the front-left part of the double line. The man in the pretty
sailboat tries to stay in line about halfway back, next to where I am,
but the wind keeps pulling him back out onto the open water. He tries
his anchor; it just messes up his ability to proceed forward with the
line. I tell him to just go ahead and float around, go with the wind.
I'll keep his place in line. He should watch for when I get near the
culvert and just go through then; I'll hang back out of the way.
The others in line grumble about having to stay in line when the
sailboat guy doesn't. They don't realize that the Emperor's police might
arrest him and execute him. They don't have his problems. They envy him
his pretty boat. I don't feel like explaining. I suddenly see that his
mast and sail will never go through the culvert-- what was I thinking?
(discontinuity)
I'm so tired I don't realize I've relaxed and fallen asleep until I wake
up (in the dream) in my own bed to get the phone. It plays into my ear a
snotty, sarcastic answering-machine message nursery-rhyme song that
seems to be asking a question. I answer what I believe I'm being asked
as well as I can, whispering hoarsely, "My roommate." A stranger
creepily urges me to go on and tell him the story of my life. I'd do it
but I'm so sleepy and my voice isn't working right. I say, "I'm not up
for that now. You woke me with the phone." The anonymous voice manages
to convey menace with a barely audible chuckle. I look at the clock,
which is one of the clocks in Juanita's apartment --in my house-- huh?
It's two a.m. But if it's Juanita's clock, that's not right; she sets
her clocks for all different times. And then, if this is her apartment,
where's Juanita?
I'll figure it out tomorrow. However wrong the clock is, it'll be just
as wrong later.
I hate anonymous mentally ill cowards who try to scare you with letters
or with the phone, and I hate them all the more because I imagine them
hiding in their own place, thinking they're getting away with something.
If so much is already wrong with their brains, why don't they drink
Drano or poke themselves in the eye with a pencil? Why does their
condition allow them to go on for years and years?
/That's/ what I'm afraid of (re: the earlier question, "What are you
afraid of?"). I'm afraid of angry people. I feel sorry for them because
their life must be hell, but how does that give them the right to use
the mail and the phone to threaten me?
I don't even think of them as people. They're like the next gradation
below superstitious people, who are merely annoying, with their
religions and their dream dictionaries and their transparent psychic
advice. Angry paranoids are twitchy, people-shaped, wild animals who can
pass for human until it's too late. Like Timothy McVeigh, slightly
pre-bomb. Is it unreasonable to be afraid of them? No.
I think all these things in a half-awake, half-asleep state, wondering
if I only dreamed answering the phone, finally determining that it was a
dream after all and drifting off again.
Next dream. I'm on the highest observation deck of a network of wooden
towers linked by stairways and ramps. I'm in high hills of dry grass and
low shrubs northeast of Anderson Valley, between Boonville and Ukiah
(CA), but this is way after some kind of major breakdown of civilization
and the only man-made thing in sight is this bunch of towers.
Occasionally people --tourists-- come up, look around a little and go
back down, but I stay here looking west.
Finally I see something worth waiting for, that only I would detect.
Something's wrong with the sun. I pull down a curved bathroom mirror and
project the image on an empty plane of air above the rail. In the image
where the sun should be there's a brown disk with a swirly snake of
smoke curling under it from the left and making seagull-wing-shaped
zigzags to its right.
Another brown apparent-sun-size disk grows like a malignancy out of the
zigzag of smoke, swings once, clockwise, around the other disk, wails
down the sky trailing smoke like a crashing warplane on fire and falls
to earth to the north, rolling like a hubcap, starting fires! I run
down the stairs and ramps followed by another person I think of as a
rival for credit for this discovery, and, on the ground, I run east to
where it looks like the thing will roll to a stop. The other person runs
recklessly past me when I slow to keep from going out of control running
downhill. I shout, "Be careful!" Kids don't know how easy it is to break
your neck.
I reach the object. It smells like smoldering newspaper. Is it a rabbit?
No, it's a cat spotted like a black and white cow-- no, two cats curled
around each other. An indeterminable amount of time passes while
technological rediscovery leaves this area pocked with industrial-park
development. I wait near a low, open, gray-painted metal cabinet door
for the smudged smoke-cats to come out.
Lawrence Bullock, the playwright, songwriter and actor, confidently
jumps forward and takes away from the top of the cabinet an
old-fashioned radio-station vacuum-tube-type audio limiter that /I/
wanted. I don't make a fuss because there's lots of stuff like that
around; I'll get another one. The one he took was too big anyway-- big
and hollow, like a dorm-room refrigerator.
I look back to the cabinet door. It's gone; the entire bottom of the
cabinet is welded shut. I can see through the pet-airholes that it's
empty. I should continue to watch it, though, because this is so
obviously just another in a series of the twin space-alien cow-cats'
clever tricks.
My dreams from Tuesday 1/16/1 (Constellation with Text. Camcorder
Batteries. Gay Battleships.) :
First dream. I'm out at night in front of my house with my cousin Teedee
and his wife Rochelle as they were when they'd just been married.
(They've since had like ten kids and I think five of them lived.
Rochelle has cancer now for the second time and isn't expected to live.)
Here they're getting ready to get in their car and drive back to Ohio in
the early 1970s. I want to tell them the trouble they're going have in
the next thirty years, but how would that help, even if they believed
me?
Through the trees I see a lovely starfield, but there's something weird
going on: there's an American-Indian-looking rocket-bird-symbol
constellation horizontally lined out in white like a tinkertoy design,
longer than my field of view is wide. It's moving slowly, like a
projected planetarium image, behind the trees, to the south. I look
closer, zooming in, and see it's really moving to the north (unless the
left-right switch is a consequence of the zoom lens), and individual
stars within the constellation, though not on tinkertoy lines, are named
in tiny, blurry, white captions printed on the sky.
I tell Teedee and Rochelle, "The human eye is drawn to text in the
landscape."
I stand watching this gigantic diagram move in a direction stars /can't/
move, while holding the phone to my right ear (the wrong ear for
phoning), waiting for the meteorological authories I've called to pick
up on their end. While I wait, I mentally organize my description of
what I'm seeing so I won't sound like the usual sort of idiot who has
trouble describing something he's looking at, something right in front
of him. I don't want to be dismissed as a crank. I want them to go out
and see it too.
Next dream. I'm in a very old woman's dim room with her visitors,
mannequin-like, overgroomed, middle-aged real-estate people, who want to
read the stick-on labels on something teevee-shaped on a high shelf.
(The room is lined with dusty, white shelves of books and knick-knacks.)
I've already read all the labels. I pull an old-fashioned-futuristic
telescoping light fixture out from between items on shelves to my left,
cannibalize an ornamental lamp for a bulb and adjust the fixture so the
visitors can read.
I tell them, "I spent an enjoyable afternoon yesterday with-- with...
uh, real estate--"
"Bob Comfort," the man says. Right. With Bob Comfort. Who?
They leave. The old woman in bed has a black-red, inch-long,
organic-looking, pointy needle-thing on the end of her swollen, balogna
tongue. The needle sticks right out the center of her wide,
doughnut-like, O-shaped lips, leaving about two inches all around. Yuck.
Horrible. A mathematically horrible design.
I'm in the house I lived in on Morningside Drive when I was in sixth
grade, but I'm who I am now, grown up, here to fix a list of electronic
things for the club of uneasily well-off people who are taking over the
house for a retirement center now that the old woman is moribund. It's
dark and cold out-- winter. I go from the bedroom into the chilly living
room and talk to a nice, reasonably healthy old woman who's happy with
all the things I've fixed, but she wants my advice about the camcorder
she and her husband have had for twelve years. She says the rechargeable
batteries went dead so they bought a new charger and it charged them in
half the time...
I say, smiling, "And they ran down in half the time." /How did you
know?/
I tell her she needs new batteries; the old charger damaged the old ones
when it broke, but they don't usually last as long as they did, anyway.
The phone rings. The old lady excuses herself, talks at length into the
phone (about leather horse tackle, weather, finances, politics, etc.)
while looking apologetically at me. I'm not gonna get paid until she
gets off the phone. I root around on a cluttered bottom shelf in the
living room, pushing things aside --binoculars, books, camera equipment,
board games-- to get the old batteries and look at them. They're two
blue-plastic linear bundles of five D-cells each, with solder tabs on
the ends. For a camcorder? It must be a big one.
An annoyed retired man putters at the sink in the open kitchen. He
pretends not to see me. I try to put all the things back on the shelf,
but it won't all stay. I bring the man the binoculars. He says falsely
heartily, "Want some lunch?" (Lunch? It's late at night.) I'm leaving;
they can mail me a check. I tell him to get new batteries; he becomes
his own effete, grown grandson who looks like a young, greasy Cat
Stevens; he goes off through the house, calling, "Grampa!"
Outside, in front, people arrive in a car in the driveway that runs
parallel to the street, between the house and the street, blocking my
car in. I don't want to talk to them. I'll figure out how to get away
once I'm in my car. As I get in, I drape my big, white, pet cat (?)
against and on top of the pile of tools and electronic equipment on my
front bench seat. There's a terrifying roar from huge
semi-tractor-trailor trucks barreling across the road and down the drive
between this house and the next. I wanta get /outta/ here! I pull off my
dishwashing gloves and fumble to find the button in the dark that locks
all the car doors, afraid that the noise from the trucks might be
masking someone coming up behind me to make me go back and fix more
things, or to reach in and put their hand across my mouth.
The cat stretches luxuriously; it wants my attention. I think, /It
exists to be seen./ How will I get away? I have to leave the relative
safety of my car and look behind it to see if I can just back around
onto the brick walkway without driving over anything expensive. Then I
guess I could pull out through a break in the hedge. But I don't want to
get out of the car. I'm afraid.
I'll just drive over whatever's there. I start the car, jam it into
reverse and crank the wheel.
Next dream. In a warehouse with triangular cones of light coming from
lamps hanging way down from the invisibly high, dark ceiling, an Irish
trickster-thief, a kind of human cat-monkey character, is given a
position as head of Disneyland's underground rebel organization simply
so that everyone will know where he is for a change. He scuffs at the
gray-green linoleum floor with his heavy boot, bites his lip and
considers turning down the job.
Through the back rolltop door and out in the bay I see navy merchant
battleships end-on. They're narrow at the bottom and impossibly higher
than they're wide, like cartoon ships. What keeps them from tipping
over? Being jammed in so tightly? On the vast back porch of one of the
ships, through the original political warehouse, in the gym's locker
room, mincing-gay college-type gung-ho weightlifter athletes from the
1920s snap at each other's butt with towels and rub their own muscles
suggestively. They're like the marijuana dealer's father in the movie
/American Beauty/. They're talking about how much they hate gay people
and /they're/ gay.
I think that's always what's going on with people in government and on
the radio who hate particular groups of people. They're afraid that's
how they themselves are, inside, and they might /be/, actually, because
they were raised by severe parents who were similarly afraid of
themselves, so they have to make a show of oppressing others so as not
to think about it too deeply, keeping the hate going indefinitely. I've
thought this for so long that it's like a one-syllable meme anymore.
It's one of those things it takes an instant to think but a whole
paragraph to say.
My dream from Wednesday, 1/17/1 (The Coen Brothers' Ghostly Restaurant
Empire):
In my old apartment in the green house in Caspar I watch a movie about
poet Bill Kovanda's restaurant that was bankrolled by the Coen Brothers
(who made the movies /Barton Fink/, /Fargo/, /The Big Lebowski/, etc.).
It's Bill's restaurant and he's allowed to run it any way he wants to;
the one condition is the outdoor sign-- it must be no bigger than a
typical dish-cupboard door and it must say "Karl & COHN BROS." I'm
surprised Bill's gone along with this (Karl?), but he seems to have, as
have many others (the movie implies). I notice I'm not being shown the
restaurant, but only the sign. It's propped up against the gas stove in
the kitchen where I'm watching the movie. I puzzle over this. Am I
watching a movie or looking at the sign? I pick it up-- it's cold, a
thin, white, stone slate.
Now I'm out on Highway One past Caspar, over the bridge to the south,
facing the land next to where Jacques Helfer used to rent out little
pastel hovels. There's something wrong with the power lines that run
over the road and continue inland past several old, slapped-together,
unpainted houses that look like the buildings in the movie /McCabe and
Mrs. Miller/ and, in the dream, have been here for over a hundred years.
While the rain-slickered power company men finish their work on the
lines and troop out to their trucks, I nervously shy away from ideas of
climbing the nearby pole and tapping the electricity at the high-voltage
side of the pole-pig (the transformer). I worry that now I've thought of
it I'll inevitably find myself up there carelessly shocking myself to
death, trying to get free electricity. There's no way around it; I'm
going to do it, so I might as well deliberately make it safe, maybe by
putting a metal hook on the end of a long, dry pole and pulling the line
switch on the /next/ pole. If the power stays off because I /turned/ it
off...
But which way's the power come from? I think the switch is /after/ the
transformer, not before. Can't I just expect to remember not to climb
any power poles? Please. (Praying to myself.)
In one of the old, damp buildings the power company men have left a
dirty sheet hanging across the doorway into the part of the apartment
where there's danger of being shocked when the power comes back on. I
have to go back there for something. The last power guy tries to stop me
and I confidently brush by him, saying, "I'm not going to use the
plumbing." But I can't remember what I came back here for if not to use
the plumbing. And there is no plumbing.
I come back out. It's night. Juanita's sleeping on an old couch. I have
a silent discussion with the invisible Coen Brothers, where they offer
me incentives to join their restaurant empire. I could have my own name
across the top of the special sign-- "/Marco/ & COEN BROS." Also they
encourage me to pursue my interests, such as research into the
mysterious objects in this old house, one of which is an antique
cardboard parlor-game box with a half-inch-thick marble slab inside and
under a molded tray of artists' colored marking pens. You take the slab
out and eerie, pointy, brown-red worms poke up through the white plastic
tray, between the pens. There's a traditional folkloric ghost story
attached to this game, and I want to study it and debunk it, but mainly
I wish I had a plastic bag to put the pens in, because I imagine them
leaking later after sitting on the shelf for another hundred years, the
ink soaking into the marble slab, ruining it. And what about these
awful, diseased-looking worms.
Juanita's only pretending to be asleep. She watches me sleepily, through
slitted, blinking eyes. She says in a little-girl voice, "Who are you
talking to."
I say, "The Coen Brothers." I hold up the marble slab. "Isn't this cool?
They had marble for a [paint] palette. They had all the marble they
wanted, back then." I think of stealing the marble to use it for a
cutting board, but that seems rude, especially since the old landlady's
letting me and Juanita stay in this damp, cold, dangerous old house
while I decide: restaurant or not.
Not. I don't want to work in another restaurant, even if I were to own
it. I'd rather live in the 19th century without electricity.
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