Royal Fireworks. Surface. "SHUT-De-Fock-Op!" Jealous. Art School Town.
Marco McClean
First dream. On the steep side of a ridge an immense,
sluglike royal fat woman as big around as an Airstream trailer
is worked uphill sideways by her entourage; they go to one end
and push it up a little, anchor it, then go to the other end
and push that up. This is part of a ritual ceremony that calls
for illegal fireworks. A man lights a fuse (I light the fuse);
it burns down and disappointingly doesn't result in flashes or
bangs but in a change in the feeling of the hillside, where
now at the top is a ranch-style house and scattered around are
sheets of black-and-white newspaper ads already burned mostly
to ashes, and the royal slug woman is gone.
I climb to an elevated flower bed set into the top of the
ridge next to the house, to hide; I lie against the back wall
of dirt and wait.
The religious royal entourage people are all confused and
unhappy about the weird fireworks problem, how it didn't do
what they expected, and how they've lost their ruler; they all
wonder, /Who would know about fireworks, to solve this?/
Richard Alcott would know; I half-remember him being somewhere
around on the hill.
A woman comes and hides something up inside the corner of
the house's roof overhang nearest me, and she's a master
strategist-- she hides decoy things in other places. More
people show up: a sleazy military general, the Pope, others.
The general gets his car keys from the roof overhang and
/whew!/ misses the secret hidden thing. The woman bluffs it
out, makes the general feel inadequate; he knows what she'll
do if he doesn't show her proper respect, she says.
I wait till the moment when everyone turns downhill to
start away; I reach up to the secret thing (a gold keyring
with a broken-off padlock key on it), slip it into my pocket
and mix in with the crowd headed downhill.
Now the hillside is not so steep; it's a wide gravel
driveway. I find in the gravel an odd old bottle whose wiggly,
conical glass stopper is bigger than the actual container
part; this has been here for hundreds of years. I give it to
the important woman, to allay her suspicion that I've stolen
her secret thing, the keyring.
Skinny dogs run nervously back and forth behind a closed
horsedrawn carriage.
It's a warm, slow, lazy afternoon but I'm charged with
purpose. I come to a city park with barbecue grills to the
right and horse stalls to the left, and I see Mickie Zekley of
Lark in the Morning Music and shout, "Mickie! I need you! I
want to talk to you! I have ten minutes!" He comes to me,
becomes a professional listener, lies down on a blanket on the
grass, closes his eyes and composes himself to listen and
think. His sidekick, a combination of Lance who used to work
at Mendo Micro and Steve Weingarten of /Hit and Run Theater/
crouches down, senses that Mickie doesn't need him for awhile,
and hurries away.
I tell Mickie about a rubber-tired train of Gypsy buses
and the people inside them. He asks about a trivial detail,
something that seems to tie the gold keyring to the Gypsies. I
say, "That's not what I called to tell you. It's not
important." Ah-- his mistake; he settles back to listen even
better from now on.
Next dream. I'm with Juanita standing on gray water, on
the surface of a lake behind a high dam of boulders. We show
each other things we discover, such as if you bend over so
your head is right down next to the water and you look at the
sunset between the rocks at the far side of the lake, the side
that doesn't need a dam, the pattern of tiny ripples in the
water seems to freeze in place.
Juanita says, "Kiss me." We go to the narrow top of the
dam. I sit down and she --now she's a big, strange, puffy
blonde woman-- she sits on my lap with her legs around behind
my back and we kiss.
Next dream. A society of rap poets is having a convention
in an East Coast big-city version of downtown Fort Bragg (CA).
A small rock shrine that looks like the time portal in the
/Star Trek: The Old Show/ episode /The City On the Edge of
Forever/ stands in a parking lot behind the row of buildings
on Main Street between Redwood and Laurel; this rock is where
the award-winning poem of the moment is posted. I read this
poem --it's grammatically childish but it rhymes and all the
words are spelled right, and that's what counts; that's why it
won.
I take the notebook folded back to this poem to Headlands
Coffeehouse and sit at the window bench. Some Mexican kids at
the table behind me are playing a game where they take turns
making fun of a random sentence in the poem. I assume anyone
is allowed to play, and I take my turn, and the nearest boy
looks at me with venom and barks, "SHUT-de-fock-op!" I bow my
head submissively and say, "Yes, sir." He tells me again to
shut de fock op, and I say again, "Yes, sir." He's
exasperated that I don't get that I'm not supposed to even say
/yes, sir/. I'm supposed to shut de fock op. Kids are way more
obsessed with the rules than they used to be.
When I leave, the boy follows me across a dark parking lot
where in real life is Main Street and then the old Union
Lumber Company Store. He grabs from behind at my hips. I twist
loose and see that this is not a boy, it's an Oriental girl in
disguise as a Mexican boy. I say, "I'm married." She's
disappointed; she goes back to the coffeehouse.
Next dream. I'm in a complex of concrete county fair
buildings. Juanita's here, paying a lot of attention to a
Scottish artist. I'm jealous. I come back after being away for
awhile and Juanita and the artist are pushing a big white
plastic clothes-iron shape the size of a car, that smashes
pigment-bearing plants and household appliances and leaves
smears of paint on the floor of this big space. I try to help,
but Juanita obviously wants me to leave her alone-- I'm
interfering in her project with this guy. I'm not jealous
anymore; I'm just sad, then resigned to it. I go out, curious
about what will be outside. I don't know where this place is;
I don't know where I am, and that's okay.
Next dream. The Fort Bragg of the last-dream-but-one is a
school town around an art school-- a boarding school for
talented kids. This is a special night; everyone's getting
ready for a complicated show. I'm who I am, at my real age,
participating with junior-high-school kids in a rehearsal for
a big swordfighting scene; I and the kids all have CB whip
antennas for fencing epees.
Stamp, lunge, parry, hop, etc. I'm barefoot, in black
Fruit-of-the-Looms and an over-large red t-shirt.
I wander away from the festivities. On the sidewalk across
Main Street from the Gray Whale Inn there's an art piece
that's a freestanding glass and steel elevator shaft three
stories high that also goes down under the ground. A lot of
propane cylinders hang on hooks on their sides inside the
shaft, and the elevator mechanism goes up and down like a
desert oil pump, stretching and compressing a gigantic canvas
diaper.
Another art installation involves an entire building.
Inside, they've built an indoor roller-coaster ride that isn't
a real roller coaster but a pastel plaster representation of a
Disneyland-type ride through an Italian royal house. I look
down on an opera stage area from the balcony where you'd get
on a car if there were cars and a track. I think, /This is
what life would be like if they gave artists the kind of money
they give drug companies and the police./ I move along with
the crowd to see the rest of the roller-coaster course.
I wake from sleep (within the dream) on the stage that I
was looking down on before. There's the kind of mess you get
after a big out-of-control party; I don't remember it, but I
guess I fell asleep here. Only a few people are left. A girl
wants my autograph. She and her friends have been waiting for
me to wake up. She says, "Please don't take my picture; my
hair is dirty."
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