Earth-Mother's Light Fixtures. Explosion. "I Don't Want You Sick Here, William-Erik." Tremolo Organ. Chinese Paper Carnations.
Marco McClean
08-05:
First dream. New-age back-to-nature people live in a
hollow tree. I'm a technician they've captured to fix things
they can't figure out. The Earth-Mother queen of the place
orders me to produce the religious candlelight thing that
they'll all worship on their special day this year. I'm given
a choice of various glass bowls and cups; I decide to use them
all.
Someone has already cut the top from a tube of automotive
RTV (clear, silicone adhesive sealant, like Shoe Goo) --it
can't be closed; I have to use it all up. I smear it on
several shelves of internal tree roots and stand back,
thinking... What order should I put the bowls in?
The goop is glazing over. I won't be able to change my
mind and move a bowl once it's set down. I start putting them
down any which way. I'm sure it'll be fine; I'm doing the best
I can.
(I don't remember smelling the RTV in the dream, nor
worrying about breathing it in an enclosed place. In real life
it's terrible-- it's so strong it burns your eyes; you can
smell how poisonous it is.)
Next dream. I'm in a house that's a jumble of all the
houses I ever lived in. This combination house is my house
now; I own it. I imagine the doorbell ringing --it rings-- and
I walk from the back bedroom /of my own house, that I own, for
the first time, to get the door./
Now I'm lying on my side on the front porch, face to face
with a boy who's standing at the side of the steps leaning
against the porch; he's selling magazine subscriptions. I get
up, walk down, go toward the street; I'm groggy and headachy;
I say, "Have y'ever been knocked unconscious?" Boy says,
"No." I say, "Well, you wouldn't trade it for smashing your
thumb." The boy goes to the next house.
Doug Warner drives up in a fire truck, sees me, says,
"Ah-hah! It's you!" (I called the fire department.) I tell
Doug to park the truck and come inside. I want to show him how
my theater-prop experiment exploded and coated the kitchen
with lampblack.
Next dream. I've hitch-hiked all night to a college in
Canada, to enroll. It's still dark out; the office won't be
open for hours. I go into the gym and practice running,
jumping shoulder-rolls on the blue-green indoor-outdoor
carpet. Hitting the ground leading with my left-shoulder is
way smoother than leading with the right, so I do two or three
rights for every left to try to even them out.
Children come in and rollerskate in a carpeted, sunken
area of the gym that might once have been a swimming pool with
no deep end.
I put on a short-sleeved sweatshirt over my t-shirt and go
to the office, carrying my legal-sheet notepad and an
inside-out ski mask. The office has a countertop with a long
bench along the wall facing it. My stepbrother Mark is talking
to the office lady. A tough-but-appealing girl with
smeared-over acne scarring comes in holding hands with her
baby brother; they sit to my right. We wait. After awhile the
girl says, flirting, "You were lookin' at me." True, so? She
reacts to the ski mask in my hand: "Ugh!" I put my hand inside
it and work it like a puppet.
My stepbrother is gone; my friend Mark and a lot of other
people are suddenly sitting to my left. Mark recites a long,
funny poem about British heraldry, getting louder and louder
toward the end. When he finishes, I say, "It's better if you
slightly drop in volume as you go. You get confident when you
think you're making it." He takes this as a good tip, but
there's an undercurrent of resentment.
Going across the college to the next office involves
crossing a bay on a logjam. The logs are wedged against muddy
shores lined with thousands of tree stumps. I hear George
Bush's voice arguing with a woman investigator on the radio,
trying to make her seem responsible for this devastation; this
cuts to news about a mysterious right-wing gang taking credit
for chainsawing down the entire national park to protest
logging restrictions.
Lots of people are going the way I'm going, but I see a
human-size bloody patch in the mud that no-one's seen yet. I
keep my mouth shut about it; maybe I can tell the radio woman
later and she'll be first with the story.
Farther along on the mudflat above the stump field are
sea-level-problem-beached boats that were floating lunch
cafes, giant barrels painted with billboard ads, and old
sailing ships that, without their sails, are nothing but
open-ended cylinders of spiral lapstrake construction set in
the dry mud.
I enter a mazelike, busy shopping-mall, eat two slices of
rye bread in the food court by the first doors, make a note on
my notepad and discover that I've lost my ski mask. I'm on
time for my ten a.m. appointment at the college office, but
now my notepad is gone. Tch, first the mask, now the notes.
Lots of people wait here. I pace impatiently. Nothing is
being accomplished. A lawyer by the back door talks with his
little-girl client; he's telling her that her victim lived,
was crippled --brain-damaged-- but still might identify her.
He suggests she go back and strangle the victim some more.
From the farthest point in my pacing I turn and say, "Could
you take that outside so we don't hafta listen to it."
Everyone twitches at my rudeness.
I cross the line between desks to the
office-personnel-only area and examine everything, including
the food magazine the office boss is reading. He says, "/I'm/
working here." (He means I don't belong here.) I apologize, go
back, pace, turn, pace... I realize this is the wrong office
for me --this is the office for the /law school/. An idiotic,
shrill office girl says to another person waiting, "You don't
have your paperwork! How am I supposed to-- ...You /got/ ta
have your /paperwork!/"
Fed up (my papers are long-gone), I leave, shouting back,
"You just threw away forty-three-thousand dollars!" This feels
really clever, like /boy, did I tell them./
I go in a wide spiral through the mall, keeping alert for
the right office. In the drama department, Steve Siler, to my
right, directs the rehearsal of a scene where the same Steve
Siler comes from a corridor on the left arm-in-arm with his
daughter at the age she was in the Community School in the
early 1980s. It's a wedding scene in a musical comedy.
Director Steve says to actor Steve, "You're a little too
fast." Everyone goes back to his mark.
I go up the wedding-play corridor, then through a
construction-site flap door and up a maintenance ramp to the
insulation-dusty truss-crisscrossed space inside the roof.
This is obviously not the way to the office. When I come back
down, here's a disheveled William H. Macy character in a brown
suit, with a brown suitcase (full of money?) and a gun. I help
him through the flap door up into the ramp, reach back out for
the black rubber flashlight the gun became when he dropped it,
rub my fingerprints off it with my sweatshirt and hand it to
him. He can barely stand, he's so tired; he's been through the
wringer.
An exasperated female P.A.-system voice comes down from
outside the roof: "William-Erik, I don't want you sick here.
If you have to go to the bathroom, do it before you come up."
(?)
I feel that somehow the devastation outside --the chainsaw
gang, the logs, the sea-level change, the mud-- are the result
of William H. Macy's simple money scheme gone wrong and then
gone worse, like in the movie /Fargo/, and I consider taking
the suitcase and just leaving him here to be caught. All
damage is already done, and it won't make any difference who
gets the money, so why shouldn't I take it? Still, I stand
here dithering about it, because if I take it and am caught,
/I'll/ be the pathetic character.
Next dream. I'm on an alley at night in a concrete horse
stall with a big drain in the center, finishing putting
together a final going-out-of-business issue of my newspaper
(this stall is my office). The Mexican boy who cleans these
stalls up and down the alley says he didn't sweep because my
drain is clogged with a telephone book. I move it, do some
more work, look again and the book is back in the drain. I
move it again. It returns. Fine-- it wants to be there, let it
be there.
I travel parallel to the alley by crossing within the
horse stalls. In one, Jenny Johnson from the old Community
School is here, sitting at a bench-table with another girl. I
say, "Jenny! I had another dream about you --uh, the other
day." She's not interested in my dreams, and her friend
doesn't deign to look at me.
In an unfinished garage I clean up the guts of a tube-type
electronic organ the shape and size of a piano bench. A tiny,
lame, Oriental girl sits at an even tinier bench and gets
ready to accompany people who've gathered here to sing
Christmas carols. The organ makes a thrumming, tremolo,
bad-ground-zot noise; the little accompanist cries, "What's
that!" She falls off the bench and scoots away from it on her
butt. She's too upset to lead the Christmas carols; I pick her
up, carry her to a couch and sit down, holding her and petting
her like a pet cat, saying, "Oh, poor honey, poor honey."
Everyone's waiting. I wave to the boy who called the Christmas
carol meeting; he jumps up and exuberantly conducts the lot of
us in singing /Oh Come All Ye Faithful/. The others only know
the first verse, so I sing the second verse alone. "Sing,
choirs of ayn-jells, sing in exaltation, sing all ye citadels
of Heh-ev-nabuv..."
Somehow I end up on a forest hillside above the town of
the horse-stall alley and garage; I'm lying on my side,
tending a campfire. Above and beside me stands a family of
brightly-colored three-foot-tall bendable Disney cartoon
characters. The little lame Oriental girl, now grown up into a
healthy park ranger, climbs up here to make sure I'm okay. I
have trouble getting up to greet her; my left side seems stuck
to the ground. I roll over onto my right side and bounce to my
feet.
The dream jumps back to the garage, which now is much
bigger and has a wide-open side set back from the alley,
across a parking lot. Men stand around with nothing to do.
When I come in off the alley, crows fly over. The men see the
crows and think of me as the crow man, as though I caused them
to appear, and now the men are black and feathered and either
have crow-head costumes or actual crow heads. The preacher who
runs this place comes out, washing his hands in the air,
plotting to make trouble. I say, "What's your business?" He
says, "Cotton goods." Uh-hm. Cotton goods.
Now it's years later. The garage is an Old West mercantile
shop. The owner hires the girl I brought with me (?), and he
takes her into the back office through a swinging door. I
don't like this; it's like in the movie /The Inner Circle/
where actor Bob Hoskins takes the main character's wife away
into the officers' part of the train to have his way with her,
and her husband has to sit and wait.
I follow, and there's nothing back here but the restroom
in the theater in Santa Rosa, no way out and no-one here. I
come back out into the office Christmas party. I participate
desultorily in an improv sketch, where I maneuver the
situation to make another worker be the one who has to
embarrass himself by making up a silly song and singing it on
the spot. He does all right, though. He's good at it.
I'm thinking here about the wonderful old parts inside
that tube-type electronic organ from all those years ago. I
wish I still had it. I wish I had it here. I wish I hadn't let
that son-of-a-bitch take, uh, whoever she was (?) into the
back. I should've done something.
Next dream. I'm floating slowly around a gigantic,
pyramidal, Gothic stone mansion/office-building in an eerie
fog at night in the late 1800s. This is the night when the
compulsively-innovating business owner's new electric-light
system will go on and the old gaslights will be shut off.
There's a lot of glass, and the rooms with windows to the
outside are very big, vaulted, like European train-terminal
waiting rooms.
Gaslights go down, and weak, greenish, point-source,
electric-arc lights flicker on and burn unsteadily, fizzing.
I float along, spiraling up the building, tapping on each
window I pass. At the top, I'm both inside with other
directors of the business, and outside, above the skylight,
with my hands pressed together as if praying. The outside
person, an old employee/founder/director, drifts away,
dissolving into the sky.
I move downhill in this many-level penthouse office. A
desk has trays of red carnations and paper copies of them;
this is one director's presentation of his idea to diversify
into Chinese paper flowers.
As the last verse of Weird Al Yankovic's /A Complicated
Song/ plays in the background (the part about the man unwisely
standing on a roller-coaster ride and getting decapitated;
it's a list of all the things he can't do anymore without a
head), a gay-seeming black businessman strolls about the
office, stepping up and down to the various levels,
soliloquizing about relationships. Two women who work here
wait to leave; they can't go home until the man finishes. They
don't mind this. They like him.
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