Skate Like It's 1952. Aqua Cassette Deck. Bomb Plot. Wind. Acoustic Tile. Two By Two. Eight Basic Ingredients. Dino Island Club. Water Spies.
Marco McClean
I'm renovating an ancient Eastern monastery (the Caspar
Lumber Co. office, hollowed out). I want to put Romex through
the south wall for an outside outlet and a big breaker switch in
its own box. I push the top of a sixteen-foot-wide,
ten-foot-high section of wall open at the top and slide the wall
aside like a sliding door. The tiny Oriental monk children on
the grass outside stop playing soccer and stand around, amazed.
Now I'm coming north across the field to the work-site
building, from another identical building, as through the
monastery is where I used to live, across from the Caspar Inn. I
have a handful of drywall screws to fasten up the outlet box and
the breaker box. In the monastery I get a drill and a circular
saw and bring them to the now-never-opened wall. All the
sections of this wall are barely hanging on, only tacked at each
section's top corners, bowing outward so you can see the sky.
Later, the space has been finished and made into a
roller-skating rink. Playwright Lawrence Bullock and
photographer Laura Julienne sit on folding chairs in a corner,
talking. I skate around the floor, holding upright and pushing
before me a section of the failing wall from before, inventing
and speaking all the parts of a kind of Bob-and-Ray parody of a
rainy-day school gym movie about kids in the 1950s. Some kids
skate near to me say something about how hard it must be to make
that stuff up and have it sound so authentic; I say, "This is
easy. It just comes."
Outside again I'm at the end of a short, pot-holed airstrip
runway whose far end stops at the skating rink. I'm about to
teach one of the skate kids to fly by skating down the runway
and hopping.
My dreams from Wednesday, 2006-08-09:
First dream. There's an art opening in a gallery in concrete
basement rooms. The art is all oddly shaped bottles with colored
water in them, a different color for each bottle. There's even
art in the restroom.
I'm supposed to record a concert somewhere else; I ask
people where the concert will be. No-one knows.
The concert is in a big dark auditorium. I set up my antique
RCA microphone and discover that I need audio cables from my car
to connect the preamplifier to a massive brushed-aluminum
audiocassette deck. Outside at my car I'm confused by having two
cassette decks, one the heavy aluminum one and the other a
delicate aqua plastic one, newer. Better?
Next dream. All the senators of an underground country in
the early 1900s are in danger because a criminal gang's fake
senator has put a plastic explosive bomb somewhere in their big
locker room. I organize a search but find the /lump of modeling
clay/ myself. A helpful cop escorts me and the lump of clay out
of the locker room, but the cop takes us on a detour into a busy
restroom. I feel he's in the employ of the gang, and sure enough
the clay is kicked away across the floor, under the partitions,
lost again.
I rush around trying to find the clay and accidentally bump
the shoulder of a tough gang kid. I explain why I'm anxious:
there's a bomb. The gang kid is easy; not angry I bumped him. He
tells me about how he was almost a senator once but he was too
short so he went to Hell instead. About Hell, which I don't
believe in, I tell him, "They say, if you can do the first six
months you're gonna be okay."
Next dream. I'm in a concrete shower room in like a YMCA. I
want to leave but my pile of clothes has been replaced by shower
towels and a cloth belt. The floor near the urinals is tilted so
when you use one you have to hold yourself from slipping by
keeping one hand on the wall or the pipes.
A boy reaches around me from behind and grabs me in an
inappropriate place. I say, "Let go." He doesn't move. I say, "I
will elbow you in the face." He lets go. I get out of this awful
place.
My mother lives in a house that's a lot of separate
shack-rooms on a cliff above the sea. Kay is here, complaining
about the quality of the shack she lives in somewhere else far
away. When Kay leaves, my mother tells me that Kay doesn't even
live in a shack but in her pickup truck. Okay. Whatever.
A little north, up the coast, I audition to be a player in a
kind of improvisational game show Doug Nunn will be producing. I
do some cartwheels and cheat by levitating slightly to be more
graceful.
I go out the door into a room that's the covered square in
the center of a small shopping mall, then into a toy-soldier
store. Drummer Mike Bisson comes in. I say, "Are you guys gonna
play here?" He says, "Yeah. In two weeks."
In a restaurant a pretty 40-something redheaded woman asks
if I'm the one who wrote that story about [garbled phrase]. She
says her extension class just discussed it. I want to answer but
I'm too far away now; the whole time since doing the cartwheels
I've been moving steadily toward the sea. I go out a final door
and /up! into the wind!/ I'm blown miles inland and come down in
a street of sad yard sales at night. A little boy is here, alone
in his travels, having a Mister-Toad-like adventure, playing
with toys and junk he finds wherever he goes.
Next dream. A big bronze-colored ship travels on two
handsful of hydrofoil fingers, pursued by a fast animal-like
sailing ship. The bronze ship turns downward to go under the
water, but before it gets away the pursuing chip /bites at it/,
crushing the delicate latticework of windows and skylights over
the aft deck.
Now I'm in resulting damaged submarine. We limp to land,
become a three-foot wide, sixty-foot-long rectangular section of
heater duct camouflaged with acoustic tile panels, and we park
next to the trailer of the woman who manages a trailer park. The
woman's little girl comes out all sleepy; she says her mother
and the old Russian woman from that trailer (she points across
the yard) have gone to town to find out about the /sea
disaster/. (That would be the wreck of the ship that bit us. The
people in this country will probably blame us for that. Good
thing our ship looks totally different now.)
The little girl understands everything at once. She wants to
come away with us when we finish repairs and go with us to our
world.
I say, "We'll come back for you."
My dreams from Thursday, 2006-08-10:
First dream. I see a series of sloppily-drawn but smoothly
animated cartoons, in each of which two animals trot along
side-by-side, avoiding obstacles, splitting apart into pieces
--legs, head, back end-- and coming back together again. One
time they're ducks. One time they're wind-up toy horses with
painted-on wild eyes.
Next dream. An expensive school/camp/outdoors-club like a
martial arts temple park exists to teach cooking, to put the
polish on top-level chefs, but it's fallen a little so now
anyone out for a thrill and rich enough can go through the
program. A new batch of yuppies has begun the cooking course on
a steeply tilted section of a miniature golf course. Everyone
uses special gloves and the exercise results in scalded hands.
Each person loses part of a finger or a whole finger. The master
chef will show them how to use bits of their own fingers in
special food. They weren't serious about this before but they
must be now.
The master chef says, "There are eight basic ingredients:
avocado, eggs, and six others."
Before, I was just watching, but now I'm in the story,
seeing all this from the point of view of having gone through
the entire training course myself long ago. I'm just ahead of
where everyone is on the physical course; I'm sitting in a deep,
flexible, bowling-ball-return track, sliding forward at walking
speed, following a ping-pong ball.
I hear the class coming up behind me, doing their last
cooking exercise. I'm not supposed to be here; I grab the
ping-pong ball, widgy out of the track and run away diagonally
across a dirt field to some vending machines by the head of the
escalator down to the parking lot.
The cooking master comes here, goes down the escalator,
talking excitedly to himself. I follow. Will I hear him and be
disappointed in his mundane concerns? No-- he's talking about a
cooking competition in Washington, D.C., and the president of
the United States will be there. (Not the current real-life
idiot puppet president, but some future, reasonable, decent man.
Someone fit for the job and worth being excited about
impressing.)
Next dream. An odd, nebulous version of /Fight Club/ plays
out. The main character's name is Christian (say kris-JON)
Darden, not Tyler Durden, and this becomes what the story is
about; the wrong name causes things to go wrong so the story
spoils like fruit spoiling, and it ends with a giant lumpy
claymation dinosaur rearing up out of the volcano at the center
of a tropical island, going /RRAAAWR!/ loud enough to shake
trees, then it coughs and looks embarrassed. Awww, poor thing.
Next dream. Two good guys, one invisible and intangible and
the other a shag-haired surfer on a surfboard, defy an entire
army of bad guys who live in a submarine that's really just a
lot of swimming floats made of barrels and styrofoam and planks.
The surfer guy goes up a permanent mountain ridge of water,
coasts back down and across the water valley, jumps over the
submarine, gets over the next water ridge and eventually reaches
shore.
In the hotel belonging to an authority higher than both the
good guys and the bad guys, the surfer and the intangible man
tell the authority's butler that they /changed/ something about
a nuclear test. The bad guys' leader is a cross between Scorpius
of /Farscape/ and Mendocino publisher Beth Bosk; this villain
makes the required "curses, foiled again!" or "Hogan!" Colonel
Klink motion and stomps out to go back to the submarine and
start another project doomed to comically fail.
-end-