Friday and Saturday mornings
Marco McClean
Aerodynamic UPS. Chipped Chia Sphinx.):
Vignette. Two nebulous shapes. One is a sleazy entrepreneur
character who loves and wants to protect the other, a naif with
potential.
They play and bump around like animated dish sponges. I can't
tell if they're enjoying this or fighting or both.
Next dream. I drive into a rural, insular, post-disaster town.
The stores and businesses, all made of salvaged two-by-fours, are
clumped together in a bunch, like circled wagons. The old woman in
the doorway of a fishmarket/grocery store watches me drive slowly
around the inside of the compound in a half-circle to the right;
she's suspicious.
I drive into a doorway in the middle of a long wall and up the
side of an inner wall, beaching my car at a forty-five-degree
angle.
One of two now-grown-up twins I remember from the old
Community School (I think one of them died, since) leads me to a
lab/shop space devoted to rechargeable batteries and devices that
use them. He asks me, "How did the UPS [uninterruptible power
supply] work out for you?"
I say, "It didn't." (It's still on the floor in my house in
real life, next to my computer, waiting for a car battery.)
I see a shiny, rounded, 1950s-looking,
car-battery-charger-shaped UPS that, in the dream, I remember
donating to this lab for sale. They haven't sold it yet. I wish I
had it back but I don't want to be an Indian giver.
My friend, electronics repairman Art Mielke, offers to keep an
eye out for a good one for me. He runs this lab.
Next dream. In an alley on the ocean-side of the Mendocino
houses near the sewage-treatment plant, a down-on-his-luck
traveling salesman pays off my patience --my not requiring my loan
back-- with a red plastic container of gasoline. I pour it into my
car's gas tank. The last bit of it is a cloudy, clumpy liquid. I
ask, "What /is/ this?"
He says, "Oh, I pissed in it. To make it look more full."
Really!
I pour the remaining gas back and forth between more and more
cans that just appear. I'm trying to pour off the gas, leaving the
impurities behind. The smell of gas is so strong it's sickening.
It's not my car anymore-- it's the empty space where the
salesman's car was before he left. Also, off to the side, he left
the A-frame sign for the suit he'd been trying to sell. (The other
night I listened again to my tape of Alex Bosworth's brilliant
story about the salesman who operates out of the trunk of his car,
selling, over and over, the shirt Elvis died in.) (Alex Bosworth
of /Crayon Theater/.)
I walk diagonally through a small field the same shape as the
inner line around the building compound of the previous dream.
Some kids are playing here.
Now it's a mown park in a suburban neighborhood. A gigantic,
gentle, lonely-looking, sleepy dog lies on its side against a
house-- the dog's so big I can only get one leg and part of
another in my field of view at a time; I have to swivel from side
to side to side and tip my head up and down to see the whole dog.
A redheaded Gypsy ceramic-salvage guy is repacking his goods
into the space behind a panel in his life-size, clockwork camel.
He holds a piece out to me-- an eight-inch-long ceramic sphinx
chia pet with red plant/hair growing for its mane. The Gypsy says,
"This was /made/ for you." I shake my head. I can't afford it.
He tried. He puts it into the camel and it gets chipped a
little. I think about how it probably gets a little more chipped
every time he takes it out and puts it away. All his things are
very valuable. They're from the Old Time, when anyone could have
anything he wanted, even a terra cotta sphinx!
My dreams from Saturday morning, 12/9/00 (Shotgun. Grass Farm.
Minibikes to Nowhere. Cemetery Freeway. Upstairs-Downstairs.
Guardian.):
First dream. Alongside a future dilapidated-world version of
Highway 80 between Sacramento and Roseville I and a girl I don't
know separately arrive for what we thought would be a
musical/cultural event in a fake, quaint reproduction of a 49er
boom town, but the place is deserted. This land has all been
divided up among thrifty Scottish warlord absentee farmers. The
girl and I find a place in some water-trees by a creek to hide our
vehicles, which, once we're out of them, have been here,
wheel-less, for years and settled rusting into the ground. This
doesn't feel remarkable.
A caretaker/guard comes. I feel I can talk him into not
reporting us, but the instant he twitches in the direction of
leaving, the girl, behind me, shoots him in the chest with a
short, heavy shotgun I didn't know she had.
He's a broken rag doll, like anyone who's dead. I say to the
girl, "You fucking idiot." She wiggles the gun around
uncertainly.
I remember writing a column once about how people should be
able to have any kind of gun they can make from scratch --not from
a kit, either. They have to make the ammunition, too, including
the propellant. The problem, as I saw it at the time, was that
people way too stupid and ignorant to design and make projectile
weapons could nonetheless buy one with a week's beer money.
And those are the dopes running around with guns. They're
always as surprised as the person they shoot. Like they had /no
idea/ that would happen.
Then there are their kids who don't fall far from the tree.
Next dream. I'm with a kind of smaller, lithe, barefoot,
cartoon version of Feather on a deserted, automated farm. We go
into a wide-open warehouse that whoever owns the farm is
apparently using to make hobby half-size airplanes out of
foam-core fiberglass. Parts are scattered around. There's a wing
section that looks just like a surfboard sawed in half flatwise,
like a sandwich roll.
Feather's painfully pregnant and I have to get her somewhere
there's a doctor. We go out into a field of rows of thick,
Lincoln-green, six-foot-tall blades of grass. I show Feather how
to fly up by leaning forward and lifting oneself by the base of
the skull and the lower middle of the back. She should be able to
do it; that won't hurt her belly.
No, no. Like /this/. Watch.
Next dream. I'm with Juanita on a mini-motorbike in the hills
near Nevada City (CA). I think I'm driving us into town but we get
farther away in ever darker, more menacing surroundings. Juanita's
annoyed by my incompetence.
(discontinuity)
I'm in Grass Valley, in real life about five or ten minutes'
drive down Highway 49 from Nevada City, but the place feels like a
theme park in the far future, like the reconstructed France in a
Cordwainer Smith story about giving miserably bored immortal
people back culture and suffering and misunderstanding and death
in order to revitalize humanity. I'm riding seated backward on the
high-rise handlebars of a tiny mini-motorcycle driven by a pretty,
high-school-age French girl in short pants. I'm both intrigued and
frightened by the shiny plastic crayon-flesh-color smoothness of
the inside of her thighs-- it implies that she has no sex, that
she's like a Barbie doll inside her pants. Ugh.
Things become formless and the dream plays again with its
elements jumbled. I ride into Grass Valley with Juanita on the
handlebars. I'm lost outside Nevada City with the French girl, who
now is the daughter of the official who runs the town. /I'm/
Juanita, annoyed at the incompetence of the girl, who's driving.
I'm tired of this. I'd rather read my book, the one I was
reading before bed, anything. Anything but this aimless driving
around. (I feel guilty because I didn't have enough money to go
take care of my mother when she had laser cataract surgery last
week. She lives over in the Grass Valley area. She says she's
fine; they only did one eye and she's not impaired in any way, but
still... And my mom and Juanita get along, but there's something
low-level-weirdly-unpleasant going on between them that I can't
figure out. It isn't your typical mother-in-law/daughter-in-law
thing. One time Juanita showed her and one of her friends her
black-light angel wings tattoo that runs from her shoulders down
over her butt, and my mom said, "Look at that figure." The tone of
voice was chilling. Much later I heard that same tone of voice
from Angie Dickinson in /Wild Palms/. Remember that?)
Vignette. I pull my present car out into freeway traffic in
L.A. I'm late for a job interview. I instantly take the wrong
freeway split and spill out into a vast, undeveloped, swampy,
sandy cemetery. I have to keep going so I don't bog down and get
stuck. I'm not finding a place to turn around.
Next dream. I'm hand-sanding a door set on sawhorses in an art
gallery in L.A. I work for the gallery owner, an art dealer. He
tells me I did a good job and he plonks a framed painting --a
modern-art Medieval-looking landscape that's like my mental image
of one of the locales in P.J. Farmer's (or Piers Anthony's-- I
can't remember) /World of Tiers/ books down onto the door.
"How much, ya think?" He's asking me what the painting and
door together are worth. I say, "Six hundred sixty? Six eighty?"
He's training me to value paintings. He says, "Six eighty-eight.
Eight for you." (!)
That doesn't feel right. Eight for me?! If I'd said a
thousand dollars he would have still given me only eight. But in
the dream I'm on parole for something and I have to keep this job
and stay out of trouble or it's back to jail for me.
It's okay. I'll steal something from the gallery, or I'll find
some other way to profit from this situation, to make things a
little more even. (I'm like an Elmore Leonard character. I don't
learn.)
I follow the art dealer to the elevator and out into a party
on an upper floor for rich people. They're all drinking and
burbling at each other. I eat some tiny, triangular liverwurst
sandwiches and talk with a waitress who's been on her feet all
day. She tugs down at her pantyhose, through her short pants. Her
clothes are too tight; they've been riding up and chafing.
"Listen," I say, "Can we go swimming? I'd really like to go
swimming somewhere." I'm thinking, God, with how rich everybody is
here, there's probably a swimming pool right in the building or on
the roof or something.
The waitress grins at me. She looks like a cross between Meg
Ryan and the poet Devereaux Baker-- she's disheveled and
attractive. I can't help it; I love waitresses. She's like, /We're
not allowed to use the pool. We're the help./
I feel confident; here's where I get my eight-dollars'-worth
and I don't have to steal anything. I say, "Where's the pool."
She doesn't know I'm not one of the rich people. If I tell her she
can knock off and go swimming, she can knock off and go swimming.
Next dream. I'm in L.A. on foot to watch out for a very
important Scottish man with a drinking problem. It has something
to do with a promise my old-world-Scottish father (!) made to the
family of the man I'm supposed to, uh, watch.
I'm walking over a river-park area on a very high pedestrian
bridge and I come upon some British schoolboys who scatter,
leaving behind one boy who's playing with a jagged concrete rock
as though he's about to throw it over the edge. There are people
down there! I keep walking; I don't speed up.
As I come even with him he leans way over the concrete rail
and he's obviously aiming-- he's deliberately going to drop the
rock on someone's head! He releases the rock and whirls to run
away.
I grab his head and push him back around, forcing him to watch
where the rock hits (I don't get to see this). I squeeze his head
between my hands and /bonk!/ the bridge of his nose on the
concrete rail, saying, "Never do that."
That afternoon, I watch, invisible, as a woman secretary rides
a small, tramlike, Disneyland peoplemover-train-thing to a meeting
in a bench/terminal with the city's transportation chief, who's
bound by law to catch and punish me for breaking the boy's nose,
but he sees value in letting me continue this vigilante-type
action. He says, "It takes some of the burden off me." The
secretary has no opinion. She's just waiting for instructions /and
writing everything down/. I want to tell the transportation chief
not to get in trouble over me, but I'm not here; I'm just
watching.
Years later I'm resting against the iron rail of a pedestrian
bridge over a wide canal near Venice Beach (the one in the L.A.
area). One side of the canal is a sandy place that's divided up
for the various beach activities. Over here are musclebound gay
men and women playing volleyball. Over there is clothing-optional,
meaning clothing-off.
Nearest the bridge is a place for people to practice yoga
breathing. A woman inflates her belly --too much-- and I realize
that her belly goes up as the flexible head and chest of a boy to
her right go down. This is a game they're playing. She squeezes
down on her own head and chest (and belly) and the boy's comically
surprised head inflates like a big balloon. I realize I'm seeing
this story in a book, a collection of a Sunday comic strip famous
only in my dream.
I walk around to a cafe where I sit with the transportation
chief's secretary, who needs me for some sort of scheme she has. I
haven't bathed for a few days, so I lean backward over the side of
my booth-seat, duck my head completely under the water filling the
cafe aisle and scrub my hair. I get water up my nose and cough and
choke, embarrassing the secretary.
Now I'm sitting in a section of booths that have been pushed
together at the edge of the cafe nearest the canal. The Scottish
man I was supposed to watch before is now old-- like sixty or
seventy. He's had a full life in L.A. and enjoyed himself and he's
fine; there was nothing to worry about.
I tell the happy group of his old cronies a funny story about
how one time, oh, forty years ago, the Scottish man sneaked into a
high-class apartment building with a waitress he picked up at an
art opening and they got in some kind of trouble... but I can't
remember what happened. I somehow got him out of trouble. I have
an image of him and the waitress fleeing out a service entrance in
weird, checkered Bermuda shorts... I keep talking even though I'm
not adding anything. People gradually, politely drift back to what
they were doing before.
Apparently I do this all the time. I'm senile. I just start
talking. /This is the worst part of any of my dreams, Hellcatt--
this is my nightmare: I'm old and demented, and for an instant I
come to my senses and realize it./ Part of what's so horrible
about it is that /I don't want to wake up./ Because, wake up to
what? An immobile, dried-up husk of a body in a convalescent
hospital bed?
Aaaaugh!