Paint It Black. His Ancestral Home. Cherchez La Femme. Private Boots.
Marco McClean
Vignette. I'm using a spraygun with a comfortable pistol
grip to put a second (or third) coat of flat-black paint on
a two-foot square of grainy 5/8" plywood that's wedged up
between two scrub-oak stumps. I don't know what's around me;
I don't look up. The swinging air-hose slaps against my leg.
Next dream. I'm with two small, giggly, Oriental
prostitutes swimming out from under a pier, toward shore,
and into the mouth of a dark dock. I'm here because I'm
worried about the girls, and they're here because it's their
turn to service the hereditary ruler of this Southeast Asian
country, and if they were to fail to show up, soldiers would
come looking for them. And they don't mind; it's their job.
The ruler swims out from the boat ramp with his
minister, who holds him steady in the water while he has sex
with the two girls. I wait, treading water a little farther
out. The ruler and his minister swim back to shore. The
girls swim to me and we head back toward the side of the
pier. We're not going to stop at the pier; we're really
going home, the location of which is a secret from those in
charge.
As we walk up the driveway of an old farmhouse in gentle
foothills, I stifle my annoyance at learning that the girls
talked about our house while they did the little ruler.
Somehow I know that this house /was his house when he was a
little boy/, and he'd forgotten all about it until the girls
mentioned it. So now he'll get all nostalgic and come
around, and we won't be able to live here anymore.
Sure enough, here come the jeeps. I look around inside
the house for anything to hide, to keep, but there's really
nothing but a few artist's kits-- paintboxes and little
easels. Anyway, it's too late to hide them. I worry because
the kits have bits and pieces of my spiral-bound diary, and
I don't remember if I've been disrespectful of the ruler in
it.
The ruler's entourage takes over and they start giving
orders about cleaning this farm up and setting a pavilion
up, etc. Right in front of the ruler I hesitate to answer a
sub-minister's incriminating question about where the farm
people acquired a bucket of rivets. There's no way for me to
safely answer without endangering the others. I'm sure I'll
be ordered shot, but Steve Weingarten, who's been
gravitating closer and closer, suddenly comically attacks
the sub-minister, taking his mind off my insubordination.
They wrestle and shout like a /Three Stooges/ fight. Steve
is surreptitiously working their fight around the other side
of a shed where he can quietly break the man's neck.
The ruler, a three-foot-tall, Vietnamese Yasser Arafat,
sees in me the prophecy fulfilled: I'm the one who will make
sure his reign is long and prosperous. He makes /me/ the
sub-minister and turns to other important matters. I run to
the outside cellar door and squeeze down a tunnel-like
stairway to warn the children living in the open-sided earth
cellar to flee up into the hills. "I'll figure out some way
to bring you food." The smallest child, the one in charge
because of his big, flat-top, tow-ball head, raises one
eyebrow, so gesturing that he doesn't trust me. I get to
live in the house and have a bath and sleep in a bed and
everything, and they're supposed to live outside in the
hills? I tell him that if they don't go they'll be killed.
He refuses to leave. Half the kids leave anyway, but half
stay. Well, I saved the smart half of them-- that's actually
better than saving them all.
Next dream. I'm at the open outside cellar door of the
house in the previous dream, listening to American
technicians in the basement. They're getting radio
information back from the robot-operated ship returning from
another star system. The ship has been gone for like twenty
years. It found an Earthlike planet with some mudpuppies
that were actually colony beings, not single creatures at
all, but mudpuppy-shaped clumps of temporarily-cooperating
cells-- a proto-animal. The ship told Earth by radio years
ago and started back, feeling it'd failed. The technicians
knew when the radio signal reached us, but only told the
American government, even though they'd been hired by this
little Southeast Asian country to run its space program.
They're talking snidely about all this now.
The little ruler appears behind me. He's heard enough to
make him furious. They found turtles, he thinks, and he
loves turtles --a turtle is his country's logo and mascot--
and if he'd been apprised by the goddamn technicians that
the ship found turtles on the other planet, he would have
sent more ships a long time ago. He orders the lying foreign
devils off his soil.
Now I'm out on the next hill over from the farmhouse,
watching the Americans and their families scramble to get
out. They'll never be welcome here again. I watch a flickery
home-movie of an airplane cut out of sheets of corrugated
metal, bent and riveted together, an airplane that couldn't
possibly fly, but does. The space technicians built it of
the bits of aerospace technology they've stolen from the
project over the years, bits they don't have to leave
behind. The plane's backswept wings tilt downward, not
upward. I know how unstable that is. Is the film
upside-down? Or did the locals who cleverly re-invented the
movie projector not know that a lens inverts an image? They
won't make that mistake again.
Next dream. A tall, spindly old man is the teacher at an
art school in an Oriental city. It's Saturday and the kids
are all off playing somewhere. The old man straightens up
the classroom, collecting painting kits and little easels to
stack them in a wooden cattle-feeder rack.
American troops burst in through the door. I think
they're going to kill the old man, but it turns out that
he's the later self of the person who the ruler of this
country felt was the fulfillment of the prophecy (see dream
before last). The Americans have made friends with this
country again in order to benefit from its space program
that it continued on its own all this time, outstripping the
rest of the world by now, and the Americans are now sucking
up to the little ruler or his son or someone like that. They
found the old man and they're here to set up a
communications post so the old man can talk to /the next
starship to return from the mudpuppy planet/.
I'm the old man. I watch the Americans establish a guard
and set up their things. They're so efficient, like
machines. The one black man in their company is an umbrella
stand made entirely of two flat-black cowboy boots slit
along the inside cuffs and sewn into a single cylinder. He
hops through the door between two men at attention and
around in a semicircle to the left to stand at attention,
himself, near enough the door to be useful in case someone
comes in with an umbrella.
It strikes me that if the Americans want to impress
anyone with how they've changed and become honorable, they
should make more of an effort to at least pretend to be a
classless society. I mean, don't they see how obvious it is
that they make the black guy be the umbrella stand?
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