Loops. Grim Spoilers. War. Traction. Rare Old Domino Nickels.
Marco McClean
First dream. Deep underground in a cavern my group is
engaged in getting out by traveling along bunched-up hanging
loops of metal cable lined with sections of soft rope. The
idea is to go down and up each loop and so get to the end, but
there are unstated rules that bear on forward progress-- for
instance, no shortcuts.
Some of us use the rope sleeves to go down the cable; some
prefer to tough it out, going down bare cable, in hope that
this is another of the unstated rules-- that doing it the hard
way will result in getting out quicker. (There's a Tarkovsky's
/Stalker/-like magic-logic to all this.)
At the bottom of a loop I sit at a table in a
vending-machine cafe, in a rest area. Then I get ready for
sleep in a hammock next to the hammock of a little boy and
girl, brother and sister. The children are miserable; I play a
don't-be-afraid game with them, where we cover our noses and
partly cover our eyes with a hand. We're all filthy from being
underground for weeks.
A megachurch huckster/preacher character is standing next
to a table of small, slick brochures that are get-out-of-here
request forms. I say, "Reach me a form, will ya?" (There's an
indefinite wait for an answer to a request form, but at least
you've begin the process of getting out.) The preacher hands
me a damaged brochure. I hand it back to him, saying, "Get me
one whose return address is not defaced."
Vignette. A metal air mattress art object is attached to a
wall; grim silent kids take turns smashing it out of shape,
using a long wooden pole.
Next dream. Mendocino is the site of a shooting war
between soldiers of several big businesses. I have a machine
gun that's almost too big for me to carry by myself. Most of
the company I identify with is captured and will be driven
away in a white moving-van trailer. I hide in shrubs, waiting
for a good time to act. /The truck comes loose from the
trailer and goes away east toward the bank./ An Oriental man
from a third company (not us and not the captors) runs out
from shrubs up the street and slaps signs for his company onto
the trailer with my friends inside, claiming it. He thinks
that's all that's required, that he doesn't have to defend his
claim; he runs away to get more signs to stick on other things
to claim, and I go to the trailer to let my friends out. /This
is a stupid game./
My dreams from Thursday, 2007-03-01:
First dream. I'm on the roof of a small independent
hardware store that's attached to a giant hardware store
behind it, where in real life is the new town hall on Main
Street in Fort Bragg (CA). Other people are up here, who like
to be up on commercial roofs at night. A parts counter man
from Rhoads Auto Parts is here. Two girls are talking; one
says the man quit and will be leaving town because of having
"coughed up bits of intestine." I sit and talk with the man.
He says he's moving to a place with /good vapors/. I don't
want to get into a discussion about psychic real estate
concerns; I say carefully, "It's a good idea to leave a place
that makes you feel sick." It's true.
It's just beginning to get light out. We separate to look
for an easy way down. I find two metal ladders bolted to the
north wall, but one's not strong enough to take my weight and
the other is so narrow I can't even get my finger on a rung.
Climb down it like climbing down a pipe? No. It stops too far
above the ground.
The auto parts guy has somehow got down to the yard next
door.
I go higher up onto the big roof, go way back to where
shacks lean against the store, and climb down stepped shack
roofs. Everyone is down now; we're in a park where the
buildings were a moment ago. We're all walking east to Main
Street. I meet a friendly soft all-white Australian shepherd
and run around and play with it in the grass. A black-haired
girl with milk-white skin runs past me; I put on a burst of
speed, catch up with her and race her to the road.
At the road I go into a narrow train-car-like movie
theater. I examine a series of toy train engines, one after
another, that have in common a way to get extra traction by a
center wheel or other pushing thing --one of them has
styrofoam blocks on an eccentric shaft. Across the aisle to my
left a little boy sitting with his mother watches this last
engine closely; it turns out to belong to him. I give it back.
Does he want any of the others on the seat? /No, thank you./
Now I have a long cardboard box with novelty magic tricks
in it. One trick is a fishing-pole/walking-stick with an
Egyptian snake/pharaoh-head hook on the end. I lift this out
of the box. I'm humming a triumphant-sounding tune. I say,
"What's that from?" The little boy across the aisle thinks of
it the same time as I do; we say together, "Madame Bovary." I
say to the boy's mother, "Smart boy." She's like, /Of course./
A stage magician is trying to set things up to show a
movie. I consider using the hooked pole to pull down the
screen in the middle of the theater (there's no-one sitting
farther forward than that), but the magician goes to the very
front, climbs the altar and pulls down a screen there. I go to
the rear to adjust the projector; the magician calls back to
me to /get the rewind reel/, meaning the film is back-to-front
on the reel and must be rewound before playing. (He's right;
the sprocket-holes are on the wrong side.)
While I deal with the film, Steve Weingarten of
Hit-and-Run Theater watches and jokes about /Broken Flowers/,
the Jim Jarmusch movie we saw here last week in the back-story
of the dream, about a lonely man visiting all his
ex-girlfriends to find out which one sent him an anonymous
letter telling him he has a nineteen-year-old son. (I saw this
movie in real life Wednesday night.) I joke to Steve, "Don't
set me up with any date advice, because I'm /tired/." I tell
him about the society of people who climb buildings and sit on
the roof at night. He thinks I'm kidding.
Now it's another night and I'm up on the hardware store
roof again, the big roof; it's even bigger than before.
Someone says something clever and I write it down on the waxy
peel-away side of a sheet of Avery label paper: "Government
has always been least incensed at, say, a Trotsky, and most
incensed at small matters of decorum." (Matters of decorum
like breaking the tacit rule of not climbing up on buildings
at night.)
Next dream. I watch a PBS television show being made about
a Russian university. The gate to the grounds is a section of
Roman-style aqueduct; men on a hanging scaffold are painting
the structure white. They notice they're on camera and they
start to sing and dance. One dances nearly out of control;
rather than rein him in and try to be safe, the others join
him in the crazy dance --continuing to paint the whole time--
and the dance becomes an acrobatic trick that ends with the
wildest painter hanging upside-down from the edge of the
scaffold, ninety feet up, held by his ankles. The man holding
him loses his grip but tries to save the man, and they both
fall. The third painter looks about to fall deliberately, in
pure grief. I think two things: 1. Did the teevee people know
this would happen? and 2. I hope the camera guy didn't freak
out and shut off the camera; because then the men will have
died for nothing.
Back in the U.S., in Fort Bragg (CA), I'm surprised to
find old-fashioned freighter ship docks to the left of the
train station parking lot. I walk out that way. Some
early-Soviet-era Russian sea officers stand around telling
jokes (in Russian), enjoying the night air. I go back to the
parking lot and put two chunks of redwood inside the back
hatch of my old Chevy Citation.
American spy soldiers pull up in cars and dress and arm
themselves to attack the Russians for no reason. As the spy
soldiers run south to attack the Russians, Juanita and I go
north on a white-painted raised wooden walkway and go into an
warehouse where they're having a frenetic 1920s dance. We join
the dance and run and hop all over the place, pick each other
up, spin around, do impossible moves...
After the dance, in the next building they're putting on a
county-fair-type low-budget exhibit about political systems
and economics. In the exhibit, at first there are five
editor-publishers and each one has his own little pro-union,
socialist, progressive newspaper. One by one they the editors
are frightened and bought off and destroyed by bigger,
anti-union newspaper companies, until there's only one little
editor and paper left. (This is the two-color paper, printed
in black and, on at least the front and back page, red.) The
editor is knocked off his feet by a thug swinging a
two-by-four and pulled on a conveyor-roller track out through
a slot in the wall; he's replaced by a puppet-editor. The new
editor happily holds up the same red, black and white paper as
before-- /or is it./
Juanita and I are recruited from the audience to
participate in the next part of the show. Juanita sits at a
table. An old blind woman flutters her hands to feel her way
over Juanita's head, down the length of Juanita's silver
clarinet, past the flowers stuffed in the bell of the
clarinet, and the old woman mimes feeling an imaginary teacup
in my hand. /Huh?/
An actor plays a doctor who won't serve us because we're
poor. I say, "Well, at least you won't unnecessarily take off
my leg, then." Wrong thing to say; I can go now.
A disgusting blood-red premature baby-thing wants its
mother to hold it; its mother is a normal baby about two years
old. The mother-baby ignores it, squats and surprises herself
by peeing on the floor. /I'm confused; are they still doing
capitalism?/ The premature baby-thing is so pathetic; I pick
it up and hug it. It clamps itself around my neck with
surprising strength. /This must be so people don't drop them./
While I wait for Juanita to be finished with her part in
the show, I go to a glass-covered wall display that's an
advertisement for two new books. The book company has actors
here to enliven the experience of the display; a Dickensian
street boy is nabbed by a New England version of the Fagin
character, who says, "You're the kind of lad that would not be
lacking fair passage! Pay, pay, pay!" Keystone Kops come
around to arrest the immigrant boy for not paying to get here.
Juanita and I are back at the car, but the political show
is not over. Orangutans use hypnosis to take over the will of
a man who used to be their master. They were his maids and
butlers, and now he's their puppet. He becomes a brute beast
who fights others, animals and men, on stage in a big
greenhouse-theater, for the amusement of foppish rich people.
(Somewhere in the middle of this last dream I'm in a kind
of theater lobby or bank lobby in the shopping mall the train
company made in what used to be Fort Bragg's Ford dealership.
I want very much to write something down before I forget it.
Rather than go back to get my normal notepad from near the
campfire pit at the dock where the Russians were attacked (or
are about to be attacked), I dump papers and receipts and mail
from between the pages of the notepad I have; also pennies and
nickels fall out. The nickels are shaped like dominos. Until
World War Two this was the normal kind of nickel.)
-end-