I
I found a little flap of dead skin on the middle finger of my left hand and began stripping it away. Meanwhile, I heard in my mind's ear the pastor of my boyhood church bid farewell to a disgruntled segment of the congregation with which he had doctrinal differences. As I peeled my hand in one long, continuous strip, the pastor wambled with a cane toward the narthex--rather like the lame defense attorney in
The Lady from Shanghai--his speech growing echoey and indistinct. And then a thick swathe of flesh tore away from my palm, disclosing blood and bone.
II
I dreamed I was Rod Serling. I mean, I was watching Rod Serling, but at the same time I
was Rod Serling. And I was thinking, "I need to find some teleplay-writers; trouble is, no one does that anymore except Jodie Foster." Then I walked into a sort of Quonset hut where shadowy people wound among antique cheval mirrors, tapestries, mahogany furniture--expensive stuff. A woman who resembled my Aunt Cathy--similar dark, shoulder-length hair--sat at a table near the entrance. "Do you have any teleplay-writers?" I asked her. "Hmm," she said. "We've got Jodie Foster in a booth at the back, but that's about it."
III
A dream about a guy I knew in college and never much cared for. He struck me as prudish, aesthetically staid, and prematurely old. When we shared a hotel room in Toronto, his intellectual hubris irritated me. I don’t remember his name, but he was shaped like a Coke bottle, so I’ll call him Mr. Coke.
I was lying on my back on tall columns of jeans and t-shirts against a wall. I could touch the ceiling. Far below, Mr. Coke was pulling out t-shirts—quickly and gingerly, so as not to crumble the columns. He reminded me of someone trying to yank a tablecloth out from under plates and silverware. Nevertheless, every time he pulled out a shirt, the columns wobbled as though about to topple over. It was a long way to the floor, and nothing would have broken my fall.
Mr. Coke chose the same t-shirts I would’ve chosen: ironic or emblazoned with band logos.
On the ceiling the white paint looked like a sheet stretched taut over a dinosaur spine. I grasped the spine with my hands and feet and shinnied across the ceiling to the adjacent wall, where there was a small door like that of a dumbwaiter. Maybe it was an escape route! I opened the door with my foot and found...another wall! There was a phone, too, and below the phone a number written in pencil, almost illegible on the lumpy, whitewashed cement. But even if I’d been able to pick up the phone, the number would have been useless. I knew it was a cruel practical joke.
IV
I remember a nightmare I had when I was 14, shortly after my sojourn at a church camp. I dreamed I was sitting in the back seat of a car parked in front of the camp's general store. The engine began to skreek and skritter like the cassette-player I used at the time. Suddenly a gargantuan panther burst out from under the hood--like the baby monster c-sectioning himself in
Alien. His murderous eyes flashed; his muscles rippled horrifyingly under his sleek black fur. He galloped toward the car, leapt, and rammed the windshield with his head. The resultant crack-web seemed to enmesh me as the slightly dazed panther trotted away from the car, preparing to hurl himself at the windshield again... I awoke with a start.
V
I was with my father and late maternal grandfather in the parking lot of Eastern Michigan University. A Goodyear blimp like a giant hermit-crab croissant hovered high overhead. My father and grandfather toted their acquisitions toward an embankment surrounding the lot; I followed empty handed. (I haven't fired a gun since my teens.) My father uncharacteristically aimed his new old rifle at the blimp and fired. Characteristically, he missed; even more characteristically, he accepted failure with good-natured equanimity and turned to proceed on his way. My grandfather then seized his opportunity to display superior marksmanship. He took aim, fired, and missed. Unlike my father, however, he was unwilling to concede that the target was beyond his range. He took more careful aim and fired again, this time hitting a glass panel of the blimp. I heard a faint tinkle and saw tiny shards falling. My grandfather chuckled his bad-boy chuckle, and we all turned and started up the embankment.
Suddenly I heard a horrific crash behind me. Like the opera-house chandelier in
The Phantom of the Opera, the blimp had fallen on the rifle show, crushing countless people! The wrecked blimp gushed a pool of gas that spread with preternatural speed. I tried to run up the embankment after my father and grandfather, who'd disappeared; but I stumbled and fell, and the gas got me.
VI
I was sitting in a circa 80s school bus. I wiped frost off my window and saw a televised speech by "the dictator of Poland." On the balcony of a building like a Bavarian cuckoo clock, a giant effigy of the dictator cleaved the air with his arms and harangued the crowd in Hitler fashion. He was a Macy's-balloon-sized puppet with a loudspeaker built into his throat.
My late paternal grandmother sat next to me across the aisle, babushka'd, staring at the front of the bus, apparently unaware of me. I started singing "Anyone Who Had A Heart," wondering if she could hear me, if she knew the song, if she liked Bacharach. I felt a sentimental tenderness toward everyone on the bus, as if I'd had a drink or two. Some little boys were stampeding down the aisle and trampling one another. I thought I should intervene, as when I sub at elementary schools. I joked with one of them about the Green Bay Packers logo stuck to his forehead. "A third eye, eh?" And suddenly I was Barack Obama in a Macy's parade, marching through Manhattan, beaming and waving at the throngs of cheering onlookers. But at the same time I was watching myself as if on television.
VII
I dreamed I had a book of poems by Cormac McCarthy. At first I was excited about it, but disappointment quickly supplanted my excitement: McCarthy was like Raymond Carver in that his poems weren't as good as his prose. In the dining room of a student coop where I used to live I threw the book away. Since it had become a large, bloody slab of plastic-wrapped beef, it hit the bottom of the trash barrel with a sickening plop. "You shouldn't throw it away," I thought. "You know how you are: you'll wish you had it back. Besides, the trash won't be taken out for weeks. The book will rot and stink." And I knew that throwing the book away would somehow make me a suspect in the recent disappearance of a ten-year-old boy. A drug-dealer--a fourteen-year-old boy with scraggly blond hair--approached me and, brandishing a knife, demanded the whereabouts of this missing boy. Then I was on the lam in the back seat of a car driven by one of my students. We were careening around slummy, nocturnal streets. Drug-dealers shouted jeers at us and pelted the car with eggs, among other garbage. My student windshield-wiped the yolk away.
VIII
I was strapped to a chair, wearing a sort of Lone Ranger mask with wires attached to the throats of people sitting around me. One by one these people were injected with a truth serum that compelled them to express their deepest fears. Their lips moved, but their words came out of my mouth, and I felt their fears as if they were my own.
And then I found myself in France, walking down an esplanade with a pretty, self-contained Dutch girl, a taciturn Spaniard, and a pudgy, swarthy, curly-haired young man who spoke both French and English fluently. This last handed me a pair of underwear like blue terrycloth Speedos. "Ceci sont de rigueurs pour les hommes en France," he said. Apparently my companions were expecting me to drop my pants and don these outré Gallic briefs right in front of them. I tried to explain that I don't wear underwear--that comme beaucoup des types Américains, I schlepp around in jeans much of the time, allowing my junk to flounce untrammeled inside them--but the French equivalents of some of these words escaped me, so I appealed to the pudgy one for help. He'd been my go-to guy whenever my French had failed me. On this occasion, however, he refused to oblige. He just regarded me with cool amusement as I mumbled, "Mon membre... les bijoux de ma famille..."
IX
I had a valuable vintage guitar similar to the psychedelically painted Les Paul that Jimmy Page played with Led Zeppelin. On a guitar stand it rolled down a long, straight road, across the Canadian border, and into the garage of a house like Chester Brown's drawings of his boyhood home in Montreal. From a distance I watched a man pick up my guitar, look it over, and stow it in the back of a truck parked in the garage. Guitars filled and surrounded the truck. Apparently the garage was a guitar warehouse.
Later I walked down the road to retrieve my property. After I crossed the Canadian border the houses grew charmingly antiquated and decrepit, the pavement rain-dark and grass-cracked. Everything exuded a barely perceptible aura of Europeanness.
At the garage a young man with pink spiked hair greeted me. He wore a long, olive-drab military coat with cryptic patches and black leather punk boots. He looked like a young Gary Oldman. At first he feigned ignorance of my guitar and invited me to search the truck, but when I persisted he led me to a corner of the garage. My guitar lay there in pieces. The young man admitted that he'd played it and "pushed it to the limit." To quell my rage he swore up and down that he'd repair it. I said I'd come back later, but I knew my guitar was permanently ruined.
X
I was on a jury debating whether to hang a gallows tree. This gibbet had grown old: it bent with the weight of the condemned man and set him down gently--like Frost's birch tree, though that allusion didn't occur to me in the dream. We sat around a collapsible table in a church gym. We drank hot chocolate and joked and laughed as we discussed condemning the gallows to death by hanging.
painting:
Eine Kleine Nacht Musik, Dorothea Tanning,1946
