I had this really involved dream last night. I was in a church for most of the time; it was less of a church than it was a community center.
Marcia Clark was there. She had this crush on me, I mean she was positively infatuated, just beaming any time someone mentioned my name. She and I spent a lot of time running up and down staircases together, and I really liked her too, and I had the respect of everyone else who was in that church except for the legitimate religious people, who I felt resented the romance between Marcia and I.
When she and I were not running up and down the stairs she was running around the church telling everyone there how wonderful she thought I was.
I went into a restaurant and the waiter and everyone there knew me from what Marcia had told them, and the owner of the place offered me a free meal.
I don't know why Marcia Clark was such a central figure in this, except that I've always hoped and wished that when I do find somebody, then she will be as strong and wonderful a woman as I've somehow imagined Marcia to be. Even though I fell that way about her, I always sensed from her a certain girlishness, or call it old-fashionedness, by which something in her character saw men as comforters and women as people in need of comfort. I felt she was very lonely and that the whole trial for her was a huge invasion. I could have been completely imagining it, too, but I think that this is why she and how she showed up like this in my dream.
I refused the free meal, but the waiter pointed out a flaw in the restaurant's menu which allowed me to order a very expensive dinner for $4. This offer I accepted. It was not an electronic menu system, it was a regular plastic-encased menu with pictures of plastic omelettes and nauseous meatloaf, but it had been allowed into print with some kind of glitch which let you order a certain combination of dishes for $4.
After eating (don't remember what) I went back to the church, which was mostly empty of any ceremony and instead populated by friendly people. A couple of really burly guys had volunteered to be my bodyguard. Even in the dream I thought that bodyguard services were not something I needed, until I went upstairs and into a hallway. Had I not had two bodyguards with me I would have had ice cream thrown all over me by a group of rowdy toughs. Instead, the ice cream which was aimed at me landed on some other person's leather jacket.
The bodyguards and I returned from that hallway to the church. Getting from the hallway back into the church involved riding an exposed elevator, and when we reached the top of the elevator those toughs were sitting there. One of them mumbled to me "How you think you goin' somewhere?" and he also said something about ice cream. At that, one of my bodyguards (who was the spitting image of Dennis Rodman) turned around and karate-kicked the tough-kid so forcefully that the kid's head and chest split off, and his legs came to a shattering stillness. The head rolled away, down the elevator shaft, and his torso went down the stairs. The other two toughs gasped and made foolish gestures to try and stop the flight of the body parts. I remarked to the Dennis Rodman lookalike that it reminded me of Jackie Kennedy chasing after her husband's brain, and I made a comparison between that and Marcia Clark, but I can't remember what the comparison was.
After that I left the church. I think I was only in the church for some specific period of time, like 45 minutes, but I can't remember why I was there. When I left it was late at night. The church was somewhere down by Wall Street.
I've never understood when people say that you're not supposed to die in your own dreams. The superstition I know of says that if you dream that you're dead then you really are dead. I mean what the hell kind of wive's tale is that?I die in my dreams all the time. Once in a dream I died and went to hell. Anyone who went to hell was flushed down a toilet, and had to go down a really long drain to get there. To fit down the drain I had to be turned into a tapeworm, and once I got down there it was up to me to figure out how to get out of the drain and into "Hell Proper." I remember thinking exactly these words as I spiralled to the end of the drain: "Let's see, how am I gonna get outta here." I know I got out of the drain, and I remember being interested in exploring hell and learning where not to go.
Another time I dreamed I was walking by a lake in Tampa. It was really early in the morning, and as I walked further and further from the lake and into a more wooded area I became aware that something, some kind of animal or beast was following me from behind the bushes. It was not until I realized that this thing was following me that it attacked, and it killed me. I woke up trying to scream but I could not. I was close to not being able to breath when I woke up, and felt like I was drowning. So maybe I would have died had I not forced myself to wake up, and maybe that superstision is true.
I remember when my grandmother died, it was the summer of 1987. From the time it happened to 4 days later at the funeral I think I got about 1 hour of sleep. For days and days the phone was ringing with calls from relatives I'd never heard of, from reaches of my family I'd never even imagined existed. I was an adult, but this was my first encounter with virtually all the people who were calling to offer sympathy and money and whatever else; feeling like a boy again I handed the phone to my mother, thinking she was the authority, without hinting that I might want to talk to some of these people.
The funeral happened, and I was finally able to quench the desperate tiredness I felt by going to sleep at 4 in the afternoon. I slept like a slammed door until 2:30 a.m., when the phone in my room rang. I moved from my bed into the floor, where the phone was, and picked it up. "Hello," I said. There was a woman breathing on the other side, and I heard the sound of cars and traffic behind her. She whispered "Hi. This is Charlotte." It may have been her breathing, or it may have been the other noises around her, but there seemed to be a tidal noise coarsing through the phone.
I said "OK," my eyes were drawing shut and I bumped my head against the desk. Somewhere I was thinking that this might be another family member from another midwestern state, and that she had heard the news of my grandmother's death and called to offer some of her limitless wealth to the cause of the funeral. Somewhere else I was thinking that this person did not mean to call me, and that something fabulous was happening, what it was I did not know.
"I just wanted to talk to you," she said, with a little more volume.
"Can you call me back later?" I asked. She became perturbed, and my teeth began to chatter because I was cold and because the feeling of her becoming irritated scared me.
She said "Don't you know who this is?"
I said "No."
She said "This is the woman you were with last night!"
I said "you might have the wrong number. Can you call back tomorrow?"
The tension in her voice eased, and she asked "What time?" I don't remember what I said, but as she tried to finish the conversation with some kind of teasing comment I hung up the phone, and everything inside of me was petrified beyond description. This ephemeral woman and the feelings she imparted and the noises behind her had filled my bedroom, and I thought hers was a voice of the dead, the voice of my grandmother, who had called me at that very same phone the night she had the heart attack which eventually killed her. I was too scared to even move to put the blankets over me, even though I was as cold as I've ever been; I felt something more powerful than life itself stealing the darkness out of my room. I lay on the bed motionless, feeling as I sometimes do like the room was my coffin and that this was how I would going to spend the rest of eternity. I lay wide, wide awake for hours which felt like lifetimes until I could see the sun coming up and the clenching powers that stared over my bed and over my life were vanquished into the morning.
The woman never called back, and I know now as I write this that I wish she had, and I wish we could have known each other and held mysterious courts somewhere in the hot Florida night.
