To Dream No Dream

I'm tired tonight, perhaps the hangover from last night's wishing, perhaps the result of the constant beatings.  Of course, probably both.  I tried to write earlier, but I feel I lost the fire for it.  The tale not told is already stale, gangrenous. But a promise is. . . where was I.  

I was wearing a white shirt eating chocolate ice cream and scanning photos (today's image is one) when I heard the rat-a-tat-tat on my front door.  Expecting it to be someone I did not wish to see, perhaps somebody wanting to buy my Jeep or a neighbor handing out flyers for the holiday party, I trudged the distance noticing that I had spilled chocolate all over the front of my shirt.  Before I opened the door, I reached down to make certain the front button on my pajama bottoms was done.  And when I opened the door--did I already tell you this?  Yes, surely.  And so there stood some barely-known neighbor and one of the prettiest women with the greatest haircuts and best smiles I've seen in years.  What the hell was she doing with him? I kept wondering as she kept her eyes and smile on me.  I was thrown.  He talked, she didn't.  Come to the party, he said.  Yes, of course, I said, only because of the beautiful smiling woman.  I will come.  I will come.  

When they were gone, I went over and poured myself a drink and thought the unthinkable.  He did not care if I came to his party.  He would have sent me an invitation some time ago.  Still, maybe the party was under-attended, and he knew well enough to bring the young girl as a ploy.  If so, she was sure good.  Being a skeptic, I thought she was surely a shill.  But what was I doing?  The same thing I did every night, drinking and working and waiting for the clock to let me go to bed.  And so I put on my jeans and an old sweater and my beautiful wool jacket that gets too little use here in the south.  And a pair of flip-flops.  I just didn't have it in me to put on a pair of shoes.  No, no, that would be fine.  The big decision before I left was whether to pour my scotch into a paper cup or to take one of my own glasses.  Not wanting to drink good scotch from a paper cup. . . . 

I let myself into the big house.  Every inch of wall was covered with paintings.  There were easels set up in the middle of rooms and in odd corners holding this man's paintings.  They were painted in different mediums, none of them oils, and every one of them were of women, most of them nudes.  Of course, it was like being in some nightmare funhouse where all my own works were made ridiculous.  My head was pulsing.  It seemed to me the whole thing was a giant plot simply to make fun of me.  I could feel myself swaying.  

I walked carefully from painting to bad painting, for they were not very good, but there were lots of them, hundreds.  Volume.  I looked around for someone I knew, for I kept expecting everyone in the room to turn to me and laugh, faces plunging toward me, noses enlarging as in a fisheye lens, the echo and reverb set to maximum, the rpms set slow--haaaa-haaahaaa-haahaaaa.  But I didn't recognize anyone.  Wait, there was someone, the woman who owned the eyeglass store on the Avenue.  And there was another neighbor, a fellow who was a musician who owned a recording studio.  But that was it.  The rest were strangers.  And so I stood with my back close to one wall looking out at the crowd in a way that was inconspicuous as if I were still looking at the art.  

And then she was there.  Hello, she said with that incredibly wonderful smile, and my heart began to pound.  I smiled, my face crinkling like a mask.  Hello. . . oh, wait.  Oh, my.  I didn't recognize you at my house.  I'm sorry.  Geez.  How are you?  

It was a woman who had come to my house some eight or nine years earlier.  I have it all written down somewhere, in files of journals that I kept at the time.  It would take me hours to find them, to find this part, the part about her.  How did we meet?  She came by my house, I am sure.  She knew me already. . . but I am not ready to reveal all that yet.  I would have to tell too much and too much that is incriminating.  But we had a connection that was not quite personal and it turned out she lived a few blocks from me with her mother.  And she had come to my house one night. . . enamored.  And then. . . so was I.  

And now we stood there, two people with a strange history.  

"The last time I saw you, you said you were moving to New York. . . or L.A. . . which was it?"  

"Los Angeles."  

"Are you still there?' 

She was still there.  She had come home for the holiday to see her mother, but she was living just under the HOLLYWOOD sign, acting in independent films and doing odd things.  

"Have you been in anything I can see?" I asked her.  She named a film I can't quite remember now, something like "Beautiful Vampire Lady Killers."  I began to remember weird details about her.  She had been into video games and Kung Fu movies and strange Goth boys, I remembered, and I said, "You used to be into video games and Kung Fu movies and stra. . . karate or something."  

"Yes, yes, I still am.  Fighting and . . . " (and here I was prepared to hear "fucking" but that is not what she said) ". . . dancing."  Oh.

I had not thought about her for years, so it was a slow trickle of odd details that came back to me.  I still had a birthday card or a Valentines card or something that she had made for me sitting around in a drawer somewhere.  She used to come by my house when I was not there and leave things for me.  And sometimes at night when I was asleep.

"It has been a long time," I said to her as I remembered.  "How old are you now?"

"Twenty-eight," she said.  Jesus, she was beautiful.  And I tried not to think about what she was looking at, comparing it to what she remembered.  Eight years had been great for her.  For me. . . not so much.  I felt strange and embarrassed and awkward.  I remembered suddenly standing at the door in my pajama bottoms and white shirt with chocolate ice cream smeared all over the front.  I'd probably worn that shirt when she used to stop by eight years ago.  I felt like an idiot.  Some strange force had taken over my face.  I could not make it do anything natural.  We chatted a bit, the conversation, at least on my part, becoming more and more strained.  Her brother's girlfriend came over holding an unframed painting.  "Look," she said, "they just brought this down from upstairs."  It was a painting of her sitting naked in a chair.  I nodded my head up and down like one of those bobble heads people used to put in the back dash of the car.

Feeling weirder by the moment, I said, "I'm going to go.  If you would like to have a drink or go out for one, stop by."  She looked at me still smiling and said, "O.K."

And then I was gone.

At home, I was still amazed, first by the circumstance, and then by her utter beauty.  It had happened, I thought.  Someone was delivered to my door.

By morning, though, all that had changed.  Adrenaline gone, there was only the life I lead, the early rising and the feeding of the cat, the morning ablutions wondering how I felt, and the rigamarole of the complicated coffee maker.  Alone in the dark in front of the Xenon screen, I thought I needed to put blinds on the dining room windows.  There was no point in subjecting passersby to this vision any longer, this Hopper-gone-wrong image of solitude and. . . .  Perhaps she was out there now, or had seen me last night after I came home, sitting like a zombie typing on the little laptop.  I thought of photographs of the broken Kerouac sitting in his worn out chair living with his mother and his wife who looked like his mother's twin, of a wasted Neil Cassady after the ravages of a crazy life.  I began to think about my own awkwardness and ineptitude and about just me.

By morning, I knew there would be no stopping by, for a drink or otherwise.  Revisiting ghosts of Christmas past is a one-time thing.


I wish that I had taken a photograph of her last night, though, so you would believe me about her beauty.  It has been breaking my heart all day.  I have some photographs of her from long ago that I would have to look forever now to find.  I can see them in my head, though, that strange young girl with such wonderful half-Asian skin.  And now, where my heart had beaten so madly last night, there is a deadly thump that squishes rather than pounds.  I sit now in what passes for my pajamas, a scotch ready at my wrist.  It is late enough that I can go to bed now and dream no dream.  I'll wake plenty early in the morning.