DREAMS FROM 1980 1 of 2
VACATION BUILDINGS AND APARTMENT
1/3/80: At first I'm walking in a forest or at the edge of a swamp along narrow boards, and someone who's rather like Carl Spring steps off to find that the surface that looks like shimmering dark water is actually ICE, and I suspect that came from the lake surface in Central Park on New Year's Eve WHICH I DIDN'T WRITE UP YET, see NOTEBOOK 191). Then I'm walking at first, but then DRIVING in a TINY car with my head and left arm out the window up a VERY steep hill (it's almost more like an amusement park ride), looking up over my left shoulder at the hill ascending RIGHT THERE, and I park alongside the road at a sign pointing in to the vacation complex that I'm pricing, and I can only see a trail going over grassy hummocks into the forest on this enormous hillside, and I walk into this huge thing and most of it seems to be subterranean, and there are huge areas filled with a few people who seems to know everyone else, and it might be pleasant, but not for a newcomer. THEN I'm walking through a part of it that seems to be MY apartment, and it has my sofa and the old pink-plush chair without arms that I'd inherited from E. 70th and a few other things, but it's laid out like a department store display window, as if it were under plastic covers, and I look at its flat-lit neatness and think "I don't need NEARLY all this room anymore---after all, can I sit in more than one chair at the same time?" And then I'm to a sort of large picture window that's more a balcony edge of MY apartment and I can look down over a baronial living room with a cathedral ceiling, and I somehow know that this is the MIDDLE duplex of the three in the building, and it's like this is MINE and that's MOM'S and the third is my sister's or Dennis's or someone else's, and it's strange (in the dream) to think I have to go THROUGH Mom's apartment to get to Dennis's. Then I hope I can use the WHOLE space if I ever have a party, and it all retains that "Better Homes and Gardens" "just ready for the photographer" neatness that implies there's no one at home, and I just don't NEED much of it. Like TODAY in my session I realized that my BRAIN is ENTITLED to be sad since IT will die even if the HUMAN or the SOUL can go on from body to body---the BRAIN-MIND is limited and saddened.
1/18/80: VERY elaborate Actualism conference, maybe influenced by Dennis's "We KNEW where the center positions were and I just FORGOT"? Winston is presiding, with red plastic nametags on everyone with punches for levels and names, and he introduces thirds with a grimace saying that they should KNOW how to operate, and I know NOTHING about what's going on. Then I leave (for the john?) and return to a LARGE convention hall and hear proceedings going on inside, but when I push my way through the drapes around the entranceways, I'm obviously going in the wrong way, and I walk around the ramps and try to find an unobstructed way in, but can't find it, not knowing my way around the HUGE auditorium.
BEWILDERED IN THE ARMY/JERKING OFF ALONGSIDE BILL
1/20/80: 1) I'm in a small room with a bed and a chest of drawers that I'm filling with personal clothing, and then it changes into part of a barracks in which I'm putting things away when everyone else is leaving. Someone's talking with me, asking what I'm doing there, and I insist that I have the orders that brought me here but I don't know what to do next. Then everyone leaves and I'm feeling bewildered, so I go out onto the parade grounds and everyone's marching around with their units and I can't even find anyone to ask what I should do next. I look down the road and seem to see a soldier in a phone booth marked "Information" and I figure I can call and see where I should be and what I should be doing, but by the time I get off the parade grounds I find myself wandering in a woods. Everything seems changed, and I find that "Information" is painted on fading surfaces of a board which isn't in use anymore, and when I look up to the booth that had been the information booth, I can see a solitary workman planing wood in his workshop which has taken the place of the information booth, and I look around to see nothing or no one who could help me with my questions, and I wonder how I've gotten into this situation and how on earth I'll get out. 2) Then I'm in a bedroom with two other beds to the left of mine, and I know that the guy on the extreme left is straight and again somehow military, but the person in the middle bed seems to be Bill Hyde or someone like him, and I get the flash of a painting entitled "Man in Bed" and all I can see at first is a view as if from the head of a person lying in bed with knees spread akimbo with a sheet draped over his body, but then I can see that there's a pink-gold cock-head peeking up through a fold or hole in the sheet, so it's actually porno, and then it turns into Bill playing with himself. If he can do it, I think, so can I, so I start playing with myself, gradually getting more and more obvious until I'm sitting on the side of the bed, and the Bill-character is making no effort to hide his masturbation from me, so I'm hopeful for something interesting to follow when I wake with a roaring hard-on which leads to the solitary jerk-off described in NOTEBOOK 200 when Dennis won't join me in jerking off.
LETTING BRUCE'S DOGS RUN AWAY
1/23/80: I'm in a large suburban house, or maybe a living room rather like one used in a TV series about middle class America, but Bruce Lieber lives there, and he has two dogs that I'm playing with (this is certainly influenced by the play with Don and Ernie's six dogs yesterday in the guest bathroom, when I apologized profusely for going in and out and letting them into the rest of the apartment---and the fact that they whined almost continuously after I and Ernie left them). I'm supposed to take them out for a walk, or maybe I'm just leaving, but when I open the door and let them out, they take off running lickety-split into the distance, down at least two blocks of a Los Angeles-type hill and vanish. I'm flabbergasted that they dashed off so quickly, as IF they knew where they were going, though of course they had no way of knowing where they were going, they were just GOING, RUNNING, going really not so much AWAY, where they were housed and fed and played with and not abused, or TOWARD, toward any reward or benefit that they knew anything about, they were just RUNNING, yet without any knowledge that they would not know how to get back (though I suppose that was an assumption on my part: in the dream I idly wondered how long it would take them to get run over, completely lost, or picked up by some other keeper; there was no thought that they might run off on their own toot and then come back sometime). I debated mildly how I would explain it, whether I would be expected to buy replacements, if this would change my relationship to him and his family permanently. They were fairly large dogs, one white with brown ears like Don's dogs, the other darker, probably black, and they ran off companionably together, as I watched breathless as they dashed across the street two blocks away to see that they hadn't gotten run over YET. Thought to have just a few lines of description about the basically simple dream, and am vaguely surprised to find it stretched out so long: the idea of the "just RUNNING, just GOING" seems to have some connection with my life, but I can't think what it is at the moment.
HELEN AND JIMMY ON TRIP; SHITTING AND CLEANING
1/24/80: 1) Helen and Jimmy had been on a LONG trip around world and brought slides for a church social. I had two trays of male porno shots mixed in and when a woman was just reaching in to look through one of them, I removed them during the 6 pm dinner break, hoping they wouldn't be discovered. They ALSO had a filing cabinet with lots of Actualism-type Xmas cards that they'd sent out over the previous years. Elaine Hyams is there too with her string constructions and other craft pieces, saying that they couldn't be displayed properly because they couldn't drive nails into the walls to hang them onto. Someone also brought up some stamps, saying "Parts of such sheets aren't very good (they were small stamps interspersed with large pale-colored labels as some of the Polish and Czech stamps), but if you have the whole "blanket" (I got the idea of a whole sheet), it's better." I'm moving tables and rickety chairs to get a better view of the slides, and some people complain and ask "Why travel?" and Jimmy blusters about the "$200,000 trip." I'm trying to be kind toward them but they behave like strangers. 2) I'm standing at the top of an escalator (like A station at High Street) and there's WATER being conveyed up each step, pooling along the top floor.
1/25/80: Don't remember this AS I wake, only LATER when I want to SHIT. Remember also that last NIGHT I crapped and had a TIME wiping myself, as if I wiped away HALF a turd at last then when I stood up the other half slipped out and I had to wipe THAT away (and the SATURDAY NOON I got up to get the computer brochure and sat DOWN on the seat with SHIT all over in REALITY, and the seat seems permanently stained!). Dream was shitting on a hopper in a LARGE HALLWAY, glad that none of the residents of the rooms were around as I farted and stank and plopped, but as I get up (and the john changed orientation from "south to north") I saw the WALL was dirty so I started rubbing with my fingers which had a bit of shit on them, so I left DARK STREAKS on the light walls and in an effortless transition some WOMAN was washing the walls, doing a better job than I did, and I awkwardly tried to say something about how good a job she was doing, how bad a job I did, without actually ADMITTING that I'd just put some of the dirty streaks on the wall. UNCOMFORTABLE DREAM! Wrote these notes AS I shit and it WAS hard to wipe away, but the NEXT DAY (1/26) it was REALLY a nightmare after the phone call with Pope.
PLAYS, REUNIONS, STAMPS, AND CHERRY CARROTS
1/31/80: The first part is scattered and hugely complicated: there are plays going on in an old schoolhouse or railroad station in a place that's rather like Maine, but rather like someplace I'd gone to school or lived long ago, so I expect to see many people that I know (talking to Amy yesterday about her meeting a classmate from University of Wisconsin on Brooklyn Heights street?). Then there are lots of photographs from productions, class pictures and picnics and reunions, and there's one loud-mouthed fellow like Jerry Lewis who's featured in many of the newspapers, except there's a voiceover along with it. Then there's a LARGE group of people, and at first I think they're the children of one woman, but there are about 300 people, and then I think it's a class reunion, and THEN I see some kind of inscription that this is a reunion of "all students and their children from the letters I-M" and I cease to wonder why there are so many. But dream gradually changes from old-timey and black and white into color as the building is CURRENT and we're visiting as tourists, and I have lots of money left to spend. HAD entered on the ground floor to the right of the façade, but the ground rises to the left and when I enter a door and go down TWO flights of stairs, I see that it merely goes down to the SAME level, and marvel at all the mirrors on the walls and on the floor at the foot of the stairway to transmit light from above. There's a souvenir counter that sells stamps and other things, and I buy a few, then go to a drawer in which there are jars of cherries kept cold in wine, and I'm looking at other things in the drawer and when I go to put back the main container of cherries, I find that I'd put CARROT pieces into the glass lid, but only AFTER I mix them with the cherries. I hope to close the drawer so no one notices, but find that it's filled with LIQUID that I can't figure out where it came from, and then there are more stamps on sale and I figure I might as well buy all of them, since we're leaving tomorrow and I have enough money without exchanging funds for dinner tonight, and I'm in a tizzy of indecision when I wake up, thinking about stamps as an investment, thinking about Bill having lived in Maine, and wondering what THAT was about.
2/5/80: 1) Mom's lying on Dietz sofa and I'm dusting EVERYTHING in house, counter-clockwise around the living room, getting into OLD corners and HIGH ledges. 2) Teacher on bus is telling me her problems in being believed, and I say that would never happen with ME in charge, and she says "What do they think, that I only have a half-mind?" 3) I'm asking Amy HOW you get to Nassau (or Jamaica) from Grand Bahama (or Florida).
2/6/80: 1) Setting up crosshatches in a set of optical mazes. 2) On vacation in a house, a couple is moving in and moving out all the old furniture in MY room and I open a large bag and take out the small bag inside a larger one to take the smaller filled bag home before returning for last weekend. HUGE over-fast green snail bangs bottle upstairs. 3) Couple in train wreck decide to marry, woman breaks news in office and all reporters mutter that it's a put-up situation and she states that it's real and thinks of TV coverage "thought it's as boring as my ribbon," and they compare and whisper "national, national" (coverage) and she's like Lee Grant in "Damian" last night.
ACCUSATION
2/10/80: I'm looking out slatted window at friends (3?) outside, and I say about one of them, "HE always moves between east and west coasts (or New York and California)" and he gives me a HEARTBROKEN look and says "How could you ACCUSE me of that?" I think, "This is the material of true human TRAGEDY---and he has the BEAUTIFUL face of the guy with the Jordache Look, and I don't want to do ANYTHING negative for him AT ALL.
2/11/80: I'm in an elegant dining room eating somewhere either in a foreign country or on a ship---or in a museum somewhere) and there's real sensuous Broadway Ethel Merman-type mystic playing something like The Stripper, and we're in a line dancing and I fling out an arm and they INSTANTLY follow---I strut and THEY strut behind me, even though I trip over my feet at one point. I compliment them on their following skills and they say, "WELL, you DO LEAD with broad enough movements!"
VISITING MANY PEOPLE; BUYING MANY BOOKS
2/13/80: I've bought 3 paperbacks that had been on my list for ages, though one that I thought was by Bradbury was by Herman Hesse, and the torn fabric cover said it was some Indian Sutra that had been translated by Hermann Hesse (and someone added "Jr" in ink after his name on the title page) in 1926, so he hadn't actually written it. Another tiny hard-to-get paperback by Bradbury I paged through and found expense account listings filling some of the pages. I brought back the bag triumphantly, but then looking and listening down the stairs in the apartment building I heard my mother's voice, so I went in and out of doors trying to find her, and then someone I knew invited me up to their apartment on the top floor. The California-style building had stairs up the center with balconies for the apartments in the center and off the sides, and there were LOTS of people that I was surprised to recognize (in the dream, though I don't recall who any of the people actually WERE). One person who wasn't too happy was John Vinton, in his apartment on the corner of the top of the building, entertaining two or three friends who seems maybe to be from Kei Takei's dance group (the older fellow Maldwyn Pate and MAYBE even Kei or some other Oriental female) were inside his apartment quietly reading in chairs on the floor, and as I glanced in from the hallway I could see his sagging balcony with a puddle of water caught in the corner where it couldn't run off over the 1-inch ledge before the chicken wire railings began, and I could tell it was raining from the dripping puddles in it, and realized THAT'S why people were staying inside on a Sunday afternoon, though the sky seemed vaguely sunny and there WERE shadows on the inside stairways. But someone rather like Margaret Meschio surprised me by being there, and others seemed to be readying for a party, and I felt comfortable knowing that I could "party" and read the books anyway, since people seemed content to spend a few quiet hours together in companionable activities of individual varieties. And all this between 9:15, when I woke after getting to bed at 3:30 after working on index editing until 3:15 and 10 am when Andre called with a typing question.
HORIZON-VISION CONJURING
2/15/80: I'm visiting somewhere in the wilderness, and we're being taught how to produce a rising black cloud on a horizon over a lake between two mountains, the cloud looking rather like the descending cloud of locusts in "Exorcist II," though this cloud is rising WAY into the sky from a greater distance. Our teacher conjures this up, and then to reinforce it in us, we're told to "form a circle," which I seem to feel is difficult since the teacher is only a voice and there are just two of us there, but I get the idea we join hands and extend free hands in the direction of the cloud, but I rather despair of ever forming it myself. The next day I'm sitting in a kitchen rather like Dietz Avenue, rather glum, reading a book, the table before me stacked with dishes from the breakfasting of a large (about 6-8) number of people who are visiting some powerful female. I'm reading the book somewhat for pleasure, but someone (not Dennis) says "She SAID you have to write a comparison between the book and ..." something which I didn't quite understand, but it didn't surprise me. I grumbled something about not REALLY having to do it, but the other person says something that makes me think I DO have to do it, and then I find myself standing in the water (like one of the muscle models?) looking toward someone of authority onshore, and he rather casually gestures and I turn onto the beach and find the cloud is rising again, and I experience surprise that HE conjured it up so easily, and not for HIS purposes but so that I might study it and make a comparison between it and the book that I'd been reading. I'd thought in a surly way that I didn't have to relate to the people in the house, and that I'd make myself useful by doing dishes for the 6-7 meals we'd be having there, but there was some resistance to THAT idea even, thinking "Why can't they just leave me alone," but knowing there'd have to be some kind of price I'd have to pay for BEING there and not wanting to take part in the discussions or parties that were going on around me that I didn't feel like joining in, though I wasn't unhappy to BE there, just to interact with the people that I didn't think very highly of---rather like Hemlock Hall without John or Dennis.
MONEY/TRAVEL/FRUSTRATION FRAGMENTS
2/17/80: John Vinton and I are entering an illegal casino somewhere, just a room in someone's house where we'd been gambling before, and I open my wallet and take out some highly colored money and John remarks "At least it's better than that colorless cash you had before," and I respond "I always have prettier money after I've traveled." Large and small pastel bills remind me of money in France and Italy, though the casino MAY be in America, even New York City. In another fragment I'm walking down the street with some relative stranger, and discover that I'm in a foreign country again, so I check, thinking that I may have spent all my money (as in the supermarket yesterday when I was afraid $22 wouldn't be enough for the $18 purchases for the dinner for me and Dennis and Avi and Robin---and that didn't include $17 for booze and $7 for meats), but find a few bills (at which point I wonder how long I'll be there before returning home and how much I'll have to spend on food), and then say with relief "At least I have credit cards that I can use" and my companion remarks with approval that at last I've gotten into using them. In the longest fragment we've returned from upstate and I've stayed in the railroad car at something vaguely like the Jamaica station, where one must transfer, and I have the picture we're just at the southern tip of Riverside, ready to come across the river into northernmost Manhattan over the subway bridge over the East River (Harlem River at that point), and my companion knew to get off and transfer to a westbound train, while I find that my train is going to the east, away from my destination, and I hurriedly leave the train and experience the classic dream-frustration of running VERY hard to catch up with the departing train but my legs just won't MOVE fast enough, and I find myself aching and even reaching down with my arms to pull my legs along faster by tugging at the backs of my knees as I run (rather like the image portrayed by Joan Lombardi as she crawled across the floor in her solo on Friday), and I can feel myself panting for breath, fearing the train will pick up speed and I'll miss it, cramping stomach, sweating brow, feverish panting, floppy feet almost beyond my control, straining thighs, and if it were a PLEASURABLE feeling it might almost be straining toward an orgasm, or better the third or fourth orgasm of an evening, and I wake before I know if I caught the train or not, though I'm not particularly FEELING frustrated as I wake.
MUSEUMS AND GUIDES
2/19/80: I'm in a French museum, though it seems much newer and more lavish than the Louvre, and enter an area paved with small beautiful Delft tiles with flower designs and tiny glasswork vases and flowers set daintily on them, and I rush forward for a good look and wet my feet in water-running channels at edges. Then I'm touring an elegant bedroom and there's an older boy-guide who appears to be available, cuddling up to me, and I caress then start sucking on him, and another joins us for a threesome of pleasure, and finally a VERY young boy, about 10, climbs into bed and to my horror a WOMAN enters (and I'm reminded that Dennis talked about being "caught while masturbating" last night before we went to sleep), and I say "I came in here to rest; I felt faint," and she says "I hope they COVERED the bed before they let you lay down," and I turn with apprehension to look for possible come spots to find that the bed was convertible, there's only a velour-covered couch under a ledge, so any evidence of our sex play is out of sight. She guides me out past a LOVELY dining area: glass-topped tables and pastel-upholstered chairs and elegant place settings alternate in glass cages with outdoors flower gardens of understated flamboyance, and as we wander the corridors on our way out she inquires "What did you buy?" and I flick PAST photos with writing on the backs that I suspect might be porno I picked up, hoping she didn't notice, and come to stamps, uncancelled, but on paper, and we talk of stamps and how good an investment they are. We're out as the museum is closing and I ask "Where are we?" in Paris and she turns to a MALE guide and he waves his arms and indicates that the top of the T is the Rue Meridional, along the length of the museum, and the support of the T is some wide division road that we're all walking down, and as he talks he steps backward into the street and either ENTERS or TURNS INTO a tiny car that speedily putts away, going so fast it's almost obscured by the larger cars between us, and we all look at this transformation with some wonderment, but the feeling of amazement is passing into tranquil acceptance as "part of Paris" when I wake.
TRAINING AND CODES
2/28/80: A large group is traveling by bus in what seems to be an outskirt of Washington D.C. for some sort of special training, and we end up driving alongside yellow brick walls with castle-like designs on them, rather like that Art Moderne brick church from the 30's in Manhattan's 80's, and I seem to remember this had been a monastery---a rather famous one for its denomination---previously, and when we got out of the bus at the entrance steps, I looked off to the side and there was a stone with a plaque saying that "You can stand on the top of Mt. Caucus by standing on this rock, taken from the top of that mountain," so I stood on the worn-shiny foot-sized rock and looked down at everyone else looking at the plantings and other signs about the entrance, and I seemed to know that the "Caucasians" WERE a famous denomination of Catholic monks. Later, inside, I glanced out and saw snotty neighborhood kids jeering at an older woman who was kneeling at the steps and kissing some sort of drawing in pink chalk at the entranceway, and they made sounds of disgust which I couldn't tell came from her kissing at all, from kissing this pink chalk which they thought might be dried blood, from her kissing the step where many people had walked, from her kissing such a relic of the past as a drawn figure on a rock. Either before or after this MAIN dream was a fragment of myself sitting in a large room with probably the same group of people, trying to figure out the codes on a sheet of paper on my desk: divided into quadrants, there were two-letter codes that seemed to refer either to courses or to people sitting in the room, and a small knot of us were discussing the code and trying to see how it applied to the room by calling out various codes and seeing how people in different parts of the rooms responded. We were all adults in some sort of training program voluntarily, but there was some amusement in the air about how we were being treated as schoolchildren by being driven in busses, disciplined like children, and having to live in communal style. There seemed to be more of the dreams, more of a sense of sweet anticipational adventure, more of a sense of detailed richness, but my wine from last night (if it didn't CAUSE the dreams) seems to have dulled my memory of some of the scenes.
SCHOOLWORK AGAIN
3/4/80: I'm on a campus during the last weeks of a school year and people are asking me what my schedule is and, as usual, I don't remember it. Can't fill in Friday morning at ALL, and then go through my list of courses and decide that the first class on Friday must be "Equations," and I wonder how I'll possibly survive to finish out the year if I don't know my schedule by NOW. Some guy wants to copy my "Equations" homework, but, paradoxically, since I've done it, I know it's only solving a few equations, so it's not worth my time to tell him how to do it. Then into a classroom and it's set up for an entertainment lounge, with some of the tables dimly lit circling a piano in a corner of the room, the other tables set up as desks in a class atmosphere. I move some of the tables around, assuming the lights will be equalized throughout the room, and find that someone comes to me to help with another assignment: copy down some discursive political polemic and find words in the verbiage which are anagrams of the word "axiomatic." IN THE DREAM I work through and figure that "society maxim" is the phrase, but in the dream-logic figure both have nine letters. He's written the words down on a torn sheet of paper, and I put it up against the model and find that he's left OUT lots of the words, and he turns the piece of paper OVER to show other pencil scrawls on the BACK of the paper, and I throw the whole thing back at him in disgust, saying it's a SIMPLE task, and he can do it himself. Then, in the same campus-like setting, someone lots younger than I am is complaining that he doesn't have time for vacations or pleasure or anything, and I turn to sympathize with him by saying "Yes, I KNOW it's just awful to be in school," and think, but don't say, that when he gets OUT of school he'll find that he's better trained for a better job, and he'll have more MONEY to take vacations, though he'll not necessarily have the TIME to take vacations. Later fill a file card with anagrams of AXIOMATIC, to see if anything works, and I start with caimio tax, IATA Comix, Ixiamo cat, I maxi coat, Atomic Xia, coati maxi, I atomic ax, a mix otaic, I mat coaxi, a coati mix, aim otic ax, I am otic ax, I am CIO tax, I am Taxi Co., I am a xi cot, I am a toxic, Toxic Maia, and I, It, am Coxa. None of which is very satisfactory.
GUATEMALA PUZZLE
3/9/80: I'm reading a book with very bland contents, but then I look at the bookmark and IT has the same size printing on it, so I put it down alongside the center of the book and it's in CODE, so that the MEANING changes and grows richer with the words, formerly independent, on the bookmark. Then there's some sort of sweepstakes contest either for reader of the book or for people who buy the book at local newspaper kiosks. I look at the SIDE of the bookmark and it has indentations in it which just fit into the design at the wicket of the kiosk, so I fit them together and find it obvious that the answer code is "B," so the whole thins is in BEE language. There's no doubt but that I've won, and I feel good about it, happy about the way things seem to be working out totally to my advantage.
CAVERNOUS BASEMENT
3/11/80: Mom and I have just moved and we're down in the enormous basement looking at the rows and stacks of storage boxes (from the filing cabinets at the end of the Selznick special on Channel 13 last night?) to see just what we should put where. Towers of cartons are tipping, and some boxes are broken as they're leaning against the dark walls, and I can see my stereo receiver in one, hoping that only the box and not the contents is broken. As I try to right the stack, other things seem to slip, so I just leave it the way it is. We know there's just too much down here to ever move upstairs (though I never see it and have no thoughts about it, though I know it's there). Debate tossing LOTS of the stuff OUT, but it's so voluminous we really have no idea where to start. There's a small pause, time has past, and I come around a corner of the storage stacks to see that Mom has left a surprise for me: in front of the blazing coal stove, casting yellow beams of light over the coal-like basement walls, stands a rather ill-formed Christmas tree, with lights put mainly on one side, though I suspect it might be to keep the ornaments away from the nearby fire in the stove. I feel good feelings toward Mom for doing that, but never DO figure out what to do with all the STUFF.
SMOKING GRASS
3/12/80: Joints (dry) on plate---looking for cleaned pipe. Man's head outside door. Pipe back, DEBATING going against Actualism! Think of smoking while jerking off.
3/13/80: 1) Behind counter at seedy baths---all guys LOOKING to be straight but they're winking at each other and patting asses and making appointments. I figure I may come just to WATCH, since some of the guys ARE coal-minerish and humpy. 2) Out trying to find WHERE I am, and it's like Columbia or Morningside Heights squeezed between Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill---down stairs around a Riverside Church-like school tower. Look for ways to descend to subway and go down steep stone steps to left, looking over railing to right to see a black man FALLING, oscillating like a leaf in the air, toward the lower steps with students watching. I debate turning away from the thump and splash, but he turns deftly and SITS on steps---only a way of gaining ATTENTION and other students KNOW him so well they're USED to it. (Bed at 1, finish writing this at 7:30 am. 3) So he's a MAGICIAN and this is one of his tricks to gain attention as tents for carnival go up! He takes a WATERMELON out of his pocket and stuffs it up his NOSE, which expands to a paper-thin brown flap, and the people wander, exclaiming how fast the tents and rides and sideshows went up. 4) Then I'm in a THEATER (at the circus?) and dressed in a suit and people see me and shout to me as I walk down aisle and look for seats in the crowded theater, noticing that in BACK of the stage more seats are empty. Amateur but "genuine" show going on---La Mama crossed with La Puma. Band plays jazzily, people talk, audience shouts they can't hear, band strikes up again, it's intermission. Woman, Gilda Kuhlman-like, sits at aisle next to me, reaches out to touch, and I move down aisle, she follows, I move BACK a few rows to aisle, she follows, I move to HER original seat, that row now FILLED. Two snotty college freshmen behind me start cracking comments, but I turn to quiet them and they DO stay quieted. OWNER comes down aisle and points out things onstage and in theater to backers behind him, then he points to my crotch (I look to see if pants are too tight, but SUIT pants are loose and wrinkled)---but I think maybe quality TELLS, and I wonder WHY I'm so pointed OUT when I am just here for a laugh. Then decide I can give THEM my plays and maybe they'll do ANYTHING for me, and DO that, and I can make my way up to BETTER theaters. Wake and AMAZED at VARIETY of "low-life" places and my ambivalent PLEASURE at being pointed out and DISCOMFORT at being pointed out THERE without knowing quite WHY. Suspect because I'm BETTER but FEAR it may be because I'm INFERIOR in some way---like how I made MAUREEN feel last night---as if all these people WERE simple IRISH in a section of NYC, like Sherryl's MATTHEW yesterday (I forget what).
3/15/80: 1) I have a large old West Side apartment (Joe coming tomorrow AND Dennis and I to Riverside Church last night, past old large buildings) and LOTS of guests, including a Barbara whose last name I CAN'T think of (not Cartland) when Joe calls, who knows her, so I just put her on the phone. A tall Chinese (guy on subway?) loves shorts with small V in front that she feels. Others come and go, chatting and agreeable. I'm waiting to see a new movie that isn't scheduled today, but I get lost in a large concourse. Woman asks me of new industrial play on "Friendship of Man" and I suggest some ways of finding out---"Looks crowded over there," and she says "Why, I know more about this place than YOU do" and I laugh. Then walk up concourses and go by a flight of stairs and to the left is a large department store and I continue to a HUGE CHURCH, thinking I HAVE to remember to show this to DENNIS. Up felt-covered steps to HILL so high in back, and they're rehearsing Christmas pageants with altar boys coming over the hill holding lit candles, but priest says they're doing it wrong, start over, and they tumble down this artificial hill, knocking holes in the Astroturf (like "Day of Locusts"). 2) Then I'm walking in the outside, still to see this movie, and walk along a sidewalk on FOOT and ONE KNEE, black behind me sort of racing with me, and then there are MORE of us, a big V (again) of rowdiness running, and look down to see OTHER walkers on road perpendicular to us, and I think we're coming to the Colorado River, hoping for a bridge, and wonder if there's been a DISASTER because everyone's walking, yet no one's really SUFFERING or UNCOMFORTABLE. Just WALKING cross-country!
3/16/80: 1) Looking in IBM's file, plastic inserts holding typed contract information (including Mae West, Pepsi Cola, other good names) and RULE that there had to be a sheet saying "No billing" if there WERE no billing sheet yet. 2) New York Times travel article of IBM country club on Hawaii where camping areas on the "Mahulu Coast" were marked out for camping, hiking, and swimming. 3) Dining in Colony/Lutece, and woman looks at black-felted walls that have replaced black-gold paper that replaced dark walls that replaced LIGHT walls as the inner room went from NEWLY painted to seedily dirty. I got up from my table with my milk glass to walk to the elegant table for some milk poured from an elegant pitcher (and I BOUGHT milk last night for pina colada mix for party today).
3/17/80: I'm a guest somewhere at a living/dining room, with two piles of food on my plate; one "my family's" and one "mine," and I make some comment about having to finish "my family's" first. Laugh at pretty blond neighbor who thinks you eat a skinless chicken neck like you suck a cock---lengthwise! He bites through bone and grimaces. I turn to share laugh with Dennis and he's languidly jerking off on one side of the sofa as Mark from Jay's mirrors him on the other side. Other men are jerking off around apartment and I eat fast so I can wash my greasy fingers and join them.
3/18/80: My memory is better of the end---AFTER a leg of the trip we're all in a large living room talking of the past, of scares and inflation and experiences, and I volunteer "I've BEEN to countries that were being taken over, but the STRANGEST country monetarily was Argentina, where, I read, the inflation rate has REDUCED to 48%/year." Most laugh appreciatively, but others turn away at my triviality. We're going to eat and the house-managers are moving tables around in the dining room and I need to piss (as I DO) and enter one of a series of bathrooms as I find stall door open, and as I look down (seeing a belt in thin yellow plastic) a woman opens door NEXT, and a voice like Pope's Gary snidely cuts, "I WOULD like you to shut the door, madam," and she has to wait for US. Before that we were rolling down a highway in a bus as a tour guide was saying "Before we get to our NEXT stop, we'd like to evaluate the trip to THIS point," and someone cuts in sarcastically, "It'll only take seven hours to fill out the forms," and he continues imperturbably, "Now the OTHERS took the LUXURY trip to Prague, but you just stopped in Greece---" and I don't remember much of rest OR what came before. But I DO wake at 6:15---VERY good from bed at 1:15 after SOME tossing---and dress at 6:40 for session and DAY.
JOE EASTER, RUSSIAN TEA ROOM, AND MOVEMENT
4/25/80: I wake at 6:45 and jot down the first notes in over a month (block of tapes gone?). 1) I'm waiting on restaurant line inside and LARGE group comes in and there's JOE (just wrote a note about him to the Brinks yesterday). He comes forward to greet me, I ask if he's alone, he says he's with twelve others (I talk with Pope about 12 disciples as signs of the zodiac yesterday?), most of whom I'd met before, and people introduce themselves with names that I almost remember. They sit at double tables on the THIRD, uppermost, tier, and now I'm standing alone, so the maitre d' waves at me and seats me at lower semi-divided center table where some important reviewer or owner is just finishing his meal, sitting with Madame the Proprietress, somewhat like the older Simone Signoret, and she recommends CABAY on the menu, the specialty of the house, even though it's only on the DINNER menu and it's LUNCH (and I just wrote up Le Plaisir yesterday). But before the food comes the whole restaurant starts to TIP. Everyone tries to ignore, but I say "Sorry, I'm getting OUT," and it seems from outside to be either a) falling into an excavation at the side of Carnegie Hall (which is anomalously EAST of what I've come to think of as the Russian Tea Room) or b) being PUSHED into a crashing façade (like Booth cartoon in Dennis's New Yorker about how all Americans LOVE earthmoving machinery?). I stand and watch and decide it's still safe enough to go back and get my JACKET, and find myself in the back in a garden where I pick coleus-like PEACH tree leaves to SAVE, and the Proprietress smiles and waves me on, clucking, and then she pushes through her self restraint and says tearfully "Care you for yourself, not leaves" (in French), and there's a plump, warm, wet embrace, and I say "Et tu, Madam?" hoping she won't mind if I tutuoyer her, and she warns "Sleep safely, with a board stretched over the bed to protect you from falling plaster." And I find myself on a shifting street knowing that at least there's time for me to rent a car and get out safely (plans with Laird for Philadelphia weekend?). SHE was dressed in the same cushioned pink, and smelled the same, as the Le Plaisir Restaurant, though it was dark and candlelit in the dream.
5/5/80: Notes jotted at 6:30 am: The first electric motor I ever made has been converted into a phone answering machine that doesn't work. I'm trying to fix it by jamming some metallic contact BACK into a connection, but there's a shower of sparks onto my living room rug and Mom says that's NOT the way to fix it! I figure I have to get a screwdriver and take off the top and check the wiring and clean the rotor poles, which seem to be gummy and THAT'S probably why it doesn't work. I'm now in front of the window on Dietz's porch, and there's a lamp balanced (rather like the ionizer now balanced on the paper-board atop my bedroom speaker) on a board against my inverted plastic turntable cover which is filled with WATER as a small FISHBOWL. I empty out some water and it still balances, so I figure it'll be OK even without the fish. Then, in a beam of sunlight cutting across the shade of the room, I look down at the rug and see SMOKE rising, and get down on my hands and knees to find that the sparks are still BURNING in the rug. I blow on them to put them out, but they glow and burrow deeper, through the rug and down into the white chalky matting underneath, so I SPIT into these 3-4 holes, partially filling them with WATER that puts them out with little puffs of steam and the orange-glow-from-fire vanishing. Then happen to see a REVIEW in a newspaper that's scattered all around the floor of a shampoo for the rug that doesn't work, and I think that PLUGS can be put into the holes, but I'd have to glue them in or the vacuum cleaner would just suck them out again. There's a scalloped piece missing from the side of the rug, too, rather like the overlapping carpet at the Met balcony last night at the gala. Remember a PREVIOUS segment of being back in Akron and riding a BUS line I'd never been on, through pleasant outlying residential areas, and very picturesque dusty country lanes. They've made a FILM to show off the road. Mom says we can now DRIVE to another line in the Goodyear area and stop to see some friends before it gets dark. Since it's only 4, there, I say FINE. We start off along the same road. THEN, at 9:35, I note a segment on mind reading: A man and woman in an amusement park pass a booth, and they stalk away when a voice says it can read minds, but at a DISTANT point he hears SAME voice broadcasting, saying "You don't like that idea?" and he thinks to himself "Yeah, it's just a mirror and someone inside," and the voice (from the distant loudspeaker) says "Well, you're wrong, it's NOT just a mirror and someone inside," so the Donald Sutherland-type who's the man pops his eyes and starts walking puzzled back toward the mind reading booth.
5/19/80: 1) I'm riding in a car at night, feeling increasingly apprehensive as the car speeds along a road which has no lights, no centerline, no guard rails, no direction markers---all I can feel is the tug of lightness as the car barrels down a hill or a heaviness in the seat as the car roars uphill. The driver says he can see "the eyes" ahead, but all I can see is a very dim red glow, like a symptom of eyestrain, though I do think of my feelings of apprehension as Chuck and I drove down the new road near "Whisperer's Campground" north of Jasper National Park in Canada, seeming to imagine eyes watching me from nearby mountaintops. Then the red glow seemed to divide into two, and I feared they would develop into some huge feline's eyes, staring at us, rather than being eyes that would look out for our safety ahead. 2) I'm in some bizarre futuristic consultation room: leaning over a railing on a balcony looking down at five people's heads, their bodies hidden under sheets or the structure of the balcony itself, asking about the care of my teeth. The head on the left was the head of my new dentist (looking rather like a much younger Dr. Winston), and he tried answering my questions about tooth maintenance and what to do about cavities, but one of the women in the center spoke for herself and the woman next to her with some little asperity when she said "We don't HAVE cavities ourselves, so there's nothing WE can tell you about how to deal with them," and the consultation session seemed to be over and the heads withdrew, or were rather covered and taken from my view. The old woman next to me fussed about some question or other, and I had to point out to her that her eyeglasses were wrapped in the black folds at the edge of the balcony's parapet, and we expressed dismay to each other that we really didn't understand this new way of seeing a dentist. 3) Rather as part of the same futuristic society, we had to join a college-like community of dormitories to qualify for this new dental treatment, which seemed like an entire recapping of all the teeth for a completely restructured mouth, but we had to line up in militaristic ranks according to the colors of the towels we had to wrap around our waists. The colors on the towels were preternaturally bright, lit by brilliant sunlight through green trees reflecting off blond boardwalks on which we had to parade in same-stepping ranks. There was some sort of rivalry between two sets of administrations, but the culture was so advanced that it was resolved merely by choosing a particular towel and wearing it. I didn't know the differences between the two, but selected a light, clean, fresh towel and started walking off when from a corner building in the huge complex came increasingly dark puffs of smoke (barbecue burning at Avi's last night?); the building, a sort of apartment house, was obviously on fire. As we ran forward to help, I could see boxy Greyhound-like busses floating slowly through the air to land on parapets on the upper floors to take off residents, and I marveled at the advances in air travel. Then I was asked/ ordered to enter an "eye slot" and I looked down at my feet to see metal sections in the wooden walkway that sank in to permit me to lie on my stomach in what seemed to be some sort of gunner's position, head looking forward into some sort of telescope which could be maneuvered by remote control so that I could see into the building itself. "See if you can see the tree we indicate" were the instructions given, and as I looked through the eyepiece I could see many trees on the campus, so I said "OK," and the view began to change. I surmised in the dream that two helicopters, held steady by three orthogonal gyroscopes, hovered at each side of the building, directing mirrors down into the corridors which would then pick up the image of what was going on inside so that I could direct rescuers to people trapped inside. I'd never done it before (and later, OUTSIDE the dream, I figured it would have to be done with a REAL fiber optics system that would be self supporting if directed by remote radio from helicopters outside, resistant to fire so that I COULD look into the rooms where only the glass tube could see), but I saw the green trees pass under my vision and brown and yellowstone buildings coming and going as I was conducted toward the burning building, and then I woke. Forgot that in 1) my anxiety got so great I could FEEL my breathing increase and my breath come in panting groans of fear and tension, hoping that I wouldn't wake Dennis, and being left with a haunting feeling of foreboding or anxiety that MAY only be my upcoming third root-canal appointment at 1 pm this afternoon, now being 9:30 am.
BOOK MANUSCRIPT AND DION FORTUNE
5/20/80: 1) Wake COUGHING violently, and take a drink of water; it's early and I have a memory of a richly detailed dream, but too lazy to write it down---thus forgot it. 2) Wake at 9 with PEOPLED dream: I'm guest at SOMEONE like Doris Fish's and she's showing me a manuscript of her mother's who'd put together a kind of fortune-telling astrology book which had a scroll-like refusal form from Harper and Row. I idly wonder if she could publish it NOW, but find that her mother's source of the book was some mystical society in which Dion Fortune's name was listed as second-in-command, so I think "I'll bet Dion Fortune DID publish this under her OWN name, maybe TAKING the manuscript over after it was refused and forgotten." Recall the next morning that I'd learned only recently that Dion Fortune was FEMALE from a Yes book-mailing list. Then there's Doris's SON, like the widow at ACC (and I don't recall now who I was thinking about---unless it was someone Margaret Willard was talking with), who leaves home, and the next day I'm somewhere ELSE and he comes over to me and announces "I left home yesterday" and I inquire, "Does your mother know this yet?" and he says "No" and I say "I thought not." Also a guest here is Dion Fortune, to whom the son says "I think I met you somewhere before," and Dion says resignedly, thinking of her great number of past lives, "You probably have." He asks her name and she says "Jane Forth" or something like that, and I wonder why she's using so many names. DID she publish his grandmother's book and she's feeling guilty about it?
PISSING / BEING SPANISH WOMAN IN PLAY
5/21/80: 1) I'm in a large bathroom/bedroom, and Mom's there saying that I should urinate onto some kind of washboard, and when I do it runs down and gets some newly ironed shirts wet, which she gets angry about, but I say "You should have KNOWN that it would run down and get them wet!" At another moment I'm spraying a showerhead-like CONE of piss into a toilet, concerned that someone might see it and think there was something wrong with me. These memories came as I got up many times during the beer-filled evening to piss, feeling better THEN than in the morning, when I had a definite hangover. 2) I'm back at Salinas rehearsing for something like "Best Foot Forward" but the part I play I played a few years ago, someone like Seraphina Smith, a dizzy Spanish woman who's always played by a man, and when I look at an old playbill-like photo album I see myself clean shaven, with earrings, my formless chin, and my awkward stagy smile, so I know I have to do it better this year or it'll just be a terrible embarrassment. I don't know my lines yet, though it's only a small part, and it doesn't seem like the director has taken any time with what I'm supposed to DO, so I'm worried about the upcoming performance, which seems to move closer by the hour through the dream until it's about 10:30 and the performance is at 11 and still I haven't started getting made-up or putting on my dress (I don't have the slightest idea where that would be coming from) or learning my lines---I don't even seem to have a script and operate with the understanding that I won't have one in time. I think of Chita Rivera's accent when she was Googie Gomez in "The Ritz" and think of some way I can make my characterization more accurate, even to taping my voice and seeing how I can make it better. The whole sequence of a lengthy dream is spent in a state of anxiety and anticipation, rather like my waiting for a dentist's appointment, and with a bit of the same feeling that "No matter how bad it is, it'll soon be over and I won't have to worry about it anymore." There also seems to be no one to TALK to about my worries; everyone else seems to know their part---or not be worried about NOT knowing their part---and is living it up elsewhere before the play.
AN ELIZABETH CLARE PROPHET SPECTACULAR!
5/22/80: I'm a guest in some huge complex vaguely connected with her (and I just made out a check for $1 yesterday for her "Prophesies for the 1980s"), but I don't care for the religious gathering, I'm in the surrounding SHOPS, and buying stamps with special corners among other things, but getting free posters and souvenir booklets and swatches of material and floor plans and architectural drawings and information bulletins which I've gathered into a large bag which I misplace with some of MY stuff. After looking at other areas I'm back to reclaim bag, checking it all out: squares of cloth, greeting cards, scrolls of attendance, and I'm even tempted to tell the overseer that I'd attended her sessions when she started back in Akron, Ohio, but I think it'd be better not to lie. When things are all packed up, the outside is like the biscuit around an ice cream sandwich so I'm biting down on the thick sweet pastry as I carry it out, thinking there's a LOT to see and do here. With the exiting crowd is a very tall, pale, mustached, glassed, white-suited man who practically GLOWS with luminosity, and I recall in the shop I looked through a booklet whose PAGES glowed with pearly light, and I wondered how they got the pages to do that, and lots of them were cartoon-like characters with balloon-speeches coming from their mouths and little hidden numbers so that you could identify who was who from remote pages. They announce that the place is closing and the last trip down is leaving, but there's no rush and they're kind to me, and I go to a kiosk from which little gondola cars, like on a ski lift, are leaving down the hill, and suddenly the scene is replaced with a dark Germanic hotel-corner with no lights in the windows, curved outside staircases dropping shadows and crescents of rain, and I think it's VERY super-romantic when it opens. Woke to use the Wisdom Beam to check it out, and seemed to get ugly comic book monsters and a twofold message, what she's SAYING might be OK, but who she IS might not be, and would anything that MEANT anything really need the glowing pages, the food, the Germanic hotel, the carnival atmosphere, and the sensual indulgences? I figured it was neither all good nor all bad, but DID get the message of an "open door" and reinforced the "Ring-Pass-Not" to keep boogies away.
TV NEWS / HUNTINGTON HARTFORD
5/23/80: COMPLETE TV news bitch, Newscast covers some event that used Mercedes McCambridge, and the moderator now says, on air "We had her talking about her book, where is she now?" Screen shows an out-of-focus helicopter, then shows flashes of OTHER people saying what happened. "What was Dolly Parton doing?" (on air), "She was behind Carter (or Castro, my notes are just AWFUL hard to read, but I don't remember anything at all OTHER than these notes---now Sunday, 5/25!)!" Camera comes to rest on studio. Voice: "Well, pick it up---the energy level," and then the screen starts flashing back and forth to photographs again, stopping on a live scene of the program's directors arguing among themselves. "Take THAT off" comes the voice. "Tone it DOWN" alternates with "Jazz it UP." Then at 8:15 Dennis phones to say he identified Mary Jorzell, or someone, on radio---no prize. Then when I wake at 10:15, there's the memory of a tall, crippled Huntington Hartford, who lives in a floating U-shaped house in New York Harbor, and there's another coverage of his style of living, focusing on a ship out of focus below, and it seems to be sinking---and it may be my imagination but it seemed very like the ACTUAL clip of a boat sinking somewhere off the coast of the Carolinas or Virginia with a load of oil that I ACTUALLY saw on the Saturday news when I wanted to watch pictures of Mount St. Helens! But, back in the dream before "flying out" to see the (possibly Goodyear blimp) photos from the air of the enormous Russian-flavored palace that HH had built for himself in the harbor, I kept looking to a john that I could use that HE wouldn't be using, finally coming around to a pair of women in the gatehouse to ask THEM where I can go to the john, and they indicate a place right near them, but it's right after that that I AGAIN run into HH, crouching down in a corner, and think that I'll never be able to get away from being in the same room with him, no matter how big his house is.
BREAKERS-TYPE HOUSE / plane takeoff delayed
5/24/80: I'm a guest of a fabulously wealthy woman in her house that goes on forever. Three or four times I wander to a point where I'm outside an enormous wing that is NOT where I want to go. LAST time I'm there, I'm looking for the mistress to take a PHONE call, and I volunteered to relay a message to her when the maid was perfectly willing to say that she wasn't there at all. But as the time lengthened that I walked down the halls trying to FIND her, I got more and more embarrassed, both for the person waiting on the phone and for the hostess when I finally got to her. Once at this point I end up watching a bride in ballet tutu (this must be left over from watching the Trockadero de Monte Carlo on the Cavett show about a week ago) on roller skates "going out for a pass" to catch her bouquet, and then throwing it back to like-attired bridesmaids. Obviously this isn't the party that I'm interested in. Once I was sitting in an enormous room and a strange man comes forward toward me and says "Is this the door?" and I glance up, say "Yes" (not wanting to be disturbed from my book) and only as he icily and antagonistically opens it himself do I realize he considered me a footman who should have opened it FOR him. Banquet halls and reception rooms and ballrooms and dining rooms join one another in magnificent profusion, surrounded by terraces and gardens. I go toward the "west" and there are wings I've not even SEEN yet (rather like the girl in "Rebecca"). At a change of scene, I'm in a plane where the pilot says "We'll have a delay" and looking out I see (delay in takeoff, that is) streams of PEOPLE walking across the RUNWAYS, as if demonstrating for or against something political.
IBM / FLOWCHARTING / DOCUMENTATION
5/25/80: I'm back at IBM, talking to a very busy Herman Washington in a crowded hallway, and he's showing me a "listing" on green/white striped paper with sticky labels on it, which are instructions, explanations, decision boxes, comments, and statement or part numbers, with lots of assembled data. But he's so busy he can't really EXPLAIN the system. I go to Mozelle, who's also running around very busy, and ask her a few questions, culminated by "Is there a write-up on this?" "Why?" she asks distractedly. "Because I want to READ it." "Why?" she asks with slightly more anger. "Because I want to USE it." "Why?" she asks with increasing exasperation. "Because I want to write this PROGRAM," and she runs her hands through her hair in her usual gesture of absolute frustration and stalks off. Earlier in the conversation I recall Herman holding up the listings and saying how difficult it was to get people to document their thought processes as they were programming, and to write up the instructions after the program was finished, so this did the whole thing, merely moving words and data from the planning sheets to the programming sheets to this final form by means of the gummed labels with all the writing and printing and machine-readable coding on them. I was determined to figure out how to use it, though I seemed to be so ill-accepted that I might not even have been WORKING there, but just trying to pick their brains for my own curiosity or for the book that I might have been writing.
BRUCE / FATHER-SON STIMULATION (EIGHTH STRAIGHT DAY!)
5/26/80: Wake at 8 (from bed at midnight, so it was fitting) and think, No dream? Then wake at 9:40, thinking for a moment that it was real, then realized it was a DREAM that Bruce called and apologized for not having telephoned me, being concerned with "Big E." "What?" I ask, not knowing what he's talking about, thinking he means a PERSON. "Me---" and then it dawns on me, EGO. "Were you home this weekend?" I asked, KNOWING that I meant Sunday and Monday of the weekend that I'm still in the MIDDLE of, and he said Yeah, and I said "I was thinking of calling for a body, but didn't." (But then I DID phone at 11:30, and there was no answer from his place.) (Back to my scrabbled notes:) Should I call for a body? And then I remember a PRIOR dream of a FILM that's being shown to a sort of PTA group---or maybe it's in some sort of avant-garde museum---of a kid about 4 or 5 playing with his hard little pecker, watching his father playing with his HUGE erection, and the kid is obviously doing it for sheer pleasure whereas the father is really wanting to come, balls tight, cock taut, and then the camera moves below and shows the father trying to demonstrate how completely ready to come he IS by coming without touching, and his cock jerks and juices but doesn't shoot, so he starts jerking himself off and letting go JUST as he's ready to come, so that it might APPEAR that he's coming without touching, but it's obvious from his face and body that he's OVER the boundary of coming as he leaves go his throbbing cock and he shoots a rather small quantity, rather watery, over the top of the camera, and then his cock dangles and he seems to be PISSING right into the camera lens, though it comes so quickly after he shoots that it MIGHT be part of his orgasm, because it doesn't seem physiologically possible to follow an ORGASM so quickly with urine---whatever he does, I think it's a rather sensationalistic shot, and there's sort of a PTA reaction of semi-annoyance at this MOVIE and a semi-reaction of "In this day and age I guess they can show ANYTHING and get away with it." Wake with a VERY nice erection that I play with for awhile and then get out of bed without doing anything about it. EIGHTH STRAIGHT DAY OF DREAMS.
6/10/80: Fragment of dream from last week lingers: a VERTICAL bed against the wall with men sleeping standing up---I uncover them by mistake, though I'm amazed, and try to put the covers back by flipping the top of the corners over the top of the mattress. Only previously it was an elaborate detailed dream about packing and moving. Then, today, in a kitchen with Mom and family that's a combination of Dietz and Hicks, I'm flabbergasted at a fuzzy mouse (like the scruffy rabbit from the TV special on Xian last night?) jumping onto the table and hiding behind a paper milk container playfully. I look to the side and there are plastic mushrooms, like spiders, uncoiling on strands from the ceiling and there are beautiful and translucent SHAPES, like plasticized rush-work, hanging mobile-like from the ceiling. One six-slatted one like an SST. Just a feeling of AMAZEMENT as I dream AND as I wake at 8:30, having gone to sleep at 2 am.
7/19/80: 1) Huge awful meat sandwich which I try eating, but bun disintegrates and I'm left with mouthfuls of inedible gristle and fat, eventually throwing the whole thing away in disgust because I'm not that hungry, anyway. 2) I'm visiting in Philadelphia, concerned about travel, in a museum, handling a map, meeting people. 3) I'm at home throwing away shoes, boots, and ice skates, and finding socks and other items stuffed into the tips which I didn't know were there. 4) There's a contest that demands matching names and photographs with typed biographies, and a few of us are comparing notes. One says "This biography says "stoned," note that." There's another that's from "New Zealand" and that ties a name together with a biography, and it seems to be a simple task, though the dream was just a FRAGMENT of time.
WARM PULSATING MANNEQUIN
7/22/80: I'm in some tiny dim bedroom and I've gotten a package in the mail which turns out to be an advertisement for a variably-sized screwdriver. To demonstrate its capabilities, they're sent a mannequin holding the screwdriver which handles an incredibly tiny 1/32" screw, a regular-sized 1/4" screw, and a larger one. I marvel that the paper used in the demonstration can be modular and processed so that the tiny screw head sticks up hard and distinct from its base, the middle-sized one stands in the middle of a cleared area the size of the big one, and the big one is on the other side, a marvel of modularity. Then I notice the mannequin is holding the screwdriver in rather life-like hands, and I remove the screwdriver and wonder if the hands could be used for jerking off, and find them to be surprisingly flexible, soft, and WARM! In turning the mannequin over, I find that it's dressed in rudimentary work clothes that part in back to show a vagina-like cleft (though greatly increased in size, about 6 inches long and 1 to 2 inches gaping wide in the middle) in the depths of which some sort of automated heart pumps to give the figure an even greater semblance of life and movement and warmth. I marvel that these advertising companies can send out such elaborate devices, but the plastic is rubberier than I would like and I get ready to use it but wake up, marveling at the bizarre detail of the dummy, the gentility of its head and graying hair, the articulation of the fingers and the humanness of the hands. Pushing down on the sides of the dummy, it's surprisingly sturdy and resists being broken or mishandled. I'm looking forward to using it and have a nicely voluptuous feeling when I wake.
CROWDS, CAPES, MORE MATCHING CONTESTS
7/23/80: I seem to be living in an apartment right next to a subway station, so that it's hard for me to say where the boundaries are: I'm wearing a long black bathrobe-cape (much like the one worn by Katschei in "Firebird" last night, but without the bright colors) which roils objects lying in its path, but when I go to hang it up on a hook, I see that there are many discarded 3-D viewing glasses left scattered on the floor. I'm inside and outside, wondering where I've left my handbag, and when I hear the subway coming, I dash out onto the platform HOPING that I've hung the bag on the hook on top of the bathrobe. And the constant stream of people which I can't tell are GUESTS or STRANGERS or ROBBERS or merely people waiting on the platform for the subway. Then without any boundary HERE, either, I'm watching a contest with a SIMILAR crowd of people: one person points to a picture of someone's head, and someone named "John" with an oldish face and blond-white hair has to place the picture on a 5x5 puzzle array, matching the picture hidden under obscuring red and black checkers. The "master of ceremonies" or "director" is heard only over the loudspeaker, and this voice eggs on the crowd to coax John into guessing faster, thereby making a mistake. "Come on, John; come ON, John!" It seems there may have been some sort of movie giving clues to the positions of SOME of the faces, and both are supposed to remember which to point to and where to put them, possibly getting another view of the quick movie when they get down a certain number correctly. In his haste, the pointer seems to have pointed to a Chinese youth who hadn't been IN the movie yet, and John is blazing with anger at having nothing to go on in guessing where the picture goes. I'm sitting on the side (now on the verge of waking up) wondering whether one couldn't use intuitive powers or ESP powers to SEE whose picture was under the checkers, and as I wake wonder whether someone like Amy or Pope or someone who was SUPPOSED to be psychic couldn't win at this lucrative contest, but then thought that all the POWER behind all the people watching, hurrying, jeering, who all thought it COULDN'T be done, would be enough to make the psychic powers fail.
TRAIN SCHEDULING AND CONFUSIONS
7/25/80: I'm at a transfer point from plane to train in my travels, walking from one terminal to another, and discover to my surprise that it's AKRON that I'm in. Detour slightly to Dietz Avenue and find the house at 1221 lit up, so I think to myself "Mom's back from her trip, too; I might as well stop in to see her." She's busy packing to go to the AIRPORT, asking if she can't take me somewhere, but I say I'm on my way to the TRAIN STATION. So I leave and a few minutes later a car stops to pick her up and I suddenly realize that the train station might be on the way to the airport, so I stop the car she's in only to find an airport limousine with three people crammed into every single seat. So I wave them on and continue walking to a post office-like structure where I try to find the train schedule. There's an information phone on the wall, but I understand her to say that I have to come to where SHE is and walk 1750 paces to find the information books on the racks. I bluster that that's ridiculous, hang up in anger, and someone else tells me that it's 1870 paces from where I am that the information is. I wander off through hallways and down stairways to try to find this information rack, and all I find are more offices full of secretaries working busily. Ask someone else for assistance and she pulls down a huge book and it's for PLANES, then someone else recalls that the train leaves at 10:25. I look at my watch and it's 10:20, but then remember with a thud of disappointment that I left my luggage at Mom's, which doesn't seem to be on the way ANYWHERE. Some elaborate solution occurs to me, and I'm in the process of explaining it to someone, trying to get them to pick up my luggage for me, or having them send it to me at my destination, but things get hopelessly confused as I wake. Though thronged with people, there's a SPACIOUSNESS and SOLIDITY about the post office-like building that I'm wandering through that emphasizes the idea of adhering to old ways of doing things and a solid bureaucracy that would be hard to circumvent. Yet I always remain hopeful and trusting that things can be worked out so that EVERYTHING happens the way it should without too much difficulty.
CARPET-MUSHROOMS, ROPE FERRIS WHEEL, KID-SEX
8/14/80: 1) I'm walking through a different apartment's living room, but I have my same copper-colored living room carpet down, and I wonder where the musty smell is coming from, and I look down to find that MUSHROOMS are growing in the damp carpet, and they've taken over so fully that in one part they've rotted out the floor and red-edged fleshy mushrooms are growing fully in a recess beneath the floorboards. I decide I really must do something ABOUT it! 2) Then suddenly I'm riding in an amusement park ride that has a lot of do with setting up ropes for the car I'm riding in, and I can swing myself as tightly or as loosely from the perimeter of the wheel as I want to, so I set myself fairly loosely so that I'll swing, and when the wheel starts turning, it turns so fast that the centrifugal force sends me out upside-down when it gets to the top, and the pressure of the blood to my head is so great that I lose my senses and hallucinate that I'm walking down a crowded city street, but retaining the knowledge that this is only a temporary hallucination and I have to be ready for the transition that will occur when the ride slows down enough so that the blood can leave my brain so that I can come out of the hallucination of walking on a city street and return to the "actuality" of riding on a rope-slung amusement park ride. 3) I'm somehow related to two women, possibly by marriage, and their children are just swarming over me in bed. I'm momentarily nonplussed, but they seem to enjoy seeing their children enjoy themselves, so I allow them to ride on my chest, Dennis-style, even past the point where they get erections on their newly-hairy bodies, and I permit myself to caress and lightly kiss one very slender, somewhat Hispanic, flank and there's no outcry from the respective dark skinned mother, so I begin to think I've got a good thing going and indulge in my sexuality with their young bodies. But, just as I get a nice erection going in real life, the UPS guy buzzes at 8:50 and leaves the McGraw-Hill pages downstairs, which is good, since I had to grab my bathrobe to cover my erection, and these warm mornings are hardly the time to be seen respectably in warm bathrobes. Jotted a dream-note so I wouldn't forget.
STRANGE TRAVEL
8/19/80: I'm getting my luggage together in some strange tourist office, and there's a meter-square rubberized model of the area that we're touring, sitting on a table, and I'm looking at it and even STANDING on it, relieved to see that my feet are clean and it's strong enough to support me, though when I look down I can't quite see the relationship of the land to the water, and whether we're seeing an island or a peninsula connected by a tiny neck of land. It seems to be somewhere in Southeast Asia, like the Philippines. Then we're there, and I'm sitting on a sun porch looking out over mangrove swamps, and this is where we're intended to swim, and the tea-dark water doesn't look at all inviting, but there's a stream nearby that looks cleaner, except that it's flowing too swiftly for comfort. Then it begins to rain, and there's a tiny girl sitting next to me, painted face, who asks "Do you want me?" and I say "No," and without comment she moves away to look for another conquest. Others come out on the porch and ask me questions about where we are, and someone pulls out a large folded map, with colored lines for roads, and there's a red and yellow dotted loop around the next place to tour, and they say the road is only still under construction, so we'll have to go there by ferry. Someone storms off next to me saying we can only get to places NOT worth touring, and the places that are worth touring we can't get to unless we pay a lot and take a lot of time for a ferry ride. I don't see what's wrong with where we are, and I begin questioning my purposes for taking this trip. Then we've moved somewhere else, possibly down to this island, and we're looking for a way to get BACK, and again out comes this large accordion-folded map with the yellow and red dotted lines, and the roads are still under construction, but the guide (or native) can't understand what we want, and I have to conclude that this isn't going to be the most picturesque trip, but it's going to be an adventure, anyway. Sadly missing from the dream was anything of the smells or sounds or tastes of any foreign country---it was like a silent movie, shaded green and murky-watered in color, with lots of gesticulating from people who knew no English.