DREAMS FROM 1986
DREAMS FROM 1986
1/2/86: SUCH bizarre details in three DETAIL-FILLED dreams: 1) I'm staying in Charles Mountain's California-style house (he was from Mattachine SO long ago, and I've hardly thought about him so I'm amazed I remember his NAME) and I'm looking forward to looking through his desks and bookcases at his collection of Captain Marvel and Superman and other super-hero comic books and coloring books and souvenirs (and there's porno there, too, I know), and he's leaving me alone in the house, so he gives me a little metal DISK that locks the front door, and I ask to be SHOWN how it works, and though he KNOWS it's fool-proof, he takes me to the door and shows me the slot where the disk turns simply and easily to lock the door. 2) I'm glancing through a Bloomingdale's slick-paper tabloid-size ad (New York Times supplement?) for about 20 TV movies that they're sponsoring, and the cover goes from March at the TOP to January at the BOTTOM, which I think strange, and the movies are mostly classics from the 50s and 60s like Godard's "Weekend" and films by Renais and Renoir with Yves Montand and Jeanne Moreau and one that seems to be entitled "7 x 7," and I look at an ad that seems to be scrawled in chalk by Diane von Furstenberg for some kind of contest with a prize of a dinner with Oscar de la Renta with guests like Picasso (but he's dead, I think) and Paloma Picasso and other elegant people. 3) Arnold and I are at his place planning to go to a movie, but it's 5:45 and since we have to be somewhere at 7, it seems late for a movie. He wants to show me the work he's done on his bathroom and he's stapled a pink plastic corduroy-type padding-material on the upper part, leaving bunches of material over non-square corners and sags and stretches and tears in the material, though I have to admit the RED on the LOWER part (on more solid walls and wood- paneling) looks better, and he's annoyed with me for CRITICIZING the top part, but I protest that he WOULD want me to tell the truth, wouldn't he?
1/16/86: Three fragments related to Anne and Gil Messenger: 1) I'm sitting in the "lower left" of a square at the top of which is a wide window (from my looking at the light shining through the broad expanse of the three windows upstairs on the parking garage next door last night?) looking out over something like my view from W. 57th Street, but it might be a south-looking view from the top floor of the Hotel Olcott. Anne is sitting in an armchair at the window at "upper left," saying that she's been divorced from Gil for a long time, but hadn't told anyone except "the closest friends," which includes Wyndee sitting in an "equal" armchair at the window at "upper right," but does not include Rosanne at "lower right" or Rebekah at "lower left" just to my left. I say "that's true," and Anne gives me a rather withering glance, at my presumption in saying aloud that she'd told me (which she had) before telling Rosanne or Rebekah. 2) Then I'd just been given a body-session by Gil in something like that same room (or in Barbara Lea's apartment?), and I'm stretching out luxuriantly in a very low sling chair (bringing to mind the kinesthetic empathy I had with the stretching bodies in the Clive Thompson dance troupe last night), and it becomes a sort of seduction of Gil, who stands over me with his legs spread apart like the sexy position of Clive Thompson in Rudy Perez's "Countdown" where I admired the view upward into his cloth-covered muscular crotch and fork. I have definitely the impression of our rubbing our bodies together and getting excited, though I can't recall the details (though that leads me to the observation that when I woke at 9:30 after drifting off two or three times through the morning, I had to THINK that I had SOME kind of dream BEFORE all the details finally sifted back into my waking brain). 3) Then there's some sort of reception, or maybe a Sunday-morning service (and this might have been influenced by Mary Vilaboa's invitation to coffee or tea in her apartment [again with a wide window with a view] before 9AM on Saturday when she drives Michael and me to George's apartment [there are a LOT {SEVEN so far} of apartments in this dream!]) with lots of students milling around, and I look at the food-table and amidst the cold sandwiches and dips and raw cut vegetables I see a smallish frying pan with the remains of the breakfast of scrambled eggs and chunks of ham or Spam or mushrooms that Gil had made for me BEFORE the other guests arrived, and I pick it up and wander through the other guests, eating it, and making it rather clear that this was the last part of what had been prepared FOR me from before. And THAT food may have been connected with the restaurant-list that I pored over just before going to bed at 1:30 this morning. But what ELABORATE sets of remembered DETAILS!
2/3/86: One of those awful "lots to do and no time" frustration-dreams connected with starting SCHOOL. Everyone's in a huge cafeteria for breakfast before the first class, and the attendant gives me a different-shaped tray, saying he's sorry, but that's the only kind left. Then John A. pointedly says we should sit with Laurel, and I figure she has something to say about an indexing job (I know this doesn't make sense: it's a DREAM), so when Maureen from a facing table asks me to join HER, where there's a CHAIR, I bend down to say that John wants me to sit with Laurel, and Maureen appears to understand. But when I get to the table where John's sat down, there are no more chairs, and I can't find any empty ones at any nearby tables. I somehow end up at a library table on which is scattered yellow file-folders labeled in pencil with words like "Aube" and "Daube" and "Tarn" filled with travel information, and I barely get finished with breakfast before it's 8:50AM and first class will start at 9, and they DON'T like lateness. I try to gather up my material and it seems like a LOT, and then I see I have bundles of yellow sheets that are TRAVEL data, so I put those back, and find I have posters from the files, but I find one showing displays in the Altamira Caves that I'd wanted to buy ANYWAY, so I can keep THAT, but STILL have too much; why don't I have a BAG?! And it's getting closer and closer to 9AM and I don't even know where to GO, and I think I can leave things and pick them up later, and things cascade from my arms and I'm feeling that I'll NEVER ask someone where MY first class is CORRECTLY. UGH!
3/14/86: 8:10AM I note my "looking down" and seeing my toenail:[diagram]
and a shape like this: AROUND my toenail, removed from back, and the nail is MISSING!
3/21/86: I'm driving out of a parking lot in a rented car, and there are deep holes in the road that get deeper and more water-filled the more exits I try to find. When I DO get out, there's a car coming the wrong way down a one-way exit from a highway, and I stare at him as if a STARE could turn him around in the right direction. End up nosed down into a real LAKE, wondering how to get OUT!
3/24/86: 1) The binding of computer-paper has three offset holes, and I'm told that you can "extract" the preface, body, or conclusions of the papers WRITTEN on this paper by just selecting the proper offset hole. There's a fuss about two SMALLER holes below them, too, but I figure it'll be easier to just get ALL the pages and throw OUT the one I don't want, rather than selecting for all the pages (but one) that I DO want, and wonder if anyone thought of THAT before.
2) I'm at a party where the hostess has served (I thought) HERSELF with a very large piece of cake, and I'm about to make a joke of it, but then she offers ME the plate, and I keep quiet. Then I decide to help her out be serving the bottle of wine that I brought, but I can't find any clean glasses in the cupboards, and the sink is filled with baby foods and medicines put there in shallow water to keep cool, and the baby tries to attract my attention, but the REAL attention-getter is a white Scottie who tries to climb all over me, then actually catches a BALL like a Ping-Pong ball in one PAW, spread-eagled in the air like a cheerleader to catch it. "WHAT a DOG," I think, and try to avoid it!
4/5/86: 1) I'm in the back of a police car with "Brooklyn" handcuffs around my ankles, but I manage to break them and run away. When I shyly lift my pant leg to show the cuffs, someone on a nearby farm offers to cut them away. 2) Geraldine Page is accepting her Oscar and giving all the credit to Rip Torn, who "saw me through all my illnesses, and worse---". 3) I'm in the Army, a) going to breakfast down an enormous flight of stairs covered with foodstuffs: slipping over ranks of loaves of bread, lines of packages of brownie mix, trying to avoid the mounds of vegetables but slipping on all of them, and getting to the bottom to see puddles where dessert-mixes had been processed. b) When I get to the cafeteria, I'm told (I seem to be an officer) by a sneering sergeant that I "can only use the second floor", but I can come in on the ground floor and go in one particular entrance to the john, which I must then exit by the other door. c) I'm told that breakfast is at 6, DINNER is at 4, and when I puzzle about the earlyness of it, I'm told that SUPPER is at 6:30, and I think that this must be either English or Southern. d) Then I'm walking on a weekend through fields at the outskirts of the camp, and see the steeple and dome of a church on a distant hill to the left, then through the trees in front I see that we've come out onto a bluff looking over the center of a Germanic-looking town with dirt-stained curved-rock-face buildings fronting onto brick-paved streets in which trolley-rails are set, and trolley wires and electrical powerlines indicate a city that hasn't changed since the 30's. We look down from a wire "cage" that turns out to be the top turret of a steeple comprised of three "cages," and the one we're on begins to loosen from the steeple and bend outward into space. I grab the arm of a friend on the central spine of the turret and swing in from my tottering position, but a friend can't make it and falls twenty or more floors to the street below. This "bluff" view seems somehow related to the bluff overlooking the Atlantic near Boston used at the start and end of the movie "The Promise," which might not have been very good, but it did feature the wonderful face of Stephen Collins from 1979, the same year noted for his blond beauty in the movie "Star Trek."
4/6/86: 1) Louise Ann Treastor is studying to be an ice-skating star and pro.
2) I present a red plastic check-tag with raised white zeros and numbers on it to "the wrong" counter in a Bloomingdale-like department store, and the attendant mumbles which I take to be "Boston." Now I'd just BEEN in Boston, but I don't remember EXACTLY checking anything there, so I try to bull my way through HERE. In my frenzy I bobble the two packages I'm carrying in the air (rather like the two New York Times magazines that whiffled when I threw them last night) and one of them, like a yellow envelope filled with manuscript pages, falls down the stairs to my right to a little landing. I ask AGAIN what she said, and she mumbles again and "tries" going downstairs, where I think she'll pick up the package I dropped, but she ignores it and passes it by. With no transition I'm standing at the top of a narrow brick stairway between buildings, and as I go down, the thorn-bushes growing at either side get closer and closer, hooking me in my thick overcoat as I go down, and I think about the packages I'm missing, the schedule I have to fill, and think to myself, "Now if this were a DREAM, all I'd have to do is WAKE UP and my problems would be solved, but unfortunately this ISN'T a dream," as I push through more and more bushes, which thankfully aren't hurting my SKIN any. Then I DO wake for a second, and get BACK to sleep for the very vivid image of 3) a white china plate with a thin, elegant black border being placed before me on a featureless table covered with a plain white tablecloth. Only vague memories after this.
4/7/86: 1) I'm bussing and tramming between STEEP houses in someplace like Monte Carlo, riding on some conveyance that I can swing out on a pole from like the San Francisco trams, looking up between the slats of balconies to see the feet of old couples in rocking chairs looking out over the harbor, and I'm thinking about whether they fear their balconies tearing loose and depositing their bodies in the midst of the rushing traffic below. 2) I'm writing dreams at Mom's, and a "neighbor" comes in, with Rick Barnett (?), and I want to phone Mom at ICWU to check if they can come in.
4/8/86: 1) Attic filled with "atomic fusion" apparatus---central tank and four side tanks connected to wines so they'll be protected if they're knocked about, but I still have to be CAREFUL. 2) Visiting office with a game in operation: slap/no slap, talk/no talk, walk/no walk, etc. Then I'm leaving Mom's for a trip and have four things to carry, and the car turns and goes down the driveway and Mom waves goodbye to everyone.
4/9/86: 1) I've got Frank Mungo's cock under a blanket and a hospital aide comes by with scissors. 2) I'm setting up a table, shaking out carpets, and putting things away.
4/11/86: Extraordinary dream about "two rides back to camp" after outings. FIRST with a "different" group of people and I had a silver shopping bag (like I bring tapes home in from Spartacus last night) that I LEFT in car. Got home 5:30AM then (unknown) out again and back to find "sun" house filled with "sun"- people of bronzed beauty. To dining room and look for familiar faces to sit with and a BLACK woman know me, asks what time I got in yesterday, and then I leave to look for people who may have my bag. But the TRIP ends at STRANGE landscapes which I'd CLIMB to find out it was a "shark-fin". There's another dream-piece at "campground tollgate" of TINY cars like sailboats that people DRIVE singly below sail, and sail becomes TENT, but base is flat for "rain protection." Like "dreaming with someone else's mind." On a FIRST day's "outing" was a museum or memorial in which was a replica of an animal---the animal is just-created, the replica cracks and its plaster and brownish, like a plaster floral wreath. On the "first day" I was running along streams and crossing grass-filled streams in various depths of water, but I was using a lovely floating run and became "dry-wet" only in dreams, seeing RED and returning to "home base." I "remember" passing the turns and a "Mexican village" just before the road to the "resort," in SOME ways reminding me of the jungle road at Hotel Cataratas in Brazil at Iguazu. But this is friendly: the landscape, drivers, passengers (kids in one car) and blacks in the "cafeteria" that help me, and "different race" in house.
4/12/86: 1) I'm looking at a subway map (simplified) of Manhattan as regards a tour we're taking, and I point to the destination below the first local stop south of Chambers Street and describe how we can get to the two stops at 72nd and 14th Street, and then go down to Chambers and either walk a bit south, or transfer to the local and walk just a few paces. 2) I'm on a tour in a helicopter that's flying VERY low along a highway along a river, and the pilot (a woman who's constantly talking) is so much looking to the river on the left that I figure there must be a built-in altitude-monitor on the helicopter that won't let it go below a certain height, otherwise we'd have crashed into the ground long before this. Dark shapes splash in the river and someone says "Are they dolphins?" and responds "No, they're lobsters," but the shapes are so transient I can hardly see them. Then we're passing a circus-front, and a poodle is running around a ring with what I take to be three anteaters, but they're moving so fast I can't tell WHAT they are, and someone says they're some new breed of DOG, but I insist that ONE, with a peaked pair of ears sitting up like a cap on its head, must have a HAT on. A woman who looks rather like Elizabeth Barber is sitting just past Michael Blackburn, to whom I'm describing my African trip, and she asks where I went, and I say I can draw her a map of the trip, and she expresses SUCH amazement at my memory and skills that I feel forced to admit that there were only a few very-well-known stops on the entire trip, and she tries to tell me to send the show somewhere where it would get many showings, and, while trying to be modest, I rather arrogantly put in that I HAVE ALREADY shown the show upwards of a dozen times. 3) There was another, dimly recalled, architectural part of the dreaming, now forgotten.
4/14/86: (get to computer at 9:55AM to get down some WEIRD details:) 1) Like Joel MacRae in "Bird of Paradise" last night, the first dream starts with the image of a man crouching in amazement at the shudders of an earthquake, except this man (who resembles Joel) is on the floor of his elegant apartment in the World Trade Center which is vibrating madly with an enormous noise. A woman with him asks WHAT this is (the man is also vaguely me), and I say "It's just a low-flying airplane, but they're usually not THIS low," and we crawl to the curtained floor-to-ceiling windows to gingerly look out to see whether we can see the airplane in fact CLEARING the top of the tower, and there are flashing lights outside and then the SHUDDER of an airplane passing closely diagonally outside, within a VERY few seconds being BELOW the horizon to the east, and I
wonder if THIS has ever been written about in a newspaper article about the unpleasantness of living at the top of a tall building! 2) A group of us are traveling somewhere with Uncle Jimmy, and it seems we're going to see Jim Roark because there are a few errands to do, and I'm always called on to do them, but I really BRIDLE when I'm told I have to phone Jim to get directions for driving to his place. I ask the world sarcastically, "Am I supposed to get directions RIGHT to his place, or is he going to MEET us somewhere and TAKE us to his place?" and Uncle Jimmy responds with his tight nervousness that "Bobbeh, you should KNOW that he wouldn't have room to ask all of us in to his place." And I get out a little telephone book of someplace like West Virginia and find that it has LOTS of locations, and I again heap on the sarcasm when I ask, "Can you at least tell me what COMMUNITY he lives in?" Then we're (somehow the place is connected with the dream though the inhabitants are different) staying overnight in a red-brick palace named "Albemoral," but though it looks elegant and commodious on the outside (and I want to get a picture of it in the morning) it's patched-together on the inside, and when I want to use the bathroom, I step inside to close a not-meeting door (like the one now downstairs at 167 Hicks) and draw cafe-curtains against the windows to the adjoining rooms where people can see and hear my ablutions, and then I can't find the light-switch and fumble along the wall until I find the wire that I know dangles from some appurtenance above a medicine chest and click the switch on the wire. But when I pull aside the dry-rotted shower curtain, the shower-head swivels brokenly and there's a desk and some filing cabinets where the shower-stall had been, so I'll have to take a sponge-bath, and wonder how ALL of elegant-us are going to get along for a four-day weekend without a BATH. Again outside, the sunset is England-moor red with "Albemoral" on the horizon and another rotting pile across the rocky-road way, and I wonder if IT is as decrepit inside as OURS is.
4/15/86: (After Rolf says "Reagan is using your taxes to make your France trip safe by bombing Libya,") I'm traveling through GERMANY, in a bus or little car down narrow roads in picturesque towns whose streets are lined with tiny chalets decked with flower boxes totally FILLED with geraniums and colorful flowers of all time, and I notice a tiny hotel at the town square with a sign for the Calmbach Hotel, and I vaguely remember the name and wonder if it's expensive and if I'll stay there rather than in a pension as I'd planned.
4/17/86: 1) Not clear if this is a television movie that I'm watching or "reality" that I'm participating in, but earth has been "invaded" by loveable incompetent aliens who try to disguise themselves as humans but end up looking strange and "mouthy" like the Milton-Berle loving visitors on one of the Amazing Stories. There are votes, at the end, for accepting the ones who look most like real people, and ones who look like Michael Blackburn and a few others (like Adriel) in my class win, except that they go off into a "living room" to open a window, but the "television watchers" know that a bomb or hand- grenade has been thrown in there, and it explodes and EVERYONE'S sad that all the "well-disguised" aliens have been killed, except for a frog-mouthed Mary Vilaboa-like alien who's crying in the corner to REALLY get the sympathies of the audience up. 2) I'm accepting money for some kind of Actualism function, though it's more a cafeteria-line-like dinner that I'm taking donations for than a class for which there's a fee, though I'm giving donors credit and/or change for their donations, so the amount is important. Michael Blackburn and Arthur Dworin are competing with each other in a jocular way in trying to cheat me of the largest amount of change: Michael will riffle ONE folded dollar out of his wallet with an implication that it's TWO, and Arthur will try some quick sleight-of-hand with dollars already in the plate to make it look like he's putting down THREE, at which Michael makes a comment, and I say, "That's OK, you're not as bad as Arthur---(then in jest) but not THIS Arthur (speaking across Arthur Dworin's manipulating arm and torso), but the OTHER Arthur (not quite clear in the dream whether I'm referring to the AIDS-ridden Arthur Ellenbogen or not)." Michael tries to outdo Arthur by getting a single wet in a plate that contains an oily salad-dressing-like residue, and he rustles it like a lettuce leaf and tries to joke that it's four, and I go many times better by saying, "You mean that you want change for that hundred-dollar bill you have there," and the Michael in the dream gets the very same "Why-you- bright-guy-I-never-would-have-thought-of-that,-you're-brilliant" look that I've seen on his face a number of times in real life, and he says "Yeah, THAT'S right" and hands the bill to me as it's become even more wet and limp and lettuce-transparent in quality. I wake at 9:30, after less than seven hours sleep, and debate getting up, AGAIN wishing I had a portable terminal at bedside with a diskette so that I could transcribe the dream quickly rather than writing down a sketchy note whose wording I won't be able to recognize when I get to the computer in a couple of hours. But this is so "interesting" that I get out of bed at 9:45 and get it all transcribed (down to the bottom of the page) by 10:10, in time for getting rid of another dipful of Jamaican Diet.
4/18/86: There's a party at Mom's at 1221 Dietz, so I go into the bedroom to amuse myself after having done the dishes and seeing it's 3PM and there's nothing much to do before dinner about 6PM. The room is rather a mess (Rita is there in spirit since her bed is there and clothes of hers are scattered around) and in the middle of the floor are assorted piles of Construct-o-set girders and screws. I'm looking for my stamps (I have an exact idea of what I want to do, rather related to how I am with them now: finish putting the French [early] into the album so that I can now count how many of each country I have in the ALBUM and separate as DUPLICATES, and I have a sheet that suggests I may have upward of 300,000 stamps) and I recall putting them into the bottom drawer of one of the wooden chests of drawers, so I open then (they're strangely put onto piles of clothes and toys and other junk, leaning against two corners) and ONE is in upside down, so obviously it's empty, and the other is empty, and I get the clear idea that she's going to throw them OUT. But what did she do with all the STUFF that was in them? She's in her bedroom, dressing, and I push past people to ask what she'd done with my stamps. She turns to the others in exasperation, then to me to say ironically, "Well, there was all that empty space in the garage that could be used for storage----" "So you put my STAMPS in the GARAGE??" I exclaimed, and turned to dash away as she turned to friends and relatives and said simperingly "So now I can't do what I want with MY OWN PROPERTY?" And I don't wait around to see if they agree that MY stamps are HER property or not, but prepare to rescue them from the cold and damp and unsafety of the garage. There'd been something BEFORE that, but I now forget.
4/26/86: There's a play going on, and a large part of the audience seems to be standing or sitting on folding chairs in the wings. There's interest in how the scenes change, as if part of the audience is a class in play production. At one point a magician tosses a hoop into the air, which sticks at the top of a flat, and he throws up a rope that "magically" becomes attached and up which he starts to shinny. At another point the curtains hiding the stages at either side of the main stage (like the set of Paul Taylor's "Snow White" on Thursday) are opened so that the audience can witness what goes on in the wings. There's some attention given to the fact that the show has now been running for six years. There was also something about time to go before the act begins, but I forget exactly what it was. Another pleasantly innocuous benevolent dream.
5/5/86: 1) I'm looking at some sort of guide with Joe Easter, and in turning pages I see that two or three sections are outlined with red felt-tip, and it looks like a street-guide to some Netherlands city that we're about to see. 2) I'm supposed to meet Madge Mao downtown someplace, and I'm sure that the bus I'm waiting for goes uptown and downtown (like I'm waiting at the midpoint of a route that's shaped like a telephone receiver: up to the north and around a west-south-east loop that returns to the north-south connecting-avenue, and then down to the south and around a west-south-east loop that returns to the southernmost point of the north-south connecting-avenue), and when I board the bus and ride for a bit I find that I'm on the northbound bus which stops at a terminal to wait at the northwest corner of the route. I think I'll be a bit late, and I debate taking a taxi south, but then someone taps me on the shoulder and it's Madge and her brother Mike, who'd just gotten on at this stop, and I'm aware that I'm rather rudely staying seated when I greet Madge and shake hands with her brother, and the situation seems vaguely reminiscent of the last episode of "The Prisoner" which I saw on TV last night, when MacGoohan shakes hands with people he's met from his "throne" underground.
5/6/86: 1) Madge Mao again! This time I'm being audited on my income tax for not having filled out the form saying that I was MARRIED. I'm puzzled that I would have filled out the form at ALL, and then find a folder of information on India, and realize we'd discussed getting married to make that trip easier! 2) I'm riding somewhere on a train, vaguely realizing that the plan called for TRAINING from New York to the West Coast, which I thought was strange since now I'd have to FLY back to NYC. I was looking with disdain at some "ruffians" near my seat, and at one point (this is like watching the cast of a cheap Hollywood western) I thought I saw one of the gunmen sneaking a wallet that really wasn't mine into his pocket, and I THOUGHT my wallet was safe in my hip pocket, but when I felt for it, it wasn't THERE. So I thought to accuse them of thievery, thinking that if they were STUCK with me on the speeding train and called the conductor they would HAVE to give up the contents to me, but then I felt in ANOTHER pocket and the wallet appeared to be THERE, except that I thought they may have stolen some of my credit cards or tickets, and I was afraid to take out the wallet and actually CHECK. Another segment of this was that everyone seemed to be sleeping in their seats and I decided I wanted to watch the scenery, so I opened the Venetian blinds on the car windows and everyone else then seemed to be watching the scenery ALSO, and I was amazed that I hadn't noticed that before. 3) There's some silly show going on in one SECTION of an auditorium (vaguely connected with my mapping out the seats at the Metropolitan Opera House last night?): about one-third way back in the left third of the seating, so that I, in the front row of the section facing the "stage" was closer than most, to see an actor resembling some specific old-time actor who always played grandfathers or store-keepers, who looked vaguely like Russell Schofield with his halo of gray hair and wide smile, go into a strip, and some pretty girl mussed the front of his clothes and then took out his tiny cock with a cute red tip which then grew to "normal" size as it stuck out about six inches, and then suddenly ballooned into about THIRTY inches, curving up the front of his belly and chest until it was practically level with his chin, and of a proportionate thickness! Some female porno-star came out to rub her behind on the donkey-member, and then he seemed to be about to come when I was looking at a brochure of movies of his, and I'm amazed that this place is so "out of it" that pornographic movies are still going for $5. Each description is quaint: "Little Mary Lou of the dry pussy goes at it with Mr. Eli. She wears panties throughout in the interests of safe sex (based on my safety-pin on my suit last night?)." I wake with a vague hard-on and definite ideas that lead to NOTEBOOK 369.
4/28/86 (found note): 1) In hospital following a HUGE (7'2"?) black man dressed in a khaki raincoat with a belt SO high (and I'm MY height) I have to reach UP to hang onto it like a kid to follow him, which CHARMS him. In and out of elevators, down halls, and at one point I lift him onto my shoulders to carry him (from Paul Taylor ballet last night? Or plump woman on "Behind the Green Door"? 2) I'm filling in some kind of schedule: 7 at 5PM, 8 at 7PM, maybe 11 at 8PM, with a graphical (?) numbering device. 3) BEFORE those, Helen and Jimmy were "Coming down long flights of cement stairs" to visit me, and Helen smells fungi, but I assure her the excrement smell comes from seaweed-like vegetation rotting at sides of steps (OMNI smell article??).
5/12/86: One of those AWFUL thigh-straining glue-footed runs, this time along one BLOCK of a crowded city street to catch what I know to be the Amiens train.
5/13/86: I'm piling up stacks of notebook paper against A-bomb blast-effects somewhere on eastern Long Island. Get IDEA: Senile dementia(Alzheimer's Disease) is CAUSED by "I don't LIKE or WANT to be getting older." Attitude of ESCAPE!!
5/15/86: I've gotten onto the back (standing) section of an odd elevator where some are sitting on the couch in front of me, and then it goes up and over and down, like an amusement park ride, to get (maybe across the moat? I think now) to another part of this HUGE old manor house. There were other people-filled parts before this, vaguely vacation-like, but I forget the details. Rescues??
5/16/86: Note from 6:30: 1) Noise-movie of car-race NYC to California.
2) Ways of boiling a shark for food or fertilizer in India, and "they were more interested in the 14-year-old daughter's showing them the tea ceremony."
3) Note from 7:30: Visiting a friend in California and he gets a call from Cary Grant. I say I don't know when he'll be back, but will leave my friend a message to call him. Then I'm into a nightclub, at back, and singer's onstage as I go down dark steps to where I hear 2-3 guys groping in the dark, and I "fantasize" meeting Cary Grant in park and becoming HIS lover, "old" tho I AM!
4) 9:30 note: In a DEPARTMENT store, my stuff blocking path, guys on intercom try to make SHOWERS hot.
5/22/86: 1) Of Russia. 2) Sculpture with skirt of painted SCREEN, then LARGE tomb-figure is reclining saint, with cherubs "at our polar organs" (at hips) "for long the ONLY work of Canova in the United States, "Now being returned to its country of origin."
5/23/86: Working on a play, TIGHT, first day. Five performances on 6/8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and I figure two weeks OK for a 2-act by Sean O'Casey (?), MAYBE "Shadow of a Gunman"(?), and I stick out beer-belly like Cosby on "Himself" (last night) and then get someone to tell Michael Blackburn about "Don," though SHE thinks I want to know, and Michael exasperatingly pauses before ASKING. Script? And handed stack of papers (Index MS or free Parity Checker). AGAIN the bed shakes at 2AM and 8:15AM!!!
5/24/86: 6:30AM: Working amid desks at IBM. Radio plays loud semi-classical music beyond partition. Guy between me and partition asks for radio on MY desk so he can play "his kind of music." I say No, RELUCTANT to say I like THAT music we're HEARING. He COEMS to TAKE it and I want to RIP it from wall, but find it's hooked up to green cables and I'd SURELY pull out OTHER things, like PHONES, crossing to cut NEXT to me, on RIGHT (formerly a wall), and he's YOUNG and CUTE and BLOND and in torn pajamas in BED. I think, "It's not so bad," and debate how to touch his nice body. 2) Then elaborate Broadway homage to STARS ---a pair of stars from each nominated show, guests wrapped in black blankets under talc-SNOW, then "Revolutionary War soldiers" advance in echelon, and I sort through stacks of photos from shows that have been cut out into relating pairs of people, going through each one from the stack on the right and adding it to the stack on the left after I've looked at it.
5/28/86: Cleaning up from party (front-porch shade and cool into closet), cleaning table, bringing things upstairs in WELL, and I'm going to the Mediterranean to a resort, for an exercise, and I don't know WHERE I leave at 11AM.
5/29/86: I've moved into what I thought was a three-room apartment, but when I stand in the entrance-way, it's clear from the L-shaped counter (rather than 2 walls) and the pigeon-holes for mail along the other 2 walls, that this FIRST room is really part of the HOTEL and not part of my apartment. The first room is rather small, and windowless, just big enough for a bed, rather like the tiny room I had for my "own" on West 112th Street. The second was somewhat larger, but I figured somehow that I didn't have enough WALLSPACE to take care of all my books, so I'd have to get rid of lots of stuff. But there was no feeling of disappointment or panic about all this: that's the way it was, and that was the way I was proceeding to handle the situation.
5/31/86: Eating flowers, jumping into cars to run from---cops? Panicked guy. More orchid-front-flower eating. With ALL the above notes I'd planned to transcribe them QUICKLY and ELABORATE on the notes, but now it's 6/24 and I've done this ENTIRE page essentially from the notes alone.
6/6/86: I'm suffering from some long-term wasting disease (though there's no certainty that it's AIDS), and I wake to speak to my oriental male-nurse, who tells me that I'd had difficulties during my shower, earlier, and I'm depressed when I can't remember anything ABOUT having had a shower, so I MUST be in bad shape. But then I get dressed and am going with two friends up a long flight of stairs to some social or theatrical event, surprised by my strength, and I figure that if there's something I want to DO urgently enough, I'll be able to do it. When I get to the top of the stairs I have to sit down in a chair, and it's if I'm reading about MY reactions as those of a character in a Huxley novel, seeing clearly the last sentence to read: "He was surprised to find that he could actually resign himself to the thought of dying, and even accept it, and he spoke in a voice that could be accurately described as a murmur." And I DO feel a kind of silent resignation, even while thinking over what I'd done and what I'm doing: movies, entertainments, stamps, indexes, travel, and from my point of view in the dream (I'm not actually much over the age I am now), it all seems OK. Obviously this stems from the fact that I had one of my very first apprehensive nights about the plane-flight for the Czechoslovakian trip which is still over two months away. There was a small coda-dream in which I was sitting just to the right of Joe Easter in the first or second row of a theater, and we turn around and there's Bill Hyde sitting behind us! Bill starts right in talking, staring at Joe as if he might remember him but not remember his name, so I bring "Joe Easter" into the conversation, but then both of them turn to a man sitting TWO rows behind me and it seems deviously clear that the two of them had made MONEY off this third man at some time in the past, and they're looking to pull some sort of scam this time, too. I feel vaguely miffed about this situation, but I don't know enough about it to do anything in particular, and then I wake up.
6/20/86: I'm at 1221 Dietz (sunnier bathroom than there) and my TOENAIL bleeds and I wash it in a porcelain-wicker breadbasket-like footbath which Mom just installed that morning. There's a SECOND bleeding before the toenail (nose?).
6/22/86: 1) I'm sweeping caked sand off a black tarpaulin on a large bedroom floor, trying to get "my space" cleaned up. [At 9AM there's an explosion that slightly rattles my windows.] 2) With Mom to Cleveland Clinic for electrogram- uniting (whatever that is!).
6/23/86: 1) Climbing mountains, followed by jeep bouncing from gully to gully, then I'm descending at a later time under a sky that has a "red dawn" light in it. In some kind of analogy to the can of ice that chills a picnic basket, I have a knapsack with a bottle that produces HEAT if shaken too much, and I look over to my knapsack on the table to find FLAMES from the heat dancing around my camera, and I BERATE the woman who was standing right there talking with someone else, while watching the flames, for not SAYING anything about the fire in my knapsack. 2) I'm practically taking the place of the recording or televising camera circling around a black soprano playing some sort of sacrificial or religious figure: naked, with shaved pubes which she protects with a hand, and I "supervise" a white actor who has to "whitewash" her body for dramatic purposes: first OVER the hand in front, then questioning whether to show her hemorrhoids on-camera, then knowing we'll go back to the front to whitewash her labia in the slippery white makeup (like Bo Derek's final sequence in "Tarzan the Apeman").
6/24/86: It's my birthday party, and there are lots of people. 1) Rita gives me OFFICE stuff: a) 2 packs of 4 colored pencil-crayons, b) 2 packs of note cards, c) a 3-D object that I hold as a WEAPON and then as a FLOURISH, that JOE EASTER puts on as a hat, for which I point out the right viewing angle to a black female onlooker. I pick up a plastic carousel-shaped DENTURE-like object. In one corner Mom is SWEARING at Marty Sokol, who RE-makes his point and turns away smiling, and Mom is in a FURY. Other gift, and Mom is SCREAMING at another old woman---or was the woman screaming? I reach for the carousel- denture to change the subject, holding it up and saying "Now what's THIS?"
DREAMS IN AKRON, see NOTEBOOK page 377!
6/26/86: 6:40AM note: 1) Army troops must leave urine specimens in large glass beakers. I pooh-pooh those who dither and moan "How can I do this in public," but I watch everyone else stripping down and pissing while kneeling in the grass to fill their beakers with bubbling yellow fluids, and then creep back to the john after everyone else has gone, walking toward the stalls over a metal framework that becomes progressively more spindly and slippery, until the woman ahead of me has to bend over and creep along on hands and feet to keep from slipping off and getting a leg caught in the lattice-work. 10AM typing: 2) I'm rehearsing a movie or TV special with Katherine Hepburn, and though we're both very old, we've been married a long time and feel very close to each other, and I'm directed to lie atop her as she lays on her back in a bed shaped like a large fish-can: raised edges with rounded corners, about 3 x 4 feet, covered with a blanket that obscures all her bodily features, and I lay gracefully atop her so that my bending body covers ALL the surface area of the blanket and fills the area of the top of the fish-can, and I suddenly feel very comfortable and feel that SHE'S greatly comforted by the gentle weight, and I cup her thin trembling face in my hand as I lie with my head near hers, and she mumbles something that I TAKE (though it is not, and how could this be done effectively in a play?) to be "I love you," and I whisper back "I love you too," and she turns in small surprise to respond, "And I love YOU." I half-wake and half- dream the extremely touching coda: I lie in the highest bliss and half-sob: "What simple words produce the highest-possible happiness," and feel myself elevate emotionally into a mystical aura of ecstasy. 3) Then I'm at Mom's at 1221 Dietz and look out the shaded front windows to see lines of cars driving up Dietz and parking in the driveway on the left, which I tell myself (falsely) is the Lears' driveway, and in front of our place, and even going AROUND our place to the right to park in BACK, which has become a parking lot for Geauga Lake Park, which delights me, because I have a free day and I can now get to the park EARLY and ride on the good rides before lines form for them. I wander back through the dim rooms, ignoring some kid's playful knock at one of the doors (the house has become enormous), and reach into various cellophane- wrapped packages (as from Christmas or a party) to take out bits of candy or pastry to eat (and in the dream I can TASTE the goodness and sweetness and flakiness of various goodies), and in one tiny scene I see some squares of what I took to be candy fallen onto the grass, but when I touch the cube of sticky substance, warmed from the sun, I find it to be a sun-softened cheese that tastes sweet and burnt and gummy and delicious all at the same time. But I'm really annoyed when I go into a back kitchen where a window is open and one of the day-visitors is reaching in through the window, saying to her companion, "And there are always cookies here; yesterday there were six..." and I interrupt vehemently, "And next time there won't be ANY," while they are hardly flustered at all, still selecting a cookie to take, as I continue to take bits from already-opened packages in drawers and on shelves. Then I'm out through the increasing numbers of cars parking in the dusty lots to play at Geauga Lake, and I wander up a rehearsal-alley to see crowds of stilt-men rehearsing their Comedie-Francaise-type comedy-scenes and sword-battles, and the men run back and forth with a sort of archtypal WIDE STANCE that reminds me of drawings and childhood memories and figures that EVERYONE must somehow remember from dreams and stories of childhood. I turn to look up a hill and on the horizon, past armies diminished to toy-size by distance, are two dueling figures that seem to be mechanisms on stilts, as the bodies themselves must be thirty feet high and the misproportioned arms and legs a hundred feet in awesome length. As part of this spectacle, I seem to be seated in a theatre watching a preview of attractions available unroll on a diagonal scrim from ahead-left to behind- right, describing at first comic books of adventures, then cartoons available from libraries, then videotapes available for purchase, then actual re-enacted episodes on this stage, and a performer appears from behind the curtain who is clearly an actor drawn on the rolling previews, and two frowning figures labeled "Lovers" come out of the elaborate movie-trailer and bow, still frowning as part of some interrupted plot-line, ironically to the audience they notice before them. And there seems the promise of dazzling beauty and fabled wonders in performance, and I wake with such bemusement that I debate going back to sleep to continue the fantasies, but then decide to get up and record these details while fresh in my mind, and taking until 10:25AM to get all down.
6/30/86: 1) Rolf is being analyzed and for some reason I'm watching (as if to check up on him). Then it becomes clear that he's been turned on for some reason, and has taken his stiff cock out of his business suit and is jerking off. I say something about it, and he comes over to where I'm sitting (which turns into a bed), and he starts kissing me. Conscious of AIDS, I try to avoid as much saliva as I can, but I'm ENJOYING it, and I get involved with him and wake with a very pleasant hard-on. 2) I'm walking along the edge of a lake which somehow I take to be a cleaned-up Lake Erie: there are rocks along the shore and bits of seaweed in the water, but the splashing looks and even SMELLS clean and fresh. I know there's an amusement park down the shore a bit, and a train comes along that I try to board, but I don't have any ticket and he won't let me on. Somehow I'm at the top of a large hill and look down to see some strange tunnels, like anthill-entrances, as if they were part of some cowboy shoot-out scene (is this from watching "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" last night?). Then I'm back on the first lake-edge, seeing that if I keep on the coral heads (yes, I know!) I can avoid getting my feet wet and walk out to the edge of the lake itself. 3) Without transition I'm starting to run down 14th Street because it's starting to rain, and I see a marquee up ahead that has a dry sidewalk under it, so I stop there to see if I can flag a cab, because I know I want to go to 96th Street for something, most likely the Thalia, which I "put away" last night, too. All these episodes notable for detail and sense of WETNESS, almost the SMELL of it.
7/1/86: 8:15: I'm cleaning my bedroom at 1221 Dietz, and Dad is there.
7/2/86: 1) Pat Burrell, Wyndee and I are talking about Actualism at Center.
2) Spartacus and I are coming from campground into "town" for "Old Dutch Taxi" to NYC, and I have FIVE umbrellas and NO COLLEGE DIPLOMA!
7/10/86: My apartment (slightly different from the current; sort of a combination of Hicks, Dietz, and W.112th St) is being readied for a large dinner party, and I look on as a waiter takes the cover off a round table set up for after-dinner coffee with only six places, and I know dinner is being set up for 10 or 12. He scatters crumbs on the floor, and when I look down to the short-nap red rug, I see LOTS of tiny objects that I try to pick up, then decide I just HAVE to get the vacuum cleaner. But when I go into the bedroom, things are even MORE of a mess, and I push pairs of chairs back against piles of mess (there is also a flavor of Gaylord's office for the fireworks), and try to rearrange a large bolster on the back of a sofa with too-puffed, too-short cushions with different-patterned casings. There's a wooden chair with some of Rita's small purses hanging off the back, and I think to leave them, but then consider that the dykes attending my party will think I'm interested in YOUNG women, not men. Am called into the living room where they've taken up a red carpet which was dirty to reveal VERY irregular 4"x4" white ceramic-like tiles, particularly on a former wall-site in the middle where the wobbly tiles stand up about three inches above the tiles on either side, and I say we MUST put the carpet back. I go into the bedroom to find it folded onto the bed, and again I try moving chairs and sofas around to furnish seating arrangements for more people (shades of my birthday party, too). Friends are arriving; I'm trying to dust, and I haven't even showered yet, but things will be all right ANYWAY!!
7/22/86: 1) I'm something like a Socialight coordinator for a concert to which about 30 people are coming, so I've attended the concert in the afternoon BEFORE the main one and spread a sort of reserved-sheet over the ten seats in each of three rows in front of me (with a few blanks that had been previously reserved for OTHERS, I guess), but since the attendance for the afternoon concert was only about 50%, there were lots of empty seats. But now that it's beginning to fill up for the evening, I'm beginning to be questioned about the seats I'm saving, and I'm hoping the others in my group start showing up so someone ELSE will help me save all these seats. 2) I'm making out some kind of questionnaire for IBM employees, and there are lots of blanks in the middle (rather like the pattern of seats in 1)!) which have to be filled out. In the course of making the test or going through the day, it's clear that one of the middle questions no longer has to be answered, so rather than redo the form and xerox lots of new sheets, I'm thinking of just crossing off that question on all the sheets I now have. Somehow connected with this I'm talking to Madge Mao in some office: I don't think it's hers OR mine, and she's talking about Werner (unnamed, but her husband) going out on consultant work, but they have monetary problems, and I say "Well, he must earn at LEAST $25-$30 an hour for his consulting; isn't he a Manager now?" and she responds, "He's even a JUNIOR Manager (somehow a step UP from a "plain" Manager) so he makes $44/hr, and they're supposed to increase that (I get the idea of a 10% across-the-board rate-raise), so it's not bad." 1) I recalled when I first woke about 8:10 and 2) is fairly clear in my mind when I decide to get out of bed about 9:10AM.
7/24/86: 5AM! Wake after LONGEST dream I EVER had: I'm dating STING, who first pretends he doesn't know me in front of two other friends, but then he kisses with closed lips VERY emotionally. Then to various levels in his house, ending in his basement in an ELABORATE "filmed video" format that ends (shades of square farming areas at Nohmul in Mexico by Mayans) by my hanging from TV-camera dolly as we ZOOM through water covering cellar floor into which have JUST MAJESTICALLY SUNK square plastic sponge-blocks of hay-like sugar cubes a foot cubed, sunk into brownish rice-paddy water or dissolvant. While below my feet I can see the white-water flash of the camera base as it streaks through the water giving me a huge fast high circling ride! 2) 8:20: architectural program about atriumed building where employees watch movies from their DESKS in center of building and no one ELSE can see them and THEY don't have to MOVE.
7/26/86: 9AM: Totally ludicrous opera spoof as "ad rehearsal" for Hoffman- Laroche (of Seveso fame!): heavy-accented Frenchman starts extreme fun of "person" "Laroche, Hoffman," and some American chimes in, then a couple starts making love to HILARIOUSLY-poorly sung "Avant de quitter ces lieux." Then a children's chorus surrounding the principals on-stage starts SO quietly into march from "Tannhauser" that "stage-whispers" of questions and corrections RISE ABOVE fantastically lush orchestral rehearsal of music; and audience is amazed and can NOT keep a straight face.
7/28/86: 1) In hotel with Marty and Regina, and decide to go to "our other" room to sleep at 11:30, though they're staying up to read. It's "Room 20, lower part of lobby," and "since they're not in SAME bed," I go down hall and through door and into a "party room" (like wire-room in "The Sting") and into two closets to try to find MY place. 2) Staying with family like "You Can't Take It With You": father successful artist (surprisingly young and handsome in blond mustache) and SON paints painting for me "I could have loved at any of seven starts" and he says "I know" and I cuddle with his GROWING THICK COCK and we kiss and he's VERY agreeable. 3) I'm talking to Father-Valko-type priest and everyone is singing and he's taking off rain-boots and rips off clothes and I say "Want to lie down?" and guide him to conveniently placed bed and he COLLAPSES.
8/6/86: 1) I'm in a hospital for some sort of operation, and there's some fuss about the kind of anesthesia needed: maybe it can only be a local rather than a general anesthetic, and I'm wondering how different dosages affect the period of insensibility. 2) I'm outside the back of 1221 Dietz, looking at a colorful crow or raven (yet with colors, like the African Brilliant Crow, or whatever it was) through binoculars, and it's apparently cawing at ME with its bright yellow eye. Then someone is trying to creep up on it, coming rapidly closer and closer until he lunges forward and, with a flurry of feathers, actually CATCHES it and begins talking to it as if they knew each other.
8/9/86: A matronly woman and a rather scuzzy younger hunter are both after the bark-like leathery pelt of a rare kind of African animal who turns out to be ME as they tear away chitinous chunks from my wrist and ankle, revealing bruised and thin skin underneath. The skin at the ankle is SO thin that everyone looks at it solicitously while I try to reassure them by saying: well, the covering DOES keep the sun away and that's why it's so pale. Then I and someone else who seems to be a friend of mine look "south" (as toward Bleecker Street from northward on Cornelia) to see HIS car pulling out for more hunting, and HER luxurious "saloon car" goes whizzing by at the same time as a blizzard of flying silvery bits like round leaves or tin-can container lids, and I remark "I didn't know they were together," and my companion observes: "Well, there's SUCH a market for the coatings that it's easier for the two of them to hunt together rather than separately." I remain rather distantly observant through the whole dream, even though the "hunted body" at the start is clearly MINE.
8/12/86: I'm into theater at A, when it's almost empty. Then I move to B and then to C and can't see the SCREEN from below, so I go to D and theater is now almost FULL, with very few empty seats, and E is behind a pillar, so I go to F, which is far away in the front of a balcony.
11/24/86: 1) I've gone to check the latest information on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, which had been handled by Helen Ferguson and then had been transferred to a bulletin board in the lobby of the office building, which was now being renovated with much activity and bustle. I find some clerk who was in charge of it, and he finds a large blue binder which had contained the information, but he flaps it back and forth to indicate that it's empty. Then he asks me to his office, where he thinks there might be some information, and we go to an area in the middle of the renovation zone, and when we both sit in wooden chairs we can feel the floor shift under us, and we agree that the room's gonna go, so we leave as it slides into an abyss. There's no sense of danger, just inconvenience, in all this. As I'm clambering up the sides of the excavation, I come to a sun-porch overlooking a leafy valley, but it's been blocked off from the office inside, and I can only think that it must have been a problem keeping the area warm with all those windows, and as I typed this the first time (things wrong with the COPY!) I imagined I might have been chilly in my sofa bed under the windows of my living room. 2) I'm in a bus toward the end of the line, where I'll get off, and the driver is surrounded in his seat by a crowd of midgets around the front and side windows, all imploring him to take them to their appointment somewhat off his regular route. No one on the bus seems to mind, but I do, and I don't like their small bodies, neat suits, greasy faces, and pencil-thin mustaches. Without transition I'm in a large dining room (obviously part of my concern about the Actualism Christmas Party at La Petite Auberge) next to a gloomy midget blonde with her head hanging low, and I'm asked if I want to be introduced to her, but I say she looks so depressed that I'll wait til she feels better. 3) Connected to the "officeness" of the first dream, I'm in an auditorium for a business meeting in the morning, but didn't notice that it was changing to a pep rally at 11AM, so when I see uniformed (black sweatsuits) students replacing the businessmen in the bleachers, I don't think anything about it, but then some cheerleaders sort of push me out of the way at 11AM, and I decide the whole thing is now a pep rally. I leave, but then turn back to get my shoes and socks which I'd left under the bleachers and had been kicked out toward me. I was glad I remembered them before I'd gotten much farther away. All these details came as I dozed before 7:30, when I got up to pee, and 9:20, when I got up to write notes to remember the dreams. Getting to bed as early as 12:30 has its advantages!
12/19/86: After so many days of remembered fragments of many dreams, some of compelling obsession, some so trivial I wondered why the memories remained at all: today I remember two bits distinct enough to record to make sure I have SOMETHING for this grotty December. 1) I'm at the dentists' (not Moskowitz), and one of them cradles my head in his elbow-crotch while he insistently pokes a probe into the inner gums of my lower jaw. The other is making remarks on social events while he records the results of the jabs on a diagnostic chart. "Does it hurt?" the jabber asks laconically, and I murmur that it does, but that doesn't prove anything's wrong, does it, since it would HURT under ANY circumstances. When the torture finishes, I ask, with irony, how much they've charged me for this, and the other looks sardonically at me and rather hints that it's a new technique they're researching that might be free of charge. 2) I'm sharing a hotel room with someone, maybe at school, and he's awake before I am, and as I turn a lamp on he turns the bathroom doorknob so that strands from the rug, caught around the knob, jerk the rug to make me laugh that turning on the lamp agitates the rug. "You're up early," I say, and he tells of noise from the neighbors. "You should wear earplugs," I say, and he says that he HAD earplugs in, at which point I exclaim that the noises MUST have been loud for him to hear through his earplugs. He rather reminds me of Jim Maher, somehow in my mind now a reference to Marty Sokol, whom Sherryl called yesterday to say that WBAI announced had died suddenly of a heart attack on 12/17/86. Many before were about trips, but none today after my mapping out a Florida drive.