Dinner with Raymond Carver

I was sitting down for a meal at a rectangular table in a diner with what may have been a group of literary dignitaries, although the only person I recognized was Raymond Carver, who was quietly eating across from me. The food had already been served and the men were poking fun at vegetarians as they enjoyed their meaty meals. I told them I was a vegetaerian, but didn't feel like explaining myself at the moment so I left it at that. Someone asked if I believed in god and I told them I was an aetheist. Carver set down his burger and looked at me.

"Do you think saying that makes you brave," he asked and I said no.

There was an uneasy silence that I eventually broke by asking if everyone at the table--all older white men--was Christian, either Catholic or Protestant. Everyone but Carver nodded or said yes.

"Not me," he said. "I'm an aetheist."

After we were done eating two waitresses came over to bus the table. One of them, a Guyanese woman in her late 40s who was dressed like a 16 year old Hot Topic employee, began swooning about something. When our bill was brought, Carver reminded me that Yacki's sister, Sumi, had left us her bag so we could pay for her food. He went through her bag and pulled out a credit card from her wallet, but I told him not to worry about it, I would cover it.

When I went to throw in my money I counted the pot to ensure we had enough for a decent tip and found that someone had paid in Euros. Suddenly I realized that it was the 1950s and it was understandable that people would pay in foreign currency. In a disconnected world pre-globalization you couldn't expect everyone to have the same currency. (Nevermind that the Euro wasn't created 'til 1999.)

Besides the American dollars and Euros, someone had also decided to pay with three playing cards.

- Arv

rough-draught.blogspot.com

Now that I think about it, we must have been inside one of those tech rooms at Stuy. Natalie and I are sitting in the back and Natalie is sleepy. She puts her head down while I flip through magazines -- literally, just flipping because I am actually peeping at my ex-boyfriend who is canoodling this round little asian girl. The girl is wearing this large black t-shirt with a long checklist. My favorite one was, "he f*cks to his ex-gf's picture." oh yes, he does.

Anyway, it's getting late so Natalie and I head out. We get into a taxi but we're not moving and no one says anything. We sit there in silence for ten minutes until I really had to pee. So I went back inside, peed, and came running back out to see Natalie looking around, terrified. For some reason, between the time I left to pee and came back, Natalie's hair exploded into this voluminous fro.

The taxi guy finally asks where we are going and starts moving. We were driving for awhile, heading into Queens, but the taxi guy decides its okay to abandon us by a highway with a motorized wheelchair. Natalie is really sleepy and groggy now. So I had to go find someone who could tell me how to get back to Bayside. Fortunately, that was easy. A woman tells me that I had to make a left from where we were, keep going until we saw the dinosaur, make a right at the dinosaur until we came up to a sandy flight of stairs and I would be able to recognize my way home from there. She offered me a ride, but I insisted that I wanted to drive the wheelchair and claimed I had done it billions of times. So I strap into the wheelchair, tie Natalie to the back, and I drive the wheelchair down the highway towards the dinosaur. It would have sucked if my battery operated wheelchair just stopped in the middle of the highway. Luckily, I see the dinosaur, so I make a right and I'm all excited because the sandy flight of stairs is up ahead. I don't really know why there is so much sand but thank god it was there because as soon as I unstrapped Natalie from the wheelchair, her limp body falls to the ground and she face-plants into the sand. But even then, Natalie won't get up and insists on sleeping there.

Dream-honey

I found a jar of "unfiltered honey" in my kitchen. A warning label told me that I should be wary of bee parts, particularly stingers, and remove them before consumption. Now, in real life I hate honey. I can do without a bunch of pollen suspended in a ton of bee saliva. I do not like the taste or the smell or anything else about it. But something compelled me to eat this dream-honey. I got out a piece of bread and poured some out over it. Compared to real honey, dream-honey is less viscous, lighter in color, and has small grainy brown pieces of I-don't-know-what in it. With no bee parts in sight I took a bite of the sandwich. And it was delicious. It didn't have that weird bee saliva smell or taste. It was just like eating a bunch of sweet wildflowers or something.

I had a similar dream when I was a young kid about the most perfect beverage in the world. I remember living in Manhattan Beach when I had it, so I must have been between 5 and 8 years old. In my dream, the most perfect beverage in the world appeared before me. It was pale blue, sweet, and tasted vaguely of something delicious plus artificial fruit flavor. Last summer at the University of Chicago food court I spotted the dream beverage in real life. The only difference was that it was carbonated, whereas my dream beverage was not because I hated carbonated drinks back then. Carbonation is not a problem for me these days, though. It was one of those "democracy" Mountain Dews called Revolution and I don't think it won. I only ever had one bottle. Maybe fifteen years from now I will find my unfiltered honey somewhere.

Ghosts of bicycles past

I was in a hurry to get somewhere in Manhattan and I had to take my bike to get there. Normally it takes an hour or more for me to bike to the city but this time it was something like 20 minutes. I got my bike out of the basement and paused for a minute on the street. Instead of my Lemond bike, Orville, it was the too-small blue road bike I found at Binghamton on the grass one day in early spring. The brakes hardly worked, the wheels badly needed to be trued, but I was in a hurry! I threw my bag into the oversized basket in front (a new addition since I saw the bike last) and was off. On the way there the bike slowly transformed back into Orville. Midway through the transition I noticed that I was riding the old red Kabuki I bought for $25 at the bike shop on Brighton that was going out of business.

I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, which looked more like the Verazanno Bridge that day. Everything was glowing the way it does after a thunderstorm. My destination turned out to be a weird coffee shop on the corner of a broad empty street downtown. Inside a 60 year old man was speaking at a podium about something very boring. There were three girls with short brown hair at a bench carved into the wall on the far side of the place. I carefully stepped through people seated on the floor listening to the man and sat down with them. I don't remember what we talked about, or what I did after that until the next morning.

I woke up at my house with the intent of making the same trip. I got Orville out of the basement. This time it was mostly the right bike except it was a fixed gear without any brakes. The Brooklyn Bridge was still the Verazzano Bridge. Everything was still glowing. Orville stubbornly remained a fixed gear bike.

Only one of the girls was at the coffee shop that day. As I sat down with her a metal buckle on my bag hit her head. She forced me to "kiss it to make it feel better". I pretended to be nonchalant and friendly about it but I was uncomfortable with this. Her two friends arrived in a white van outside. They honked for us to come out and we did. I started unchaining my bike from the pole. They offered to drive me home. I should have taken them up on it because my ride home was now mysteriously 3 times longer than it should have been, but I said no. I started to pedal away.

Easter with the Reeces

I was all set to go to my boyfriend's family's Easter celebration at his grandfather's house, and we were waiting for his mom to pick us up on a grassy street corner. However, when she got there they left without me.

Somehow I made it to our destination by hitchhiking. A colorful cast of characters, presumably his relatives, were gathering in the distance in the courtyard of a manor similar to the one featured in Last Year in Marienbad. My dream took a cinematic turn, and the camera switched to closeups of them taking group photos.

In the meantime, I awkwardly wandered around a meadow and found myself standing underneath a tree with a PA speaker in its branches. The speaker was transmitting salsa music to no one in particular. Then my boyfriend and his mother finally showed up.

Typical Embarrassing Situation

I bought a yellow and teal bikini with a high-waisted bottom part. I thought I looked totally bangin' but apparently no one else did because they made fun of me, especially Arjun. Only Vincent sided with me, but I suspect it was because I bought him a beige cellphone earlier in the dream.

Television vision

I can only see a television screen. Any area outside the square of vision is black. I am watching a woman being dragged out of her house and strapped to a table with wheels. The table is tied to an ambulance, it is very white. The camera taking the video is clearly from of a chopper, as it is high and to the left of the scene; it is very shaky. It zooms in on her face; she is a white woman, late thirty's, looks plain, looks normal, maybe she is a school nurse. She is crying, red faced, hyperventilating. The ambulance begins to move and the camera follows the table as it is pulled by the ambulance.

The voices begin discussing the alien ants embedded in her brain. I realize they are news casters. They have a scientist discussing how they will begin to remove the ants. Either they can go longways across the top of the head, opening the skull and picking the ants out one at a time. Or they can saw from top to bottom. Opening the face like elevator doors, and allowing the ants to flow out with the blood. The camera zooms in closer on her face, the tears are streaming and the look of terror is total. I watch her slowly her breathing becomes shallow and fast. She grabs her throat and begins gasping. She dies on shaky copter cam, terrified, crying, and breathless from the insects in her head. The camera doesn't move away, which you would think it would. It just shows her lifeless, dragging behind the ambulance on a table with wheels.

I got up and drank three beers, showered and smoked a cigarette.