Chapter 1.

It all begins with this sexy dream. The dream is an enigma. Sexy things are always enigmatic. And enigmatic things are always sexy. I don’t understand calculus; it’s confusing to me. I like that.  The slope of a curve? That shit drives me wild. If the end of a book gets wet and the pages are all stuck together and it becomes unclear and mysterious because I don’t know what happens; it inherently takes on this coy appeal for me. I look at that book in a different light. It calls to me. I write out the ending. This dream is like that. It is like a book that got destroyed in the rain, or the bathtub. Or like someone peed on it when they were drunk. The pee fell down in an arc. This dream finds the slope of that arc. It’s calculus.

It is by far the most wonderful dream of all time. It swallows me up.  It is the essence of everything. I am full of hyperbole…and whiskey. I have had this dream before.  Since I was very little.  At first it was my teachers in the dream. This was confusing to me. Then it was Angela Davis. That made more sense. She was beautiful.  She was intelligent. She stood for all the things I couldn’t be.  Then it changed into a thousand different women. I felt violated. Then for a short while it was David Bowie, of course. Then it took shape and matured and became what it is now. It goes like this:

My eyes open into the heart of summer. They are seeing everything in super-eight-film view: sun soaked over exposure. (Remember the opening credits of “The Wonder Years?”) I get my wits about me. I am in someone’s backyard. It is dusk and the grass is long like tendrils or spider legs or other things that are thin and bendy. It tickles my ankles. The grass hasn’t been mowed.  There are tiny happy meal toys spread throughout the lawn. They are like the little bits of candy in pistachio ice cream. I am trying to think of other analogies to describe the toys scattered in the yard but then I look up. Fuck the yard.  She is wearing galoshes and a big white T-shirt. She isn’t wearing pants. The shirt is covering her mystery. She is wearing a top with no bottoms.

“Oh boy!” I say.

We are holding hands and twirling. The dream woman, who used to be my teachers and then was Bowie now looks like me but hot, which is totally my type, and so I like her a lot. We are both white so we are both trying to get tan to seem not so white. We love racial ambiguity! We have shared values.  I love that.  She has longer hair than mine but it is the same brown color with intermittent dazzles of premature white, just like me. Her hair is beautiful, like a white bicycle after its been riding through the mud, or I guess just like the color of muddy snow, a few weeks after it has fallen when a lot of cars have splashed stuff onto it.  Although in reality, that isn’t very pretty sounding, even if it describes the color perfectly. This wasn’t a very good analogy to begin with…The point is the hair is brown like snowy mud or the soap bar when you shower after the beach, or that bagged fertilizer with those little pieces of Styrofoam that they add for some reason. Our hair is like that fertilizer.  In the dream, as we spin I ask her,

“Why the hell are you wearing galoshes in the sun?” And she replies,

“Because I am so drunk.” And I say,

“You sure do look an awful lot like me.” And she laughs and says,

“No, you do.”

Then I smile because I’m extremely confused by her statements. But maybe they made sense within the rest of the context of the dream and anyway it doesn’t matter because it’s clear that we are in love and I like that she is complicated. We are about to get physical, which is my most excited part of the dream.  But then I start to wake up, because if dreams let you do the things you wanted to do, then you would never wake up.

I open my eyes just a little bit. Then I close them again. I try to plunge back into sex-enigma but something is off.  It is the irregular wobble rotation sound of my fan, which can’t not oscillate.  This is a double negative but it’s just descriptive.  My fan won’t stop oscillating. It is old and it has Parkinson’s and it doesn’t really rotate in a logical pattern, it gets caught up. Even if I hold it with my hand to tell it to sit still, it just clicks over and over like a robot with ADD. Hot tops with no bottoms girl version of me is fading away…and now there is something else, someone whispering in Portuguese…I don’t speak Portuguese. But it sounds nice…