Every once and a while, I indulge myself and post a blurb about my dreams.
Well, this was one for the books...
I was in a big city (or what seemed to look like NYC) in a car with some friends. The sun was shining - noon light's trajectory from the hood of the car into our eyes, the tunes on. All the elements of a successful Sunday road-trip. From the bird's eye view over an open bridge, I watched in the distance as saturated black wads of smoke spewed into the sky. But there were no smoke stacks for miles, so it must mean one thing.
The hum of syllables intermingled with stray musical notes confused me as I tried to grasp the seriousness of what was happening. The driver, busy looking to his shotgun co-pilot, were laughing too hard to even notice the horizon quickly change colors.
Another plume of black squirted from the same spot ahead.
what the fuck?
Turning towards the back seat, the driver witnessed the transformation in the expression on my face. Silence. The music cut out abruptly, followed by a somber voice.
Ladies and gentlemen, there has been a terrorist attack on yet another building in the city.
Deeper silence.
Our breathing became louder than the idling engine...
**
I was working in some Wal-mart/Price Club huge chain buy in bulk kinda place. Walking into this airplane hangar warehouse, the geometric order and patters of perfectly placed product islands was quite overwhelming. It was my first day and I was late, or so I thought.
The back area - employees only, looked like the dressing room of a Broadway play: kaleidoscope costumes busting out of rolling racks, stage hands, makeup artists, actors running in every direction, between, past and into each other.
I walked up to a coat check counter: "this is my first day. Do I have to sign in?"
Some fat woman in a yellow and blue smock, barely covering her belly, shoved a plastic tag into my face, then dumped a pair of roller skates (more like roller shoes) into my chest.
The skates were yellow and blue, just like her smock, but had the Adidas signature side stripes on the side. I tied up the laces, tested my balance and began to skate around the chaos, into the hallway and out past the pyramid of Life cereal, to the center of the store.
Somehow I managed to find a back way, which led me down a long narrow cement walled corridor. Staff whisked by, occasionally bumping into me without saying a word. There were drilling sounds coming from the distance. Hardware section? The closer I got to what seemed to be an opening of sorts, the clearer the brays and moos became.
Men in hounds-tooth plaid hunting jackets crossed my path, some looking haggard, some of their faces splattered in blood. The dampness of hot blood seeped beneath my clothes. This was a slaughterhouse, right underneath the supermarket, and as if pulled by gravity, I was heading right towards it.
The wheels of my skates stopped rolling as they hit a pool of dried blood. Standing at the intersection of a busy hallway, I looked in all four directions. Behind me, my original point of entry - a serpentine cement maze where light disappeared into. Ahead of me - a small closed window 6 feet from the ground where the only rays of sunlight spilled through. To the left, the dark and noisy pit of the killing room, and then to the right, the mechanical chaos of organized supermarket industrialization.
My curiosity pulled me into the darkness - drawn to the bare bulb that faintly lit the rest of the obscure space. A man came out in a black rubber smock, hands filled with pieces of steaming pink flesh. The blood glowed against the slick surface of his waist.
You don't want to go in there.
His face was solemn. Years of killing had worn away the color of his face, yet there was a soft melancholy sadness to his eyes.
Trust me
he showed me a two-way door that flapped open and shut: one side, smeared in finger paint like streaks of blood, the other, pristine hospital white. Just as I walked through to the other side, behind me, the last helpless cry of a baby lamb as its throat was slit was drowned out by the gurgling sounds of a chainsaw blade through flesh.
***
I was sitting in my living room, in my old apartment near the market. The summer Sunday hum of shoppers and merchants was a welcome element. Bob and Denise sat on the couch, telling me about their plan to elope.
"but bob - for the longest time, you told everybody that you had committed suicide. How could you have lied to us? Lied to me?"
Silent, he looked at me over the rim of his glasses and stared. "He had to - nobody would have understood him otherwise". Denise caressed his cheek, forcing him to break his stare. They looked lovingly into each other's eyes.
But I was so sad for so long...
Bob seemed to understand, almost apologizing, lowering his head.
I got up to make some tea, when something in the sky began to change. The same thick woolen blackness that covered the city after the attack now slowly seeped into the corner of my view of the skyline.
not again...
Our neighbours had been notorious for throwing wild parties that dragged past the night into the morning, and the beginning twangs of electric guitars had the makings of another one. Looking out onto my back balcony, I saw about a dozen young men and women, dressed in black, paler than the living dead, dog collars, smoking cheap cigarettes, holding 40 ouncers of Jack and Johnny. But something was different this time.
With their backs to me, two guitarist began to play. The first few notes of Anarchy in the UK rumbled from the amps pointing in my direction. It was them: Johnny, Steve, Paul and Sid. On my neighbour's balcony! Even in my dreams, I'm still a photographer - running to my bedroom to pick up my camera to document this event!
Zoom in - over the shoulder to Sid. Strung out as usual, precariously perched on the metal railing, standing in front on Morticia Adams - marvelously morose, all in black.
Since when did the Adams family become my neighbours, and have parties on their balconies? With the Sex Pistols?!?
I was distracted by a heavy fabric of smoke, making its way over the city like a languid magic carpet, blotting out the spectacular ochre sunset that I had come to enjoy from my kitchen window.
but the sex pistols played on uninterrupted while the city behind them slowly burned...
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