(9/30/05) not a crackhead; black saint christopher

(Entered in paper journal at 8:55 AM at Starbucks on 43rd Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was in a big bedroom with IS, one of my roommates from my old rented room in Harlem. IS heard that I had called him a crackhead. He was sad, and he tried to show me that he was really intelligent and that he'd actually never have anything to do with crack.

He impressed me somehow from the very beginning so that I was ashamed to have thought he was an idiot and a drug addict. Now I was trying to be like him, trying to be as knowledgeable and skillful as he. But I felt like I had to do so much to apologize to him.

IS had a case full of thick, thick picture books. They were mainly on world and architectural history. I wanted to look, but I felt like I wasn't entitled.

The sun coming into the room was bright, almost video-buzz-white. IS got a guitar, acoustic-electric, hollow-body, stained cherry red. He began playing, As he sang I could tell that even though he had the upper hand on me and he could make me feel so inferior to him, he always felt like I never thought of him as good enough to be my equal. I felt bad about this, but I was more interested in learning from him how to play guitar.

At some point the guitar strings changed into bass strings. Then IS was on TV, on a music video. I saw IS's guitar first. Then I saw IS. The music played pretty loud. I began singing and playing along, trying to learn the lesson.

Now I walked into the hallway. The hallway was full of unhinged doors, like a maze of flats. A tall, tough, white guy walked out and asked me to stop playing my music. I now realized that I had confided in this guy and that he had told IS my opinion of him.

I was mad. But I was also just trying to find out how to get away from this guy, as if getting away from this white man would reverse events and take away the hurt I had caused IS.

Dream 2

People were crossing a river and into an interior blended half with construction material and half with the actual banks of a river. A couple people crossing (everybody crossed one at a time) were black men, tall and strong. They were all violently angry at me.

Everybody, including me (wherever I was), carried a try-like object over the river. It was thick, couch-shaped, and of solid material.

The material varied -- wood, metal, crystal, etc., from "tray" to "tray." People used these "trays" to carry people across the river, like Saint Christopher would carry the infant Jesus on his shoulder.

The black people were first angry at me because they thought I didn't want them to cross. and then they were angry because apparently I had given them "trays" with the edges cut off, so they could only bring one person across each time. And they thought I did that so that they'd have to take a white person across each time. I looked at one of the cut trays, made of clear crystal, and wondered whether two people couldn't actually fit on there.