(Entered in paper journal at 8:12 AM at Starbucks on 1st Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)
Dream 1
I was with a family. We were in a confused apartment complex, out on the balconies, walking to "our new apartment." I was with the kids, but I wasn't quite a kid. I feel like I was just a spectator, immaterial.
But then I was "hanging over the shoulder" of a man like Michael Bluth from the TV show Arrested Development. The man watched two male adults leading the two children. The two men may have looked like Gob and Tobias.
The two men stood before the new apartment. One of them had a strap-on dildo and led the other into the apartment. He told "Michael/me," "Keep an eye on the kids. He and I have some business to take care of.
I was in a dark room lilt only with a deep blue light. The two kids sat on the floor. There were a boy and a girl. The girl was younger than thirteen but was very tall and emaciated. She wore trashy clothes and had a life-worn despair in her eyes. The boy wasn't much more than a vague entity. The boy and girl sat across from each other, playing a game like cards, using chips for counters.
I walked through a dark hall to find the two men, to see if they had finished their business. I saw them in another dark blue room, getting ready to have sex. I walked out, making some deadpan "Michael Bluth" remark. The dildo, by the way, was glow-in-the-dark. As I headed back I thought momentarily, Why would two men need to use a dildo for sex?
I arrived back in the kids' room. I realized now that all the members of this family were prostituting themselves -- the children probably at least a little against their will. The men had moved away from the old apartment because they needed to find newer, less trashed-out customers. I was disgusted by it all.
I now stood out on another apartment complex balcony, talking with someone I didn't see. He asked me, "But if Michael Bluth was living with these guys now, where is his family, and why don't they visit him?"
I (as Michael Bluth) said, "Don't you see? It's dramatically feasible because each member of the family is paralleled by each member of this family."
I stood by myself in front of the family's old apartment. A man with huge, frizzy hair walked up the long staircase to me. He smiled and said something like, "Hi! What are you doing right now?" The guy looked strung out.
The guy thought that by standing here I was making myself available for sex. I was about to tell him no. I wanted to get angry and yell. But I was so afraid and disgusted by everything that I didn't even want to acknowledge the existence of any of it.
Some man walked up from the left. He had to go down and then up a flight of steps. He said to the guy, "You have the wrong place. This guy doesn't do the kind of business you're looking for. Come with me and I'll help you out."
The second guy looked at me and smiled genuinely. He was clean-cut, but a little sunburned and hardened. He acted slightly effeminate.
Dream 2
I was in something like a gondola riding down a suspension track into a tall, sparkling city at night. I was like an invisible spectator. A woman, maybe twenty-five years old, sat next to a younger woman, maybe a girl between seventeen and nineteen years old. The older woman was trying to hit on the younger woman.
The women had seen a lesbian who was kind of on the ugly side. The older woman asked the girl questions about the ugly woman to make the girl say she thought the older woman was pretty, even sexually attractive. When the girl finally said something like that, the woman said, "Well, I think you're even prettier and more attractive than that."
The girl knew where this was heading now. But she was going along with it. Part of her felt like she shouldn't. But mostly she was rather malleable. The girl's appearance was now like a doll, a two-or-three-foot-tall, Victorian-style, porcelain doll with huge, blue eyes. I was kind of jaded and disappointed by the whole scene. I had hoped I would be able to be with the girl.
I was a worker in a cafe in the enormous town. It was a dim, elegant place made of wood, like a bar. We may also have sold ice cream.
My coworkers were talking about the new manager. She was apparently a tall woman, athletic, and incredibly beautiful. She was a lesbian, possibly the woman on the gondola. The coworkers, all guys, were all genuinely talking about what a genuinely good manager the woman was. I was flustered. I didn't want to hear that a woman, especially a lesbian who took a girl I was attracted to, was such a good person and manager.
I tried to make some qualifications to the guys' statements as I swept the floor and wiped off the bar with a wet dishcloth. But the guys kept refuting me and saying, "No. She's really good. She's made a million improvements on XXXXX already."
Now as I was sweeping under a table by some mirror walls, the new manager walked in. She said something really nice to all of us, also implying good-naturedly that she knew I had expressed my doubts. I kept silent. But, a little against my will, I thought, Actually, I guess she is pretty cool!
Showing posts with label homosexual affair. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homosexual affair. Show all posts
Thursday, February 16, 2017
Monday, November 12, 2012
(10/1/09) grandpa visits from beyond; floating head art gallery
(Entered in paper journal at 7:45 AM at Sit & Wonder cafe in Brooklyn.)
Dream #1
I walked down into a dark basement and into a bathroom. The basement itself was dirty, as if long unused, and almost completely dark. I was afraid to go in, but I did, closing the door.
My vision was, at first, all purple-white eye-static color in the dark. Then I saw or imagined a stretched-out sideways version of a classic grey alien's face, as if the alien were lurking in the shower to capture me.
But my vision cleared, and I actually could see some of the bathroom, as if it were lit by faint moonlight pouring in from some distant window. As I went to the bathroom I thought that, just beyond the wall against which the toilet backed (this wall now no more, apparently, than a couple of plyboards slapped up so on layered over the other), there was a room or a deeper basement, unfinished, skeletally "divided" into rooms, which was turned into a "classroom," -- or, basically, just a small, old school desk.
This place, I knew, was where my brother studied, my mother having taken my brother out of school. (I saw an image of my brother crouching down before a wind of my old high school building.) I thought that something seemed cruel about pulling my brother out of school. It was cruel the way my mother locked my brother so far away from people.
I was now in an enormous living room. The windows let in grey light, probably from a rainy day outside. I stood between a couch (of maroon leather?) and a small, wide table with a television on it. The carpet was pale grey. The living room seemed to stretch on, at least fifty feet on each side.
The television showed a rainy scene in front of a church in Venice (?). The TV announcer, probably a woman, was talking about the rain, but she might also have been mentioning a service at the church, possibly a funeral.
I now stood in a hallway or foyer area. The walls were almost all made of glass, giving me a pretty full view to the rainy area (Venice?) outside, although there were some structures, columns or wall, made of pink stones, obstructing my view.
I saw, somehow framed by the metallic skeleton of beams holding up the wide, glass panes, a very modern-looking, American-style church. The front of the church was A-shaped, made of gold-yellow bricks. It had a large circle of stained glass in the center, near the top, with an A-shape of arched-rectangle windows tapering down under that. I thought of the church as a Methodist church.
Just to the left of that church I could see the corner of another red-stone church, which was Catholic and, it seemed, more of the traditional Venetian style (?). I knew tha tthis area of Venice had nothing but churches all over the place.
(The area felt to me like an outskirts of the Denver suburbs, just a couple wide streets away from a main highway.)
To my right, the wall before me all red stone, was a doorway with a heavy wood (?) door open just a little. I assumed that beyond the door was a sanctuary. A priest (?) in a black robe with a white collar stood before the door. He may have told me that the event I had come for wasn't actually happening today. He then walked into the room and closed the door.
I now looked to my left. In another room that was all empty and walled and ceilinged with windows, stood my grandfather, who had died about a year previously in waking life. My grandfather had his hands clasped casually behind his back. He was looking out the windows. He turned away from the windows to face me.
He looked different. He was huge, at least six feet tall, and, proportionally, wider than he had been. His skin was patchy-dry and red-pink, like the skin of someone who smoked way too much. He had a strange bowl-cut of red-gold hair, which almost looked like a wig. He wore a beige-olive suit jacket and slacks and probably a deepish blue shirt and a tie.
He didn't look like he was completely alert mentally. But he recognized me and walked toward me. His eyes were almost vacant, like those of Frankenstein or a zombie. He may have been carrying an empty or almost empty, black duffel bag in his left arm. As he continued walking toward me he said, vacantly, "I've been meaning to ask you, Son, are you okay? Have you been having a rough year?"
My grandpa was now in front of me. But he kept trudging forward. I walked up to him and squeezed both of his hands, which were folded together before him, just above his bellybutton. I told him, "Yes. It's been a really awful year."
My grandpa kept walking forward, off to my right side. He said something like, "Well, keep up your hope."
My grandpa walked through the heavy, wooden door and let it close behind him. I understood that I wasn't supposed to follow my grandpa past the door. But, like I might doo when suddenly remembering I needed to tell one of my bosses something important, I rushed up to the door and pushed it open.
Before me was something like the living room of a Pennsylvania Dutch house. My grandpa was already across that "living room" and into an area like a largely columned, medieval interior (of a castle?) mixed with a parking lot.
I called out to my grandfather, telling him something like I loved him or I thought about him a lot. I couldn't stand thinking that our exchange had only been about how I had been doing. I wanted to let him know that I cared about him.
My grandpa turned toward me. In some sense or another it was like he stood outside, in a well-lit (with white, halogen lights) parking lot at night. He faced me at a quarter-turn, so that I saw him almost full on, but with a left profile. He looked normal now, not all distorted like he had looked before. He wore a beige, windbreaker-type jacket, khaki slacks, a blue, button-up shirt, and a hunched hat. He may have had his hands in his pockets.
As I spoke, two people sitting at a table in the Pennsylvania Dutch living room began speaking, telling me something about how the event I was looking for wouldn't happen today. The director for the event hadn't showed up. They kept on speaking so that my grandpa could never hear what I said.
It also seemed like there was a huge wind blocking my voice from my grandpa's ears. My grandpa kept calling out, "What? What?" Finally he said he couldn't hear me and that he had to go. He walked away into the night.
I looked down to the two people at the table. I was somehow concerned about them, now, and interested in what they were saying. They were two children, one boy and one girl. They wore stereotypical old-European peasant clothing. They sat at a thinnish, wooden table.
Both children had their faces painted. The boy, blonde, may have had his face painted a ghostly white with black circles for eyes. The girl, wearing a yellow kerchief over her hair, was made up so that she looked like wood. Her entire body, in fact, wherever it showed out from under her clothes, looked like the painted feathers on a wooden decoy duck. The girl also, when she first spoke, didn't even look like her lips were moving. But as I looked at her longer, her lips did begin to move.
(As I later reflected on this, I thought that my shock at how wooden the girl looked actually broke my connection with my grandpa, at which point my grandpa said he had to leave.)
I sat down at the table, across from the boy and girl, who sat side by side. The girl told me that she and the boy were here for something like an audition or else to be extras in a movie. But the director hadn't shown up and wasn't likely to show up.
A girl, who I now thought of as my grandpa, walked up to us from the nighttime parking lot as I told the boy and girl not to give up hope, that there was still time for the director to show up. The girl/my grandpa sat down to the wood-painted girl's right.
The new girl looked to be maybe in her late teens or early twenties. She was tallish and white with slightly tanned skin. She had blue eyes and chesnut brown hair pulled back and up into a ponytail She wore a green t-shirt, which she tucked into white jean-shorts that extended to just below her knees.
At some point I stopped thinking of the new girl as my grandfather and just started thinking of her as some girl I knew (?). The new girl was cheerful. She agreed with what I'd previously told the children, even bringing, I think, some evidence that the director was, in fact, coming.
Even thought I no longer thought of the new girl as my grandpa, I did know that she was, like my grandpa, dead, a ghost, if only because she'd come from the same place toward which my grandfather had departed. In fact, I thought of the girl now as the spirit of a boy who had died.
I could see the boy in the dark. He had longish, bowl-shaped, blonde hair, and he was wiry and thin, looking a little like a punk rocker in the toughness of his face. The boy seemed terribly upset. Then he was dead.
Now the new girl said she had come extremely prepared for the audition. She pulled out a notebook and pen and began writing down, in outline, all the steps she took to get ready for things, mostly to illustrate to the boy and girl, who were like good-hearted, but somewhat clueless, directionless, and unmotivated peasants from out of town, that they shouldn't give up hope and that they should keep fighting for their dreams.
As the new girl kept on writing her stuff out, I realized how incredibly bright and motivated she was. But he's dead!, I told myself. This boy's dead, and he's still working like this! It all seemed so absurd and yet so joyful that I suddenly broke out in a joyful cheer. I screamed, "Yeah! This girl! This is who I love!"
I stood and walked around the table to embrace the girl. I may have been able to embrace the girl. But I think something happened that made the girl inaccessible, as if she were walking back through the nighttime parking lot, up to a chain link fence, or possibly already beyond it.
Dream #2
I walked down a wide sidewalk in some part of a big city full of one-story warehouses. It was a cold afternoon. The sky was pale tan-blue, as if the sun were finally below the horizon.
I heard two men across the street. I recognized one voice as that of my old friend R. I looked across the wide, empty street to see two white men in grey, hooded sweatshirts, each man having the hood over his head.
The men spoke in a casual, sports-like, but also business-like, tone. But it sounded like they were talking about the next time they'd meet, to go out on a date, in somewhat sexual and romantic terms.
The building the men stood in front of, another one-story warehouse, was white, the paint job looking rough, like stucco, with a gate drawn entrance and the walls lightly misted in a pale, faded, blue graffiti.
I looked more attentively at the men and saw that one of them definitely was R. I called out to him. He at first looked shocked to see me, as if he'd been caught engaging in an extramarital affair. The other man had walked away casually.
I crossed the street to meet R, making nothing of the situation I'd just seen. R asked, a little suspiciously, what I was doing here. I couldn't quite place where "here" was. This place could have been Red Hook, Brooklyn. But it didn't seem quite right. We were at the top, it seemed, of a long, shallow hill. And I knew there were other long, shallow hills full of wide-stretched warehouse blocks like this beyond us.
But eventually, as we briskly walked toward the corner of this block, I settled on the idea that we were on Smith Street and Ninth Street in Brooklyn, I told R that it was coincidence that we met here. I always walked down around here.
We decided to cross the bridge together. Somehow, though, we walked on the suspension beams of the bridge. These beams must once have been copper: they were now corroded to a bright Statue of Liberty green. The beams, I saw, octagoned up, flat, and down, repeating along the length of the bridge.
I was surprised we had taken this route, but I knew R had chosen it as a test of how honest I was being regarding my accidentally having seen him in this neighborhood (and having caught him with that man).
As we ascended the bridge I looked out at the cityscape, seeing how monumental everything looked: we were so high; the bridge was so tall; the buildings and building tops so vast. I remembered that I'd had this kind of vision and feeling in dreams about riding trains across bridges in the city, but I couldn't remember the dreams I'd had.
R and I walked down one of the beam slopes and into an enormous, white-walled, wood floored loft. The walls were at least thirty feet tall. The room was probably one hundred by one hundred feet. The wall opposite us was one big window, looking out over the river.
All throughout the room, gigantic plastic (?) boards bearing the heads of famous Disney cartoon characters were suspended from the ceiling by white rope or thick, white twine, the heads suspended about three feet above the ground, and the heads themselves maybe six feet tall. There may also have been occasional abstract plastic models, also large, through the room. There were one or two other people in the room. One of the people was, I think, a curator.
We walked through the gallery of Disney heads. R asked me, as if, again, to test my innocence, what I knew about these cartoons, or how involved I felt with these cartoons. I may have said something.
We were now in a different exhibition room. The room was rectangular, versus square, with ceilings as high, white walls, and wood floors, maybe slightly smaller (or larger?) than the other room. Heads hung from the ceiling again, though not through the entire room -- just in the lower left area of the room; beyond the "quadrant proper," though, so that the display took up a little more than half the room.
The heads were also more varied, being not only Disney heads but also anime character heads and the heads of real-life celebrities, both "cartoonized" and taken from photographs of the celebrities. This room was dim, as if it were now dark outside (if this room even had a window), and as if the room were lit with just a few watery, incandescent lights, like track lighting from the ceiling.
R and I were alone at first, although eventually there may also have been an old man, who kind of looked like Orville Redenbacher, and who was the curator for this gallery.
I may have been kneeling or sittin gin front of one of the heads. I noticed that R, who stood to my left, was talking to a woman. I looked to my left to see R engaged in a flirting conversation with a woman who was in a place where a head had been.
The woman was cluttered around with a couple wooden boxes. The woman wore chunky, frizzy, knit wool clothes. She had frizzy, long, blonde hair, smooth, clear, tan skin, and pale, blue eyes. She may have been bound, either bound standing or bound to a chair. The woman's responses to R were cheerful, but almost robotic, as if the woman were a program, something made to be part of the exhibition.
I thought, R figured something out. He learned how to speak to the hanging heads and bring them to life. I thought I would try to do the same thing R had done.
I looked to the head before me, which was from a photograph (black and white, or sepia and white, the pixels (?) very visible with the enlargement of the photo) of a great composer. I asked the composer a question, like, "Can you speak, too?"
The composer, first as the large head, then as the composer "himself," standing before me, responded, "Of course I can speak to you, you idiot. What do you think I am? What do you think this is? You already saw him speaking to the girl? Why would you think I couldn't speak to you? God. Why'd I have to get stuck talking to you? I thought I'd get some good questions."
(Once the composer had become real, he took on the appearance of a white man with slightly pinkish skin. He was tall, thin, older, with a loosely wrinkled, but dignified face. He had a full head of pure white, soft hair, which glowed under the soft lights here. He wore a nice, grey suit with a white shirt and a tie.)
I was ashamed for having spoken to the composer. I looked away from the composer, at least hoping that I could console him for my dumb question by not talking to him at all.
Dream #1
I walked down into a dark basement and into a bathroom. The basement itself was dirty, as if long unused, and almost completely dark. I was afraid to go in, but I did, closing the door.
My vision was, at first, all purple-white eye-static color in the dark. Then I saw or imagined a stretched-out sideways version of a classic grey alien's face, as if the alien were lurking in the shower to capture me.
But my vision cleared, and I actually could see some of the bathroom, as if it were lit by faint moonlight pouring in from some distant window. As I went to the bathroom I thought that, just beyond the wall against which the toilet backed (this wall now no more, apparently, than a couple of plyboards slapped up so on layered over the other), there was a room or a deeper basement, unfinished, skeletally "divided" into rooms, which was turned into a "classroom," -- or, basically, just a small, old school desk.
This place, I knew, was where my brother studied, my mother having taken my brother out of school. (I saw an image of my brother crouching down before a wind of my old high school building.) I thought that something seemed cruel about pulling my brother out of school. It was cruel the way my mother locked my brother so far away from people.
I was now in an enormous living room. The windows let in grey light, probably from a rainy day outside. I stood between a couch (of maroon leather?) and a small, wide table with a television on it. The carpet was pale grey. The living room seemed to stretch on, at least fifty feet on each side.
The television showed a rainy scene in front of a church in Venice (?). The TV announcer, probably a woman, was talking about the rain, but she might also have been mentioning a service at the church, possibly a funeral.
I now stood in a hallway or foyer area. The walls were almost all made of glass, giving me a pretty full view to the rainy area (Venice?) outside, although there were some structures, columns or wall, made of pink stones, obstructing my view.
I saw, somehow framed by the metallic skeleton of beams holding up the wide, glass panes, a very modern-looking, American-style church. The front of the church was A-shaped, made of gold-yellow bricks. It had a large circle of stained glass in the center, near the top, with an A-shape of arched-rectangle windows tapering down under that. I thought of the church as a Methodist church.
Just to the left of that church I could see the corner of another red-stone church, which was Catholic and, it seemed, more of the traditional Venetian style (?). I knew tha tthis area of Venice had nothing but churches all over the place.
(The area felt to me like an outskirts of the Denver suburbs, just a couple wide streets away from a main highway.)
To my right, the wall before me all red stone, was a doorway with a heavy wood (?) door open just a little. I assumed that beyond the door was a sanctuary. A priest (?) in a black robe with a white collar stood before the door. He may have told me that the event I had come for wasn't actually happening today. He then walked into the room and closed the door.
I now looked to my left. In another room that was all empty and walled and ceilinged with windows, stood my grandfather, who had died about a year previously in waking life. My grandfather had his hands clasped casually behind his back. He was looking out the windows. He turned away from the windows to face me.
He looked different. He was huge, at least six feet tall, and, proportionally, wider than he had been. His skin was patchy-dry and red-pink, like the skin of someone who smoked way too much. He had a strange bowl-cut of red-gold hair, which almost looked like a wig. He wore a beige-olive suit jacket and slacks and probably a deepish blue shirt and a tie.
He didn't look like he was completely alert mentally. But he recognized me and walked toward me. His eyes were almost vacant, like those of Frankenstein or a zombie. He may have been carrying an empty or almost empty, black duffel bag in his left arm. As he continued walking toward me he said, vacantly, "I've been meaning to ask you, Son, are you okay? Have you been having a rough year?"
My grandpa was now in front of me. But he kept trudging forward. I walked up to him and squeezed both of his hands, which were folded together before him, just above his bellybutton. I told him, "Yes. It's been a really awful year."
My grandpa kept walking forward, off to my right side. He said something like, "Well, keep up your hope."
My grandpa walked through the heavy, wooden door and let it close behind him. I understood that I wasn't supposed to follow my grandpa past the door. But, like I might doo when suddenly remembering I needed to tell one of my bosses something important, I rushed up to the door and pushed it open.
Before me was something like the living room of a Pennsylvania Dutch house. My grandpa was already across that "living room" and into an area like a largely columned, medieval interior (of a castle?) mixed with a parking lot.
I called out to my grandfather, telling him something like I loved him or I thought about him a lot. I couldn't stand thinking that our exchange had only been about how I had been doing. I wanted to let him know that I cared about him.
My grandpa turned toward me. In some sense or another it was like he stood outside, in a well-lit (with white, halogen lights) parking lot at night. He faced me at a quarter-turn, so that I saw him almost full on, but with a left profile. He looked normal now, not all distorted like he had looked before. He wore a beige, windbreaker-type jacket, khaki slacks, a blue, button-up shirt, and a hunched hat. He may have had his hands in his pockets.
As I spoke, two people sitting at a table in the Pennsylvania Dutch living room began speaking, telling me something about how the event I was looking for wouldn't happen today. The director for the event hadn't showed up. They kept on speaking so that my grandpa could never hear what I said.
It also seemed like there was a huge wind blocking my voice from my grandpa's ears. My grandpa kept calling out, "What? What?" Finally he said he couldn't hear me and that he had to go. He walked away into the night.
I looked down to the two people at the table. I was somehow concerned about them, now, and interested in what they were saying. They were two children, one boy and one girl. They wore stereotypical old-European peasant clothing. They sat at a thinnish, wooden table.
Both children had their faces painted. The boy, blonde, may have had his face painted a ghostly white with black circles for eyes. The girl, wearing a yellow kerchief over her hair, was made up so that she looked like wood. Her entire body, in fact, wherever it showed out from under her clothes, looked like the painted feathers on a wooden decoy duck. The girl also, when she first spoke, didn't even look like her lips were moving. But as I looked at her longer, her lips did begin to move.
(As I later reflected on this, I thought that my shock at how wooden the girl looked actually broke my connection with my grandpa, at which point my grandpa said he had to leave.)
I sat down at the table, across from the boy and girl, who sat side by side. The girl told me that she and the boy were here for something like an audition or else to be extras in a movie. But the director hadn't shown up and wasn't likely to show up.
A girl, who I now thought of as my grandpa, walked up to us from the nighttime parking lot as I told the boy and girl not to give up hope, that there was still time for the director to show up. The girl/my grandpa sat down to the wood-painted girl's right.
The new girl looked to be maybe in her late teens or early twenties. She was tallish and white with slightly tanned skin. She had blue eyes and chesnut brown hair pulled back and up into a ponytail She wore a green t-shirt, which she tucked into white jean-shorts that extended to just below her knees.
At some point I stopped thinking of the new girl as my grandfather and just started thinking of her as some girl I knew (?). The new girl was cheerful. She agreed with what I'd previously told the children, even bringing, I think, some evidence that the director was, in fact, coming.
Even thought I no longer thought of the new girl as my grandpa, I did know that she was, like my grandpa, dead, a ghost, if only because she'd come from the same place toward which my grandfather had departed. In fact, I thought of the girl now as the spirit of a boy who had died.
I could see the boy in the dark. He had longish, bowl-shaped, blonde hair, and he was wiry and thin, looking a little like a punk rocker in the toughness of his face. The boy seemed terribly upset. Then he was dead.
Now the new girl said she had come extremely prepared for the audition. She pulled out a notebook and pen and began writing down, in outline, all the steps she took to get ready for things, mostly to illustrate to the boy and girl, who were like good-hearted, but somewhat clueless, directionless, and unmotivated peasants from out of town, that they shouldn't give up hope and that they should keep fighting for their dreams.
As the new girl kept on writing her stuff out, I realized how incredibly bright and motivated she was. But he's dead!, I told myself. This boy's dead, and he's still working like this! It all seemed so absurd and yet so joyful that I suddenly broke out in a joyful cheer. I screamed, "Yeah! This girl! This is who I love!"
I stood and walked around the table to embrace the girl. I may have been able to embrace the girl. But I think something happened that made the girl inaccessible, as if she were walking back through the nighttime parking lot, up to a chain link fence, or possibly already beyond it.
Dream #2
I walked down a wide sidewalk in some part of a big city full of one-story warehouses. It was a cold afternoon. The sky was pale tan-blue, as if the sun were finally below the horizon.
I heard two men across the street. I recognized one voice as that of my old friend R. I looked across the wide, empty street to see two white men in grey, hooded sweatshirts, each man having the hood over his head.
The men spoke in a casual, sports-like, but also business-like, tone. But it sounded like they were talking about the next time they'd meet, to go out on a date, in somewhat sexual and romantic terms.
The building the men stood in front of, another one-story warehouse, was white, the paint job looking rough, like stucco, with a gate drawn entrance and the walls lightly misted in a pale, faded, blue graffiti.
I looked more attentively at the men and saw that one of them definitely was R. I called out to him. He at first looked shocked to see me, as if he'd been caught engaging in an extramarital affair. The other man had walked away casually.
I crossed the street to meet R, making nothing of the situation I'd just seen. R asked, a little suspiciously, what I was doing here. I couldn't quite place where "here" was. This place could have been Red Hook, Brooklyn. But it didn't seem quite right. We were at the top, it seemed, of a long, shallow hill. And I knew there were other long, shallow hills full of wide-stretched warehouse blocks like this beyond us.
But eventually, as we briskly walked toward the corner of this block, I settled on the idea that we were on Smith Street and Ninth Street in Brooklyn, I told R that it was coincidence that we met here. I always walked down around here.
We decided to cross the bridge together. Somehow, though, we walked on the suspension beams of the bridge. These beams must once have been copper: they were now corroded to a bright Statue of Liberty green. The beams, I saw, octagoned up, flat, and down, repeating along the length of the bridge.
I was surprised we had taken this route, but I knew R had chosen it as a test of how honest I was being regarding my accidentally having seen him in this neighborhood (and having caught him with that man).
As we ascended the bridge I looked out at the cityscape, seeing how monumental everything looked: we were so high; the bridge was so tall; the buildings and building tops so vast. I remembered that I'd had this kind of vision and feeling in dreams about riding trains across bridges in the city, but I couldn't remember the dreams I'd had.
R and I walked down one of the beam slopes and into an enormous, white-walled, wood floored loft. The walls were at least thirty feet tall. The room was probably one hundred by one hundred feet. The wall opposite us was one big window, looking out over the river.
All throughout the room, gigantic plastic (?) boards bearing the heads of famous Disney cartoon characters were suspended from the ceiling by white rope or thick, white twine, the heads suspended about three feet above the ground, and the heads themselves maybe six feet tall. There may also have been occasional abstract plastic models, also large, through the room. There were one or two other people in the room. One of the people was, I think, a curator.
We walked through the gallery of Disney heads. R asked me, as if, again, to test my innocence, what I knew about these cartoons, or how involved I felt with these cartoons. I may have said something.
We were now in a different exhibition room. The room was rectangular, versus square, with ceilings as high, white walls, and wood floors, maybe slightly smaller (or larger?) than the other room. Heads hung from the ceiling again, though not through the entire room -- just in the lower left area of the room; beyond the "quadrant proper," though, so that the display took up a little more than half the room.
The heads were also more varied, being not only Disney heads but also anime character heads and the heads of real-life celebrities, both "cartoonized" and taken from photographs of the celebrities. This room was dim, as if it were now dark outside (if this room even had a window), and as if the room were lit with just a few watery, incandescent lights, like track lighting from the ceiling.
R and I were alone at first, although eventually there may also have been an old man, who kind of looked like Orville Redenbacher, and who was the curator for this gallery.
I may have been kneeling or sittin gin front of one of the heads. I noticed that R, who stood to my left, was talking to a woman. I looked to my left to see R engaged in a flirting conversation with a woman who was in a place where a head had been.
The woman was cluttered around with a couple wooden boxes. The woman wore chunky, frizzy, knit wool clothes. She had frizzy, long, blonde hair, smooth, clear, tan skin, and pale, blue eyes. She may have been bound, either bound standing or bound to a chair. The woman's responses to R were cheerful, but almost robotic, as if the woman were a program, something made to be part of the exhibition.
I thought, R figured something out. He learned how to speak to the hanging heads and bring them to life. I thought I would try to do the same thing R had done.
I looked to the head before me, which was from a photograph (black and white, or sepia and white, the pixels (?) very visible with the enlargement of the photo) of a great composer. I asked the composer a question, like, "Can you speak, too?"
The composer, first as the large head, then as the composer "himself," standing before me, responded, "Of course I can speak to you, you idiot. What do you think I am? What do you think this is? You already saw him speaking to the girl? Why would you think I couldn't speak to you? God. Why'd I have to get stuck talking to you? I thought I'd get some good questions."
(Once the composer had become real, he took on the appearance of a white man with slightly pinkish skin. He was tall, thin, older, with a loosely wrinkled, but dignified face. He had a full head of pure white, soft hair, which glowed under the soft lights here. He wore a nice, grey suit with a white shirt and a tie.)
I was ashamed for having spoken to the composer. I looked away from the composer, at least hoping that I could console him for my dumb question by not talking to him at all.
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