I’m eighteen years old and my two best buddies from high school are crashing at my parents’ house with me. It is the summer after our freshmen year in college. We’ve been partying, but not that much. There wasn’t much happening.
We’re huddled in the upstairs den, which is a sloped ceiling, sky lighted, gray-carpeted room equip with day bead and papazan. Past the age of working to find porn we’re flipping through the four movie channels hoping for some soft-core action. It’s 11:00 pm. In the absence of acceptable viewing material we play my old Sega Genesis. Steve who used to sit cross legged before his knee surgery is sitting with his back against the day bead, he has some old plaid shorts, a green golf shirt, crew socks bunched down, white sneakers and a white cubs hat with a cursive Cubs on it, which protects his brown, normally finely gelled left head part. His sharp hazel eyes focus on the screen as him and Mike elbow and jostle each other while they try to outdo one another at NHLPA ’93, still one of the greatest hockey video games ever made. Mike is short. He wears glasses to mask his crossed-eyes. A Blackhawks hat covers his hair. He is wearing khakis that are too long and too large around the waist. His shirt is a white Boston Wailer t-shirt, an advertisement with a speedboat on the back, the Boston Wailer insignia on the front. It’s stained with grass and sweat and beer.
It is dark and the lights are off. I’m drifting in and out to them finishing a few games, sneaking out for a smoke or two, flipping through the channels until silence consumes the upstairs. It is not like me not to be up last, especially to be dozing through the last three or so hours of male bonding before we succumb to sleep. I usually feel like I am missing something or that I’ll be the victim of a prank, but that has not happened in a while. Before shutting it down for good I sit up and find Steve sleeping on the floor next to me. Mike has taken advantage of my absence in my bed and has gone into my bedroom and shut the door, which is at the foot of the daybed. There are no lights on. I pull the covers in tight over me and sleep and dream for what seems to be merely moments.
In my dream I wake from a slumber to a procession outside my apartment. From my third story window I see people gathered waiting for the arrival of somebody that I can only assume is important or infamous. The scene reminds me of what I pictured the procession from “Young Goodman Brown” a Nathanie Hawthorne short story, looked like. But then it gets weird, its like waking life as I am now viewing myself view this and as I hover over to myself at the window to see the hub-bub I am astonished to find the commotion going on three stories below. My apartment is apparently on Main Street so to speak, which is mobbed. The day is bright like the mid-day Monet haystacks, but the people are definitely straight out of Van Gogh’s portraits. They move in waves, like the brushstrokes that compose their bodies and their colors are vibrant like the blue background from the impressionist’s Almond Tree. But, sometimes the people lining the street below waiver into silhouettes like Mr. Tumnis from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe when he plays that instrument for Alice while standing in front of the fire so that she would fall asleep and he could report her to the White Witch.
The viewers sway as if in a breeze, their individual vibrancy wave together and bleed into each other, that is until the procession reaches them. A pope figure and a monk lead the procession. The pope is being caravanned in his high chair by four strong arms and the monk is moving with the fluidity of a vector from the pope to the onlookers; a virtual stream of brown and flesh and gold. As he reaches the gazers they start to convulse as if the monk’s presence has forced them into the throes of epilepsy. He chants something as he stands over each individual and after he has saved one individual and their vapor leaves their physical body like the spirit of the dead wolves in Roger Rabbit or various villains in the Warner Brother cartoons, the monk returns to the pope who blesses him with the sign of the cross.
And before I know it they are in my apartment. The holy men approach each occupant in my room of orange walls and golden chandeliers and do a sort of rain dance like an American Indian around a fire, a Kokepelli, a New Orleans jazz line, blessing each individual and chanting something. And as they approach, the dream me is frozen by the window and the viewing me moves from hovering above and reconfigures in front of the Van Goghesque self portrait and I see that I share the expression the painter has in his self portrait. It is a sort of terror at what will soon occur, shock and awe at my own power and confusion about the questions before me. And as the holy men are upon me I join with the dream me and fall to the floor shaking uncontrollably. They dance around me like I am their prey all the while chanting, “Jesus, Jesus, God and Baby Jesus.” And then they stop and peer down at me, merely inches from my face, questioning my beliefs and staring into my soul with hollow eyes like Gollum from Lord of the Rings.
And I wake with an erection. And I wake to find that the hall light is on. I am paralyzed and covered with goosebumps, but my tension must have awoken Steve, “Are you alright?” he asks.
“What time is it?” I ask.
“2:30,” he says.
I stop and think, unmoving from my back, and try to remember the time on the clock when I last fell asleep, but I can’t.
That summer, I start going to concerts where I find my spirituality, but the search to find my place in the world continues. Perhaps the two men peering down at me, were not the Pope and a monk, but my grandfathers wondering if I will tap into the resources of my ancestry.
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