The Dream

                                                                  

A thick yellow algae bloom cauliflowered slowly in the toilet bowl as he dumped a gallon of piss from his night out. Head hung, chin on chest, left hand holding up the Goddamned toilet seat. Warm piss pricks spattered lightly on his knee caps. Uhhnnnhaahh, a deep breathy baritone escaped from his lips as he emptied the last of it.

He tried to think back to the Pub last night. She fired off a machine gun bluster of Eminem, a Jackson Pollack of words against the sweaty air. With each break in the lyrics she looked over at him weaving rhythmically on the sticky tile floor, like the metal ball in a pinball machine only pressing and rolling from one hot, soft body to the next in the cramped quarter of the municipal space.

Last call for the night, echoed business-like from the ceiling. He remembered that and the gray fog of bodies moving in slow motion after the music stopped. He leaned against the pool table away from the flow of exiting traffic and she stood too close to him--her warm, damp thighs pressed into his while she composed a text on his phone. Easier and more permanent than exchanging numbers. There. She said smiling, eyes adrift, left incisor gone, just a wet hole close to her face. He remembered the instantaneous crazy thought that right then he’d wanted to kiss her and stick his tongue in that hole, but she hooked two fingers in his front pants pocket and slid his phone inside clipping the iron erection that stood acutely from his groin. She grabbed the soft pack of Winston lights from the edge of the pool table and joined the thinning stream of revelers as they filed out into the night.

His tongue felt like a shriveled root, blind and parched. The headache was non specific and soft at the edges, manageable with a couple of ibuprofen and liquids. He dug the phone from his pants pocket. 6:30. Lucky. Chuck’d be there at seven.

Meep meep. Two short cartoon sounds punctuated the moment. He flipped on the porch light and hoped his sister didn’t wake up. 

He texted, 5 minutes fuck stick.  

White powder hung suspended in the air from sawing around the fixtures. He and Chuck had been hanging drywall for three years now, ever since his stint at the community college ended. A twelve foot piece lay on the rack. Wait up, dude. Chuck pulled out his phone and responded to a text (Diapers!) for his wife. Shit, we gotta stop by Walmart on the way home. 

The room was about twenty feet long by about fifteen feet wide with three more rooms they’d already finished hanging. The lower level was bigger than his sister’s house. The end of the room had an enormous sliding glass walkout that overlooked a clay berm bisecting the block. He stepped outside for some fresh air. Traffic had picked up on the street alongside the development. A foreclosed house, half finished on the next lot over provided some privacy. The sun was climbing and he was glad they only worked until noon today. He sat on a pile of leftover block when his phone vibrated in his pocket. Dinner tonight? Ruby. Who the hell is Ruby? Then it dawned on him; Ruby was the singer from last night. Anxious regret seeped into his mind but not without a weak anticipation picking at the edges.

Fine bits of drywall fell across Chuck’s faded Dio t-shirt as he routered around a ceiling electrical box. He was a wiry guy who moved with the lazy fluidity of a surfer or rockstar. He wasn’t a rockstar but he had appropriated the wardrobe--torn jeans, t-shirt and hair past his shoulders that he tied back with a rubber band. A cigarette hung from his mouth. There wasn’t much distance between rockstar and residential drywall hanger on the sociological scale.

Your kid still in diapers?

She’s only fourteen months old.

How long does it take?

I don’t know. A while yet, I think.

Let’s finish this wall and call it a day. Chuck led and he followed, although he thought he was capable of doing the same. He didn’t mind the work--at least it was inside and he was good at it, quick, efficient moves for a guy his size and he was strong enough to handle the rock with ease. The chipmunks on speed filling in between commercials on the radio droned some braindead banter until a Green Day song came on. He turned the volume up some and bobbed his head to the echoing guitars in the hollow room. Do you have the time to listen to me whine...

He ran his fingers over the split in the vinyl of the dash in Chuck’s Tercel and watched people walk into and out of Walmart, disheveled or put together, some with kids in tow. A woman in a baby blue shiny silk shirt pushed a cart full of groceries, her tits shaking loose with every step. Jesus he thought. She backed out of her space, the car behind, some rusty piece of shit had a bumper sticker that read “Fuck Your Feelings.” 

Sorry, I wanted to check out the blueray players. Too much though. The package of diapers lay in the backseat. Twenty five dollars a pop for those things. Kids are expensive. He still felt like a kid himself, even though he was pushing thirty. He thought about the text.

The old part of town, two story and single story homes and detached single car garages built for a time when people only had one car for the family. Green asphalt siding covered the neighbor’s house. His sister’s was plated in slate siding that he knew was made from asbestos from a job he worked once replacing it across town. Chuck drove into the alley. There was only one more row of houses on the other side of the alley, then railroad tracks leading to the elevator and beyond that the Crow River.

Have a good one. He climbed out of the car and stood up his full height, arching his back and listening to the music of his vertebrae crack into place. There was a weedy gravel driveway that ran up alongside the garage to the back of the house where Janet parked. She’d be gone to work now.

He lowered his bulk into the webbing of the lawn chair where his sister smoked her cigarettes. They lay broken and bent, smashed into the ground like thick dead worms in the dirt around the front of the chair at his feet. He could hear the machinery of the elevator a few blocks away. He  loosened the laces on his boots and straightened his legs. The small square depression at the edge of the yard marked where his father had a garden when they were kids. Above him he stared into the canopy of the ancient Elm that protected the yard. Its trunk too thick for two of him to wrap his arms around. Sparrows nervously shifted around its branches and the harsh cry of a crow scolded the sparrows from somewhere deeper.

He checked his phone. 

Dinner?

He slid it back into his pocket. The back door opened into the kitchen and he could smell something cooking. A small chicken sat dead center of a big oval shaped crock and was in the process of melting into itself like a bantam wicked witch of the west. The skin was still tight and a little yellow, not ready to be picked at. After changing into shorts and peeling off his socks, he settled down to Call of Duty: Black Ops to shoot some shit up, relax and think about this Ruby from last night. He adjusted his package and felt some tenderness where she clipped him with the phone. She doesn’t know her own strength, he thought.

He had always taken things as they came, like his living with Janet in their dead parent’s house or his totaling of his car and his DUI and his inability to stay on track, first in high school, from which he eventually graduated and then college from which he did not. He didn’t mind hanging drywall with Chuck; he was a positive influence. He had a job, girlfriend, baby and an apartment; he was doing well for himself and now he felt a stirring to do the same--to organize his life into some recognizable pattern.

He checked his phone.

Pizza?

He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, just a little rest. 

He was at a woman’s bedside, sitting in a square wood and orange vinyl chair holding the woman’s hand. She was pregnant and in labor. Her legs were in these huge stainless steel stirrups and the doctor, who looked just like Chuck was saying in a soothing tone, It’s ok, he’ll probably leave you and then we can be together. He looked at the doctor but he didn’t look back. He only fiddled around between her legs and continued to speak in low tones that he could no longer make out. Deep disappointment welled up in him and someone pushed him on the shoulder but he didn’t want to look who it was; he didn’t want to hear what they’d say. Then there was a harder push and he saw Janet standing in her pink nursing home smock. 

Will you put the chicken in the fridge after you eat?

Chicken?

In the crockpot!

Geez, what time did you get home last night? 

I was having a dream in the middle of the day. I must have been more tired than I thought.

It’s past the middle of the day; it’s almost four and I picked up another shift so I gotta go pretty quick. Will you put the chicken in the fridge later? 

Sure. Hey, could I use your car?

I need to be to work in ten minutes.

He hauled Janet back to work and she would get a ride home with a co-worker. 

I’m not doing this again; you need to get your own car. She worked her way out with her big bag. Don’t forget about the chicken.

He watched her walk through the automatic doors and disappear inside.

The meager pressure felt like a soft rain but it took forever to rinse the lather from his body. Janet bought the shampoo and he smelled like a bouquet of chemically enhanced flowers. 

A date. Last night he drank too much beer and danced to shitty music and stumbled into this woman’s view. Ruby. She did not avert her gaze. He thought she was drunk. He was. Her aggressive move to contact him stirred something up. His last date was a disastrous senior prom with Mary Gonarek. She left the dance early without telling him and he searched the gym for an hour before he realized she, who was two years younger, just used him as her ticket to the event. Actually she had initiated that date, too. He felt fat.

He slapped some Old Spice Swagger on his chest and balls, applied deodorant, combed his shaggy head and got dressed. He didn’t drive very often and lacked confidence. She lived near the fairgrounds, where the railroad tracks come into town and the potholed street jarred him as he rolled slowly into the block, looking for the house number. 

333 in a descending diagonal under an open porch next to a faded green wooden screen door. He made a U-turn at the end of the block and pulled up in front of the house. Don’t even try to understand...Take it eeeeeeasy flowed from the dash speaker. The sound of the Eagles always reminded him of his parents--a nonspecific 1970s evening image, low lamp light, the O’Falllon’s, neighbors then, playing pinochle and thick amber bottles of Pfeiffers, a pile of homemade pickles and ham sandwiches slathered with butter at midnight.

He hiked up his pants and gave his t-shirt a pull to stretch it from shrinking up in the dryer. A narrow ribbon of concrete connected the curb to the porch. He turned his head and listened before knocking, a tv program droned from somewhere inside.

He knocked.

Second thoughts flooded his mind. He could be sitting drinking a beer and playing PS4 or be down at the river trying to hook a Northern with a Daredevil. He could be having supper with Chuck and his girlfriend and kid. 

No one is coming to the door. He traces the number three on the cool brass by the frame and decides to go. The porch boards squeak under his shoes. The switch is instantaneous, like the other thing never happened. This never happened. It would never happen. His anxiety gone, replaced by the interminable dissatisfaction that lined the shell of his will. He scraped a thick tuft of green grass growing from between the crack in the sidewalk with the toe of his shoe. The car needed gas. Fuckin’ chicken shit.

The sound of the porch board squeaking broke his mental misrevelry.

Hey! Where you going? 

He turned and the caution in the question killed him.

Sorry. I thought you weren’t home.

Here I am. 

She stood there for a moment and came towards him. Her eyes were large and bright and so was she. Dark hair, unmananged and wild, her shirt, low and loose draped over tight jeans that ran down to thick soled, shiny red shoes with unwieldy high heels. 

Behind her, nose pressed against the screen door, a tow headed blond boy in a striped shirt flanked by a gray headed old woman. 

I’ve been looking forward to this. 

She turned. 

Bye Baby!

Love you Mommy!

Before he thought to keep moving she stood before him. 

He opened her door without thinking. 

Do you mind if we stop at my place quick? I forgot to turn off the chicken.

Whatever you want.