Dreams From September

September 26, 1990

Quick dream (I should give this more time): Dan and I are in my car, Dan is driving.  We are stopped and backed up by several cars at the corner of Prospect and Touhy; we are south of the intersection.  I take the opportunity to jump out of the car to quickly run an errand in one of the Prospect shops.  I have some film to turn in and some old record albums I want to sell.  There is a one-stop shop that can take care of both of my needs.

I turn in the film quickly, but they have to assess the record albums one at a time, and there are about fifteen of them.  I wonder if it will take too long, but I decide Dan will have the sense to pull the car over to the side if the light turns green.

The shopkeeper looks at the albums.  They are worth 5¢ ...15¢ ...10¢ ...etc., depending on the newness, popularity, size —all the obvious factors.  The total comes to $1.75.  It’s too small an amount, really, but I am ready to concede, wanting to collect the money and get out of the shop quickly.  But then the shopkeeper convinces me that I ought to hold off on selling them until they increase in value.  As a consolation he gives me a punch card which, when filled, will allow me to redeem a given number of records at a higher price.

I leave the shop ...and outside I find my car sitting sideways, perpendicular to Prospect Avenue with its nose in the middle of the right hand lane and its rear almost right up against the parked cars on the side of the street.  Traffic is slowed down even more now, as cars have to drive around mine now.  Dan is asleep in the passenger seat.  I go over to the driver’s side —and it is crushed, beyond just a scrape, bashed in all along the side.  I am able to open the door and I determine the car will be driveable, but Dan still doesn’t wake up.
 
I shout, in a panic.  Dan wakes up groggily and continues to be only half awake for the rest of the dream...  The cops come... We look the car over... I calm down a little... and Dan goes back to sleep.

September, 2013

He stood outside a Shell station in the warm part of fall, wearing scuffed black leather, studded and chained, heavy calf-high boots, fat dark glasses and a nervousness that made me look away.  I didn’t notice his hair, except that it must have completed the grey-black head-to-toe theme he had going, not goth or Johnny Cash but relic all the same. And I didn’t see if he was smoking a cigarette, either, but he had all the gestures: one hand always going to his mouth, a jitteriness about him and a general haziness.  I wasn’t close enough to smell him, but there was no point.  He seemed to be waiting for someone or something, adding to the nervousness, but he stayed close to the side of the building as though what he wanted was right there.  Maybe he just wanted to be noticed.  I imagined him getting up in the morning, putting the whole costume on one piece at a time in front of a mirror, trying to look cool, but that wouldn’t explain why he was here, standing on the alley side of a gas station.  Everything about him was out of alignment: he wore biker gear but there wasn’t a bike around; he might have been waiting for a bus, bu this wasn’t on a bus route.  He looked like there should have been a pay phone next to him and he was waiting for it to ring, except that they took out all the pay phones years ago.  He might have been waiting for someone to come out of the bathroom, or waiting for his turn, except that this particular Shell station didn’t have a side-entrance john. There was an air pump with a few loops of hose next to him, but this was probably just a coincidence, signifying nothing.

All of this I gathered in a glance, before the nervousness turned me away.

Inside, the attendant was a chubby faced hispanic named Alexa, according to her name tag.  She was on the afternoon shift, the same shift for enough years to know all the regulars or at least what they wanted.  I never bought gas here, too expensive, but this was a regular stop of mine for a pop on the way home, to get me through the rush hour.  One 20 oz. Diet Coke with one Grandma’s oatmeal cookie pack.  Neither the caffeine or the sugar are good for me but I will not begrudge the routine and I’m sure I spend much less here than most.  Alexa spends more time dispensing cigarettes and lottery tickets than she does my $2.61.  But she knows me, knows my purchase, and we exchange one verison or another of how do you do.  One day I’ll stop for a moment, if there’s no line behind me, and ask her what she thinks of the weather, but even if this ever happens it will probably not go further.  She has customers to attend, I have a forty five minute drive ahead of me and we live in different worlds.