Dark hallways, crowded. I find my room. I am in charge of this room, although my duties are not prescribed. I am familiar with the job, just like the one at the county as a gamma minus civil servant, doing nothing really but performing well. This seems like a schoolroom. (In my dreams I'm often in unfamiliar territory and not acknowledging it like protagonists in scifi stories.)

Others are scattered in the room. There are lovers here, stragglers there. I say, I have to use my room, and they began shuffling out.

I must go to the office for my assignment. I do that, down a long U corridor. At the desk, it is very crowded.

A little guy is worried, but he shows bluff. I see him clearly, up close. He's a child forced to be a man. He says, it's $18,000 on it, and Ma doesn't know what to do. I lean closer to ask, "Is it a divorce?" and he throws it off with a sneer; "No, it's not a divorce."

I want to help him. What can I do. I say, I'm no lawyer, but I'll look at it for you. He seems agreeable to that. He is in profile to me, at the counter. His hair is long and oiled, like a very short adult. Just no time to be a kid. I really intend doing something. Sometimes I'm able to help. Probably some legal document the officials are always terrorizing civilians with.

Out the door is a train station, but it runs indoors like carts for the lame and lazy at the airport. Hey, I'll take it around to my room. I go out and enter the sliding door and it closes behind. There are lots of us just standing and the cars swoosh away.

I see out the window we've passed my room. There is no stop there. The terminus is in another quarter further on, and as I step out I realize I must make my way over strange terrain to find the room.

The conductor walks away from the engine car and someone follows and so do I. He must know the best way to go. Doors open ahead of him and he doesn't even lose pace, and neither do I nor the other guy.

The last door opens onto a control room. Banks of breaker boxes, cables. The two of them go right up to a box and begin fiddling and adjusting and discussing, while I stand there like an idiot.

I must again find my own way...

Mother directs me to a rooftop to find Reloj. He's been running the bulls up there, actually a calf in deplorable condition, as if it had actually been through the corrida. I am utterly aghast and wonder if the little critter can be saved, and through quick and easy remedies, he is.

The roof is like in movie tenements such as West Side Story, but actually it's more like the system of gables where I'm working, a small farming community in the North Central Coast of California. (My dreams are often cobbled together out of what I know like happens in high school prop departments.) I am leaving for the weekend but decide the calf is all right up here grazing on the roof if I come back and feed it every day.

I drive to a bar to meet old Bonham character Heavy Johnson, who is turned murderous from the jolly old fatboy he was by beer and a dearth of outlets for testosterone testing. Heavy casually dangles a knife, staggers to menace another table. I slip out - virility stretching like a balloon makes me nervous. Heavy stumbles dramatically to radiate drunkeness so he won't be responsible in the morning.

Back at the gabled office building (actually an old vets hall of the type like Mexican aduanas) I meet some anonymous folks in an auto out front. An elderly shy withered chicana has to go to the bathroom. She is small and gaunt with gray in her hair and deep lines in her face. Okay. I guess I'm the bathroom guide. But - where?

There's a conference out front between some raucous wouldbe attendees to a musical soiree and the mustachioed Don Frito, the baron of this hacienda. They are actually looking for a place to stay, these lurking silent stoic campesinos, and the Don tells them there's no room in the gabled inn.

`We can go across the street to Mt Charlie's,' says one of them, but Don Frito tells them that's an old myth, as Mt Charlie is no part of his establishment so will not take his turnaways.

Around the side of the building a shy withered one takes matters into her own hands. She bends to release a slide-arm mechanism on what I take to be a fire door and she pumps it open, strides without hesitation down the steps into what is obviously a private bedroom to another door.

The one who had the idea about Mt Charlie's steps just as deliberately to a pay phone near the fire door. Everybody seems to know their parts but me.

I move to reassure the one at the phone, who hands the receiver to me. At the same time, the chicana sweeps out of the bathroom and turns to step briskly, adjusting her skirts still with a swish, to the front door.

I am aware at around this time somehow that the calf is missing.

From 11-Oct-1980

This is a complex restaurant setting. I am there on my lunch hour with two women friends. I'm having tea and crumpets, although I don't know what `crumpets' are. The waitress isn't taking my order anyway.

I walk about tables and intricate glassware. One of the women is the better friend, and she has gone. I decide I won't pay.

I have been left with the friend-of-the-friend, and neither of us are happy about that. I am calling for a ride; she waits in an adjoining room, stiffly. I call work as well.

I am driven in a convertible around a residential circle, one of those long drivway U tracks like in romance novels. The driver up front has his lady with him, and they're only acquaintences of mine. He drives very fast in reverse but it's all right. He stops and I step down. I traipse uphill on a road they drive away over in the other direction.

Here is an arcade, a wharf of old whitewashed cavernous brittle flaking concrete. I know where I am. I can be back to work with a long walk through an extended "L" course. I try and call work again. (I had asked the lady in waiting, I remember now, and she told me it was 1:15 and I've been trying to call work since.) A pay phone fails to connect me.

I pass among dowdy rustic fishers, Italians, one plays an accordion, nobody pays me any mind.
I lie down, and I'm in attendance at a Linda Rondstadt concert. I am in the second row, and I have on a Stetson, smiling, and all around they are preparing to go onstage for a photo sequence. I am not designated, but in the neighborhood of those who are.

It's a benefit for an unfortunate, the photo series will tell a story with speaking parts and group shots with the audience and crew behind Linda. I wonder if my voice will desert me onstage.
Linda warns participants about mugging or "showing your teeth with a hand at your throat." This is, I understand, a cartoon expression of anxious war vets. It will all go to Governor Brown (her strange boyfriend) eventually as some sort of petition.

I lay there in my Stetson. The woman to the right of me goes forward. I don't.

From 11-Oct-1980

This is a complex restaurant setting. I am there on my lunch hour with two women friends. I'm having tea and crumpets, although I don't know what `crumpets' are. The waitress isn't taking my order anyway.

I walk about tables and intricate glassware. One of the women is the better friend, and she has gone. I decide I won't pay.

I have been left with the friend-of-the-friend, and neither of us are happy about that. I am calling for a ride; she waits in an adjoining room, stiffly. I call work as well.

I am driven in a convertible around a residential circle, one of those long drivway U tracks like in romance novels. The driver up front has his lady with him, and they're only acquaintences of mine. He drives very fast in reverse but it's all right. He stops and I step down. I traipse uphill on a road they drive away over in the other direction.

Here is an arcade, a wharf of old whitewashed cavernous brittle flaking concrete. I know where I am. I can be back to work with a long walk through an extended "L" course. I try and call work again. (I had asked the lady in waiting, I remember now, and she told me it was 1:15 and I've been trying to call work since.) A pay phone fails to connect me.

I pass among dowdy rustic fishers, Italians, one plays an accordion, nobody pays me any mind.

I lie down, and I'm in attendance at a Linda Rondstadt concert. I am in the second row, and I have on a Stetson, smiling, and all around they are preparing to go onstage for a photo sequence. I am not designated, but in the neighborhood of those who are.

It's a benefit for an unfortunate, the photo series will tell a story with speaking parts and group shots with the audience and crew behind Linda. I wonder if my voice will desert me onstage.

Linda warns participants about mugging or "showing your teeth with a hand at your throat." This is, I understand, a cartoon expression of anxious war vets. It will all go to Governor Brown (her strange boyfriend) eventually as some sort of petition.

I lay there in my Stetson. The woman to the right of me goes forward. I don't.

From 10-oct-1980

In a strange country, a sinking sort of dream...

I practice my serve with a fancy raquet and no ball. Perhaps it's a sporting goods store. An elaborate serve it is, too, with twists and turns in my motion and the raquet is engraved with names in the handle I don't recognize and no visible results anyway.

The upper quadrant of a shopping center parking lot, that's where I am, and there are splashed in the grass puddles in my day, an Escher woodcut; there is all eternity lurking, openings in the dark ground with no warning to let the unwary through to the lower level many feet below.

I enter a Mexican or European restaurant with my bike. I am known by the proprietors and cooks sitting at a small table on the upper level at the end of the bar. They offer to take me down to the dining area, and their table with one other, that one with a smiling grizzled character still seated, begins to descend before I am aboard the section of floor where the tables sit. It's a massive lift of twenty feet square or more. They just sit, the staff and the raffish one, for a new level to evolve.

At the other end of the bar is a doorway. I take that as just as well; work my bike along tables and feet -

I go driving. Just driving, to "get out" like we used to do in the old days.

I wander off the reservation. I'm down 75, close to Dallas, only it's all freeway. I make to turn back now. Cross left the oncoming lanes, clear to the frontage road going up the other side. I'm not sure of the way home.

I turn into a complex, a nondescript building off the service road. Maybe someone here can show me the way to go home. I dismount and wander into a building.

There are counters and offices, and no border between where the customers stay and the workers move. I'm waiting and nobody seems to mind.

I approach a trio, and radiate presence. One of them still talks, and I await attention, politely. Which way do I go? Someone says, over that way. I smile, thank her, leave.

It's down 75, only not like any 75 I ever drove. Reloj is with me now. We're to turn off here. Right here. I do.

In the process of traveling down a narrow dirt road, two ruts, really, Reloj becomes the driver. We are brought up short at an ordinary country barbwire fence, a lock on a gate.

We stand down, consider. Obviously, we must find someone to open the gate. (We never consider just turning around and going back from whence we came. Dreams are like time itself sometimes.)

Someone looms along one side of the road beyond, which is paved, a farm-to-market. He's a lanky highway cop, indicates a building. Okay, we go into still another building. It must be what you do around here when you're lost.

Reloj goes off to an office. Inside, it's just more worker wandering, me waiting.

I finally am able to attract notice. The auto we drove up in is now in a lot, she says. Just go to the attendant, she says.

I go back down to the gate. There is now a huge parking garage, multi-level, and I enter into the foyer to the office, speak with the one in charge through a half-door.

He says, he doesn't know my auto, and has no way of knowing where it is. This doesn't strike me as peculiar, all these unhepful agents. I am very patient. I explain, but it makes no difference. He does have an orange copy of a ticket, which obviously refers to me in some way. I ask to see it.

Inscribed thereon is a complete description of the auto, a Nissan, with all relevant numbers and the exact stall where it now rests on the third floor. I point this out to him.

He is not embarrassed; it's as if I've finally provided him with relevent data he can use. It's like the common workday wisdom of those who figure someone new to their premises thus ignorant of their process must be mentally deficient.

Now it's standing in front of the garage, beside the wired fence gate, waiting for Reloj time.

The lanky highway cop meanders back by. He remembers me. I figure there may be trouble retrieving my ride, because it now belongs to Reloj, who is off on some obscure conference somewhere back in the building.

The cop asks where I came from. I point to the trail. He says, no, you couldn't have come that way. I insist. He says, there's no way. I even describe for him the building which sent us down this way.

He laughs. "Fella, you know, that's Special Customs. There's no way on earth you just waltzed on through there."

I say, "You mean like Miami Vice?" He smiles, nods. That's it.

I have no idea how I made that connection, or how come him to ratify it. Perhaps the reference is so abstruse he isn't sure there isn't something to it but doesn't want to admit he doesn't know what. Maybe it's just that my TV references are slight and aged like ol' Barney Fife himself and his must be, too.

My dreams, they dissolve often without a working denouement...

From 4-Oct-1980

I am in earnest affable confab with a counselor whose speciality is sex, maybe Kinsey; he is smiling and I am loose and cooking and he says, "We'll get to the problem in a moment," which means he's sure I'll ask the question I'm there to ask, but I'm not there for any question, just the informal discussion - and then I realize or am convinced, there may be a slight trouble somewhere...

I am amazed he spotted this and in a total cordial easy manner besides, I am astonished and I am prompted and begin to point up my general references to the personal - but we are interrupted by a dowdy glum dull matron who plops down in the middle of our eager frenetic vitality to sap us down to her dreary mundane minutiae -

- she holds up a postcard she intends mailing.

And that bit of data seems to be the sole justification for sidetracking us all into the grim backwater of her droll dreary day; misery in a sad lady self-indulgent in the bleak company she inflicts on us unabashed. I am eager to get on with my own recitations like everyone else but can't with her there, holding up her foolish postcard, mailing a bloody postcard, that's her demand on our furrowed and frantic consciousness, dead sparks drying in the still air...

A postcard.