My companion is a little pup. Scoob is offstage for the moment, like when we go to the beach. The pup and I sit at a small table which is part of a restaurant, but it's angled and obscure like a labyrinth so you cannot see out of your immediate fern-beclouded setting.

There is one who is hiding behind the greenery spilling from a planter box over our table. He has a camera. There is one plate, set before me, as you don't serve hounds in this place. The photographer intends taking our picture. I don't know why, but I don't mind. The waiter has no badge of office; he's like somebody in charge in a Mexican joint in his cleanest casual.

I see on my plate chips of what may be beef. I intend it for the pup anyway. Underlying the dish, whatever it is, maybe hidden by gravy, is a slab of steak.

Then the steak comes up missing. I follow the photographer into another part of the forest. He is in different dress now, but I recognize him. He's pretending to be on other business, behind a long counter like in old-time diners.

I ask the waiter, who is slouching nearby, hey, where's my steak? He shrugs. That guy took it. More shrugging. You have to replace it then. Still more.

They both think they can just wait until the dream is over. Time is on their side.

They're right.

In the morning I will suit out in my dress greens. There will be two of us, my first drill sergeant, a lanky sort with brevet stripes, which meant he was acting as a DI. I don't remember his name. It's been over forty years now. Maybe he's reading this, and will write and tell me his name.

I am to show up at work in my dress greens. This I don't question. It's an office requirement. Okay.

But it's morning and I seem to have left off gathering my uniform until now.

It's the busdriver's suit, you know. I hustle around and look for parts of it. Brother Joey and I will take the bus. He works somewhere else, but he's wearing dress greens too. I cannot find everything. It's been such a long time.

I am on the bus. Oh, wait, I say to Joey. I have on white socks. Joey says, that's doesn't matter.

Joey says not to worry. But then I think, hey, wait, I don't have my headgear! It's against the rules to be outdoors without headgear. I better go for my busdriver's hat!

I run back. I look in my apartment, then in Joey's. He has one small one-bedroom on the same floor. I am very late, I know, but don't look to see just how much late. I think, wait, there's this corner, and I go back to my apartment.

Find where old gear is gathered. Here's Joey's work cap; it's a sharp modified baseball cap, part of the fatigue uniform. Sure enough, I find my flat dress green headgear. It looks like Ralph Kramden's. I go out now.

I take the stairs rather than wait for the elevator. But that puts me down in a strange street. I run this way and then bend over that way, and then find a bunch of people at a stop. I stop.

It is some time here before I ask which stop this is. It's Third and Fifteenth. Oh, dear. I need Third and Second! Second Avenue is the route that takes me to the office.

I take off running up Third. I'm very late.


Do you know how pretty are the ridges up here? Like coral reefs in the sky. The bright colors are to warn away aircraft, you know. I ride it down the slope; it's like the spine of a Triceratops. Wheee!

The coral is now slithery, sinuous.

I catch up to the head of the snake. It flashes forked tongue, rambles.


Here I am now set down in a garage. I'm traveling with an Hispanic guy on bicycles. We're going somewhere, you bet.

He stops off at the window along the cavernous pathway. I ask, where is the school. He indicates, so I keep going.

But now I have to slide on my back, the way I swim. I pass others. Here is a child with a mother. It's my child; I have fathered it, but it's only like I jaywalked or something. Sorry, but she understands.

I am swimming over the pavement, the way I swim, which is floating on my back and paddling. I now am before the registrar. She shows me a mark in my record, her jaw set like it's a D. It's another child I've fathered. I'm chastened, but it's not like I failed the course.

26-Oct-1980

It's Reloj and me on a trip to Monterey, CA. There's a Mexican restaurant in Watsonville, on the way, and evidently also in Montery.

A giant green road grader roars into the lane next to us from off right; it's clean and neat and a chicano sits high up in the cab.

Asks if he can to park heere.

"Si," I tell him, with all the simpatico at my disposal.

We're alongside a long tan building. There are trees and a gravel road running by it.

"I like you, mon," the grader man smiles.

Inside now, Reloj and I are in conference.

"Champagne," either one of us says.

"Champagne," mutters a disembodied voice.

A plump ma is grinning over her stewpot, rolls like dough from her fat cheeks and arms, "Champagne, yeah, shore...champagne," she seems to be melting into the pot, cackles and all.

On the road again, without any champagne, a small plane swoops in a circle, around behind - it's one of those aerobats but I wonder if the pilot is in control.

It zooms behind us as we watch, squanders altitude, pulls out of fearful freefall and continues to circle in front now - amazingly it keeps its nose pointing at us like a hex.

It sidles around us; I can hear someone onboard it chuckliing like ma as the plane circunmnavigates...

I am back at the restaurant in Watsonville now. Oh, shoot, I slipped a cog in progression. Reloj is still in Monterey on real time. I have to go back.

Inside at the counter, in Monterey, someone sits, and a lagging lilting brunette is behind us, reaching for something. She is rummaging in the high racks of flat displays. The higher she reaches the more of her bare lissome stretch is available to the public behind her. I wonder if she knows this. I wonder why they place all the common flatware so high. I am hardly ever cynical while dreaming.

(I forgot to mention earlier while we were there someone we called Pop had come through after the lunch crowd with a pushbroom - I had a straw broom I'd taken from the auto - my old red VW of Mexican venture days when dreams merged with the jarring world again - customers pick up their feet while the long head of Pop's broom whisks by...)

The lissome lady comes back around the counter, drops something there, everyone shuffles up and heads out - I see it's one of those juicy chocolate chip cookies I'm now addicted to and am glad.

Reloj's in the car when I go out. He has on a striped shirt. We discuss how we came to be separated. He had gone somewhere, and I hadn't. I didn't know. It's all right now. The auto we sit in is a sports machine, like the Triumph TR-3 I once drove.

We nod together and I fire up.

I wake a time or two every night, and the first time, I thought, that's a good dream, I'll surely remember that one. Then I was asleep again. And when I awoke, all I remember of the dream is...

The kittens over the minefield. The enemy had cast them out there to clear the mines. I was panicked. The enemy are scum.

But I managed to call them all back to me without tragedy.

In the next sleep segment, I am visiting someone and am reminded, you forgot to do the film. Oh, boy, I sure did. I was supposed to help with the film last visit.

This is a multiple-adult house. I go to the machine. It has a keyboard and a long window viewport into a box about three feet by six, and inside you can see several small wax figures. You prepared them for the scene by the keyboard. For one shot, they are held horoizontal and glue is applied. This is so a material will stick to them.

Then they will be programmed to act the scene, with the special effects, and it will look on your screen exactly like any other movie, yet these actors are all about six inches tall. It's a remarkable studio to have in one room of a private home. A spectacular explosion and auto crash scene costs five dollars, and looks like anything you'd see at the mall.

But it's the end of the shooting day, and I go to tell Mischa, the producer, there'll be no real footage today. I see someone I know, have known before, and she is cold and ignores me. That's best sometimes.

This is Gone In Sixty Seconds III, and it's becoming very expensive. I think I'm responsible for some of that, because of my tardiness on the set. The price is ballooning up above sixty dollars American. But, with European distribution, we expect to gross around two hundred million, so everybody will be friends again when the receipts start rolling in.

The boys drive off in a jalopy to my left, and the police to my right. I am expecting both to return soon with trouble. I am anxious about that. I can be whupt or arrested.

A blonde in a roadster passes by, left to right, and I call to her. I pick up a huge surfboard and hurry to where she has stopped. I figure she must, for I am in danger. She does. I sit down in the passenger seat, and nevermore is the surfboard a participant.

She immediately turns onto a hidden road winding down to our left. Opening up in the dell is the prettiest scene, a pond and an escarpment like a mushroom; it's the illustration for a child's storybook.

In the house, I amble along through the rooms. The blonde has spoken not a word to me. I see children rambling through a sunken den of sorts, and I continue on.

Pause at a door. There are two men in there, I'm guessing, although both have yet to rise this day. They are different ages; maybe the father and brother of the blonde.

There are strangers everywhere, although the family isn't large, neither is the house but it has narrow passages. I should introduce myself, I suppose, but nobody pays the slightest attention to me.

Scoob is here with me, and there are puppies, too, who cavort and bark, but the barks are subdued, like whispers.

[Two events in waketime history may account for these scenes. One is when I skipped out of Ft Polk, 1969, and spent the first night, after being shaken down by the Leesville city police in Lousiana, across the border and was immediately on awakening accosted by the cops from nearby Jasper, who took identifying numbers and drove off "to check" and meanwhile I expect at anytime the MPs to come across that bridge over the Sabine I had just crossed in the night.

The second was when my brother Joey took me to the house over in Dodd City, a little burg east of Flatlandia, to meet with and perhaps take a young lady somewhere. She invited us in, and Joey wisely declined, and I went in to sit in a circle with strangers. Nobody introduced anybody.

This circle was brought to mind recently by Joey's recalling what I had told him about the conversation I overheard. It was hilarious, now that I remember it. Two old guys are talking trade. One says to the other,

"Lem, how'd you swap that 'ere five five Chevy for my Pontiac ?"

And Lem squints at him, growls:

"Just like you didn't have nuthin'."]