Dreams, Crack and the Minotaur

Hey Em, I know you blocked me, but this undelivered messenger just woke up from a dream, a dream nearly as brutal as one of your concussion dreams where my little pitiless pony carries me into the enchanted planting ground, only it’s not a pony this time, it’s a bull, but not exactly a bull, more like a bull masquerading as a man, or a man masquerading as a bull and when we reach the planting ground, I’m not planted, no, I climb up up and along a belly laughing tree trunk until I find the right limb with my smile branded on it and wrap its soft and pliable vines around my neck, zero fun, have shat myself twice thus far in my sleeping bag, where did this sleeping bag come from, I never owned a sleeping bag, was I ever sleeping in this sleeping bag?

Yeah, how many weeks with the most loathesome creatures in Wilmington, North Carolina, in the 3rd Street Carousel Bungalow perfumed with sweat, sulphur and despairing nut juice, but I’m blessed to have been installed in a closet large enough to stretch my legs out in, a closet with wooden floors, floors that are easily treatable for fleas and bedbugs and other countless parasites. I can’t believe my unholy luck. I have two cans of Cutters in my dufflebag and spray my limbs and balls and scalp accordingly. I guess this is the great one we had, we invented some brave new wounds for each other this time, I’m sure, still have a shiner and the Milky Way remains in my periphery.  I finish my bottle of white wine and twist off the cap from another magnum and find my phone is dead and I need to recharge it in the outlet in Page’s bedroom and I open the closet door and Page declares 

“Chris don’t come near me I got the SCAYBAYS!” before snorting a line of meth off the bathroom mirror she wrenched off the wall a few nights back. I’ve been hearing this warning for centuries.  

“It’s all good,” I murmur, the eternal phrase all the damned must murmur and plug in my phone beside her infested bed and walk into the kitchen for the bologna and cheese and bread I had bought and cocooned in four bags and stored in the back of the fridge but my provisions are gone and I’m enraged for five or six seconds but human rage has no power in a housefull of demons. I notice all the doors of the kitchen cabinets are ritually arranged in a circle on the floor, like midget doors to hell. I tiptoe around them carrying a cold thigh from a KFC bucket and enter the den and of course Gene Paine, aka Tractorhead is shirtless, freebasing and in the throes of Mr. Olympia power poses and sitting across from him on the edge of a rotting recliner is Jeeka, remember him, Em? The self-proclaimed retired Washington Lobbyist who wears the same tie dye rags everyday and Jeeka’s legs are possessed by a poltergeist as he stares with cannibal concentration at the king of genomic pain in his frozen, quivering glory. The black fur blanketing Tractorhead’s vertebrae sparkles with bitter dew as he drops to a knee in planet lifting prayer to his hog lagoon god and his eyes are dead with vast and worthless love and he slowly begins to proffer the pipe to Jeeka and Jeeka falls off the rotting recliner onto his knees reaching with drowning man passion and Tractorhead turns the crack pipe around into my direction, still holding his purple-headed hit like a prophet and I take the pipe and toke the still smoldering rock just to inflame the court jestering of Jeeka, I despise crack but I despise Jeeka even more during this moment as I behold Tractorhead in his final Atlas pose wondering if I have indeed found the center of the labyrinth of my ludicrous life.

The hit floods me with an avalanche of bullying love and I chase it with a long pull of my cheap white wine and unfortunately catch Tractorhead’s awful green feline gaze, the gaze of my father, a gaze full of blurred memories with blood pouring from their mouths and I realize I must truly be dead and deep down in the underworld, perhaps I did finally hang myself from a laughing tree in that enchanted forest that has been waiting for me since I was slimy and bawling, or did I open one of those kitchen cabinet doors carefully arranged on the floor?

Yeah, this reminds me of another of your last concussion dreams, Em, where I woke up in prison, finally busted for unspeakable shit and I was in the cafeteria and all the heads of my fellow convicts were stripped of all flesh down to their skulls eating their Salisbury steak and potatoes and brownies chomping and mumbling bitter bone poetry through our denuded jaws like the greatest theatre troupe I’ve ever found…

“I’m dead,” I finally, fearlessly declare, “I was 42 in my dark and troubled wood and found the portal tree and hung myself, like Judas, like all the great betrayers, and here I am, seriously, I need help to find my corpse, man.” 

“Well goddamnit give me some google coordinates!” Tractorhead says taking out his phone. 

There’s a frantic knock on the door then, and it’s Ben, you know,  Ben, beginning his endings again. Ben is on the far borders of the hungry ghost stage, not yet a demon, but on his way, remember, there’s an organic process when becoming a demon: first you’re transient, or a lost soul, and when you realize you have no person left to call home you’re a hungry ghost, and when you’ve finally forgotten the essential memories of yourself you’re a demon. Ben is a hungry ghost, yet Ben is wearing an auburn wig and raving about being stalked by the local Nigerian Mafia. Ben is on the border of demonhood indeed, his eyes already burning bright within black rings.Tractorhead gives him a thimble bag of rock, most of which is probably candle wax and Ben smiles that awful half-boy smile and his eyes finds my eyes and he says, “Hey Chris, how you doing man? You promised to write me a song over a year ago! What’s with the shiner man?”

“I cut my life shaving.”

Ben blinks about a dozen times and kinda dissolves through the front door. 

Jeeka is balled up on what was once the carpet, weeping silently like a child just after his daddy’s belt, less than a presence, more like a discarded memory and I kneel beside him and offer him the pipe, feeling a sudden profound pity for him, a pity that haunts millenia, a pestilential pity. Yeah, Em, this is where I am, among the monsters we always sneered at from a warm spooning distance deep within our king-size bed with a loving beast between us. Is Russell in our life? The Dachshund Beagle boy we inherited from Tod Horris? Did you know I murdered Tod? Well not exactly murdered, and not exactly alone but that’s another story. 

Page staggers into the den all bleeding scabs and evacuated eyes and roars “Where’s my wine!!!!” She looks at me with my shitty magnum of pinot grigio and says “You stole my wine Chris!” She charges me with what looks like a butter knife dipped in shit and Tractorhead swiftly corrects her paranoia by bitch slapping her and she falls on the floor without words or consciousness.

“Dude, you’re completely and utterly in the wrong fucking dimension, the fuck is wrong with you? She’s gonna press charges and this time the bail is gonna be a million,” I say as sober as I can and failing miserably. 

“She won’t remember a damn thing,” he says as he gingerly gathers her into his arms and carries her back into her bedroom and a memory mushrooms from my once neighbor George Lord, who went to college with Tractorhead and confessed unto me deep inside a night of heavy drinking that Eugene Paine may be a CIA experiment.  

There’s another knock on the door, there’s always knocking on the infinite doors of hell and I answer it and when I behold her something happens, a recognition dumping gasoline on the serene mask of my stupor. 

“Hey, I’m Alex, is Gene around?”

Part of her face had been destroyed but reconstructed fairly successfully, at first she’s Indigenous, no, no, she’s Slavic descent, the cheek bones, the left one on the disaster side protrudes a half inch further than the other. She’s a triumphant piece of debris and knows that I know and smiles at my fleeting confessional silence.

“Nope, he’s running errands, will text him you stopped by,” I tell her and slowly, proudly shut the door on her beauty. I will recognize her in the future in Seattle, two years later, she was an overpass jumper I couldn’t save because I didn’t contain life-changing words, I never will. 

I take another everlasting pull of my wine and Tractorhead walks back in the den his green gaze molten with murder and love.

“Alexandria just sent me a text,” he purrs, right before a bestial leap.

“Yeah? And what did your future dead succubus for hire text you?”

“She was a gift, brother, I know you’ve been lonely right now.”

“The last thing, the last thing I need is a gruesome seduction, you fucking psycho.”

“You sure Chris? Have you looked in a mirror lately?”

“That’s the lamest B-movie shit I’ve ever heard.”

“Let’s go find your corpse, then Chris,” he says.

Tractorhead finds my troubled wood on his GPS and it’s off of Hwy 421 a mile before the regional dump and all the while he keeps giving me hits of what he calls “The Messianic Shit,” and of course I hit his pipe as I have hit all false prophet’s pipes in my life and I smoke his Kools and pull from his fifth of Taaka from his false prophet thighs and listen to his stories of when absconded angels visited him in solitary confinement after he sent a fellow convict into a coma and I nod politely like all men long ago dead do and he goes on and on until he makes a sudden turn down a dirt road and busts through a chain barrier with his 79 White Whale Ford Pickup and keeps driving until his White Whale crashes into a pond.

It’s a deep pond and we’re sinking fast and the water is up to my neck and I’m ready to die in water, always have been, but not in a pond next to a dump, no, not here, this is not the site and I’m pulled and suddenly elevated above the reeking swamp upon Tractorhead’s shoulders and my hands search desperate for a grip and find horns and the horns are smooth and I stroke them with gratitude and my beast seeker purrs with pride.

We hunt for hundreds of yards until we finally find the tree and me, well, it doesn’t actually look like a me, it’s a human, for sure, but I can’t be sure, it’s a human shape silhouette, there are millions of them out there. I unsaddle from Tractorhead and we try our phones for a flash light but they died in the pond and Tractorhead begins to climb the tree and I grab him by his belt and wrench him down into the roots and mud.

“Goddamnit I’m the one who carried you here to your own corpse!”

We wrestle for a while at the base for the prize, Tractorhead has a steel plate in his skull but my skull aims for his nose and my skull is sharpened by histories of cast iron skillets. 

I make my way up the tree, Em, but the tree isn’t laughing it’s just another looming lonely black god in the night, all natural evil in its silence and stillness and I finally slide down my appointed limb and onto my corpse, who smells like rotten wine cask and we cling together gently swinging, waiting for the dawn, for this dream to pass…