True Sh*t 8: More Nightmares

Looking back to when I was a kid, I recall having some of the damnedest nightmares, including a series involving visitors from space. They never had good intentions.

The neighbors and I ran from our homes, oval shapes hovering over us with a moving jerkiness like anger about to explode. Sometimes I would see the invaders walking over us, other times I only felt their presence, a numbness of dread embroidered into the back of my neck. Often the dream started with the sound of heavy fingertips rapping on the walls or tapping along the windows, and I would get out of bed not knowing that I had been ushered into that other world, the dreaming world. When I did know, I reached for the curtains but was afraid to pull them aside. Afraid that the visitors would be right on the other side of the glass, looking back at me and they were never afraid.

In one dream, I awoke to the sounds of something on the roof. Gentle footsteps. I lay there watching the ceiling and following the sounds of the steps down from the apex of the roof to the edge and off to the corners. Who's up there? My answer: a force that pushed me into the mattress. Couldn't get up. I could move my eyes. I looked around, seeing nothing, but feeling something inside like lead flowing about. It's them and they didn't waste time tonight. Just go away. Please let me go. I looked down at useless feet, couldn't run. I can still see my feet, white socks on, just feet, pointing up like normal. Were my parent's awake? Couldn't call out. Could they hear the vistors? Just let me go. I'm getting colder, maybe the fear, maybe more. Just let me go. I'll do what you ask. But no demands were made. No voice. The force takes it's own time, it came upon me and gave no feeling of concern to my desire to avoid it.

It left, and when they left, I felt the void left behind. I lay silent and looked at the ceiling. I could move my head and I looked at the clock. It had an old numerical display like a black plastic Rolodex. The shutters fell over as time passed. It was a little after three in the morning.

I could move and I wanted to get up and look out the window. Look up and see. I thought of going outside but I lay there. I realized I was in the coldest sweat and I thought of getting fresh sheets. I waited to wake up. Minutes went by and I was still there. I woke up right? No? Yes you did. You woke up just before or right when they killed you. It was them, right? Who or what else? A half hour. I had to have awakened, but I don't remember it. The morning finally came. I woke up. Yes? Don't remember. Sure I did. This is ridiculous, that was a dream. Days. Weeks. Thirty years. Yes I did. I woke up.

Fun with drugs

I recall an interesting day back when I was in the joint. It was our drug science class, and the teacher showed us a film called Dead is Dead. It brought a message of all the wonderful things we could expect from using Heroin and other drugs.

The film's narrator was an old heavy set Black American seated with a lifeless droop in a Lazy Boy recliner, and he remained inanimate in that chair through the entire film. This man, with weary yellow and red eyes, and a deep dry monotone voice, was our escort into the unfortunate world of the inner cities. There we watched the effete and addicted living day by day, and the day always included drugs of one kind or another.

The first scene showed a white tiled bathroom where a man, shaking uncontrollably, tried to remain seated on a toilet. His body was rejecting whatever he had ingested and expelled waste into the toilet to the point of overflowing the toilet bowl with a dark grime which ran down the white porcelain onto the floor. The high contrast of the film gave unnecessary emphasis to the sight.

Another scene showed a young girl sent on a grocery errand by her mother. The narrator explained how she got a little side tracked and spent all her mother's money on heroin. The next scene showed the young girl sitting in a filthy stairwell holding her stomach while rocking back and forth. While our ghoulish stoic spoke, the girl suddenly threw up on herself with volume and force. For reasons I can't find, Bill Withers' Lean on Me was playing in the background. To this day I really don't care if I ever hear that song again.

There were the two boys who fancied glue sniffing. They each enclosed their heads in a plastic sack which they filled with fumes from the glue. They overdosed and died with the bags, misty with their last breath, still covering their heads. They ended up on neighboring autopsy tables as a matched set. While nobody looks good dead, I have to say that Black American features and ash blue lips are awful together, even with a Glad Bag veil.

There were other snippets, all concluded with an uttering of the film's title, and always causing the girls in the classroom to turn away in disgust. My friend and I stood our ground, proving we could take it all, but in truth I think I skipped lunch. And dinner. My breakfast the next day, wich certainly did not include oatmeal or Cream of Wheat, probably was a light one.

I wasn't interested in drugs of any kind, and the film neither added to nor took away from my decision. Remembering its one indisputable effect, I can say that if one is interested in weight loss, they should find this thing and watch it once a day. They'll be a size four in no time.

The horny and the thick

I visited the old site. Like any good cat, I bring back a little prize...

There was a particular night, a long time ago, probably in the late seventies, that will stay in my memory for the rest of my days. I'm sure it was in the summertime, as I stayed out later than usual.

I went to my best friend's house like I did every day, and we wandered around the apartment complexes where he lived shooting the bull and coming across people out enjoying the evening.

We talked to one guy who observed the poor condition of a nearly empty in-ground swimming pool. He said, "I expect some fucking Lock Ness Monster to come out of there." We thought that was funny and true. There was a lot of algae growing down in there.

The night seemed to have a strange mystical air, people appeared heightend in some way, women had a look in their eyes, their bodies charged, and I got the sense they were on a kind of hunt.

At various times we thought we heard someone cry out or shriek in a strange way from off in the distance. As young males with our minds often on that precious and unobtainable encounter known as sex, my friend told me those sounds had to be a cry of ecstasy. I shrugged. Maybe.

We saw a large dog trying to hump a much smaller dog. The big one was some kind of shepherd mix and I don't remember the breed of the little one. It was about the size of one of those lasa-apso-ipso- pipso dogs. The big dog kept humping the air and trying again and again, achieving nothing while keeping a mindless smile dogs often have. I just shook my head.

We thought we saw something going on in a car in a parking lot. The windows were a little fogged, but that was all. We joked about it and tried to convince ourselves that maybe we did see something, but we knew we hadn't. We walked on saying, "Are we going to see something? Did you hear that? What are they doing?" There was nothing.

It became late and I walked home. I didn't have my bike with me and I don't remember why, but I assume it was another encounter with a pot hole that left me with a bent rim. At the time, the people in Lakewood Washington thought the state bird was the pot hole, so the road conditions remained lunaresque. I walked down the train tracks then turned onto a dead end road and came across a white early sixties Ford Station wagon. It was completely out of sight from everyone except those walking down the tracks as I was doing. I thought "Why is that old Ford sitting out here by itself?" Then I thought I saw it move. "Boy, this really is a strange night, I'm seeing things." As I got closer I noticed I couldn't see through the windows. They were fogged. Really fogged. Another thought rolled around in my head, "It's really muggy in there. How long had this car sat at the end of the road?" I got closer. Maybe it really was moving. Very slight. I walked past it. Through the window, I could see a human form on it's hands and knees. Because of the windows, this appeared as a diffuse naked shape with very white skin. At the same time it was clear that the car was moving, rocking back and forth. That was when I caught on to what was happening.

I walked on and thought, "Wow. Everybody's doing it tonight!" Everyone except myself, the one who's head was as thick as oak.

My time in the joint

Another one from the old site. This is my favorite. Living through it was another story.

All blogs post a list sooner or later. This is a list of things about my three years in the joint. You might know the joint by another name: High School.

The North Building was constructed in 1953.

The ceiling tiles in the hallways had a habit of hanging from the ceiling but not falling free.

One of the home economics teachers was a woman who was young and single. I always wondered what she did with her spare time. Mainly I wondered if she was having sex regularly.

One of the science teachers was very popular with the girls, and would show us pictures of his latest child. The girls loved him, but I couldn't stand that guy.

Some of the girls went to his house to paint the baby's room.

I painted my room all by myself. (Boo-Hoo-Hoo).

The student body consisted of one thousand three hundred and fifty kids.

I knocked down a ceiling tile. I meant to push it back up into the ceiling, but it fell to the floor instead.

A janitor saw me do it.

The following Monday, I was summoned to the vice principal'’s office. There he sat with another administrator. On his desk was the tile.

They played bad cop/ bad cop with me. I was very scared of being expelled. They asked me what would happen if every student did what I had done, and I thought to myself, you would have one thousand three hundred and fifty tiles lying on the floor.

I was sentenced to hard labor in the cafeteria for the next three days cleaning out the trash cans. This would give me a better appreciation for what the janitor had to do to make a living.

In my junior year I noticed that the sun rose, revolved once around Loraine Mercurio and set, and that was the end of another day.

The totalitarianist regime, I mean administration, played the same tactic with another student that they played on me.

Their tactic misfired a little bit. The young man got a can of gas and set the school on fire.

The fire burned down the gym, several hallways, the music room and damaged other rooms.

In all my years, it was the biggest fire I have ever seen.

At least three or four fire departments came to put out the fire, and it took them all day.

In over twenty years, I can still see the look on the principals face as he walked away from his burning school, and I smile. How about your one thousand three hundred and fifty tiles now, eh?

The kid got twenty years, and no one was harmed by the fire.

The southern building, condemedmed by the Fire Marshal and closed off, was in the process of being demolished. I was fascinated by the old building.

One rainy morning, around 3:00am I snuck into the old building and wandered around in its dark and silent hallways. It was a bit creepy, but I was enraptured by the place and its past. I found what looked like the chemistry lab. There were a lot of built-ins with glass doors and I thought it a shame that it was all going to be destroyed.

Our school was known as Clover Park High School and we were the Warriors.

While in the south building, I stole a set of the glass doors from the chemistry room. I still have them.

My last report card had a .25 GPA. That's point-two-five, or one quarter of one grade point.

Tags: Clover Park High, Clover Park High Class of 81, Clover Park High School

Lessons in home repair

It's a double post today. This one, also from Origins, goes under 'Marital Combat'. Lock and load!

Those who do their own home repair know that many lessons are learned along the way. I learned a good one years ago about caulking guns.

I was at the end of my tallest ladder, an aluminum one about three hundred dollars in length, if you know what I mean, trying to caulk a window I had installed. There were several problems. First, the gun was a cheap one that performed poorly. My master and commander, the wife, had convinced me to get a cheaper one. My other problem was the ladder was leaning against the wrong house. Oh, I lived there, and my money went to pay for it every month, but I no longer felt it was 'our' house. I felt it was under the control of the woman I married and now resented. I was a tenant worker. The job was going wrong, and my anger grew in geometric proportion to the amount of caulk that went where it shouldn't. I had caulk on me, the ladder, the side of the house, and areas of the window it needn't be. Finally I threw the caulking gun to the ground and came flying down the ladder and landed on the gun. The wife rushed out to see what was happening and I gave her a loud and colorful briefing on the project, her, and her house. I don't know how often I had cursed the house and the wife, or the exact words I used that time, but I do remember the wife reaching her limit, and yelling at me while slamming the back door against the wall over and over. She didn't realize that her precious little dog had wandered between the door and the wall.

They say the bombing of Dresden produced a fire whose heat was so great that pieces of buildings rose in a fiery vortex, high enough to pass the airplanes dropping the bombs. When brought to a high temperature, marital combat plays out in a similar way. After the wife slammed the back door, I responded by kicking over a dresser her uncle gave her. It was the ugliest dresser I had ever seen, and another project she started but couldn't seem to finish. The "I will get 'round to it" things that lived on top of the dresser fell and patio, smashing to pieces. Then I turned my wrath on the largest symbol of all that was demoralizing and unjust in our marriage; I hit the side of the house. My physical strength was about as weak as my ability to manage my stress, so I only succeeded in gouging my hand.

After cooling off I had a rare moment of clarity that allowed me a good look at myself. I was embarrassed, disgusted, and worried. The wife came out and we looked at the door. The hinges were nearly pulled from the frame. She checked her dog and found no injuries, and I picked up the mangled remains of my caulking gun. The tube of caulk, once full, had ejaculated its guts all over the lawn. She suggested that we see a counselor, and I agreed. That same week we went to a counselors' office and pushed ourselves into the opposing ends of a large couch. I had begun to realize I had a lot to learn about myself, but I did understand my lesson in house repair: don't hold back when purchasing a caulking gun.

Nightmares

Another memory from the old site. Sweet dreams...

I remember as a young kid lying awake at night and being afraid of dying. I'm not sure if I was even in the first grade. My mom took me to church, so I knew about God, and I would ask her to pray to God not to let me die. How does a young kid develop a fear like that?

I used to have a lot of nightmares when I was young. Usually I would fall to my death. One nightmare had a science fiction elemnet to it. The one about the furnace. Yeah, the furnace. It would detatch from the chimmney, grow two accordian like arms each with big mechanical claws, walk out of the garage, and come looking for me. It always caught and crushed me to death. Oww.

As I grew older the nightmares subsided. But I did have one in my late teens which was clear and memorable. In it I told my dad to go fuck himself. He went into his bedroom and got his .38, came back out and shot me. I felt the bullet go into my shoulder and shatter my shoulder blade as it exited my back. When I woke up there was a sharp pain in my shoulder and I laid back in the bed thinking, "That son of a bitch."

Beneath the illusion

This is an old post from the other site. I was thinking of all the divorced guys at work and how they appeared to have survived without much trouble, but I knew that we all have so much more under that carefully maintained surface.

I hardly remember seeing a good marriage while growing up. The grey facade of my parent's union and the ever rising divorce rate made me feel that marriage was a big sham foisted upon the populace by some invisible group with a cruel sense of humor. I want to blame my fellow Baptists. Why not? You go to church, the preacher tells you God made man, woman, and the institution of marriage, and God saw that 'it was good', but how can an omniscient being create something that only works fifty percent of the time? I know, it has nothing to do with God, it is us.

I watch guys at work get divorced and find 'true love' again and it's always a co-worker and it always seems to work. It's like they're in a club. The second wife club. I know divorce is no picnic, I've nearly been there, but they make it look worth while. They crawl out of the marital battle field blackened and tattered. A nurse comes to the bedside and wipes the blood off. Their eyes meet and it's true love. Once more into the breech dear lovers! I know my perceptions are an illusion and my co-workers wished they hadn't gone through what they did and, being typical men, they'll never reveal the pain or the regrets. It's funny how things seem from a distance.