VITAL STATISTICS
Dreamer: Helen
Date: Aug. 18, 2000
Title: Porn, Betrayal, and a Tornado
I was going around a dream-geography town with Gene. It was an upscale town, reminiscent of Boulder, CO or Burlington, VT, with a pedestrian shopping zone filled with a lot of boutiques and such.
We did a lot of window shopping but it was getting late and stores were about to close. We decided to return to the toy store to buy a game to play, which was very much like Connect 4 but in the dream was called Connectix.
On the way back home, I realized I needed to purchase some pornography, so we stopped at a little magazine shop and I bought all the dubious looking magazines I could find. Somewhere along the way we met up with Heidi (a real-life friend) and we all walked home through Essex Jct.
It must have been garbage day on Park Street because trash was heaped up all along the curb on Park St. from the area where the railroad tracks cross the street to past the Beverage Outlet. Walking behind us was a grown-up version of Mike Clodgio (a real boy I went to elementary school with) who was strolling around with a bunch of similarly brutish friends. I passed by one heap of trash and noticed, sitting on top of it, a stack of glossy Japanese porno mags with lurid and brightly colored covers. I stopped to pick them up, hoping that Mike wouldn't notice what I was doing. But he walked right past without even recognizing me or what I was picking up.
Gene & Heidi had kept walking on, obliviously. I caught up to them and let them continue to ignore me all the way home. Once home (which was exactly like 1610 Jacob St. except inhabited by a different bunch of people and in a different location) we found a group of Wiccans in the dining room gathering to perform a memorial ritual for someone I only knew by name. I passed on sitting in, but Heidi joined them and so did Gene. I gave up on playing Connectix that night and I went to my bedroom, which was right off the dining room - exactly where it had been in the real Jacob St. house.
I decided to check out the porn magazines. The first one was small booklet that was quite thrilling, full of wildly obscene, crudely-drawn cartoons. I set it down and looked at the rest. The glossy-cover Japanese ones were not pornographic at all, were boring, and I couldn't read them besides. I looked through the other offbeat magazines I'd bought at the magazine store and discovered virtually all of them were not pornographic as well. One was a fanzine devoted entirely to a movie called Ultra Samurai Man (similar to a real film called Sgt. Kabukiman, NYPD). Another photocopied 'zine was all about Tibet, illustrated with grainy photos of fantastic scenery. One magazine was about guerrilla filmmaking. Another one fooled me momentarily into thinking it was a porno with a photo of two dinosaur skeletons arranged so it would look like they were fucking. It turned out all the rest of it was a very knowledgeable series of stories about the adventures of the author, an amateur paleontologist.
I went back out into the dining room and found the memorial service was through and now everyone was chilling out, smoking a little dope. They offered some to me, but I declined. Somebody asked me to turn on the TV, which I did. It turned on to one of the films in the Ultra Samurai Man series, with a scene that took place in a cubical-farm office setting. It was in the middle of the movie and I really wanted to see my first Ultra Samurai Man from start to finish, so I went back to bed and fell asleep.
60 seconds later I awoke, and it was morning. I went back to the dining room. Most of the witches were asleep in the living room. Heidi and Gene were awake. Heidi looking like she had been crying earlier but had composed herself by now, and Gene consoling her. I asked what was going on. Gene explained that Brian (Heidi's husband in real and dream life) was gone. Daniel (another real life mutual acquaintance) came in from the dining room and explained that Brian had said he was in love with somebody else and had gone.
I questioned Gene and Daniel to get a clearer idea of what was going on. Heidi was stoically cleaning the house and I didn't want to bother her. Gene and Daniel gave me an extremely fragmented story, but I was finally able to piece together that Brian had come to the conclusion that he was gay, had fallen in love with another man - possibly named James, who was a friend of Greg's or Daniel's or Tom's, or some combination thereof, or it was some other man entirely, and he (Brian) had gone.
Gene and I both felt that we should go find Brian and get this sorted out. Gay or not, he was still married, and he had to find a better way of resolving this issue than by ditching out on Heidi and disappearing without a word. So we headed over to Albany and walked up State St. asking everybody we even remotely recognized if they'd seen Brian. Finally we found someone who knew where he was and he agreed to parlay with him. At this point I felt as though I'd done pretty much all I could do for the time being. Gene and Heidi walked down State St. and I went into the CVS drugstore. (In this dreamscape Albany the CVS was located where the Crowne Plaza Hotel is in real life, and most of the real life modern buildings were tall historic buildings.)
The cashier at the CVS was an acquaintance of mine so she and I got to gossiping and talking and laughing for a while. Then I left to walk up State St. As I walked I noticed that some people were behaving in a quite agitated manner. Looking to the sky in the north I saw, to my horror, a tornado bearing down on Albany. I sprinted down the street all the way back to the CVS yelling to everybody to take cover from the tornado, where my friend, her co-worker, and me all sprawled out on the floor in the bandages and rubbing alcohol aisle. I want to see what was going on, so I crawled to the plate glass window and saw that the tornado had gone around to the south side of State St. and was coming up behind the smoked-glass box that is the IBM building on State and Pearl. Just then a young, female Japanese tourist and an old white woman strolled by on the sidewalk. I opened the door and ordered them to come inside, practically dragging them in along with two other old women and an old man. We all lay down on the floor, but after a while my curiosity got the best of me and I crept back to the window where I watched the tornado obliterate a tall, red-brick building next to the IBM black glass cube.
Watching a tall building cave in on itself brought me to the brink of panic, but my CVS friend helped me keep myself together. Eventually a cop came by and told us the tornado had gone to Menands and it was safe to come out. I left the store and practically skipped up State St. where I saw a green glider/plane slowly spiral down to earth and land in a parking lot. The pilot got out and started boasting about his heroic trip and how hungry he was. A cop came over and started giving him shit in a good-natured way. Apparently the pilot had been wanting to do something daring like flying in a tornado, but before I can find out what exactly happened I woke up.
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