VITAL STATISTICS
Dreamer: Helen
Date: Jan. 12, 1997
Title: Large Snakes Can't Bring the Dead Back to Life or Jerome's Zombie Bride
I was stranded with the crew from Gilligan's Island, except instead of being on an island we were stranded in the backyard of my parents' house. Also, Gilligan's sister had been with us but she died in the shipwreck. For some reason we couldn't bury her, and it was getting to be two months with an exposed corpse lying around. Ginger and Mary Ann, and the Howells really couldn't hack it anymore - none of us could - so the Professor suggested we feed her to the very large snake that lived in the big tree. It was a 15-20 foot snake, and I helped Skipper try to hoist it out of the tree but it sank its fang deep into the ball of my thumb. It hurt like crazy and I remember thinking, “So that's what that Bible quote about 'sharper than a serpent's tooth' means.”
Skipper found some spaghetti tongs in my parents' kitchen, pulled the snake's fang out of my hand, and laid the snake out behind the garage. Using the same spaghetti tongs, we dragged the remains of Gilligan's sister over and coaxed the snake to swallow her, feet first. The Professor also said something about snakes having some kind of preservative effect on bodies before they started digesting them.
Next thing I know, I'm at my job as a quiz show panelist crowded into the back of this dusty old classroom. The MC would ask each of us some weird question and we would have to respond with the best answers we could come up with. He held me in utter contempt because the only answers I could ever come up with were morbidly inappropriate. If the question was, “Things you do after 2 months?” I'd say stuff like, “Feed corpses to snakes.” Stephanie L. was there too, and the only nice person at this job.
I lived with Jenny K., and her (dream) brother and a roommate, Ronald, in our apartment/aquarium fish store. Ronald turned out to be a psycho and stabbed her brother to death right by the fishtanks while I was watching. He made it very clear that he neither liked or trusted me. I also had to deal with another psycho, a homeless black man with wild hair named Jerome, who had found the snake and cut Gilligan's sister out of its belly. She was now fairly well-embalmed from soaking in snake juices. He said they were married, and he draped a wedding veil over her head and stuck black olives in her eye sockets. He dragged her all over town with him and called her 'wife'.
One day he showed up at my quiz show job with weird lake-bottom muck heaped up all over his shoes like rows of teeth and kept trying to engage me in lunatic conversation. The MC was furious at me. I didn't want to go home because Ronald was living in my apartment. My nerves were frayed, and I needed a break, so Stephanie gave me the keys to her house - a nice, quiet, two-story place she shared with Moon and Katie H.
I was actually more afraid of Jerome because of his connection to the snake. Everybody else in town acted like Jeromešs 'wife' was merely a zombie; I was the only one who insisted she was dead. I also became paranoid that I would be eaten alive by the snake.
At work Jenny tells me she's thinking about feeding her brother's body to a snake so she can get him back as a zombie too. I try to dissuade her from this madness, but she persists. I can't go back home at all any longer; it's too weird. So, I try to take refuge in an abandoned rock quarry. There I run into Jerome, who says that, because I'm his sister-in-law, I have to help him find a place to take a shower. He's acting fairly lucid, and his 'wife' is nowhere in sight, so I give him the keys to Stephanie's place, because I know everybody who lives there is gone on vacation. But the next day after work, he's back at the quarry on top of this slide/crane thing hollering a steady stream of complete insanity the whole time. Plus. he keeps going back to Stephanie's house where he rants loudly, reads her mail, and masturbates energetically all over the living room. While he's there, I sneak into her house to retrieve some wooden, yellow buttons I'd left in a room on the second floor, and sneak back out again. I feel quite guilty because she's been the only sane friend I've had in this whole experience and I don't want her to discover Jerome in her house. He's obviously crazed, and from the content of his rants it's clear he's capable of violence, but I march back into the house and tell him to give me back the keys - which he does with no argument. I still have to get him out of the house, though, and at that point I wake up.
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