Fan’s Complaint

The following was found in the excavation of my travel journal. It was written in the summer of 2003. It is an account of a dream I had somewhere in Europe, probably written on a train or a park bench when I should instead have been talking to strange European women.

***

I am a favored aide of President Bush. He calls me “Willy.”

“Willy, come on in here,” he says, “tell me what you think I should be doing about this mess.”

So I ask with complete sincerity, “Don’t you think the American people would be happier if we spent the money currently budgeted for war on improving social services?”

President Bush then produces an elaborate 3-D display of line graphs from nowhere.

“This is our economy now,” he says, pointing at the graphs, which were blue holographic lines descending slowly in real time. “Each line represents a major sector,” he says. He pauses to gauge my reaction, then continues, “This is what happens if the sectors related to defense stalls.” At this point, three of the many lines on the graph turn yellow and dipped sharply. Seconds later, all of the other lines dove precipitously toward the carpet.

I was convinced. It was all in 3-D.

Claire Danes walks in and says, “Mr. President, Matt Damon is waiting.”

***

I was hesitant to post this, because the previous post listing the top five regrets of my twenty-five years also happened to have been the 400th post on this blog. It would have been a nice way to end whatever it is I am doing here.

But tonight (last night), I watched the world’s toughest man cry. He finally hung up his skates. He spoke of how hard his decision to retire was, but that he was able to do it because he knew it was the right thing to do, at the right time.

That seems like a damn good way to make decisions to me, and so I’ll keep on doing whatever it is I do, whether it’s posting little scraps here, or smoking, or drinking. No matter how counter-productive it seems, I’ll keep doing it until I know it is time to quit.

T, J, S, and I are roommates in a small apartment. While we’re sitting around watching TV, a cop jumps through one of our windows. We quickly surround him to tend to his wounds. He’s hurt pretty bad, with several gunshot wounds in his torso. With his dying breath, he tells us to run.

S. grabs the cop’s gun from out of its holster, and tells the rest of us to hide. Someone dressed like a terrorist from Counterstrike jumps through the window that the cop came through, and S. shoots him dead. S. takes the the shotgun and desert eagle off the terrorist’s body, and hands them to T. and J. Another terrorists kicks down our door and comes through. T. and S. quickly make short work of him. His dual pistols are handed to me.

The four of us exit our apartment out into the street, where we find all the cars have been turned over. Terrorists are hiding behind the cars, and a long firefight ensues between the four of us and the fifteen or so terrorists. We eventually win.

The four of us are in a high school gymnasim. The entire town is here to honor our heroic actions. S. is on stage, giving a speech. T., J., and I are watching from the bleachers. S. finishes his speech, and waves at the three of us to get on stage with him. I manage to get off the bleachers first, and I see a look of horror on S.’ face. The bleachers are collapsing behind me.

T. and J. are dead.

I’m still living with S. in our apartment. S. is slowly going insane. Since we saved the town, we are the only citizens allowed to carry firearms. S. has been brandishing his gun all around town. Whipping it out at the 7-11 to get free groceries, and at the bar to get free drinks. He comes home drunk every night with prostitutes, and makes them leave without any money.

I stop spending time in the apartment, leaving early in the morning on walks around town, and going back only to sleep. One night, as I’m falling asleep, I get the feeling that tonight, S. is going to bring home the girl who is supposed to be my girlfriend. It was a strange, semi-conscious notion. None of us were really ourselves, we were just playing characters in this story. Neither T. nor J. are really dead. This girl, however, does not belong in this dream, and cannot be allowed to sleep with S.

So I get out of bed and hide in S.’ closet. My hunch was correct. S. did bring the girl back. They start making out and taking each others’ clothes off. I burst out of the closet and unload both my guns into S. When I am done, both S. and the girl are dead.

incredibly intricate dreams of crystalline windows, windshields, spider-webs, led to fractured dreams of labyrinthine narratives. following her on rollerblades, tracing out routes in the wastelands of brooklyn which may or may not have spelled a hidden message (a la City of Glass), until I found myself at an artists’ collective in an old warehouse, where the spider-webs and windows came back.

she said, “you’re falling apart. you should spend the night.”

I’m driving around in Queens–windows open, listening to the Ramones–when a bug flies into my eye and I lose control of the car. Through one eye I can see the car going through a stop sign, getting on the sidewalk and narrowly missing an SUV backing out of a driveway.

I manage to grab the wheel and regain control. I slam on the brakes. For some reason, I’m not wearing a seatbelt, and I pass out after the car comes to a stop.

When I come to, my car is full of Asian girls, who are delighted that I am okay.

“I was so scared that you were dead. I’m sorry, it’s all my fault,” one girl says to me.

Huh? I think to myself. I look around, and all these girls are dressed for the club. I hear thumping bass coming from the house in front of which I’ve stopped. I’m blinded by the headlights of an SUV stopped behind me when I check the rearview. I piece together that these girls were leaving the house party in the SUV, the one that I almost hit, and now they’re worried I might blame them, or specifically, the driver–the hot girl talking to me with booze on her breath.

“It’s nothing. I was able to swerve away. You should be more careful next time though. You might hit a white guy who’d press charges.”

Somehow, they never noticed that I was driving on the sidewalk, and the girl is really grateful that I won’t call the cops or press charges. She gives me a kiss and a wink, and asks me to call her. I nod.

“Oh, what’s your name?” I quickly ask as she’s walking away from my car.

“It’s Louise. What’s yours?”

“Call me Jim.”

I’ve just graduated from college, and I have a feeling in my bones that I’ll never see any of these people again. We are all by a gas station. It is not a ceremony of any sort. We are all going through the crowd looking for each other, to wish each other luck in our future endeavors, to say our “see you agains,” to say our “goodbye forevers.”

Everyone I know is here. Some say goodbye to me, some wave, some hug, one guy throws a paper airplane with a message written on the wings. I catch a glimpse of the girl I really want to say goodbye to, as the airplane is launched. By the time I pick it up off the ground, this girl has disappeared.

I woke up feeling incredibly sad, even though I expect to have a nice, relaxing sunday.

Oh, I neglected to mention that the girl in this dream was E****a.

I am somewhere in the great plains, driving east, heading home. The eastern horizon is already dark as the sun sets in the rearview mirror. There’s a sign for Cody, just 90 miles south, across the state line.

I’ve been to Cody before. There is a gas station just outside of town that sells really good cigarettes. And that state there has the lowest tobacco tax I’ll see until PA. I’ll take a short (90 mile) detour to bring a few cartons back to New York.

It’s a two-lane straightshot to Cody. I’m doing 100, and the engine is eager to go faster. She hasn’t gone like this since the last time I was in Utah. The sky is brown ahead of me–there’s a bad storm ahead. I hope I can get to Cody and back north to the interstate before the storm hits.

I make it to the gas station very quickly. There are some cowboys smoking cigarettes by their pickup trucks. I don’t like the looks of them. I’ll be in and out with my cigarettes in five minutes. Those cowboys won’t be a problem.

The restaurant greeter inside the gas station hassles me. I tell him I just want some cigarettes, and he makes me wait before I’m allowed through the restaurant. I finally get to go through, and instead of the convenience store part of the gas station, it’s a McDonald’s. The building is apparently a big circle, and I went in through the wrong entrance. I get through the McDonald’s to the trucker showers, and then I hear sounds like gunshots. Outside the window, I see hail.

Past the showers, and it’s another diner. The cowboys are in here now. They look at me as I argue with the waitress, who won’t let me through unless I eat there. There are truckers behind me coming out of the showers, attracted by the commotion.

I see my car through a window, absolutely battered by the hail, and I come to the realization that I am not going to make it out of Cody.

I am doing some filing work in an old office building downtown. The fileroom in which I work is on the 3rd floor. The place to which I have to bring the files is on the 4th floor. And the person to whom I report is on the 5th floor.

To get from files where they need to go, to the fourth floor, I have to push a cart up a broken and therefore nonmoving walkway to the 5th floor, then use all my strength to get the cart down a flight of stairs. And then what needs to be done, is that I need to take one piece of paper that verifies that the files have been moved back up to the 5th floor. But for some reason, I am not allowed to take the stairs. It leads to a freight area of the 5th floor, which is not at all connected to the offices. So I have to take the stairs down to the lobby, and take the people elevator from the lobby to the 5th floor.

As if that wasn’t a horrible enough fucking nightmare… For one thing, that is almost exactly what I do, when I have work… Anyway, there is more.

On my way from the lobby to the 5th floor with the verification paper, I run into a girl from high school. I don’t like her and never did. She is obnoxious and ugly. We get to talking on the elevator up, and I enjoy the conversation so much that I did not notice passing the 5th floor. Paper in hand, I follow her up to some other floor. She apparently works as a messenger. We keep talking, and neither of us wants to leave. It’s decided that we go up to the roof. She knows a way up.

It’s fantastic on the roof, once we got rid of the homeless guy who was sleeping up there. We talk, share a cigarette, then start making out. Things progress, and then it turns out I am impotent.

As I am being consoled, my phone rings–it is my boss, asking for that verification paper. I tell him I ran into some problems, but will get it to him right away. I put my clothes on and run to the door. It is locked. I try to use my phone to call for help, but the battery has died.

***

More than the one with the homeless man/monster suffocating me on the subway with his tentacle, more than the one where the bomb detonates in lower Manhattan, more than the one with cocaine candy hearts, and definitely more than any of the E****a dreams, this dream has convinced me that I am completely fucked in the head and need to seek help. I actually sprang up in bed when I realized the phone had died in my dream.

This dream was so scary because it’s utterly lacking in dream logic and so close to real life. I don’t really understand how something so mundane and realistic can be scary, except that it was unexpected. I could deal with raining crocodiles, or my teeth and eyeballs falling out, but I’m not prepared to have the same damn things in my dream as in my waking life. Maybe my subconscious knows that I need to get my shit together, and it crafted a picture of my life exaggerated just enough and in the right places so I could see how stupid and ridiculous my real life is. Or maybe since I managed to duck whatever shit was supposed to happen to me on Friday the 13th, Manos McFate has sent me a chilling vision of things to come.

Either way, I doubt I’ll get any more sleep tonight.

I am driving on the Pacific Coast Highway, the sunroof is open and there is a happy girl in the passenger seat. We are heading south. I know this because the ocean is on the left. I can hear the waves and the seals when I brake for the corners.

The girl asks why I have to drive so fast. I tell her that the whole point of having a car like this is to take the corners fast. She frowns a bit, then nods in agreement.

A yellow Corvette is quickly behind me. I pick up the pace, but cannot manage to lose him. He flashes his high beams as we pass a sign for a pull-off. I pull over to let him pass.

The girl is gone. As is the Corvette, and the ocean. I’m somewhere else now. It’s grey and no longer sunny. I go even faster, sort of hoping that I could catch the Corvette, and maybe the girl, but have a feeling that both are long gone. I keep going faster and faster, and finally I lose the tail-end on a sharp right.

The tires scream, and then it’s just the scratch of sliding on dirt. It’s too dark to see, but I know there is a cliff face rushing toward me on the driver’s side window.

Not a dream, just some alternate interpretations for my Asian dream, prompted by a night out with Asians and some introspection.

1. I am so uneasy around large groups of Asians that I feel the need to be intoxicated. Or maybe it’s just that I need to be intoxicated when I’m around large groups of people. OR maybe it’s just that I need to be intoxicated. Regardless, the resulting lack of judgement means that I wind up getting involved in tedious conversations with the wrong (white) people.

2. The “answers” that I had been looking for from my former English teacher–which had I had deemed to be of great significance during my short-lived embrace of my Asian American identity, can only be found if I can break through the “wall of whiteness” that surrounds me (ie my social network).

3. If I do not give my heart to another Asian, it will be crushed. Or conversely, if I give my heart to another Asian, it will be crushed. I’m not entirely clear on this.

***

Aforementioned night out with Asians: was not entirely satisfactory, as I was the only one drinking, as well as the only one who had to drive afterwards. Failed to reach necessary level of intoxication for having a good time, instead reaching the “lonely longing” phase that happens if I stop after the third or fourth drink.

Midwestern pragmatism vs. East-coast excess, the twinkified prodigal vs. the Good Asian Son–the contrast is remarkably striking whenever I find myself in that particular crowd.

Whatever this guilt is, it had better be the ticket to grad school.

I’m at a bar and grill close to Stuy. I may still be in high school. I have got some candy hearts in my pocket that are made out of cocaine.

I sit down with a bunch of unlikely Asians from high school, and we all order food. Then all of my companions get up and go “upstairs.” I follow them, but I’m stopped at the staircase.

“What’s up there?” I ask the bouncer.

“It’s a Korean Karaoke place.”

“Let me up. My friends are up there.”

“You’re not Korean.”

“Fine, I like it better down here anyway,” I lie.

“We’re taking over the downstairs too,” he says.

“Fuck you, asshole. Like the world needs another Korean Karaoke joint.” Then I deck him, but no one seems to care.

He’s not really much of a bouncer. In fact, he was just another person from high school. A bit taller than I am, but very skinny. I’ve lost all interest in going upstairs. I just want to do my candy hearts.

My English teacher walks in, and she asks me what I’m doing here. I buy drinks for both of us, and I excuse myself to find a place to convert the candy hearts to powder form. I’m convinced that if I gave my teacher the converted candy hearts, I would get to go home with her. I check the bathroom, but there are bald men in there–three identical bald men in orange baseball shirts using the urinals and the one stall.

I go back to the table where I had been sitting, but I get completely freaked out that someone will see me crushing the candy hearts and get suspicious. I lay one of the hearts out, carefully, after looking around warily. As soon as I put the spoon to the heart, one of the bald men sits next to me and starts a conversation. Then I look around, and I’m blocked into this booth by white acquaintances from college. They ask me about the Yankees, and some other New York things, and all I can do is nod politely and hope that they go away soon. I’m watching the bar, and my English teacher finishes her drink, and heads upstairs.

Now the people I’m sitting with have finished the food that arrived when I wasn’t looking, and they’re ready to leave. The bus boy comes around and takes away all the utensils. My acquaintances, and the bald guy say good-bye, and all I’m left with are candy hearts and the busboy asking me to leave so that they could close.