Tim Brandigan's dream...

 

Tim is waking up from a dream. Patrick sleeps in one corner of Branagan’s downstairs den, underneath the zoo of stripes from Terrence’s knitted Tiger predilections. Pat falls asleep at Friends house as he falls asleep on his school desk, his face ruffles and exudes a battered red, one arm and elbow positions at a ninety degree half-frame around his chin, his eyes squint like raisins in Bev Pinesol’s squirt-inducing tapioca-n-rice specialty she prepares when Marilyn is out of town. Slowly, the red caves in Patrick’s eye torch into yellow consciousness as he feels a rollercoaster jerk.  Tim is shaking him into consciousness as if he were convicted of something substantial.

 

“Patrick! Patrick!

 

“Hmmmmmmmmmmymmm. Yeah. Wah?”

 

“Ohmigod Patrick. Look. Ohmigod!!”

 

Patrick clasps his eyes shut and then pries them open, offering an offal yawn.

 

“Patrick, I gotta tell you about this dream. I think it is of utmost importance. We need to act now if we intend to act at all.”

 

“Yeah. Patrick is attired in standard McReynold’s household wardrobe, undershirt and corduroy slacks. The back of his pants sags slightly and periodically through Tim’s tale Patrick readjusts the hemline.”

 

“Well, you were in this dream, only you had hair gushing out of your mouth and nostrils. Acute, wicks, follicles, whenever you spoke you grunted kind of like what you are doing right now.”

 

“Wyuh?” Patrick inquires, opening up in mid-yawn.

 

“And we were slashing our way through the west bluff. For some reason, Christmas lights were festooned everywhere like spider webs. Neighbors bore happy birthday caps like dunces, made out of old wrinkled Urinal Jars with yellow coffee stains brimmed like jaundiced solar systems. Everyone was grunting and shepherding collars  with no dogs. It was like…weird.”

 

“Tim, you are like seriously starting to like frighten me. It’s what? Four in the freakin’ morning? Somethin’ like that? Your chemical campaign induced nighttime histrionics can wait for at least another three hours, in the meantime I think I am going to safari my way back into a nighttime slumber and dream of…..”

 

“Did I mention it was the three of us, myself, of course (after all I was the original dreamer) you and some girl you kept on referring to as “Hall, Liz”  who was dressed in mossy parachute pants.”

 

“What! The three of us! Hyacinth was there?”

 

“It gets better too, all of the webbed lights and groaning zombies and collarless mammals, all seemed to be one-long continuous gust-of wind-blown ribbon which lead to Von Behrens front porch, where, for some reasons, there was a candle, the only light outside of the grotesque Christmas lights.”

 

“Yeah. Patrick prods his pinky finger into a walnut-lidded eye, fishing out particles of sleep, puss and a broken eyelash lodged in the corner of his left eye.

 

“So we enter the house and everyone out in front is kneeling, groaning, like Dave’s house is an alter of some sorts.”

 

“Patrick nods and says the word Yeah, right, whatever.”

 

“This gets weird. Hyacinth insists that she is staying outside because, as she adamantly iterates, ‘I don’t need to go in there. It wouldn’t do me any good, besides…’ We, you in particular, nudge her and she refuses, stating her quotation besides over and over again like a round, until finally she turns, spits at me in the face and says in a very grade school girls are the dominant human genus voice it wouldn’t do me any good because I already Know what's in there. Before she twirls around and plumps lopsided cartwheels all the way down the street.”

 

Patrick’s mouth is stretched open in astonishment; all the way form chin to nostril.

 

“Dude.”

           

“Yeah, here’s the weird part. Everything in Dave’s house is mouthwash. Green, except for some reason when we look at it, it turns color, like a hamster gyrating inside a caged 3-D kaleidoscope. It was almost like that Pink Floyd video Boner showed us when he was baked last week. Weird.”

 

“Weird.”

 

“And all the while the furniture is break dancing. On and off the ceiling. The living room overhead fan is belted where his sheeted sofa is, and his family is spinning around on the fan, like it is a carnival ride.”

           

“So what do we do?”

 

“Well, I asked David’s folks whether or not he was home, and of course they point down a labyrinthine hallway, with the tented table top and chairs of the dining room drooping above us like giant wet leaves.”

 

“Dude.”

 

“Ok, here comes the weird, important part, we are trundling through the ceiling, which is more like a path, and we approach the multi-doored hallway, right before his room, the weird thing is we can now hear water dripping from somewhere and swamp flotsam. Somehow we found ourselves in a morass. And for some reason, we find ourselves very comfortable.”

 

 “How do you mean?”

 

“Well,” Tim pauses and then regroups his thought, motioning with his arms in orchestral strokes, “We unzip our flies, plop out our dicks and immediate start to pee.”

 

“Pee?”

 

“We pee for like five minutes straight, all around the upside down hallways, carrying our penises in front of us like super soakers, then, eventually, we start to squirt our penises at each other, like one of your water gun fights in your basement.”

 

“Tim?”

 

“Yeah, weird, and we are both trying to urinate in each others eyes saying things like Got you and Blam! Blam! Blam! and You’re dead and am not. What’s weird is that we can’t stop peeing, like a midnight Pepsi rush, liquid just keeps on flowing out of us like Niagara falls, and soon we notice that we our sloshing in our own piss. Only our pee changes color as well and has lumped together in the morass and kinda like resembles He-man slime. Eventually, we drop our penises and start to dunk each other like free swim at Logan pool, only there is no cute lifeguards and everything, and I mean everything, smells like moldy shit and sneakers.”

 

“I take it the lifeguards forgot to put on their coconut lotion?”

 

            Tim doesn’t acknowledge Patrick and continues. “All of a sudden we realize that we have been splashing in our own pee and that when we were fooling around, we entered Von Behrens room. Only his room looks exactly, and I mean it down to a science on this, exactly like the tunnel down in Bradley Park.”

 

“The tunnel?”

 

“Yeah, only there’s no lights and no softball but we can still somehow see. I’m wearing goggles for some reason and all of your facial hair has twisted into a very long moustache with ponytail braids. We look at each other perplexed, still laughing from when we peed all over and tried to dunk each other. You are about ready to call out for David when we hear a voice.”

 

“A voice?”

 

“Yes, coming from where his bed normally is, only we can’t see anything except each other yet in the dream. This voice interrupts up somehow, even though we haven’t talked yet.”

 

“Wha' did the voice say?” Tim pauses for a moment, crosses himself, from navel to forehead and then sideways.

 

“It was the voice of Satan!”

 

“What!”

 

“But Satan cackles like he had just gotten off on fuckin’ a little lamb. There was something distinct and sinister in the snarl of the voice, booming HA’s. A jester who was about ready to assassinate the king, overtake the kingdom.”

 

“Dude.” Patrick ohms in a serious drone.

 

“And the voice jutted out from the bed, it snapped, saying something like, ‘You idiotic fools. You have wasted every single thing that was precious inside of you. And now, now you must die’”.

 

“…….”.

 

“For some reason though we felt that the voice couldn’t have been David’s. We neared the voice and discerned that it was coming out of the very exact location from where his bed frame stood, only, and this is the weird, creepy part, the voice it turns out is echoing out of a long, cylinder, which upon closer scrutiny turns out to be the HOLE.”

 

“The Hole?”

 

“The sewer opening in Bradley Park. And that the slime we peed is flowing out of it, like the cylinder is barfing, so much piss-slash-slime is gushing out.”

 

            “Shit.”

 

“And for some reason my goggles offer a little light and your pony-tail moustache propels us deeper into the tunnel where we hear multiple grunts and horrific HA’s and as we say the word David, looking for him, the piss-slime subsides and we realize that we have pushed so far back into the tunnel, that we are lost and we have no where left to go.”

 

“……”

 

“And then we start to quake, shivering and we hear David’s mendacious, almost demonic laughter and as we look up we see a pair of illuminant nuclear cooper eyes, looking back at us, that our not our own, laughing, the demon-eyes were laughing Patrick, I shit you not they were laughing.

 

Midway through the retelling of Tim’s dream Patrick was beginning to drool and now, Tim pauses with his story to punctuate suspense and nearly all of Patrick’s chin is drool and for some reason he is speechless and the lids of his eyes are vaulted open, he may have gone over a minute without having offered the world a  blink, picturing, inside his head, a slightly different yet generally the same vignette of Tim’s dreamtime psyche, the thriller zombies and webbed lights and ceiling-fan family on a carnival ride and both Patrick and Tim peeing (Patrick, of course, imagines his pecker to have a lot more hairs then Tims, whose envisioned penis Patrick pictured as having a sort of beige turtle neck clothed around it) and then Patrick feels himself, feels himself splashing around with Tim and trying to baptized him underwater, Patrick feels the sewer water enter his ears and nasal passages and begin to fill the snot laden linings of his late summer sore throat as Tim recalls this vision, retelling the nocturnal adumbration to Patrick in deep, detail  and with late night sleep over confidentiality and best friend sincerity and Patrick sees his friend, the one they refer to as VonB, the one who sometimes feels that he is a gangsta and dresses with his clothes which still have the tags affixed to the side of them, his hat twisted so that the bill looks more like a frozen boomerang, the laces on his shoes sloppily crossed-he sees his friend, fresh out of spilled dice to drop, darkly-outlined, in a room that was once his, clad in a jester cap, telling his friends that they have wasted, that they have let go of everything inside of them that was at one time worth something, and that know they must die. Patrick can hear Dave’s voice, cackling, can hear him loud and clear telling both Patrick and Tim (even though it is Tim Branagan relaying the dream like anecdote to Patrick) that they are no longer welcome here-that they must descend and leave in order to find out who they are. In order to find out what blood truly circulates in their veins.

 

“Patrick?”

 

Blackout. By the precocious age of one-three Patrick has set foot in Lums Family rest aunt all of three times. The first was when he was three years old and his grandparents were watching Amy, Chris and Patrick because Mama McReynolds was busy giving birth to Allan. The second was shortly after Sarah learned how to say Pepsi and Warren (pleased as a bowl of spiked punched) video taped the segment and sent it off to Pepsi which he is sure they used in Commercials over seas and in Russia only he sure as hell hasn’t received one damn dime in terms of profits people. The last time Patrick was in love was two years ago and was a precociously gifted eleven year old and his Parents figured it was about high time that they taught their eldest, first born soon all about the birds and the bees only to find out that Patrick had already known all that since about the time he was five and suggested to Warren and Helen, over buttered and sloppily syrupped heaps of Barnburner offerings, the best place in town to rent high quality non-statically pornographic visual simulation.

 

Lums carries with it the heavy feeling of autumn year round. Patrick’s Mother always wondered why Patrick used to play gynecologist, rather than doctor, with Martha Thomas down the street. The colors of the booths are the same as the trees which grace Bradley Park in October and early November. The air conditioner always seems to be crackling even, sometimes, in the winter and late at night, when Patrick goes for his solitary walk, smoking a stolen Benson and Hedges in the alleyway behind Barker Avenue, sometimes, he peers inside the wooden blinds which cut off the windows that peer inside the Smoking section, he can see some of the chairs turned upside down and stacked with the jutting wooden legs protruding towards the still life oscillating fan and there is something, for some reason, beautiful to Patrick about the sheer nakedness of the limbs and the solitude of the restaurant after hours and the way he can peer inside the window so much that he feels that he is peering into the blackcap hole socket of a human skull and he has found the love of his life but, for some reason, everybody has gone home and it is after hours and the manager is busy channeling timecards and wondering who to hire to replace the wayward chef. The skull gradually attires itself in flakey skin the color of an albino saltine with Tim’s brow facing straight into Patrick, like he is one the other side of the mirror, asking Patrick just what the fuck they are going to do about this whole situation. With VonBehren pulling the power on the whole neighborhood and then informing them, his bestest of buds, that their lives have equated little less than shit.

 

“Tim, shit, whatdowedo? Tim, shit.”

 

“I don’t know. Do you believe in Omens?”

 

“What? I feign saying grace in class, why would I believe in Omens.”

 

“That’s Amen. Patrick, you’re really starting to wig out on me.”

 

“Wig out. Who’s started to wig out on whom here?” Patrick’s body has drifted from stiff sleep to a blender of bewilderment in a period of fifteen minutes. He quakes.

 

“Tim,”

 

Tim quickly dismantles the rotary phone, dialing with a possessed vigor. A thick, soporific voice slices into the fourth lull. Still shaking Patrick can hear Tim inquire if it was indeed Mr. Von Behren who picked up the phone, before Tim apologizes; identity’s himself, enunciating very clearly that both he and Patrick have reasons to be concerned with your son.  Months later, while collecting with chip February pre-dusk briskness and scrambled snow bank clime, Tim Brandigan will confess to Von Behren that maybe he and Patrick did over react a little bit, before Tim tells David that look, the world is coming to an end with the middle east and all, asking David if his soul is prepared and if he is so too sure.