Magic Tricks

Chris Baldridge was performing at a little girl's birthday party. Her entire extended family was there. The family was like an Old World Italian family, or gypsies, or the mafia. They were powerful, mysterious, and dangerous. They were all dressed in black clothes, and they stood around a huge room watching Chris as he entertained the little girl.

His first trick was to release a blue bird from each of his sleeves. The little girl reached out and grabbed them and plunked them down on a table before they could fly away. She looked at Chris with a very determined and grudging expression, letting him know that he could not impress her.

The father offered Chris a deal. If Chris could stand on a chair placed on top of a table and perform the same trick again, he would double the fee, but if Chris couldn't, he would receive no pay at all. Chris knew that he had no choice and turned away with a sigh. From the chair on top of the table, Chris tried the trick again. The birds flew out of his sleeves and then fell to the table. Somehow Chris had lost.

Grandmother?

I was a little boy, playing with my new friend in the valley in the mountains where she lived. She was an African American, and she lived in a small beige house. I was confused about what I looked like, so I went into her house to ask her Grandmother. I stood near the bedroom door and called out, "Excuse me! Grandmother, can I come in?" "No," she replied, "but I'll come out." She came through the door and looked down at me. I bowed and said, "Grandmother? Do I have red hair?" I don't remember how she answered, but she was amused.

The little girl and I found another friend, who was a boy, and I turned into a girl. I looked at myself in a mirror and saw that I was wearing a gray T shirt with cut-off sleeves. I liked the slope of the my shoulders and thought I looked like a basketball player.

The three of us followed the little girl on a hike out of the valley. At first we were on a wide trail, going up past campgrounds, up over the mountains. The little girl led us in a single-file line; I was in the middle. Then she turned off onto a narrower trail, then onto an even narrower one. The last trail was barely wider than my foot--smoothly-brushed light tan dirt lined with narrow pebbles. We climbed over rock outcroppings and pulled ourselves up until we finally topped out at a flat red rock. I put my arms on it, stepped sideways over a deep drop onto a higher rock, and stepped up. The view was into another high valley. To the left was a row of standing stones, and not very far ahead was the edge of the valley, looking down into yet another lower valley. The grass was green, and the rocks were spaced perfectly for jumping from one to the next. It was a beautiful place to play.

State Fair

My family and I went to the Texas State Fair in Austin. Mom and Dad were there ahead of me and Diane. Diane drove us in her car through the fair grounds, but sometimes I walked alone by myself. We were headed all the way to the very end of the road to a big warehouse which was the beginning of the fair. We would start there and make our way on foot down the main concourse back to where we started. On foot, I passed marching bands warming up and getting into formation and recognized many of the players. Their uniforms were always red and white. I saw Mr Collins, my middle school band director. He invited me to play with them, but I didn't have my saxophone with me, and I didn't really want to anyway.

I was looking forward to meeting up with my friend, a boy my age, who would be playing an instrument and strolling through the grounds. He approached me and was very unhappy. He told me that he had seen my parents and that they had said mean things to him. They didn't like the costume I had made for him, a Hansel-type alpine-style German boy outfit with lederhosen and leather boots. It was white with embroidered red roses. They had told him it didn't belong in Texas. I was completely indignant about this and wanted to confront them right away. I thought about venting to Diane about it, but I knew she would take their side.

Saturday Morning

This is not a dream.

I had to go to the Alltel cell phone store today. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less than get in my car and drive to the blighted area known as Bodo Industrial Park. That is where the store is located, down a tiny, icy alley between Planned Parenthood and an enormous Federal Express warehouse. The way to find anything in Bodo is to turn off the highway into the first access road available after you spot the Wal Mart sign on the horizon. Drive around aimlessly for ten minutes, through parking lots and down alleys, past the dentist offices, past the large equipment rental stores, past the lumber yards until suddenly you run into whatever you’re looking for.

I had to go the Alltel store to speak with an Offical Alltel Agent about separating my phone line from my ex-boyfriend’s. This is the closest thing to a divorce-type activity I’ve had to do since we broke up last summer. We were on the family plan. He set the whole thing up and even picked out my phone (which appropriately broke last night—the plastic hinge cover fell off—somehow I woke up laying on it—and now when I open it, it’s suddenly in two pieces). So he chose the Plan (there were never enough minutes), and we split the bill, which was in his name, each month. He used to scold me for using Directory Assistance and for making what he described as “unnecessary” calls before 9PM. Since moving out, I’ve had to mail him a check each month for my half. Despite the unpleasantness of the errand this morning, I was at least looking forward to picking out my own Plan, one with a generous number of minutes, and getting to make out my monthly check to an anonymous entity rather than to him.

I walked into the store and put my name on the waiting list, then found a chair by the window and sat down to wait. This was my first visit to a cell phone store, so while I waited, I looked around. It was decorated in a tri-color scheme: light blue, light green, and deep purple with randomly-splotched, vaguely-color-coordinated, wall-to-wall carpet. There were huge full-color photographs everywhere of very happy people, all in the process of making phone calls with their shiny new phones or working with handsome Alltel Customer Service Representatives. The real life Representatives were dressed the same as the photographic ones: black pants, blue button-down shirts, and shiny black shoes. Their shirts matched the blue in the tri-color scheme perfectly. The space was divided up into rows of cubicles, each separated by flimsy-looking partitions covered in directive and creepy phrases, widely spaced and in a perky yet professional font.

Welcome to the World of Cell. Choose your Plan. My Circle means My Choice.

In each cubicle was a tall desk flanked by stools made of brushed steel with plastic webbing for seats and backs. Customers and Representatives were perched on the stools, trying out phones, reading brochures, signing contracts. I waited my turn. It was a long wait, and I had that generic waiting-room feeling, the one where you don’t want to be wherever you are, but what choice do you have? None. So just wait.

While I waited, I cried a little bit behind my sunglasses at how ugly everything I had so far seen this morning was, and probably a little about my failed relationship, too. I don’t want him back, but I either cry or get angry whenever I think of him. It’s not fair to dislike him for being such as massive disappointment, but I do. I also had a few self-congratulatory thoughts about the way I have set up my life. I rarely have to drive anywhere, let alone blighted areas, and unpleasant chores are few and far between. I thought about the Representatives, driving to this tri-colored place every day, working with clueless, old-world, crying people like me, running credit checks, and explaining Minutes and Plans and other kinds of ridiculous contemporary concepts. I felt so lonely.

White

I was visiting Michael in a southern coastal city. It was warm, and all the buildings were white. We sat on his porch, repainting the columns. They had deep rectangular grooves in them, and I liked the way my paintbrush felt on the edges.

Then we were inside, and one of the rooms was mine. It was painted white and totally empty. I sat in the corner and watched Michael scale the opposite wall to a built-in shelf near the ceiling. He took a running leap and stuck to the wall, then crawled up like a big grasshopper.

I was in a car, explaining to him that I had to go home. He went to the driver's side and tried to get in, so I stretched out on my stomach across the front seats. I was hoping he would lay down on top of me and be close because he had been very distant and quiet since I said I had to go.

Sometime during my visit to Michael's city, I left to go snowboarding. I rode down a short hill, across a wide flat spot, then up an opposing hill. At the top, I curved around and went back down. I felt so confident and comfortable. Then I realized that I wasn't riding a snowboard. I was riding my longboard without the wheels. I slid and surfed over the terrain, back and forth between the two hills. Everything was totally white, even the sky.

Heroin

Someone gave me a small white block of heroin. I put it in my mouth and chewed. It was very sticky and chewy, like taffy. I began to feel relaxed, but there was an under-current of tension as I tried to get the stuck pieces out of my teeth with my tongue.

Old Friends and Weird Sex Acts

I was visiting Sarah Thompson is her rooms at a dorm-style complex in an unknown city. She was away, and while I was waiting for her to come home, I found myself crouching next to the side of the bed. I had my arms wrapped around something on top of the bed, and after some puzzling, I finally realized it was my own butt. I couldn't figure out exactly how this had happened since I could feel my butt down below my heels, but I did recognize the unique opportunity that was presenting itself. I leaned forward and there was my vulva! I decided to perform oral sex on myself, and I took a few hesitant licks, hoping that Sarah wouldn't come home soon. My vulva was oddly familiar and I wondered how that could be since it's not a view I'm often privy to. I thought about how it was really actually impossible that I was doing this, and at that moment everything changed. I realized that it was not my butt that I was holding in my arms, but a black poodle. The vulva was the same, though, and I stood up and backed away. I was a little alarmed but mostly just curious.

Sarah came home, and for a nice long while, she and I and our friends from the OSU library sat around together in her apartment reading. I thought about how nice it was to spend time with people who enjoy the same things I do.

Next I was flying on some sort of contraption that Mercury made. It had a flat wooden seat connected by immensely long ropes to a white, square-shaped balloon. We rode through the air above the city and enjoyed looking down on familiar sights. We landed and it got dark. There were no lights anywhere. Mercury wanted to take it back up in the air and fly to his house, but I was scared that we wouldn't be able to see anything and would overshoot it. He reasoned that we could travel only a few feet over the tops of houses and touch down every few streets to get our bearings.

Corduroy or velvet?

There was a little girl's room. It was a small box on top of a larger box, open at the front, like a fort. There was a ladder with skinny wooden rungs. There was a man, and we kept asking each other over and over again why the little girl's room had burned. Did the furs in the bottom part of the room ignite the corduroy in the top part? Or was it the corduroy and velvet in the bottom part that caught fire and burned up the furs at the top?

Liripipes

I was sewing liripipes by hand. I had a small amount of black fabric left, and I wondered if I should use it to make a child-size liripipe. I hesitated because the black color reminded me of a priest or an assassin, and I didn't think that would be appropriate for a child.

I was on a South Pacific island in a large city. I was being given a ride on a motorcycle by Jason Frueh. He was taking me to the docks so that I could catch a boat back home. We were riding down a very wide boulevard with palm trees on the sides of the roads and long stretches of open fields. Jason moved so that we were sitting side-by-side as the motorcycle drove itself. We talked about how unique and beautiful the city was, and whether I should just stay on the island.

This was the second time I had been to the docks to catch a boat. The first time Mom took me, and she was angry at me. She left me to wander until I found what looked like a tug boat. I found a ticket booth and asked a woman who was working it if the tug boat was the one I wanted. She laughed at me, not very nicely. I wandered around the docks some more looking at all the luggage and trunks stacked here and there. There were many people. I found a man who looked like he might be a porter, and I asked him if I could buy a ticket from him and how much it would cost. He told me $15. I dug through my wallet but was having a hard time extracting the dollar bills. I had many smoothed-out silver gum wrappers, and they fell neatly into my hand. I asked if he would accept those instead.

I was in a big warehouse. I had gone there with Brad to vote in the presidential election. I saw a little girl. She was black and had her hair fixed into beautiful dog ears. She looked up at me and said, "Reagan was president once before, wasn't he?" "Yes," I said. "He was shot with a hand gun, wasn't he?" she said. I agreed that he had been and walked away. I stopped in front of an electronic voting machine and put down the pot of vegetable soup I'd been carrying. Brad tossed a small electronic chip into the pot. The soup began to stir itself, became a brighter red, and I could smell the tomatoes. I asked Brad what he had done, and he said he had seasoned the soup with an electronic encyclopedia.

I was sitting on a couch-bed between Jared Johnson and a man who was both Brad and Michael. Jared politely said that he could move his bed into the garage or sleep at a friend's house since there wasn't much room. I said he was crazy to suggest that because we were all roommates, and if he moved, I would never get to hang out with him. This made him very happy, and he smiled, then put his arm around me and snuggled down into the bed. I let him snuggle me, but I wondered if it was bothering Brad-Michael.

When I was 8...

...I had a dream about my leg that has always stayed with me as one of the grosser things that I have ever imagined, or channeled--whatever dreams are.

In the dream, I looked down at the top of my right thigh and saw a circular scab about the size of a quarter. I started picking at it, and as the edges peeled up and away from my skin, I saw that the scab was attached to a hard, scaly, porous, yellowish, crusty, five inch long core that filled a hole in my thigh. At the bottom of the hole there were moth balls. It didn't hurt at all, and I kind of wanted to eat the core.

When I was 30, I had the second grossest dream of all time. I came upon my friend Katja laying in the gutter of a city street, out of her mind with pain, ranting and acting crazy. She was in front of a large white building with pillars. I called an ambulance and got in the back with her when it came. The EMTs put her on her stomach and pulled up her shirt. Her back from her hips to her neck was a solid mass of blisters, layered on top of each other. They were puffy, mushy, and hot when I pressed on them. It looked like layered sheets of bubble wrap. Then we were in my backyward. Katja was laying on the deck with her shirt pulled up. Mona, the German Shepherd, was walking on her back, almost kneading with her paws. Her long toe nails were puncturing individual blisters, and Katja was moaning. I could tell it felt good, but that it also hurt almost beyond bearing.