Tuesday, today, but first I'm going to refer to yesterday: I was riding my bicycle home from Second City (writing class, sketch comedy), head buried, back forcefully arched, asserting myself against the cold. Fairing well, I crossed the domain of a 1,000 unattended potholes, as common in Chicago as Highways are in L.A., when a Shortcut crossed my eye:
Portland Street. At the time, amidst the potholes, I was riding through an industrial business park and I'd
never noticed this offshoot from the arterial street of Cortland, but there it, was. Portland Street followed a northwest/southeast trajectory, fortuitously where I needed to be, so I gave Blue Velvet (my bicycle) a gentle push and we were off.
The Potholes were getting worse; with each rotation of my pedals I had to divert my attention from the street to the road, street and road, and back again. I'm seeing things like one views a flipbook, and a sense of dread washes over me. I catch an aluminum rendering plant to my left, a freight door ajar, but there was no one working, only a stage, three feet high, where a man in a white tailored suit was captivating an audience of no more than seven laborers, pamphlets in their hands, smiling unabashedly. Another pothole: I hit this one and I'm a goner, cash in my life insurance policy...if I had one, a singing telegram to my primary beneficiary of my recent demise, but it's only a practice run. I dodge the pothole, my lungs aching from the cold. Flashes of catapults, the size of houses, find their way into my thoughts, and I feel like I'm going to cry. How far does this street go? And why aren't there any cars?
Steadfast, I continue pedaling, the tendons in my right knee threaten to go on strike, take a sabbatical to some Biological Resort where I'm not on the guest list this evening. To my left I notice three consecutive offices for Social Workers with cascading, unmistakably similar names I imagined came packaged together and discounted for purchasing the entire set. The middle office was Warren something, all lights aflutter and no less than 4 patients waiting in the lobby and I wonder how many people, if any, I'd helped that day, if I'd made anyone feel worthwhile, treated anything/anyone as sacrosanct, just generally gave a shit, and --
It was too late. Black. I was falling, subsumed in darkness. I lurched and threw Blue Velvet to make way for my fall. The patients in the Office, had they seen me? Did Portland Street swallow me up. No. I had, taken myself, self-propulsion, bicycle and all, into a pothole the size of a Trailer Park. And to them, interspersed with their problems, addictions, domestic disputes and obligations to the State and the Parole Board -- I was no more.
There was no drop in the pit of my stomach and the once encroaching sense of dread supplanted by a somnolent hum, the kind we feel just before falling asleep when we know there's no other option and our thoughts can only grow to be innocuous at best. Wait...I see, light? Halogen lights, and I'm getting warmer, my heartbeat increasing, am I dead?, and... Water. Clean, chlorinated water, I knew this smell, in my formative years I was a competitive swimmer -- the chemicals used to mar my bleached blonde hair and I was forced to wear a swimcap with a turtle on both sides. I'd reached the bottom, and though my clothes, layered and voluminous, were sodden I felt no weight, no pull, and ascended to the surface. There I was greeted by a wall of lavender, the succinct march of incense -- too much to count -- wafted all around me and I saw her: olive skin, black hair in a bob, lab coat, sea-foam greet high heels, couldn't be much older than myself. She flashed a calm, unassuming smile and approached with a clipboard. I tried to ask how many others had plummeted from the sky but my mouth was still partly submerged and I choked on water, the chlorine burning my nose. She was hot, and it was embarrassing, but her disposition was warm and still status-quo. Where the hell was I and--? She'd pointed to the stairs in the shallow end of the pool. My sense of time and space percolating, slowly gaining my wits about me and I swam to the edge. The lavender was nearly too much. She offered me a towel and a white robe, eerily my size, and craning my neck I noticed an alabaster statue of a woman, nude, holding a sword, bookshelves protruding from the firebrick walls, a sequential series of massage table portraits, next to, you guessed it, a nearly ostentatiously ornate Massage Table.
She laughed and told me to cut the trans-dimensional-wonderment-thing I had going on. Her name as Chenelle, and she was terrifyingly attractive up close. She told me I'd found The Portland Street spa, and as far as she could tell, documentation-wise, I'd had an appointment from a few months back, confirmed by email and telephone. But? No matter, Id just come from Second City, and I can improvise the shit out of any situation, and dude, she was really hot, like keep you awake at night Hot. Near the farthest bookshelf, which oddly was stocked with Raymond Carver novels and antiquated issues of Time Magazine, there was a curtain for me to change. Call it arrogance, or intended voyeurism, but I left a slit open so she could see me if she was so inclined. She wasn't. She was preparing something at the massage table and I continued to change, to clean myself off. There was an unmarked bottle I took as body lotion and I applied it liberally, feeling instantly better, reinvigorated, reborn. Lady Lazarus called to check if I was OK...I gave a sure thing! wave and leapt out shortly thereafter.
With the brazenness of an anticipated first date I trotted to the massage table, she motioned, reading over some forms on her clipboard, not even making eye contact with me. Hello? Do you see this body, pay attention to me! But, well, I disrobed, full-on nude, grabbed a hand towel and lay supine, the smell of lavender dissipating, and I felt warm, nebulous, increasingly drowsy but an undercurrent of coherent thoughts orbited my consciousness. This is what happens when you take GHB. She told me what I thought was body lotion was a precursor to the process, aligning my brainwaves via a chemical I can't pronounce, to assimilate with The Receiver: Chenelle, her official position at the Spa. An esoteric, something near-erotic body buzz enmeshed itself around me before I could question the nature of this visit, or, where the hell Blue Velvet had landed: I just bought that bike.
She sipped what I think was tea, pursing her lips and taking it in slowly, it must've been very hot, and with an immediate pang of clarity like we feel after that first gulp of coffee, that first line of cocaine, she casually patted the inside of my left ankle and said it's time to begin. The halogen lights dimmed, almost indiscernibly, or maybe I was hallucinating.
I still wasn't used to the sound of her voice: resonant but rounded and alluringly feminine in peaks and intermittent syllables joining together.
- Do you think people are easily disposed of?
I want to ask for clarification, but I feel I know what she's getting at, and I feel the sense of dread reforming, gestating somewhere just under the surface. I tell her no, flat out. But, in my experience there's a mutual respect between two people, lovers, participants in a relationship that needs to be sacrosanct (why am I saying that so much today?). I tell her, no, I challenge her to tell me what actions to take when two people have Peaked, when a relationship has run its course? But I don't give her time to respond. I feel tears well up, disproportionately in my left eye. Closing my eyes, I tell her we can still believe in each other, but bereft of passion we need to cut our losses and recognize what we had, what we were able to create, what we came away with, and that counts for something. My right fist begins to clench, but the body buzz, the somnolent hum, is overpowering. Regaining my cosmic, floating-in-space composure, shutting my eyes tight to focus, I implore her to connect the dots, the salient qualities of people and what the advent of new relationships, now that we're ready, hold the promise of the premise of what were trying to achieve in the first place. I asked her what Primal meant to her -- how necessary it was for two people to connect, to flesh-out something meaningful, and then tell me who exactly it is I'm disposing of. Yeah, take that.
Feeling mighty proud of my answer, and somewhat relived for reasons I would come to understand in the days to follow. Nothing. No response. I open my eyes like what the hell man? to move along this whole psychic-interrogation, but I was alone, in my bed, 5 a.m. in the morning, nude. I started to cry and the somnolent hum slowly gave way, vanished. It was Tuesday.
And if you think dreams are a cop-out, well...
Jeannie didn't necessarily want breast implants. She, like most affluent urbanites in their mid-twenties, was lumbering towards a ubiquitous sense of symmetry, and her breasts -- analogous to her lack of punctuality or pronounced speaking voice -- were coral in a sea of personal bullet points that needed remedying. She sipped her Kombucha, not quite assimilated to the briny taste. The condescension dripping southward in mini-armadas all across the bottle transfered to her hands with each woeful gulp, and so on and so forth the keyboard on her laptop computer soon collected it's own mini-oases over non-related letters and numbers.
