A Century of Dreams

Sanguine Sanny woke up in a rather marinated state and looked at the mushrooms growing outside his window.  They were red.  More accurately, they were reddish-brown, and Sanguine Sanny was sure that these mushrooms indicated where the little people dance.

The little people. The wee folk.  You know what I mean.  Of course you do.

Sanguine Sanny rolled out of the urine-soaked sheets of his bed and wrapped a tapestry around his naked frame.  He toddled to the window and surveyed the wonderful field and the vast, vast number of reddish-brown mushrooms.  Donning his fez, he walked out into the bright daylight and began meticulously picking mushrooms with a bobby pin.  One by one the mushrooms made their way from the grassy meadow where the little people dance into Sanguine Sanny's salivating mouth.  It was Pavlov all over again, except with no dogs, no bells and no meat powders - only the saliva.

It took only a few minutes for the pain to begin in Sanny's abdomen.  In another minute or two it was excruciating, but Sanny continued his fungal feast.  The bobby pin darted faster and more deftly as he went, and the reddish-brown mushrooms flew down the poor fool's gullet at breakneck speed.  It was only a small voice that made him pause.

"You damned fool," said a wee man in wee bell bottoms, "those'll get you sicker'n a dog."

"Tap, tap," went the bobby pin, and the wee man in bell bottoms fell to the ground unconscious.

Sanguine Sanny vomited a great column of chunky, reddish-brown gastric juice. "No leprechaun with bad fashion sense is gonna' tell me what to eat," he said, wiping his lips.

From the Land of Sky Blue Waters

Merv Duckwiler, that old door-to-door vacuum-tube salesman, sat down at the bar just after he shook the dust of a hot Kansas afternoon off his sandals.  In his case those sandals were a pair of brown, scotch-grained bluchered wingtips with a double sole.  "Damn fine shoe," he thought to himself when he bought them.  "That's a damned fine shoe," the shoe salesman said to him, confirming Merv's thoughts.


"Gimme a bourbon on the rocks - a double," Merv called out to Donny the bartender.  Good old Donny.  Donny always set you up right.  Donny always poured just one more for you when you needed it.  Donny always listened.  Donny never judged you, like some people.


"Hot one out there, Merv. How's sales today?"  asked Donny as he obliged with the double bourbon on the rocks.


"It's rough," confessed Merv, "with that new radio store over in Wichita, people just take a drive.  Buy some corn, buy their milk and booze and they buy a radio tube.  Japanese crap."


"Take your medicine, chief," suggested Donny.


"Yeah.  Japanese crap."  Merv slowly sipped at his bourbon and felt the tension kind of slip away.  He stared at the electric picture over the bar.  The little lighted sign revolved or something, somehow, and a placid, tranquil scene of a northwoods lake with a canoe on its shore advertised some beer named 'Hamm's'.  The picture revolved internally and you would see the shoreline of the lake pass by every minute or so.  Merv voiced his approval to Donny.  "You got this 'Hamm's' beer here?"


"No, sorry - ain't that something else?  My brother Steve in Minnesota sent that to me just last week."


"Nice," replied Merv, and accepted a refill on his double bourbon.


The afternoon was just as hot, he realized, no matter how much bourbon was coursing through your veins.  After a second and a third and then a fourth double, Merv settled up, tipped his hat to Donny and headed out into the late, late afternoon sun of Augusta, Kansas.  In a few hours that sun would be going down and framing Wichita off to the west in a golden glow, and there would be some ass of a pimply-faced kid in a radio hut or a radio shack or a radio house or some damned thing selling a vacuum tube to his customer.  Merv Duckwiler's customer.  Merv Duckwiler's hard-won, fought-for, pandered-to customer who meant the ever-loving difference between a full belly and an aching, aching hollow when those Japanese for-crap tubes start selling off the ever-loving shelves in that radio hut or that radio shack or that radio house or some damned thing.  Wichita.  "You could just go shove that whole filthy city where the sun don't ever want to shine no more," a reeling, staggering vaccuum tube salesman shouted at the hot, deserted Augusta downtown.


Merv Duckwiler started feeling something welling up in his gut, and he knew those four double bourbons would see the light of day one more time.  Don't scuff those wingtips, Merv, as you kneel down in the alley behind Donny's Place, kneeling and praying and vomiting and wishing you were paddling a little fiberglass canoe on the placid, tranquil lake in northern Minnesota.


Customers hate scuffed shoes on a salesman, you know.

How Do You Spell "Arriba?"

Insane,” thought Mike Stencil, “absolutely insane. There is no way you'd get me up there.”

Mike was watching a climber on a rock face somewhere near Mount Lemmon, Arizona. The climber was making good progress – stopping every now and again to shake out a limb, flex his fingers, catch his breath. The rock face was hot and dry, and it was being buffeted by winds to match. Mike was conscious of that weird sound that you sometimes hear when it is hot – kind of a high-pitched buzz, that seemed to be more inside of his head than outside. It was not the really cheap vodka from the night before, either. Damn that Preston – he was always selecting the “high quality” beverages for their climbing trips.

“Absolutely insane,” he thought again. He drew his glance from the distant climber back down to his own current situation – about forty feet up a relatively simple pitch about three hundred and fifty feet away from the other climber. Insane, it appears, is a relative term.

The buzz got louder, and Mike realized it was not inside his head after all – it was one of those insects, he decided. What do you call them? Cicadas? Crickets? “Whatever the hell they are, they're annoying,” he thought. He reached back into his chalk bag and grabbed a few fingers' worth. Grab a handful of jug, switch hands, repeat. Up we go. Crimper after crimper...fingers getting raw.

The buzz subsided for a minute and Mike thought back to a night in the Twin Cities, a meal shared with friends at a Mongolian restaurant – the rice, the undercooked egg, the undercooked pork. The several days spent on the toilet. He remembered how his limbs shook and the sweats that accompanied each rather eventful trip to the commode. A nice evening in Dinky Town turned into a gift that kept on giving.

His limbs shook - “sewing machine leg,” he and Preston called it. Sweat was pouring out of his brow and evaporating, it seemed, as soon as it broke the surface. To be honest, his bowels seemed a little loose as well. Hard to distinguish, he thought, between undercooked Mongolian and climbing with a hangover in high altitude. “Up we go, Michael,” shouted Preston from below, “andale, andale!”

“Piss off, Preston,” he shouted back, “don't rush me.”

“No pro-ble-mas, amigo.”

Mike hated it when Preston tried speaking Spanish – hated it and loved it. It was rather reassuring and made him feel pleased that at least his Spanish was a hair better, but Preston tended to sprinkle Spanish into the conversation at the most inappropriate times – especially when there were groups of Mexicans within earshot.

Mike took another breather and watched as the four Mexican climbers sauntered past on the trail down below. “Hola, amigos,” he heard Preston say to them as he casually belayed him without a care in the world. Mike just shook his head.

Another couple handfuls of chalk, a few more feet up the rock face. Mike made his way slowly but steadily until suddenly he began sweating like a thief in church ('not the same way his father used to use that idiom, by the way) – he felt something like a small rodent at the back of his tongue, a strange noise rumbled inside of him from the depths of his digestive tract, and he half expected to send a jet of liquid fecal matter down his leg. Surprise, Mike. Half a dozen really cheap vodka sours that had not made it very far through the metabolizing process, along with two power bars, a banana and three cups of instant coffee came roaring out of his stomach, burning his throat on the way. The multi-colored concoction cascaded down the rock face, and as Mike lost his grip and hollered “falling” through a mouth full of vomit, he heard Preston laugh like an idiot and he felt the rope go taut. Preston had him tightly belayed while he laughed and laughed and laughed like an idiot. “Muy malo, paisano,” he shouted up through his laughter.

“That's Italian, you ass,” Mike coughed back through chunks of banana.

Half a mountain away a climber looked down at a sick fool and his climbing partner who was laughing like an idiot.

“Insane,” he thought aloud, “absolutely insane.”

But Everything Tastes Like Chicken

On Tuesday I sat down in the dentist's chair, and suddenly I was at a monastery in upstate New York. Strange as that may be, there is occasionally a wool sweater than takes me from wherever I might be to a concourse waiting area at Orly airport in Paris.  Bam. Just like that.  And every now and again I step out of my office and I am stepping out of the Cherry Court Hotel near Victoria Station in London.  Whammo.

Smells.

Amazing, aren't they?  There is a type of low-lying ground cover that, when it is run over with a mower, will transport my wife from wherever she is back to her grandmother's house.  The smell of chlorine takes me back, of course, to high school and the pool that I loved so much.  My friend John has the opposite reaction to chlorine:  the smell of it can produce a panic attack as it sends him right back to swimming lessons during grammar school - bad memories of some sort rush to the surface and make him sweat, get all cotton-mouthed and start coughing.

I guess we start associating smells as soon as we notice them, and if the emotions or whatnot are strong enough at the time, something sticks. I am obviously not a student of cognitive science or anything close, as you can tell from that description, but I do know this - scent is powerful...

***

Mike Stencil was about 23 years old when he smelled the burning flesh.  "Sweet," he thought to himself.  Sweet like a sugary, caramel-ly, sweety meaty stench that nearly made him retch.  Not sweet as in "a sweet deal."  You know what I mean.

Gasoline and human flesh and hair and vinyl seats and a windy day made for a roaring conflagration.  The smoke pouring out from the auto accident carried with it that unmistakable fragrance, and Mike paused to say a Hail Mary.  "God," he thought to himself.  And that was all this young guy who would one day be a priest could think at that moment, "God."

The smoke seemed a lot thicker than smoke he was used to seeing from barbecues and campfires and it was a lot thicker and sweeter than the smoke that would pour from the incinerator that Mike would have to use to burn rubbish for his boss at the shoe store.  Mike didn't know about that smoke yet, though...the shoe store would be ten years off in the future. Today's smoke was thick and dense and sweet as any smoke he'd ever smelled.  "...now and at the hour of our death. Amen," concluded Mike, as he sent the Ave wafting heavenward.  "God," he repeated in the confines of his thoughts.

It would be just a few months later that Mike would be driving down a country highway in the middle of a beautiful autumn, paying no real attention to what he was doing and loads of attention to the fall colors.  As he raced down a long sloping hill, he gave no thought to the oncoming eighteen-wheeler in the distance, and so he was taken quite by surprise at its presence as he skidded into its lane in the low right-hand curve at the bottom of the hill.  Wet leaves and loose gravel aided his car in its slide and Mike in his loss of control. "God..." was all he could get out as he faced the oncoming truck, now wildly blowing its horn.

A fortunately-placed dry patch of road that was free of gravel and leaves grabbed Mike's front left tire, and he shot back into his lane, missing the truck by what seemed like feet but were likely yards.  He coasted to a stop and sat in the driver's seat, shaking and panting, noting an unfamiliar loose feeling in his bowels.  He rolled down the window and took in some air...praying that his heart wasn't going to come pounding right up through his throat.  As he breathed in the cool autumn air he noticed he was being watched by a man on the front lawn of a beautiful farm house.  The man was burning leaves and looking at Mike.  The smoke from the leaf pile was on the breeze and it wafted in through Mike's open window.

"Sweet..."

Listening to Django Reinhardt

Sitting here at the kitchen table, listening to that blessed Gypsy, another week is due to get underway in about twelve hours, and I think, as I often do when listening to him, that in some cases two fingers were better than four.  I can't imagine going through life with only two functioning fingers, but I can hardly imagine Django Reinhardt with four.  Do you know what I mean?  Just listen to the guy rip along in a fast number and you can hardly imagine it at all.  Crazy.

How many of us are limping through life on all four fingers, while we watch others create true art and achieve great success with only two digits?  I have watched people that I really thought were really quite hampered by some grave handicap, and I have watched them as they made life look easy.  Then some simp like me comes onto the scene, having what I thought were all of my ducks in a row, and I manage to screw things up royally - it does not matter that I have all four fingers, existentially speaking...I have been unable to even play the scales of life on some days.  Never the matter, however.  There is always Paris...and we always have a cocktail mixer in the freezer.

Truth be known, I have only been to Paris once and I did not enjoy myself.

***

Paris looked a lot like any other city in the late December snows - a lot more French, obviously, but it could have passed for a city in Quebec or, if you squinted, New York.   Tell that to a Parisian and he will be livid, but he will get over it in a short while.  Anyhow, Paris looked a lot like any other city, but it had a rather distinct smell - one I did not care for, and one I do not wish to experience again anytime soon.  The impression (and the smell) that I took away was framed by riding on a too-full car in the Metro, surrounded by sweaty Frenchmen.  It was hot.  God, was it hot.  The outside temperature could have been thirty below zero for all I cared (although it was a lot more temperate than that), as I was only concerned with the humid, smelly interior of a subway car that was rising steadily to match or surpass body temperature, and smelled like a junior high school locker room.  I nearly threw a stomach full of madeleines and espresso all over the floor of the Metro station when I exited at Gare du Nord.  Mind you, the exquisite aroma of madeleines, espresso and bile might be a fair improvement for Paris.

Yeah...we'll always have Paris.  You can keep it, frankly.