Dream journal: Steve Tristano, someone I went to grade school with, I run into him in San Francisco. He’s black, not dead. But he hardly remembers me. I’m getting ready for an event, a wedding, whose? John’s? And I am traveling around California. The ocean. It feels southern like the Bahamas but it’s in California.
I don’t know why Steve is in my dream, quite frankly I haven’t talked to him since high school, and he was so heavily into drugs it was hard to have a conversation anyway. Steve’s father, Lenny Tristano was a famous jazz musician who invented the boogie-woogie. Steve used to play the boogie-woogie for us when the teacher was out of the room.
Another event. I’m waiting for the shower so I can change into my green skirt and blouse and new silk magenta shirt. But someone is in the bathroom. I thought I was with John in the dream. It seems like Bob’s sister Nancy Hamilton, is in the dream. A judger. It seems my all my old lovers are all blending into one persona. All my past sins.
My clothes are in the back of the car, it’s Bob‘s blue squareback. I’ve gone back in time all right. I gather them up. And then I’m in Forest Knolls again. Somehow I’ve managed to relocate Steve in my dream. But we are on Magnus Street in San Francisco. Magnus is the last name of another boy I once loved, Danny Magnuson. I remember overhearing Steve saying he had to fix his car on Magnus Street. Magnus means the king, it might as well mean the magician. All these cars again. Vehicles how we get from place to place.
He said, after I saw you the last time, all the memories came flooding back, our childhood. He held up a newspaper clipping of me in his hand. My mug tends to appear in newspapers every so often the hazards of being a poet. But I was surprised as this was in San Francisco.
Now the wedding party, or whatever it was, was going full tilt. I wound up near the trailer court in Forest Knolls. There are naked babies wearing paper bags over their heads and cowboy hats. They were in a formation all facing me like a constellation. On the other side of the building I’m flying. I’m still trying to get ready for this unnamed event. I’ve got a bedsheet wrapped around me and I’m holding my laundry.
There is something equally absurd in the next junkyard like the babies I can’t remember what they were doing. I’ll have to wait for the image to reappear. Steve is no longer black. His skin is white. The black was very faint anyway. Nothing is in black-and-white I guess is the take away message.
I ran into Steve at the counter, it’s also a gas station/store. I’m waiting with wet hair and all this laundry. I can’t quite get it together. Something happened to me, I’m dizzy and about to lose consciousness. I try to tell Steve but he’s too busy and conversation with someone else. I do faint, and fall against his left arm. He thinks I’m merely being forward and he keeps on talking. He doesn’t mind. When they finally realize I’m not with them, they lay me down on the floor and continue to talk.
I’m a long time in this place of limbo. I might as well be a corpse. An oddly dressed one. I come to, sleep then come to again. I’m very ill and they assume it will pass. Then I’m in a catatonic state all twisted up in my bed sheet. I can hear what they’re saying, many things that pertain to me but I can’t rouse myself to respond. I can’t remember what they’re saying and I begin to take in my surroundings, coming to after what seems like days, an eternity. Maybe this is purgatory.
I realize how long I’ve been away, that I probably missed the event I was trying to get ready for. The clothes are scattered all around me and I’m still not dressed. My hair is in a tangle and I’m aware for the first time that I am not properly dressed, though I’m not naked either with my damp and twisted bedsheet.
I feel like I’ve made a long journey and there were many dangers. I am weak, a bit disoriented, but I made it back safely. Steve is still talking to someone else but there’s some small thing growing between us though we’ve hardly spoken to each other at all. A kind of love, after all. Childhood love. I still feel a terrible loss of John and resist the urge to go back and fix things the way they were before, though I know it is impossible. Those babies held smoking guns, they were a blind posse, for what I don’t know. Steve’s father, Lenny was blind.
Steve, whom I’m sure has been dead for years because he became a heroin addict back in the late 60s and early 70s. Who could survive that? I am in 2nd grade again, and he and Pete Sutton play the boogie-woogie on the piano, it was wild. I fell in love with the both of them and I was only eight years old. The dream Steve I fell in love with, was that second grader at the piano, not the drug addict with the Jesus Christ face and the long dark hair.
end of dream sequence
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