Okay, so there’s this dream, okay, and it spits in your face every day, in traffic lights and snow storms and air conditioning, and it spits all over your face every single day and you choke on the green grass and the other sides and stupid euphemisms that leak from your cortex, dribble down the two accordion disks of your spine and plop onto your stale, stale tongue. The grass is greener on the other side, or a soft gold, but anyway, over there, where it all is, that poltergeist of a dream sits on a pink and green lawn chair with a flip-flop tan on each foot, and from that lawn chair, with its flippy-floppy feet sprawled all the way out into the white sand, sand as warm as your insides, that poltergeist dream can see its face in the reflection of each perfectly pedied toenail poking out from the white, warm sand, shining bright like the sun above, which literally—LITERALLY— wears big, black RayBans because everything on the other side, over there, where it all is, is that fucking cool. It’s all out there, with the green-gold grass and the other sides, and the unbuttoned shirts and salty lips and SPF-8’s and glistening baby oil, baby, and all those avocados in lieu of mayonnaise and oxidizing apple slices can be eaten in the shade of a palm tree.
And oh, the palm trees, because they are so luxuriously indigenous out there, how they can be seen for miles, so indigenously, along median strips in perfect equidistance from each other, so naturally, and in all shapes and sizes, from comically oversized pineapples to skinny two-story bellyscratchers of bleach-blue sky and everything, everything smells like tomorrow and nothing exists of yesterday unless it’s vintage. That poltergeist dream has a name, Lance Razore, and albeit Jhonny Columnist with his scarf-in-summertime skeptical speculations, it’s his real name, and goddammit! doesn’t that name sound sharp (pun) and edgy (intended), and everything that someone with an unbuttoned shirt and a 24-hour five-o’clock shadow would want? L. Razore, turning the world over and shaking loose the change from its pockets, hoarding all those important phone calls and TMZ cameos and freshly apricot-skinned women that dangle and fall into the off-pink bed sheets of a kingsized Tempurpedic, four hours after a quick five-and-a-half $9 appletinis, sweet and sour and strong, and they don’t have olives because olives are so-o gro-oss, and they have those icky pit things.
It’s another morning, early, the sun not quite finished with its second cup of coffee and still wiping away the crusty clouds of dawn. The wind caresses the white cotton curtains dangling from the window frames, and outside and inside, the wind mixes gently with yawning mouths and coughing coughs. It’s that certain chilling warmth where only a thin layer of bedsheet is needed for such a sibilant, soft, and cool-in-both-senses-of-the-term wind.
It’s a Tuesday or a Wednesday, or three or four mornings after Clay Primiasma’s third or fourth thirty-third birthday downtown last Saturday, but a good portion of the party had continued up until this moment, or just a few hours before, when everyone finally passed out wherever they were standing when it seemed like a proper moment to pass out.
Bodies littered the floors and couches and the deck out back, as Lance stepped over the party debris, close to half-quietly, a one-hundred percent effort of full concentration, but he couldn't shake the fact that his head was screaming like a thousand colic babies with megaphones. In a primitive, mental grunt of globby semiotic association, he asked himself: Where is my/a goddamned lighter?
The goddamned lighter, it was just the first item on a long list of Where-is-my-Goddamned's?. The list reads as follows--Where is my Goddamned: a) Cell phone? b) Wallet? c) Goodies? d) Car keys? e) Actual car? f) etc.? All of these, including the etceteras, were replacable, all something worth worrying about tomorrow, whenever that comes, or today, if it never leaves. Right now, he had one real focus--he needed a lighter, a goddamned lighter. Even if (a) G/god did damn this highly saught-after lighter, Lance made a deal with himself that he would go to the deepest depths of damnation to find it, a lighter, one, just one lighter, a goddamned lighter, he would go there and battle all the demons and the fires and the pitchforks and the worst imaginable things that one experiences in the underworld, because right now the worst thing he can think of is not having a lighter. He would flip over the smoldering rocks, traverse the bubbling lava of Styx, suffocate that three-headed dog, Ceberus or something, squeeze through the fiery gates of Hades/Hell/whatever, walk straight up to that ugly, hoofy man, the main man himself, the taskmaster of torment, the patriarch of pain and punishment, the last laugh, the materialized result of the shoulda-woulda-coulda's, El Jefe, the boss, that guy, and Lance would stand there at the fiery throne, handsome and messy and wearing Prada, surrounded by minions and demons and slaves and ghosts and ghosts of slaves, and he would stick out his hand and demand that the head honcho of horror hand over that little handheld plastic spark machine. Not only would he receive the lighter, but they would exchange business cards. Lance promised himself he would do this, he knew he would, all of it, and it could be done as long as hell was within arm's length of where he stood.
He looked around at all the beautiful people, ugly, the way they lay like rag dolls, and there on a coffee table, next to all the ashes missed from the full ash tray, all the magazines and black wood, rested a yellow lighter. Close enough, he thought.
Now he needed a cigarette.
****
Maslow woke up alone, next to his fiancé. Or maybe it should it be: Maslow woke up next to his fiancé, alone. She was sleeping soundly and he was soundly awake. Nothing new, nothing was ever new. The growingly-antagonistic red glare in the dark from the corner of the room shined skinny and digital: 5:56. Each morning was the same, waking up with the mild relief of him somehow 'beating' the alarm clock to the punch--just knowing there is an opportunity for four more minutes of slumber seemed like a temporary win--followed by the mild disappointment of it still being another day. Each day seemed tagged with an expiration date--each day was stale bread, bad milk, bruised bananas, leaky batteries, a sad-blue, a faded tattoo. He watched the numbers change in slow motion on the clock, fabricating the imaginary tick-tock's in his head, their echoing like an army of gongs.
And there they were, she and him, together, but for him, apart, together alone, together a million miles away from each other in the same bed, him a slave to his own head, digesting irrational nuances, neurotic and anxious, self-phobic, stretched thin and feeding on his own mental paroxysms of self-doubt and something else unrecognizable to the word-arsenal of 'feelings'. She was quite the opposite, simple from head to toe, her feelings seemed to fit perfectly into little shoe boxes and stacked quaintly and happily in an order that fit accessibly inside the closet of her heart. She was content. He was stale. Maybe.
Because of their opposite natures, they seemed to meet in the middle of each other's preferences. For him, everything seemed average, vanilla, and for her, she was content, a perfect environment for the zygote stages of an American Dream. The first step was on the way, to get married. They found themselves suspended in average mediums, watching average shows, with average conversation which eventually lead to average sex.
She had no idea.
He had dreams the night before that he couldn't remember. He rolled over next to his fiancé and put his arm around her. She woke up and kissed him half on his lips and put her head back on the pillow. He liked that, the imperfect kiss, and in fact there were lots of things that he liked about their relationship. He liked the comfort, the obvious comfort, the ease, the doting, her efforts to make him happy on the outside, her ability to deal with his meltdowns, her unconditional dedication, the mildly jealous looks he would get from other men walking with her when she dressed up. She was very pretty, beautiful even, and he liked that, too, her chalky chestnut eyes, her wide smile and her jawline handsome jawline. She was, in the grandest of senses, what others called a catch.
He had dreams the night before.
