The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

She laughed in return. This he saw but could not hear, although she was close and his ears were still sharp. Then she walked behind the fountain … and didn’t come out. Yet Dave had reason to believe she would be back. He had glimpsed the life-force down there, no more and no less. The strong beating heart of beauty and desire. Next time she would be closer.

V

Peter came into town the following week, and they went out to dinner at a nice place close by. Dave ate well, and drank two glasses of wine. They perked him up considerably. When the meal was done, he took Ollie’s silver watch from his inner coat pocket, coiled the heavy chain around it, and pushed it across the tablecloth to his son.

‘What’s this?’ Peter asked.

‘It was a gift from a friend,’ Dave said. ‘He gave it to me shortly before he passed on. I want you to have it.’

Peter attempted to push it back. ‘I can’t take this, Dad. It’s too nice.’

‘Actually, you’d be doing me a favor. Because of the arthritis. It’s very hard for me to wind it, and pretty soon I won’t be able to at all. Darn thing’s at least a hundred and twenty years old, and a watch that’s made it that far deserves to run as long as it can. So please. Take it.’

‘Well, when you put it that way …’ Peter took the watch and dropped it into his pocket. ‘Thanks, Dad. It’s a beaut.’

At the next table – so close Dave could have reached out and touched her – sat the redhead. There was no meal in front of her, but no one seemed to notice. At this distance, Dave saw that she was more than pretty; she was downright beautiful. Surely more beautiful than that long-ago girl had been, sliding out of her boyfriend’s pickup with her skirt momentarily bunched in her lap, but what of that? Such revisions were, like birth and death, the ordinary course of things. Memory’s job was not only to recall the past but to burnish it.

The redhead slid her skirt up farther this time, revealing one long white thigh for a second. Perhaps even two. And winked.

Dave winked back.

Peter turned to look and saw only an empty four-top table with a RESERVED sign on it. When he turned back to his father, his eyebrows were raised.

Dave smiled. ‘Just something in my eye. It’s gone now. Why don’t you get the check? I’m tired and ready to go back.’

Thinking of Michael McDowell

There’s a saying: ‘If you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there.’ Total bullshit, and here’s a case in point. Tommy wasn’t his name, and he wasn’t the one who died, but otherwise, this is how it went down, back when we all thought we were going to live forever and change the world.

Tommy

Tommy died in 1969.

He was a hippie with leukemia.

Bummer, man.

After the funeral came the reception at Newman Center.

That’s what his folks called it: the reception.

My friend Phil said, ‘Isn’t that what you have after a fucking wedding?’

The freaks all went to the reception.

Darryl wore his cape.

There were sandwiches to eat and grape drink in Dixie Cups.

My friend Phil said, ‘What is this grape shit?’

I said it was Za-Rex. I recognized it, I said, from MYF.

‘What’s that shit?’ asked Phil.

‘Methodist Youth Fellowship¸’ I said.

‘I went for ten years and once did

a flannelboard of Noah and the Ark.’

‘Fuck your Ark,’ said Phil.

‘And fuck the animals who rode on it.’

Phil: a young man with strong opinions.

After the reception, Tommy’s parents went home.

I imagine they cried and cried.

The freaks went to 110 North Main.

We cranked up the stereo. I found some Grateful Dead records.

I hated the Dead. Of Jerry Garcia I used to say,

‘I’ll be grateful when he’s dead!’

(Turned out I wasn’t.)

Oh well, Tommy liked them.

(Also, dear God, Kenny Rogers.)

We smoked dope in Zig-Zag papers.

We smoked Winstons and Pall Malls.

We drank beer and ate scrambled eggs.

We rapped about Tommy.

It was pretty nice.

And when the Wilde-Stein Club showed up – all eight of them – we let them in

because Tommy was gay and sometimes wore Darryl’s cape.

We all agreed his folks had done him righteous.

Tommy wrote down what he wanted and they gave him most of it.

He was dressed in his best as he lay in his new narrow apartment.

He wore his bellbottom blue jeans and his favorite tie-dye shirt.

(Melissa Big Girl Freek made that shirt.

I don’t know what happened to her.

She was there one day, then gone down that lost highway.

I associate her with melting snow.

Main Street in Orono would gleam so wet and bright it hurt your eyes.

That was the winter The Lemon Pipers sang ‘Green Tambourine.’)

His hair was shampooed. It went to his shoulders.

Man, it was clean!

I bet the mortician washed it.

He was wearing his headband

with the peace sign stitched in white silk.

‘He looked like a dude,’ said Phil. He was getting drunk.

(Phil was always getting drunk.)

Jerry Garcia was singing ‘Truckin.’ It’s a pretty stupid song.

‘Fuckin Tommy!’ said Phil. ‘Drink to the motherfucker!’

We drank to the motherfucker.

‘He wasn’t wearing his special button,’ said Indian Scontras.

Indian was in the Wilde-Stein Club.

Back then he knew every dance.