"C'est la Vie"

 

I woke up fuming from the ordeal of last night's dream. I was back in LA, living in Pico Rivera, an area where I'd lived in the 80s cult days. Some things never change, and I guess it is foolish to think they ever would. 

The dream started in the supermarket. I was filling my shopping basket with the usual items, stocking up my two weeks worth of kale, cabbage, sweet potatoes, frozen turkey and the like. A very shy autistic boy kept giving me furtive glances, like he wanted to engage me, but I was mostly focused on my shopping, weaving my basket in and out of the rush hour shopping traffic in the store. 

At the very last aisle, right as I was approaching checkout, he managed to get close enough to strike up a conversation. It was very banal, and I don't even remember what he asked me. I offered a very standard reply, something like, "Yeah, I'm just out shopping." He looked up at me, eyes brimming with admiration, like I was a rock star, and he was my biggest fan.

"Cool!" was his singular response.

Cool. I guess it didn't take much to impress him. Just me and my basket of groceries. I paid for my food and went out to the parking lot where my ratty black Honda Fit was parked. Rather than load the food into the car, I attached the basket to the rear bumper somehow and drove off towing it like a small trailer.

This impromptu rig worked out OK for the first few blocks. I kept checking my rearview to make sure the basket was still there. I could hear it clattering, so I guessed it was, but you never can tell. I had to be sure it hadn't up-ended, leaving me dragging an empty basket down the road. Nope. Still upright and full of groceries.

The freeway was a different story. It was rattling and bouncing all over the place, fishtailing in the curves, and giving me a fright. I pulled over at one point to re-secure it, tightening up knots in the rag that I'd used to tie it to the car. 

While I was out there, I noticed that my left front tire was nearly bald, and I could hear air hissing from a small hole in the tread. Damn. And I'd just replaced those tires. Now, I'd need to get my alignment checked and buy at least one new tire. I thought about getting off the freeway and airing it up but opted to try to get home instead.

I drove to 9050 Burke St., the apartments where I'd lived for a year or so with a few of my fellow cult-mates. I'd had my car stolen on that street back then, so I parked the Fit in one of the parking stalls under the apartment complex. I stashed the shopping basket between the car and the building, beneath the overhead storage cabinets, where I figured it would blend in with the other shopping baskets left there by some of the local homeless population.

I went up to the apartment, intending to visit with a friend for a minute. Ronaldo, my old roommate was there, along with his new roommate, William Fitchner, who plays Allison Janney's wheelchair-bound beau on the TV show "Mom." I remember him mainly for his role as Detective Tardio, an overly affected swishy snoot of a private eye who makes abundant use of the words "Bichon Frise" in a Danny DeVito/Chris Rock movie called "What's the Worst That Can Happen?"

I always confuse him with Greg Germann, who was a regular on Ally McBeal (a TV show Sharon and I used to watch in the early 2000s) and Gray's Anatomy (which we didn't).  I'd only stopped by for a minute to talk to my friend, but this guy kept prolonging the conversation with his boring stories and endless uninteresting factoids (kind of like I'm doing here with this unnecessarily convoluted backstory).

 

William Fitchner

Greg Germann

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I managed to get free, finally, and bid them both adieu. I returned to my car to find that the shopping basket was empty. Damn that boring roommate and his boring stories. Now, in addition to a flat tire, I had two weeks of groceries to replace. I stepped out into the middle of the driveway and looked up at the open windows of the apartments, screaming at the tenants, at the sky, to anyone and everyone:

"Goddamn you, vultures! Why don't you come down here right now? Come on, MOTHERFUCKERS!" 

No vultures showed up to take up my challenge. They were long gone, along with my groceries. Lily Zermeno did show up, however, to offer me condolences. She tried to give me a hug, but I resisted. I was too pissed. She settled for an almost imperceptible butterfly kiss on the lips, which I thought, during other circumstances, I might have enjoyed immensely, although at the moment, it barely blipped my radar.

"How else do you expect pig donkeys to behave when you leave food at their trough?" she said in a tone not at all commensurate with the embarrassed stupidity that I felt.

It had dawned on me at some point that I could have avoided all this by simply loading the groceries in the car, but by then I'd already fully committed to my shopping cart trailer method. It was saving me the extra step of loading and unloading the car, or some such reasoned logic, I kept telling myself. Throughout the entire dream, the soundtrack from Pulp Fiction was playing in my head: 

"'C'est la vie,' say the old folks. It goes to show you never can tell."