Spaghetti and Salmon Salvation, the Bullet and the Boot

I dreamed I was attending a full-immersion automotive school being run by Paul Teutul Sr., the perpetually angry American Chopper dad. I wasn't doing too well and was a likely candidate to wash out due to physical infirmities. I felt extremely weak and undernourished, like I was going to pass out, as I waited my turn in the lunch line.

"This outta fix you up," Paul Sr. said as he dished up a giant plate of spaghetti and handed it to me.

I thanked him and took the food back to my bed. It was a dormitory style hotel room with multiple beds and cheap pile carpet. I took a few bites of food and immediately spilled the rest onto the floor. I tried to scoop up the mess using the bedspread, but it only made matters worse, creating a giant stain that looked as if someone had just been murdered there.

I picked through the remnants of my dinner, attempting to salvage a bite or two of what looked like it might have previously been grilled salmon, mixed in with the spaghetti and bits of carpet fiber and cigarette ashes. Finding it too unappealing to eat, I took my bedspread, plate and fork back to the serving line to show Paul Sr. what had happened. Meanwhile, a rather dismayed housekeeper, another member of the Teutul family, got down on her hands and knees and started working on the giant spaghetti stain on the carpet.

"I'm sorry about the mess," I apologized to the girl, "but as you can see, he served me way too much spaghetti for this plate." 

I pointed out the very small, flat plate and indicated the mountainous serving size by extending my hand skyward. The girl just shook her head and carried on scrubbing the tomato sauce into the carpet. Paul Sr. didn't disagree, but he didn't offer me another plate, either, so I sat there in the back of the serving truck cleaning my food with a garden hose. 

The truck was a 1963 Dodge army green panel van, the kind used for bread or milk deliveries, or Army Corp of Engineering mobile base station operations, that might later get sold and repurposed as a hippie RV or a bandwagon for a low budget punk band. It was ugly enough that I didn't think anyone would mind my using it as a spaghetti strainer. 

Despite getting some bits of spaghetti and salmon in the AC floor vents, the process worked like a charm, and soon I was dining on pristine pasta and seafood that looked as if it had just come out of the kitchen. Not a trace of tomato sauce or dirt from the carpet remained, just gleaming noodles and fish, all neatly arranged on the plate. The fish looked as if it had been freshly prepared by a chef, the convenient serving sized cubes that had previously been unidentifiable floor debris, reassembled into a complete fish, head and tail included.

In the next scene, I was with Paul Sr. and his daughter under an overpass, watching traffic go by on the highway underneath. The girl produced a pistol and took a shot at a small metal light fixture up on the roof of the bridge. The bullet struck the target and ricocheted, striking me in the right foot. It stung a little, but my work boots protected me, and it bounced harmlessly into the dirt. I fished around for it and found what looked like a hollow point slug, still warm to the touch. 

I showed it to Paul Sr., and we concluded that it wasn't actually a bullet, but rather a conical sliding fishing weight with a hole in the center that just happened to be present at that location and was somehow warmer than the ambient temperature.

"If this were a hollow point," Paul Sr. pointed out, "then the tip would be damaged from the impact with the metal fixture." He pointed up at the dented light fixture and then at the pristine slug. 

"It doesn't add up," I countered. "When it hit my boot, it was burning hot, and you can see where it dented my boot." I pointed down at my boot, but there wasn't any evidence to support my claim. "Well, anyway, my foot still stings from it." My case was getting weaker, though, since my foot actually felt fine by then.

The dream fizzled, and I awoke with the familiar annoying feeling of something in my right eye. I put some eye drops in it and tried to rinse it out, but it is still there. Hopefully, it will fade as the day wears on and there will be no evidence of anything, like my dream of the bullet and the boot and my miraculously resurrected spaghetti and salmon dinner.