A bigger living room than I imagined

 

Starring: Natalie Manes, Joan Cusak and Rienna Young (as herself)

I was in a house by the beach. I remember this distinctly because I was sitting in my living room on a beach towel with Natalie Manes, and the tide rolled in and soaked our bottoms. We had just met and didn't know each other very well, so this was one of those moments where nature intervenes, creating an awkward romantic opportunity.

"Ha ha!" I said, "I guess we're going to get wet," and I squeezed her to my side to brace against the inch high tsunami.

She laughed and did not pull away, and we sat there in the sludge for a moment enjoying the cool ocean breeze.

My aunt Carol, played by a young Joan Cusak, was waiting in a van nearby. I had told her to keep the engine running, and Natalie and I would be along momentarily. We were scheduled to pick up a recently painted upright piano, which I felt would make a nice addition to my expansive living room, once we cleaned up the silt and sand. The teal paint would match the hue of the low pile carpet.

I glanced over at Rienna, who was sprawled out on a twin mattress. She looked up at me expectantly. She was wearing some cheap polyester lingerie, but she carried it off like it was business casual, and no one seemed to pay any mind.

I was considering how to ask her if she'd like to accompany Natalie and I to the van, as we had a piano to move, and we could use all the help we could get, but I just couldn't. It didn't seem fair, me arm in arm with Natalie and all, to ask her to participate in some conscripted manual labor for my benefit. Though we'd parted on good terms, I felt the guilt of disloyalty in that moment. 

Meanwhile, the clock was ticking, and I felt the urgency of the piano situation pressing upon me. Aunt Carol did have the van running after all, and that took precedent.

I'm starting to see a pattern here, but crazy people routinely do that.

Picking up from where I left off seems to be the best way to proceed. When I start at the beginning, I tend to fabricate and conflate fiction with actual dream content. As with all of my convoluted dream quilts, I'm having to patch disparate images together into a less than cohesive broader image, and I fear it will not produce anything but some variegated, random thumbnails.

 

A waifish, Winona Ryder-esque girl in her twenties flashed a toothy smile as she dispelled accusations of Nazi affiliation that had recently cropped up during a conversation between a group of locals and some passersby in a city park. The group, of which I guess I was a part, not by choice but by proximity and happenstance, consisted of the girl, my mentally compromised roommate and some random kids who functioned as NPCs, their sole function being that of rumor adjudicators: "Yes, I heard that!" or "No way! That's a lie!"

In this instance, they were taking both sides of the "She's a Nazi" debate with regard to the pretty, petite brunette in the muddy pants, and I found myself quite interested in the outcome. I had fallen into her company only recently, and being starved for good conversation, I was stumbling over myself to try to impress her, recent Nazi allegations notwithstanding.

We'd met in a tunnel, a sewer pipe adjacent to a condemned ramshackle ranch house that I shared with my de facto roommate, a bipolar schizophrenic with suicidal tendencies. 

<stitch incoming>

This guy. I don't generally like to paint with such a coarse brush, but I can characterize him with only a couple of words: unstable meathead. Low forehead, narrow field, deep-set predator eyes and a loose Brillo of curls that looked like a bad perm recently freed from the confinement of a hairnet. You know the type. A walking posterboard for jock itch who probably owned several sweat-stained MAGA hats.

During his most recent suicide attempt, I'd tried to talk him off a cliff, but he jumped anyway, landing in a shallow creek, seemingly none the worse (or better) for the experience. 

"Come on in!" he called up in an oafish bellow, taunting me from the abyss. "It's not too bad."

As I looked over the cliff at my indestructible psychopathic roommate in the creek, I noticed that the tide was rolling in. The creek had morphed from a small stream to a sizable inlet that fed into a bay, and waves from the outer ocean were making an incursion into the normally still waters. My roommate scrambled up the rocks as breakers, ever increasing in height, threatened to wash us both off the cliff.

<stitch>

Back in the tunnel, where my still dripping roomie was having yet another self-induced, mumbly meltdown, I spied the brown haired girl. She was trying to find a quiet place to read, or so she said. Were she an actual Nazi, or someone attempting to evade detection, I guess hiding out in a tunnel might make sense. But with my now howling roommate making the less than ideal situation untenable, I found my icebreaker.

"I know of a better place than this, if you don't mind cobwebs, a leaking ceiling and a few missing floorboards here and there," I said beckoning with a flourish to a dilapidated structure just outside of the tunnel's opening.

"I don't mind," she said and promptly stepped in a mud puddle, soaking the cuffs of her balloon pants up to the ankles with thick brown slop. She carried herself with such grace that this didn't seem at all out of the ordinary. To the contrary, such was her magnetism that one would almost feel compelled to soil their own shoes in solidarity. Almost. 

I sidestepped the puddle and led the way through a series of rooms and corridors, each more chaotic and disheveled than the last. Wires to flickering fluorescent fixtures hung low, and the ceilings and walls were partially caved in. The floor was mostly dirt, some of which was wet from the leaking roof or possibly from the nearby sewer pipe. This made the trek uncomfortable in the places where one had to crawl due to the collapsing ceiling.

"There doesn't appear to be any furniture," I apologized weakly.

"Oh, that's all right. I'll just use this blanket here," she said, pointing to a remarkably clean and dry blanket in the middle of a cave-like open area where some natural light managed to filter in through the broken slats of the wood and plaster wall. 

I liked her moxie. I would not have to feign opulence to gain her favor. She seemed to be unperturbed by the generally squalid conditions and was able to genuinely frame the less than ideal circumstances in a positive light.

"I'm a blanket kind of girl anyway," she said in a way that left room for hopeful inference from me.