June 1994: Early memories and strange dreams


I didn’t start reading the newspaper seriously until I was twenty-two. The issues I first remember reading about were the ousting of George Duvalier in Haiti, and the rigging and losing of the Philippine elections by Ferdinand Marcos. I was doing quite a lot of cooking at the time. Since I had started computer school the previous June (which I had completed the previous November), I had not been thinking about sex much. I was working at the movie theater and wishing that I was still living at home. Why did I let things get so bad? I was trying to prove that I could make a living. Then I read a book on the Philby conspiracy. I started thinking about sex again after I started reading a book by a Mexican poet, Homero Arijdis. It was a narrative, free-verse poem called “Persephone.” Then I had a horrible job. But it paid for two trips to Europe. I wonder how much I owe to my two trips to Rome for the poetry I was able to write two or three years later. Clearly two of my poems owe their origin to the two books mentioned above: “The Execution of Donald F.” to the book on Philby, and ”April Nocturne” to “Persephone.” Sex & spying: what’s the connection? Scopophilia, obviously.

I had a really bad dream
It lasted 20 years, 7 months, and 27 days
Never had no one ever
--The Smiths

I had this dream about that time. In the dream I discovered that Elise lived in the same house as I did. Her bedroom was two doors down from mine. But it was Phil’s house, in Cohasset. Just this evening I had been thinking about how my desire for Elise may have been displaced homoerotic feelings for Phil. Just as I started writing the entry, I remembered the dream I just described. I tried to remember if I ever slept over at Phil’s. Not in Cohasset, anyway. Maybe in Hull. But Phil slept over two nights in my condo just after Christmas, 1984. There has been a dual displacement in the dream, therefore. Instead of my apartment, it was Phil’s house. Instead of Phil and I, it was Elise and I; or was it I and Elise: if my apartment became Phil’s house, did I become Phil in the dream? And did Elise become me? In other words, was I-as-Phil desiring sexual gratification form Elise-as-me? I desired to be Phil, but to be sexually satisfied by Elise--or by myself. Then there’s the dream segment from last night. Phil and someone else were lying next to me naked, with erections. They wanted me to undress and compare their bodies or genitals with mine, and I became very disturbed. I felt like I was going to catch something from them. Or I felt it was kind of a shameful, macho kind of thing to do. Next I think of the time I went swimming naked with Phil across the street from his house in Hull. Afterwards he was asking me about the back rubs a teacher gave me. He asked me if she wrapped her legs around me. I lied, saying “nothing like that.” Phil had told me just before that one class he had been sitting next to the teacher while someone read “To His Coy Mistress,” and that she had rubbed her leg against his. I figured he was lying. Is that why I lied? The Lemonheads are like throat lozenges. Both last Monday and today they, the Evan Dandos, have helped me to overcome my block, the catch in my throat. Now it is clear why: Evan acted as a conduit for bringing back my desire for Elise, which had been displaced onto her from Phil--back onto Phil.

Now it should be clear also that I went unconsciously from “Mistress” to “Persephone” to “April Nocture.” Was there also a work that initiated the chain form the book on Philby to “Donald F.”? Philby was bisexual of course: Philby(i)-sexual. e. e. cummings:


l(a
le
af
fa


ll


s)
one
l


iness


I am reminded by cummings by the parentheses I just used. Now I am reminded that I had a cummings poem in mind when I wrote “In April” in 1983: it was the one that ended “no one, not even the rain, has such small hands” (which, by the way, was cited in “Hannah and Her Sisters,” which wass playing at the movie theater where I was working in 1986, the year I began talking about). Now I am also reminded that I wrote “In April” just after Phil had shown me a poem he had written. He had talked about nectar in it. So did I in mine. It seems that my feelings for Gita were also displaced from Phil. By the way, “April” is an anagram for “Ripley,” a girl I was attracted to at Derby. The evidence for this is that she appeared in a dream I had the night before I wrote “April Nocturne.”

* * *

Swallowing a penny. I was taken to the hospital. I remember putting on a hospital slip. Burning my finger in the cigarette ligher of a Ford Falcon. I was fooling around with the the radio. I remember I was trying to sing along with the radio. I was singing “dee dee dee.” I was wondering how one could say “la la,” because I couldn’t pronounce l’s. Left with Jeneanne, the babysitter. My parents had given me one of those toys where you press this stick and a disk, with red and blue segments, spins around and becomes purple. Then I climbed out the window and walked down the street to to the Five and Ten. The babysitter’s parents were walking from the other direction and picked me up, laughing. Playing with blocks in the back room. I had an accident and didn’t know what to do. Feces got all over the blocks. My father pretending to take a fig newton out of the magazine ad. For years I was never really sure if he had really done it or not. He went into the kitchen to get a whole box of fig newtons after, but I held on to the belief that maybe he had really done it.


Watching a movie at the Manns’ house. This Frankenstein-type monster was stalking these nurses around a hospital. They were hiding behind corners, fretting. I said “I’m scared,” and the others laughed. A dream where I fell onto the floor of the basement, saying “oopsie daisy!” This elephant couple was scolding me. They were saying “no.” The first time I remembered hearing “no” in a dream. Waking up, the first time I remembered hearing my heart racing, my pulse beating in my ears. Le non du pere. La stade du miroir: I remember looking in a mirror when I was three, being in awe suddenly of the concept of the self: “I’m...me!” I thought. A dream when I was four: I was walking with my father and brother in the woods on the other side of Tower Road. They went up an escalator and it was suspended from the ground before I could get on it. Smokey the Bear accosted me, scolding or criticizing me. Cf. elephant dream. In the first dream, I fell onto the fell onto the basement floor with a bump. In the later dream I remained on the ground while the escalator was suspended. Elephant probosces like penises. Bear face like vulvar hair.


Two or three more memories: I saw Maureen Mann and her friends with whistle pops and always wanted one. One day my mother took me to the Five and Ten to get one. At home it fell on the grass . I washed it off under the bathroom faucet, but it wouldn’t whistle anymore. Lying on the sidewalk one afternoon with Brian and his friends, whining “I want to go to the Five and Ten.” A mounted policeman comes by our house and I sit on the horse with him. With my mother in Bermuda. We were trying to hire and horse and buggy, but they were all booked. Horribly upset, disappointed to distraction.


* * *


I remember having a dream at 28 where my grandmother is holding me on her lap and cooing, talking to me incoherently. Her face is sort of semi-solid: features are not chiselled or sharply defined. Sort of like clay, or chocolate, or wax. Must be the return of an infantile, preverbal memory. Another memory: being carried under my grandfather’s arm into the bathroom to be changed. On my tricycle on the front porch at Walker Street. I am about to hold on to the railing riding down the steps while still on the tricycle. Manns tell me the paint is wet. I let go and tumble down the steps, banging my face. Vague memories of being locked in my bedroom and “wanting to come in the house.” Memory from when I was four: I am wandering around on Tower Road. Stranger, a man, picks me up and takes me home. I expect my mother will be glad to see me, but she yells at me and locks me in my room. I lie down on my back and kick at the door. Returning to Walker Street after having moved. I am looking through the screen door into our old apartment. Baby standing behind. “Hi, little fella,” I say. Remember seeing opening of Bulwinkle show on television behind screen door.


Two recurring nightmares, age four: in one a woman with black hair and sharp, fine features holds me and says to me, “caboose, caboose.” In one dream I am on a train with her; in another she is sitting next to my mother, talking to her. I am terrified that my mother doesn’t know who this woman is, that she is trying to take me away. At the time a confused the word “papoose” with “caboose.” The woman was from a television show on channel 2. I asked my mother what the show was about, and she said it taught you how to speak French. Cf. infantile, preverbal memory of grandmother: both cases involved a woman I didn’t understand. Nightmare that recurred while sleeping in my father’s old bedroom in Redding: I see my grandfather, but it turns out to be a double. He doesn’t know me. He never looks directly at me. He doesn’t say anything. One dream I see him going up behind me on an escalator. I wake up very scared, look out the window at the eerie moonlight shining on the garden waiting desperately for morning, or to fall asleep again. Man is silent, woman is incoherent.


* * *


Dream last night: I am at party of parents’ friends’ house. My father introduces me to my grandmother. I don’t understand how she came back to life. I don’t want to be impolite and say “I thought you were dead.” I wait for a moment alone with my father to ask what’s going on. Grandmother(‘s spirit) gets wind of my intention and pushes my father out a window. I figure this must be a dream. Later I am watching my grandmother in some strange complex of rooms--maybe some hybrid of ruins, perhaps a Loire Valley chateau, and a more contemporary unit. I am hanging, or hovering, from the ceiling. I am trying to think of the word for people returning from the dead. I know it begins with r. Grandmother begins talking about such--she tries to come up with the word, sorting through various r words. The word occurs to me: revenant. I tell it to her. She does not listen, continues to run through more r words. Connection: a couple of weeks before, a Cambodian tutee was filling out a form. She had to list her work title. She was a cashier. She says she knows another word for it and tries to enunciate some dimly recalled word beginning with r. The word “receptionist” occurs to me, but that would be wrong. I say to her, “I don’t know.”


Dream last year after reading about Freud’s wolf man: am in seminar room for Chaucer class at Tufts. Black-haired child comes in to see me. It is wolf-man-as-chid. Am proud that wolf man chooses to talk to me rather than any others in class. A woman aks me if I would like to hear the cihild’s life history, says he is from Switzerland. I say “I would love to.” Grandmother appears and says “that’s not what you should say. You should say ‘I would be delighted to.’ I yell at her, castigating her for always criticizing me.

Dream a few nights ago: parents were living on the Cape for the summer. Was down there. Brother had found job at used record and book store. Was jealous he finds jobs so easily. Don’t like it there, want to go back to Boston.



* * *


Yesterday walking with black tutee: he points to another student sitting by South Station and waves to him. “You can see where his motivation’s at,” he says to me. Says he shouldn’t be hanging around. Should report him to halfway house. Black unemployment issue makes me think of cultural anthro course from ‘89. Single parenthood by black women due to black male unemployment. Think about own employment problems. Understand despair and lack of motivation to look for a job. Think of rap, hip hop group at the Rat last Friday, how they were friendly like people at storefront church where I went to see West Indian friend play organ in spring of ‘85. Think of other artist friend from that time: Wei Wei. Had a dream a year or two ago he was living in Harvard Square. Last night I dreamed that I was an artist, that I had just finished paintings that were better that Wei Wei’s. Grandmother appears and tells me the Wei Wei got hired to do murals and paint ceilings at castle in Europe. Think that that is not the sort of thing I would like to be doing. Ought to go back to writing. Room I was in was cross between parents’ second floor hall and Jonathan Caldwell’s den.


Remember watching “Kimba” on Jonathan’s television. A cartoon about a fawn. Remember playing deer with Laurie Carlson and other girls. Asked if I could play female deer and girls said it was all right. Called myself Heidi. Jonathan and Andy came by. Was embarrassed and became male deer. Jonathan knew girl visiting grandparents next door named Heidi. Asked me if I had a girlfriend. I lied and said yes. He asked me her name. I said Marjorie Harris, a girl I had never met but who was the daughter of an associate of my father’s to whom I had sent a post card chain letter. Fourteen at summer camp. Friend asks me if I have a girlfriend. I lie. He asks her name. I say Ann, a girl I had danced with the spring before. At final dance aonther girl, Susie Crocker, asked me to slow dance. Was attracted to her, but embarrassed. Did not want anyone to think I liked her. Danced with her trying to give the impression that I didn’t want to. “I must stink,” I thought to myself as I danced with her, as I was sweating. She thanked me afterward. I pretended I didn’t care. Felt guilty afterward. Bettina Stamen calls me up one night before Thanksgiving, 1974. She asks me who I like. I lie, saying no one. She keeps asking me, , listing off names of girls. Really I liked her and some other girls, but didn’t know whether she really wanted to know or was just teasing me.


“So sleep and dream of love, because it’s the closest you will get to love...” Dream that marijuana plants were growing outside of grandparents’ old house, in overgrown grass. Connection: borther found marijuana plants behind MacKays and hung then in vacant lot next to parents’ house, summer, ‘85. Visited me in early August after I returned from grandparents. Cooked veal and sausages. Got high, cooked pot with peanut butter and honey in frying pan. Burned hand on oven rack taking out sausages. Saw “Emerald Forest” at movies, Beacon Hill.


Brother telling me about dream recently where he suspends someone from the ground by sticking knives into his neck into a stone wall behind. Dream from other night: large fish or shark’s stomach opens up, or is slit open, and man is taken in. Both shark (female) and man achieve orgasm as shark’s stomach devours man.


* * *


Security guards in my parents’ house: am working there, one of them. Realize that supervisor is Capp, old supervisor, but he is shorter. Realize it after he tells me to take off large coat and put on short coat. Tell him if he gives me a hard time I’ll get him fired. Threatens me with a kitchen knife in my lower back. New, different scene. Parents talking to brother in old kitchen. I have pot, walk behing Christmas tree in kitchen, trying to take pot out of my pocket, don’t know what to do with it. Parents about to search or frisk me. Out at night in back yard with brother and bong but very little pot. Sister comes out asking for smoke. Tell her there isn’t that much. Turns out she has her own bong and gives me a hit. Tells me she is drunk and is about to ride off with some guy she doesn’t know where. Am scared something terrible will happen to her, try to think of how to talk her out of it. Am sitting at a desk in house along with other security guards, also at desks. Wonder what is the point in having so many security guards in a private, suburban house during the day.


Discover Gita’s family is living in apartment next to mine. Elise’s family living next to grandmother in retirement complex. My apartment is sort of integrated with others in building. I have to go through others’ hallways to get to certain rooms in my unit. Am at supermarket. Woman undresses and changes in breezeway by doors. End up taking her out in Cape Cod. She is slightly older than I am, a few months. We have dinner with others. I have fish, pork, Mexican corn, seaweed, and refried beans which I don’t get a chance to eat. I feel I am a true gourmet, pleasing my palette. Somewhere I perform oral sex on the woman. Her labia are blue, like foam rubber. I am licking her in the wrong place. She moves my head to where her clitoris is. Returning from date to her home I am kissing her, eating her red hair or something. Her father is there and her siblings. Father says he saw my brother selling ice cream on the Cape. Leave her and want to date her again but can’t remember her name. I am walking down a street urinating and realize I am passing by her house. Hope she hasn’t seen me through window, then realize this is a dream. See it, her family name, in letters on her house but can’t pronounce it. GHILST or something. Walk back home across some campus. Am wearing boots, trudging through mud. Craig Russ is there talking to some co-eds. Say hello to him after he breaks away from them.


Am to meet Tom Waters at some bar in South Boston. Wonder if I’ll find him there. Connection: was to meet him at Brazilian restaurant in Fenway. He left message that he didn’t know what time his plane would arrive. Jim Gorman on bus or T with me saying something about jobs. Connection: day before Jim and Andrew Davis were talking about the Labor Secretary’s appearance and about the job training dilemma. Earlier dream that night: trying to get bus from Hingham. Several buses pass that are out of service. One finally stops but goes before I can get in. I latch onto it, coasting along side. Woman busdriver stops and says it is all right with her but it is dangerous and we might get in trouble. She strews banana peels around sidewalk and road to deter such action. I say it isn’t necessary. Dream from a few weeks ago: was talking to lesbian or bisexual outside of laundromat. She starts reaming me. Later her lover comes along. I think she wants to take her away from me, but they ask to get together with me. I don’t know why. They overdose me with prozac.


Dream from a few nights ago: am in my apartment examining heating system. There is this chain of cogwheels that someone points out to me, which go around the upper walls all around the room just above window level. Person explains to me that they gather heat from warm spots on the sidewalk. I think that the friction of the wheels rubbng together also produces heat. Apartment becomes a basement store with scattered pine cones and Christmas ornaments. Cathy from State Street is there. For some reason I think she, or employers, want to fire me.


Banana peels: saw Latin CD at Sam Goody’s with woman holding a banana, about to eat it. On back, woman raises skirt to show bare buttocks and holds eaten banana peel. Pearl Jam CD, bootleg, at Second Coming: girl in transparent white panties holding hose between middle and index fingers, directing below exposed breast from which wet t-shirt has been lifted.


* * *


How to deal with Charlotte Smith paper. She resists writing dedicatory, public sonnets, but then she doesn’t turn the focus back on herself. She denies herself the privilege of explaining her own grief, but insists upon brooding upon it. What is the effect of this? It is annoying, feels like she wants you to feel really bad for her, but she won’t tell you anything. Is she really trying to make you feel sorry for her, though? Perhaps she is simply trying to justify some scandalous or questionable liberty she is taking. What is this liberty? I am reminded of a tutee I was walking with up Summer Street. I told him I was getting lunch. He said “I wish I could get lunch.” It sounded like he was trying to make me feel sorry for him; but then he pulled out a bunch of subway tokens which the tutoring supervisor gave to tutees. He was wondering how much he could get for them by standing outside of Park Station, and how long it would take to sell them all off. It seems to me he was trying to vindicate himself from this shady transaction in telling me his wish to buy lunch. It worked: in the abstract I would have found such a practice unacceptable, but as he presented it, I could understand it perfectly. I felt that I probably would have done the same thing.


I am thinking of a story a friend of mine read at a reading, about a trip to Czechoslovakia. He stayed with some impoverished young Czechs in Prague. They traded jokes when he first got there: “What do you think of Gorbachev?” “He’s good for drinking.” “Gorbachev” is a brand of cheap vodka. They made him a bologna sandwich and put a catsup smiley face on the bologna. Then they started saying things like “you don’t know how bad it is here.” Eventually my friend got really disturbed by all their grieving and complaining, and left them. Were they trying to make him feel bad for them, or was there another reason? My friend, apparently, didn’t stop to consider. I often feel inclined to respond to Charlotte Smith in such a way.


* * *


Have dream where I am in Roxbury, or dangerous area where blacks are. In past I have had such dreams and been really scared. This time I think of black ex-offenders tutees I have made friends with and am not so scared. I figure either I have learned from them as they have from me, or that they will come to protect me if there is trouble. Have dream that grandparents have reclaimed old house.




* * *


Hanover Street is the corridor of a shopping mall, of which my apartment unit is a part. Hair salon is installed across corridor from where one already is. First I think I don’t have any use for hair salons, then I think they may attract women. It seems I have women roommates, but they are not really roommates; doorways of theirs connect with my unit but they are locked.


In room somewhere. Rollins is playing on stereo in next room. Brother, sister, and Kristen come out. Am watching Letterman. Letterman is dressing in clerical or commencement robes, changing them as his interviewee guests change: medical professor or lawyer. Am changing my own clothes, can’t decide what to wear. Make bed then wonder if I should do laundry. Am changing in front of sister and her friend. Wonder how explicitly they can see me.


Girl is skiing on private range. At first it is Betsy Carlson-as-child, then Francie Hogan. Champion, has done the whole course in 33 minutes and some seconds. Pass by her. Pretends she doesn’t know me. Many prior dreams about skiing ranges in odd places. Once one was connected to my parents’ house.


Thinking about Ed Batchelder last night, how he was doing book reviews for Boston Review at 32. Wondered if I’d be capable of that. Can write well enough, but can I conform to jounalistic parameters? “You got yours, now I got to get mine,” black tutee, age 33, says to me the other day. Think of distinction between street smarts and conventional skills.

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