Tenderness

Dreams, Performance, and The Way Out

When I was sixteen I worked in a restaurant. One of the busboys was named Doug, a college football player with blonde hair cropped military-style and big hands that were always dry from being washed in the scalding hot kitchen sink. For two months he appeared in my dreams, a phrase I like because it shifts the source of subconscious activity onto people and things outside of the body. Anyway, he would appear in these dreams where the two of us would do very normal things. Drive out to the river near my school or go see a movie. At work I began to avoid him, terrified that by just looking at me he would know.

I return to the dream again while on the train. It’s the only way I can stand the movement, the brightness of light, the quietness of midday-commuters. In the background, some other part of me is rattling against my chest cavity. Pressing a hand to my sternum I can feel it and the impulse is to stamp it out, like you would a fire before turning in to sleep. There is a familiar haunting happening. A slow, drawn-out chase that is almost something else, a feeling like if I open my eyes I’ll see something awful. And so I return to the dream again, not waking until I reach the West Side.

I get off at 14th street after catching the wrong train and walk out above ground, surfacing in a crowd of people. I walk fifteen blocks uptown to Lisa’s and all the while I’m lost in thought. I am pushed forward by an unnamed force. The steam blowing from sewer grates. The mannequins in their rigid poses. Tourists dragging suitcases back towards Port Authority. I let myself into her apartment and collapse on the bed. I am hungover. I am trapped in a dream that ended years ago. I try to tell her this but it comes out inverted, upside down. We go to happy hour then take the train to Central Park where we walk until the sun goes down, watching dogs and people and the way the wind looks passing through trees, shaking leaves loose and letting them fly out into the air. The year is passing imperceptibly.

*

I have begun to learn, or at least, notice the geometry of performance.

In order to perform, there is a kind of memory one must develop and then be able access at the right moment. It’s different from the kind used to carry out repetitive, everyday tasks and different still from the kind used to recall places and people. It’s a reservoir of language, emotion, and movement. It requires a level of thoughtlessness, an ability to slip into one moment while remaining visible in another. The best performers, I think, are able to do away with distinctions such as past and present all together. Creating a wormhole of believability where they and the audience can be “in it” together.

It’s not too dissimilar from a dream.

While we’re sitting through sound check, the other band’s tour manager gives me the email address for his psychic. A woman with two first names who lives in L.A.

I tell him one of my friends is always trying to get me to do that sort of thing. He assures me this woman is the real deal.

In the bathroom I hold my hands under freezing cold water, trying to wake up some part of me that has folded over. And I wonder what good a psychic is. If, perhaps, the right information can make you change. Because there must be something I’m not picking up on. Some encoded message that when discovered will act as a pain reliever or a way out.

After I walk in the rain all the way past Atlantic Avenue.

Ahead of me is a couple and their two children who are dressed up in bright raincoats and swinging from their parents arms. It is so dark out. It’s barely past five pm. I turn off the main street onto a residential block where the brownstones are soaked through and soft-looking. And people say it all the time. That on occasion they get the feeling they’re in a dream. But I feel it now, I swear, and I’m walking in the rain past these houses that are lit up all yellow inside where it’s probably warm and I’m thinking over the conversation I was just a part of and that is now some past thing that cannot be brought forward again except in memory and dream and reunion and I’m breathless. I’m cold. I’m waiting for a bus that never comes until you give up all hope.

*

The dream is: David Byrne’s Big Suit, Some West Coast Highway, Thanksgiving Dinner, A Lover’s Call. And I am caught up in it. God, am I caught up in it. Legs and arms all tangled so that every time I try to pull some bit loose, another bit tightens.