Review by DICK, May, 2013
I ate 5 alarm chilli at midnight and had a restless sleep. I had one of my infamous dreams. I dreamt it was almost 40 years ago and I got my draft notice in the mail.I felt a sudden swell of helplessness come over me, a drowning sensation as if I had fell overboard from a boat and was being swept away by silver waves. Chunks of my own history flashed by. I saw a 7 year old boy in a white cowboy hay and a Lone Ranger mask and a pair of six guns. I saw a 12 year old little leaguer shortstop pivoting to turn a double play. I saw a 16 year dude decked out in a white tux for his first prom his hair cut short and flat and shiny shoes. My whole life spilled out into the river swirling away from me. , everything I had ever been or ever wanted to be. I couldnt get my breath, I couldnt stay afloat I couldnt tell which way to swim. A hallucination .... maybe. I saw my parents and my brother, all the neighbors, the mayor , and all my teachers and girfriends and high school buddies. Like some sporting event, everybody screaming from the sidelines, rooting me on.... a loud stadium roar. hotdogs and popcorn.. stadium smells and stadium heat. A squad of cheerleaders did cartwheels, they had megaphones and pompoms and creamy white thighs.The crowd swayed right and left. A marching band played fight songs. All my aunts and uncles were there and Abraham Lincoln and St. Michael the archangel and a 8 year boy named Raymond Quantrist who died of some wierd disease in 3rd grade, and several members of the US senate and a blind poet, and LBJ and Huck Finn and Abbie Hoffman and all the dead soldiers back from the grave and the many thousands who had yet to die, villagers with terrible napalm burns, little kids with no arms or legs and the joint chiefs of staff were there and a couple of popes and Jane Fonda dressed as Barbella and a first lt named joe Demeo and an old man sprawled beside a pigpen and my grandfather and Gary Cooper and a million ferocious citizens waving flags of all shapes and colors.... they were all whooping and hollering. I saw faces from my distant past and distant future. I saw the kids I never had and a drill sargegent named Bokins sneered and shot up a finger and shook his head. There was a choir in bright purple robes. There was a cabbie from the Bronx. There was a slim young man I would one day kill with a hand grenade along a clay trail outside some mud raked stinking village. The whole universe was watching me and i could hear people screaming. I saw myself in an ambush as a cool, impassive moon rose over the nightime paddies... great sheets of meta-fire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white phorphorus, the purply orange glow of napalm, the rockets red glare...... I shot up in bed like a lightening bolt hit me, soaking wet, sopping wet, shivering and hot at the same time...What the fuck.... Ill never eat that hot or that late again..... I had a raging hard on also and went online to set up an appt for the next morning. I hit city-source and saw Rain... holy shit ... I know rain 10 years now we talk occaisionally and are friends. Years ago we saw each other a lot and did 3somes with Mia the kissing bandit a lot. She looked good in her pics and it must be 8-9 years since we were together. I called and left a message and she called me back in the AM.
