Dream Baby

By Christopher Devitt

That space between awake and sleep.

In what we call a dream.

To hit you hard and stand you up.

Call it fact or fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christopher Devitt
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215112946

Book preview

With Regard To:

Chris Billy Baa-Lamb (The Lead Sheep)

Old Man Of The Mountain

Ginsavine

Frisker

Whiskey (Whiskers)

Crazy Legs

The Hammer

Hollywood

White Lightning

Irish

Mister Cool

Boo (Beebubbulyu)

Flash DeVille

Blues

Doctor D (Applied Life Science)

The Horse (Tireless Worker)

Crispy

CD

To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub.

– William Shakespeare

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Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?

– Alfred Lord Tennyson

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All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

– Edgar Allan Poe

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Perhaps life is just that ... a dream and fear.

– Joseph Conrad

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Reality is wrong. Dreams are for real.

– Tupac Shakur

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It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else.

– Erma Brombeck

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I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

– Vincent Van Gogh

Phantasmagoria

I Laugh

Bad Day

Peepee Sauvage

Dark And Dead

Nudist Sauna

Wet Dream Woman

Two Girls Goofing

The Children Slide

Get The Kid

For Ever Gone

Anya Baby

Double D Daughter

Tableau

Interrogation

The Bus Is Leaving Soon

Big Meeting

Bistro

Wouldn’t Call It A Party

Hot ‘n’ Hard, Low ‘n’ Slow

In Concert

Bad Back Bad Day

March Or Die, Ma’am

Take The Pain

Flat Lighting, Wrong Color

Fuck It All Anyway

Human Sitiation

Old Times

It’s Come

Play Pretend

Lost His Way

It’s Grand

Field-Grade

Miss Her

Gone

Sore Hurt

Treehouse For Anne

Cocksman

End Of Times

Popstand

Chirp In The Park

The Dawning

Show Concern

Shit

And Go To Hell

Bad Form Public Popoff

En Garde

Ergo Et Al

Stitch Stark Nekkid

You Know We Always Do

Disturbance

Heraldry

Beer Hall Putsch

Mister Malone

Summertime Something

Pretend To Be

Nothing Atall

Car Coat

Go Ask Cally

Out Of Fashion

Frenchie

What Kind Of Life?

Western Union

In The Field

Goin’ Down

Stadia

Customs

Continuation

En Passant

Fade To Black

Buck Up

Chitchat, Lollygag An’ Bullshit

The Cork Is Drawn

Logistics

Bemember

Roadster

Play Ball

Mystification

All Day Sucker

OK I Say

Marilyn’s Birthday

To Save A Life

Guarantee The Good

On Expedition

Put A Point

Wrong Movie

Third Degree And Then Some

Sometimes We Just Have To Pretend

The Big Game

Organization

Up In The Air

The Game’s Afoot

Panegyric

Not There

Spam & Peas And Happiness

Funny World

Wonder

Just A Taste

Social Snort

Katie O’Brien

Special Occasion

Scallywag

Quarantine

What To Do Next

To Your Health

Baby Doll

If You Call That Luck

The Hell You Say

To Take A Shit

Distraction

One’s Métier

Some Kinda Show

Olive Asshole

The Fuck Ah’m Gonna Do

Fuggit

Out Of Time

Climactic Scene

Some Ass

IBD

Denouement

PS

I Laugh

I laugh I laugh I laugh I laugh.

I laugh and almost wake me up.

Bad Day

I’ve had a bad day. A bad day, a sad day; a day one would’ve rather not have had. But so I’ve had before. So what.

Just like a lot of other chumps. And probably animals too. Who knows? Maybe plants and minerals too. Who knows? So what.

Perchance to be pissed off; picked on and at, or trod upon and spat upon, or maybe even pissed and shat upon. Be picked and plucked – befucked. End-up in being eaten. Down the hatch.

...

Despised, Despaired,

Deprived Undying Dignity;

Bereft of God’s Own Grace.

Go To Hell.

Gott Sei Dank.

...

[Or as alternative ending:]

...

Slow-Cooked in Hellion Pressure Cooker,

Out ‘n’ Out Blown to Bits –

To Teeny-Weeny Smithereens.

RIP.

Rest In Peace.

Peepee Sauvage

Peepee Sauvage and Ergo Et Al

Walk side-by-side and hand-in-hand.

One is a hero, one is a villain;

One is a man and one is a woman.

Ah cain’t tell which is which is which.

...

Peepee: New boots?

Ergo: Yeah.

Peepee: Let’s see."

Ergo: Yeah.

Peepee: Pretty flat. No off-road tread.

Ergo: For urban walker. Or wearing round the orifice.

...

I’m not sure where to put this.

It’s all of a piece.

In time it comes to some.

But how in Hell to say it?

Dark And Dead

Dark, and dark and dead of the night.

Brother Nick home from abroad, back from the dead.

High in a tower, look down at the bazaar. Tents and stalls lined up. Noise, confusion, laughter.

Anna is in one tent and I can’t see her and I don’t know what she’s doing.

Nick in another and I’m proud of him. Maybe he’ll meet Anna and make me look good. Then again, maybe he’ll take her for himself. Who wouldn’t?

They both can be said to be desirous. Anna always edgy, but covers it up with hyperactive enthusiasm and pouty eye-rolling anger. Nick ever the master of elegant insouciance. Could it be that that was his cover-up?

Stand and look and hope I covered myself earlier when in communion with Big T, photographer with whom I used to work. Funny guy, when once you get to know him. But that can take a bit of doing, till ultimate understanding. When first we met, had thought to fire his silent glaring ass up, ships passing in the night between bays of the studio, I say. But then there came the rapprochement. Pardners with Double Dee. And then they weren’t. Falling out in business can be worse than falling out in love (or is it of? [or I don’t know]). What was it that we decided? Or was it only he, not me? Can it be that’s why I’m banished?

Stand and look and shake my soul and sweat it. Scout about my jolly options.

Was it the wife that told me I could see her tomorrow? Or was she really lying? Or was it merely a case of hysteria? Or case of mistaken identity?

I pace, look down from my cupola. Don’t get caught-out looking – It doesn’t do to stare or spy.

Even endings have their endings.

...

Is it that I hallucinate? Yet partake of no hallucinogen that I recall in time at all. Unless you call the bud just that. Or maybe they call it meditation. But then again, may be I’m mad.

Should I be sad or glad? Or bad?

My legs and ass are sore; I hit the bricks too hard. Unyielding that they are. That’s what it is about the street.

So skip in time but watch your dime, and keep your pistol primed – her hair enshrined in locket in pocket.

Someone pounds a piano artlessly somewhere. (Both!) Think on when I played the horn – how bad it must have been for everyone. And thought I was getting a taste. Ha-ha, the tang indeed! Ho-ho, the alternate bleary theory.

Why do people always tell you: That’s the long and short of it, when really they’ve only told you the long? Maybe might modify the medium.

Depends on how you play it. And what you think it means.

Look up, look down, look all around – another night out on the town. And yet you say, you thought that you were through.

Don’t say yes, don’t say no; just go.

Go.

Gone.

...

Around the corner there’s trouble. I go to check. Gangsters.

And Marilyn sits on an open stoop. What is she doing here? I try to talk but she doesn’t say much. As usual. At least with me.

The door flies open and bangers fly out. Three of them charge to the cube van parked across the street. Two others hustle in another direction. The door still lurching open, I look through: merch crammed wall to wall; it looks like a store. It’s even rather neat.

Another bandit stumbles out and buffets against me as I stand peering within.

What the fuck, pendejo! he screams.

Fuck the fuck, fucka-mutha, I say.

No talk the talk, cabrón, he say.

Yo, walk the walk, my man, I say.

Hard look. Dart back in, as though to grab something. This can’t be good.

Let’s go, pipes in Marilyn.

There is what I take to be a gardening tool propped in a corner – six foot long with a steel spike on one end. I grab it. Just in case.

Across the street the combatants have primitive weapons too. A hapless chump is cornered in the back of a truck by the three cholos. One has an old military rifle with a long bayonet; one has something that looks like a corkscrew but with an 18 inch wooden handle on the end; the other merely a baseball bat.

It doesn’t look pretty and now I think it’s time to go, which we do. I use the pike as a shepherd's staff.

...

Back at the hotel. Think to go for a swim.

Find the pool and it’s peculiar – only three lanes, very narrow, half as what they ought to be; and it’s as though you swim downhill, then turn and swim back up uphill. How is this possible? Is this an illusion? Or maybe: What Fun?

What Ho: There’s Marilyn. Sitting at the top at the beginning of one of the lanes. Not swimming, just sitting. Not sunning – We are, after all, in what seems a basement hotel pool.

Going swimming? she says.

I thought I might, I say.

Swim down. Swim back. Shoulder-hunching skinny. The water is fine but it’s very narrow. You can’t do the breaststroke lest you hit the wall. Swimming uphill is odd, for the water gets very shallow, and it’s almost like doing pull-ups or waterlogged version of low-crawl.

Achieve the top; my girl’s still there. I turn to swim back down the lane and, sonofabitch, there’s somebody else paddling through. How so? Look to the other two runways, but someone thrashes there. From where?

Jump out. Pause. Look around. Maybe talk to Marilyn.

How ye doin’? I say.

How ya doin’? she says.

Crowded, I say.

Look about and look to myself and notice that I’m not wearing actual swimming trunks, but rather, longish shorts and T-shirt, both made out of some nylon or waterproof material like a wetsuit but not that tight. Huh?

Now the lane’s open and I swim again. Downhill, warm water, odd costume. Turn around and up the hill up the hill and pull myself up in a low-crawl pull-up. Turn to reverse an’ repeat – there’s someone else again. Look to the other two lanes. Sonofabitch.

Jump out. My girl still there.

How ya doin’?

How ye doin’?

Forsooth, how do you do?

Nudist Sauna

Day trippin’, maybe of a Saturday. Winter cold. Got hat and gloves and boots and parka and heavy corduroy trousers. Approach an edifice, new sheen but really old – reconstituted heavy industry, factory or warehouse.

Squeeze iron door open and bash it with my hip. It gives and I go in. Dark. Voices from all around. To right a room. A door ajar. Enter. Dark. Sauna-like heat. Indeed it is a sauna. But cavernous, big as a gym. In quarter light or less, I see naked people – men and women, subdued and sitting, as one does in a sauna.

Come in, come in, they say.

And in I come.

Friendly voices: Hi. Hello.

Hi, hullo, your own self, I say. Or own selves, I should say.

A murmuring laugh of the congregants.

Gotta take this shit off, I further venture. Better disrobe – lest lilt of heat prostitution, and laugh ... prostration, and start to strip in the heat before the crowd. Best put a hustle in my bustle. Before I pass me out.

No hangers. Throw coat in the corner. Get boots off – they’ll kill ya in the Turkish bath. Sweater and trousers – ádios. Pause before the doffing of the undies, note the dirty yellowed grundies. (Flash on old-timey Mama admonition: Keep it clean, lest you get in a car wreck and die of the shame before doctors and nurses and all and sundry.) Hustle through humiliation, and tuck and hide them under my pile and kick the mess aside in a corner.

The heat caresses and I’m not ashamed, not even a bit embarrassed. Au naturel is not a big deal – been about gyms before. Not my first rodeo nor barbeque, baaaby. But doubtless first dance with naked women en masse.

Wonder and wander around, up and down bleachers and on the flat of the floor. Seventies old to twenties young. No Gorgeous George or Juicy Jane, Grecian specimen to be seen; but no double gauge fatties either – only the odd parceled paunch here and there, unselfconscious at that. Dicks swing, tits dangle, asses discretely displayed, pussies somehow concealed by photo-op placement of legs – or at least not brought to my probing note, which seems odd; and also I don’t have a hard-on and neither does anyone else, which is both lucky and seemly and maybe also something odd.

Hunt about in discovery. See the sights in the halflight. Savor the warmth in the winter. Appreciate the mannered correctness of the gentle cultists as I meander the gymnastic expanse and finally take a yogic pew to cleanse the pores and clear the lungs, breathe deeply for the head. A bit of adventure for me – without the risk of life or limb. Ha-ha, what fun!

At civilized length (these are not fighters or wrestlers wearing rubber suits, jumping and twisting and turning and doing pushups, dying to make weight), the heat starts to dissipate. Fluorescent light slowly comes up. So time to move some more. Climb the bleachers upward. Slowly, so as not to fall – always a hazard with grandstands.

At the baseball at the Twins games with Daddy and even old Gaga we always sat in Ruthville, I suppose because that was the cheapest. Long wooden slats captured by steel vices. They’d flex and bend and shift when you walked, and the crowd would stomp and bang them between innings or when prompted by the organist. Afraid the whole time but couldn’t let on. Always wanted to go underneath (Under The Grandstand by Seymour Butts), for to find the money that must be there, and other treasured objects fallen from the pockets.

But back to now and up I climb. Ascend. On high is obscurantist mist, from spritzed hot rocks or theatrical fog machine – I don’t know which. Fight the vapors, squint and peer through the nebula as one normally does.

And ... Good Lord! There’s a sound booth, a light booth, a broadcast booth, or something, set up impromptu in the middle of the terraced flat-plank seating. And manned by a wizened woman, small and sharp but dainty, with short cropped curly gray Afro hair and big broad beatific smile and engaging chat for me. And tales of yesteryear as well: The History Of Nudism (funny sort of ism that is) – back to the nineteenth century, classic traditions, pre-modern practices. I listen with interest but lacking clothing, deprived of pocket, and therefore no notebook or even a modern computer recorder.

Thank you. I’ll look it up later, I tell her.

She smiles and smiles indulgently.

Back up behind her sits a younger pale white woman with long brown hair swooping across her forehead (farhead), broad face and pale chalk skin, and yet more smiles – and smiles for me. One can barely see the sight of herself in that she’s settled in a hornet’s nest of electronic recording, filming, broadcasting booth equipment of one sort or another. Seems busy, but graciously tenders the beam. But busy is as busy does – just the passing flâneur.

So back to my squabble of personal rubble. Dress. Undies quick first, that no one might see the skidmarks of squalor.

So always wear clean underwear, me Mama done tol’ me; I tell ye, Ah tol’ youse. Words to live by. Ha! Don me now apparel, gay or otherwise.

People have left and I’m leaving now. Through the door, now left ajar; hear voices from afar, another room or place.

Maybe I’ll be back.

Wet Dream Woman

The place is huge – a warren of business, of industry, of work, of sport, of entertainment, of pleasure, of trying and travail. Parts had been old warehouse or such; parts are new and there are glass runways going from one part to another.

I’m here for some reason and I’m ‘sposed to go home but it’s only three or four. Mr Jimmy wants me first to go cross town to get something, but I think it’s just an excuse to hang out and fuck around.

But that’s just what she seems to want. And she, I don’t know who she is or what she does, seems slightly piqued by me. Maybe I’ll take reciprocal interest and maybe play hard ball with her. O should that chance to come to pass!

So now we find ourselves sitiated in a workshop of sorts: tables and benches and sawhorses and sawdust. The look and smack of projects: artistic and industrial or perchance theatrical. And this fine woman is Hellfire, all that. And sure fills out her jeans, she does – to slinky leotard finish on top; nothing much left to imagination, and cranks me crank at that.

There are ever shifting conferences of craftsmen types and those of money-man look. Plenty-lot bustlin’ bidness, The Great American Busy-ness; consultation, discussion; a taste of consternation, the thirsty swig of concern.

And thirsty I am but ought to get home but Jimmy won't leave me alone. And my wet-dream woman won’t let me be. She cuts me out of the crowd and I let her. Happy to hide from those I know.

Into another part of the complex we trundle and tremble. She so slick, me not so much; but let meself ‘long fer the ride. We start with a little joking, a little touching, a little poking; laughing, playing. She’s luscious, soft and firm. And then we’re kissing. And then we’re moving and it’s serious now. She makes an opening in her jeans – raw flesh like in a magazine. And looks and feels and is ... divine. We’re kissing and rubbing. And she hikes her ample ass up onto a table where woodwork had been done, makes invitation and space for entry.

Hey.

Hey.

Oh.

Ah.

And then a gaggle of what used to be called yuppies click-clack their feet on echoing floor. Are close and then they’re there and here. Embarrassed, but mostly feigning: stand up, button up, pretend that nothing was happening. Maybe just a bit of smooching, tickling and touching; good clean fun and jolly humor. But they all knew ... and ... would be discreet. But certainly laugh – tweet tweet, tweet twit.

We wander off, not holding hands, for we’re not supposed to be together, and find another locale. She seems to know this vast place. I myself, as usual, am lost. But I don’t care.

Attached? she asks.

I don’t know how to answer. Or even if I should.

Well ... sort of, I stupidly say.

Sort of? she says.

Sort of, I say. I say with a laugh and a nod and a shake of the head, and maybe even a blush. But that would be only inside, of course.

Only inside, she says.

Surreptitiously check my watch. Seven o’clock. Late to get home. I should get going. Try to blow Mr Jimmy off and make the odd excuse. But it’s OK.

And then we’re on a leather couch in a vast empty space. Stripped and naked we are and in the raw. Roll one way, then the other, and she’s laughing. Her sensuous