/yesod

Tag: movies

  • david and mickey

    It’s night and we’re driving, my friend David and me.

    I’ve known him a long time. Since we were in sixth grade, I think. We’ve stayed in touch that whole time, mostly.

    Well, we fall out of touch and then back into touch. We haven’t seen each other in years — almost twenty, I think . . . though I’m not quite sure exactly how long it’s been.

    But we’re back together for the evening, heading over to the old mall to see the new Mickey Mouse cartoon that’s just been released. David is excited. I’m feeling sleepy a bit under the weather. I haven’t been sleeping.

    Most times it seems like I always haven’t been sleeping.

    At the mall, David produces a small swipe card — somehow he’s managed to clone it from one of the security guards, in order to sneak in to the movies without paying. He has one for me as well and I’m feeling a bit panicky as we swipe our way through the back door, coming face to face with a guard.

    He ignore us. In our suits and ties, I suppose we look like we belong there, behind the scenes.

    I follow David through the hallways to an area behind the movie screen. There is a small riser of stadiums seats, sparsely attended, looking down on a little orchestra pit and a small constellation of microphones. I realize that the movie soundtrack and dialogue will be performed live for the premiere, like an old time live radio show.

    For reasons I that aren’t explained, the sound effects are recorded on the film, however.

    I watch the actors mug their way through the performance, mildly impressed at how well everything goes. I forget sometimes to watch the screen where Mickey’s antics play out in silvered, larger-than-life magic.

    A woman makes her way through the seats, selling concessions. She has the pillbox cap, fishnet stockings, and pin curls of yesteryear. But all she has to sell are oversized chili dogs in greasy wax paper envelopes — far more suitable for a ballpark than a movie.

    I buy one and, somehow, my youngest daughter is there to help me share it. Though she makes a terrible mess of it and I worry that my wife will be upset over the junk food and additives. We’re so careful with her diet…

  • the fuzzy pink octopus spider monster

    This is the first dream I can remember — obviously, it’s not the first dream I ever had. That’s long gone now. But this is the earliest one I can remember…

    …we’re driving in the car, my two brothers and me. Out mother is behind the wheel. We’re on our way to the grocery store. My older brother Scott sits up front, talking to our mom. My brother Jim and I are in the back seat, holding our pet rabbits. They are white, a perpetual look of panic in their pink little eyes.

    I realize somehow that something is not quite right with the rabbits. I see a vision within the dream, a flashback of our side yard where the hutch is kept. I see a wispy apparition flowing through the air towards them. It is pale pink, long snakelike arms or tentacles trailing through the air, reaching out blindly to tap along the fence like a blind man seeking out an open path. It is covered in stringy hair, pale pink and white, a gaping black hole of mouth and wild, insane red eyes.

    Hate pours off of it, clouding the air with ribbons of red, like a drop of blood in water. The monster finds the hutch, bends back the cheap plywood lid, and drifts inside. The rabbits explode in a frenzy of stamps and squeals, then go silent.

    Somehow this spider, this octopus, this monster has split itself into two. It shifts form, taking the place of the two rabbits — are they dead? did it eat them? — it becomes them, impersonates them . . . only recognizable by its hateful red eyes staring out from the two imposters.

    These same eyes looking up at me in the backseat of our family station wagon, the lengthening ears becoming long snaking tendrils filling the car, reaching out in the golden afternoon light to wrap around my mother”s throat, my brother’ arms, our faces, muffling our screams…

    I don’t have an exact date for this one, but we had the rabbits when we lived at the house on Peppertree in Dublin, California. Which puts it sometime in the mid 1970’s.

    I was probably six or seven years old. And the horror of those tentacles waving in the car haunted me for weeks. I still feel a pang of it even now.

    As silly as it sounds, a shapeshifting fuzzy octopus spider monster is really pretty terrifying. Especially at that age.

    Years later, I saw it again: There’s scene in the movie Poltergeist where a malevolent spider-like creature prevents the mother from rescuing her children…

    20130106-112241.jpg

    That’s about right. Dye it pink and you’ve got the creature from my dream, more or less.

    (I’ll ignore the question as to why something from my dream in the mid 70’s would show up in an 80’s movie. Sometimes it’s better not to know. We’ll chalk it up to coincidence.)