I'm anxious about revisiting the bungalow on Ambrose Ave where I once lived. The same laconic Gene Autry cowboy from Saturday t.v. matinees drawls: "There was a little girl who lived nearby. I don't know who she was, but I seen her in my dreams; I'm certain she's the one and it was here". I don't know that it's me talking or some other. Or that this is an old song I've nearly forgotten. But this is like the long ago dream about that same talking, pull-cord baby doll that was both fictitious and real. "You can't possibly remember anything because you left this place for elswhere". At the door, I press on a sad little bellbuzzer that's hooked up to springy electrical wires and hanging from the same battered fascia board and feel the mild charge in my fingers. Brrriiiiiing brriiiiiiing! Behind the blackened screen door I can see the same dark gray corpse of a crone smoking in her rocker. What was her name? She was the woman who used to plant things only at night. The vapors of her cigarette are trailing towards the gridded, galvanized mesh. The smoke comes through like Indian signals revealing that she's got the doll.
At the tail end of a snaking customs queue with Ty, Elena, Geoff, and a much older Gena. They're each wearing a wreath-like "crown o leis" chin-cinched with vines of cascading holiday tendrils. Their heads are bopping to some sort of Hawaiian slide uke that's playing over the p.a. I'm not partaking of the festivities---I keep bumping up against a hodge-podge of dented, military-issue jerry cans. The canisters are stenciled with stippled white symbols, all of them visually suggesting the direst warnings which my dream mind runs with: plutonium, aids ebola, cholera and bubonic pestilence. The "family" directly in front the containers seem infected---something is seriously wrong with their skins. The pink freckled dad with his flattened haircut has got something to do with all of it. He's got the girth of a savior, but is going down with the wife and kids. He's got scabrous blotches coating the back of his arms and neck----poking through the appendage openings of his pristine starched white shirt. He looks like something ancient...beached. I'm trying to get the other four to notice all this, but they are now far back towards the tail end of the line. I'm yelling and waving while the crowd surges, but my vocal projection is chord-cut and feeble---drowned out by the funky cacophony. The four of them are now clapping, stomping and whooping it up---entertaining the crowd around them by weaving a Celtic knot of a well-rehearsed barn-dance. The Hawaiian twang of the p.a. is metallic, hard-edged and deafening. We've moved forward in the line, but the canisters, and the family in front of us, are gone.
