Mikey Gluesniff: I Had A Dream

 

I was in the dream.

(an excerpt of the journal of Mikey Gluesniff, a hobo who came by his name honestly...)

March 7th, 1937

I had the dream again. Shorter than usual, and deeply unsatisfying. My after-supper glue smelled delicious, but then I got lost. I tried walking. Still lost. My trousers felt heavy, like they were wet, so I knew the old penny farthing was not going to be an option for getting to my brother's wedding in time. That was a shame, because who doesn't love a giant wheel and a tiny second wheel? There were no trains. Anywhere. Trains did not exist. I asked. Everyone looked at me with pity, and shrugged and shook their heads. Except this one old man; he laughed and laughed and repeated "train" over and over, like it was the punchline of his new favorite joke. It started to rain.

When the snow stopped, I left the printing press showroom (no idea how I got there) and went across the street to Pittsburgh, for one of their famous crusts with the bread cut off. They were all out. That girl was there, like she always is - ten years old and dressed for school, lecturing passersby about their oral hygiene and bookkeeping. I could do without the bookkeeping talk, you know? Anyway, I turned around and was a child again, myself. I was sketching my latest yacht design, and when I finished and held it at arm's length, it was a naked lady, and the cops came and took it away. I got dizzy, so I closed my eyes for a minute.

My head hurt. Not like a headache. More like someone was scratching my scalp with nails. I fell down some stairs and went to a humdinger of a party in an abandoned warehouse, thrown by a man nobody knows. There was dancing. Ol' Barb Stab-You-Quick was there, but for some reason everyone kept calling her Jane. Someone offered me a smoke and said they knew what trains were. Thank goodness, I said. But I blinked and the fool turned into that goat, again.

Always the goat. 

The goat says I need to lay off the glue.

Plausible Zane Scarrey vs. Starbucks

Most of the so-called "deliberate hoboes" - those who left the regular world behind and hit the rails by choice - did not set forth without a head full of dreams.  Some dreamed of lives unfettered, walking and riding free from one interesting place to another and sleeping under a blanket of Arizona stars along the Union Pacific.  Others envisaged wandering for a while, seeing America, getting it all out of their system, and eventually finding a place to settle down and restart their lives.  A few dreamed of being discovered by a big-time Hollywood talent scout in search of a scruffy, disheveled man to play the heavy in the next Bogart flick.  [Note:  This only happened four times.]

One deliberate hobo, however, took a more modest approach to his dreaming.  They called him Plausible Zane Scarrey, because he kept his dreams plausible, and his name was Zane Scarrey.

He had fled the violence and futility of the Wisconsin Milk Strike in November 1933, and his only expectation for the future was to find a version of the Great Depression in which people were not shooting strangers over busted headlights and picket signs.  He made his way to the Illinois Central, then to the Santa Fe, and finally to the fabled rails of the Union Pacific in California.  He picked oranges and strawberries for pennies a week, and raisins for slightly less, and rarely stopped moving and/or working.

When he allowed himself the indulgence, he imagined that one day, he might get hired on full-time by one of the farmers he served.  That never happened.

He pictured a world in which his black hobo friends could illegally ride in the same unlocked rail car with his white hobo friends.  That happened, but not until the mid-fifties, a half-decade after Zane's death at the hands of mindless Indianapolis cops who had mistaken him for the Beech Grove Groper at the 1951 Indiana State Fair.

Once, when he was three sheets to the wind on hobo wine and grilled baked lint fritters, he imagined that he could land a job with the railroad.  He always got along with the train crews, and the yards cops (and their dogs) seemed to adore him.  Unfortunately, he was a cow-teat-puller by trade, so this never happened.

As his hobo years rolled on, he developed a skill with pot-brewed hobo coffee.  He dared, from time to time, to see a future world in which he started a humble coffee shop on a corner in downtown Fresno, and worked hard and made really good coffee and expanded to two locations, then three, then a hundred, then a thousand, until eventually his coffee shops sold indy music and sub-par sandwiches on every street corner in the USA (in some cases, on more than one corner of a given intersection, and in a few special spots, more than one in a given coffee shop).  

This happened, but Plausible Zane Scarrey didn't live to see it, and received no credit for the idea, because he hadn't deemed it plausible, and never told anyone he had thought of it.

He kept it plausible.  Imagine that.

This post prompted by the words ENVISAGE and IMAGINE, from the good folks at Studio 30 Plus.



 
 

The Poisoned Sleep

"Honestly, Tucker - another Mountain Dew?  You'll be up all night,"  Dia scolded.

"That's the idea, Dee.  I'm not getting along with sleep, right now."  Tucker checked his monitor, touched a key, and for the three hundred and fifteenth time in the past six hours, professionally greeted another pissed-off customer of the Flagship family of insurance companies.  Above him, ancient fluorescent bulbs flickered, buzzed, and bleached away his belief in anything good in the universe.

Dia logged out of the queue and waited for her friend to finish his call.  "You have to sleep.  You can't just not sleep.  It's bad for you."

"I hate sleep - that's all.  Besides, what's it to you?"

"Hey - we've been friends for three years.  I'm concerned," Dia said.  "Talk to me."

"Ugh.  Fine.  It's simple, Dee.  I keep having this dream..."

"That's it?  A dream?  Is it a nightmare?"  Dia teased.  "Do you wake up screaming?"

"It's not a nightmare.  Never mind.  We'd better take some calls, or Cina The Warrior Princess will write us up again."

"In a second.  First, what kind of dream is it?  Is it a sex dream?  Is it a stress dream.  Are there ninjas, all quick and lethal and whatnot?"

"No sex, and no ninjas.  What is it with you and ninjas, anyway?"
 
"I don't know - I just think they're sexy.  But this is not about me.  Talk!"

Tucker sighed heavily.  "The dream is always the same.  I'm at some beach, painting watercolors of seagulls and lighthouses and sunsets - and they're really good.  I have a bottle of wine, and there's a girl there.  Please don't be offended, but sometimes it's you."

"That's sweet.  I'm not offended - at least, not yet..."

"It doesn't get offensive or anything," Tucker continued.  "It's just peaceful.  I can smell the ocean, feel sand between my toes.  It's like I belong there.  It envelopes me.  The call center doesn't exist.  There is no queue, no call count, average call time, no resolution scores - none of this shit.  It's not that I've left it; none of it even exists.  I don't live in that ridiculous little dump of an apartment.  I never get to see where I live, though."

"Well, that sucks.  What happens?"

"I walk back to my car - some old convertible, like a Mustang or something - and I open the door, sit down, and just bathe in contentment for a few minutes."

"Yeah?  Then what?"

Tucker sighed and looked around.  "Nothing.  I wake up."

Dia stifled a chuckle.  "You wake up."

"Yes.  I wake up - in this life.  That apartment, this job, these callers, this life."

"Ah.  I see.  It is a bit bleak, isn't it?  I guess seeing what you see while you sleep, and then waking to this, over and over, would get pretty old."

"It does."  Tucker nodded.

Somewhere deep inside Dia, a tiny, smoking ember began to grow.  "Maybe we just need to wake up somewhere else."

"We?"

"Yes."



Greetings, friends!  This week, for the first time, I used TWO prompts in one piece.  I couldn't resist putting "QUICK AND LETHAL" from Studio 30 Plus member Tara's LIGHTNING FLASH into a short conversation inspired by "A DREAM HAS POWER TO POISON SLEEP," from the good people at LIGHT AND SHADE CHALLENGE.  I hit their word count limit (500) with great precision.  The same cannot be said for my going 350 words over on the S30P prompt.  I hope they forgive me.




 

Cecelia Graveside and The Dead Hope

"It all turned on a dime," she said, shaking her head as if still trying to come to grips with it, fourteen years later.  "One minute, we were living high on the hog.  I had more dresses than I could count at age five, and it seemed my hair was never without a ribbon.  Mother and Father belonged to the country club, and they had martinis every night with Mr. and Mrs. Loy from across the street.  The next minute, Father was gone, having jumped to his death from the roof of the Stock Exchange, and Mother had transformed into a monster.  I was too young to understand much of it, of course, but I was told that something called a depression was on, and that it was the cause of Father's suicide, and that it was the reason for our moving from Manhattan to a tiny, smelly apartment in Queens."

"That's all well and good, ma'am, but like I said, you're gonna have to clear out of here," the policeman repeated, his patience straining.  "There's still a war on, and we've got a troop train due to stop here in the next half-hour, and there's a trainload of brand-new tanks coming out of the yard ahead of that."

"I understand," Cecelia Graveside said, careful not to meet the officer's eyes.

"So listen," he continued, "I got a heart, lady.  Really, I do.  You can come back here tonight, if this campsite is so important to you--"

"It is important," she insisted.

"But the Army don't want a bunch of hoboes hangin' around the tracks, you know?  And when the MPs show up, trust me, they ain't gonna be as nice about this as I am.  So I'm asking you one last time..."

"I'm going, I'm going," she said, slinging her stick and bindle over a shoulder, and patting the makeshift grave marker of her late hobo husband.  "I'll be back dear," she whispered to it.  She stepped past the officer and toward the town square, across the tracks.  Between her and the square, a couple of dozen newly-enlisted men gathered, worried wives and flag-waving children in tow.  Cecelia plotted a route that she hoped would help her avoid the whole scene.  She sighed heavily.

"Ma'am?" the cop called after her.  She stopped, but did not turn back.  "I know it's none of my business and all, but, well..."

"Yes?"

"I was just wondering if you've tried signing up for one of those jobs at the factory - you know, like Rosie the Riveter."

"I have not," she said flatly.  "That is to say, not at that particular factory."

"Well, I heard they're still at least two dozen hands short - even on the first shift.  I heard they're taking everybody.  They got free training.  They might even have some spots left in the workers' dormitory.  I know it's not my place - I'm just tryin' to help..."

Cecelia turned to face the earnest young peace officer, and a tear made a surprise exit from her eye and onto her cheek, where it was made to feel so profoundly unwelcome that it leapt off, fell to the ground and exploded.  "Mister, I know better than to get in line outside that factory.  Don't get me wrong - it's a swell idea, and I'm not sore at you for the suggestion.  But you see, since I lost my dear husband, I've tried twenty other factories, just like that one - from New York City to Chicago and back again.  Every time, I've gone in with a smile on my face, hope in my heart, and a firm handshake.  I still have my handshake, but that's about it.  I can't take another rejection.  Mother used to say that hope springs eternal, but I can tell you, it doesn't."

"I understand," the policeman said.  "I don't blame you."  A loud, throaty steam whistle echoed through the town.  "That'll be the tank train.  Time to move along.  Take care of yourself, okay?"

"I will."  Cecelia Graveside made her way around the gathering military conscripts and their loved ones, up Main Street to the town square.  

She stopped.  Hope hung in tatters above her.  

Her dreams, she had often said, were the stray dogs that ran around the rail yard, and sometimes followed her.  She looked to her right, at the road that led to the next town.  She turned to her left, where the smokestacks of the factory peeked above the low skyline.  She sighed, looked up at the sun, shook her head slowly, and started walking.

...eternal.  Photo by [Maris].

This one springs forth from yet another STUDIO 30 PLUS writing prompt.  This time, the goal was to use "hung in tatters above her," a phrase lifted from fellow blogger Tara at THIN SPIRAL NOTEBOOK.