R. Kelly: (lying in a hospital bed. His head is bandaged heavily; only
his face is exposed. The camera is zoomed in just on his upper body,
with a microphone held before him) It was hard taking care of them.
Not many things make me cry, you know.
Reporter: (a woman in her mid- to upper-30s)And this did?
R. Kelly: Definitely. How could it not? That's what I'm saying.
Reporter: Your parents were quite a bit older than you...was that an
extra strain?
R. Kelly: Yeah, oh yeah. They were a lot older, older than most people's
parents are at my age.
Reporter: You're 41...how old are they?
R. Kelly: They're a lot older than me.
Reporter: How much older? 20 years? 25 years? 30 years?
R. Kelly: They're a lot older, okay?!?
Reporter: 35 years?
R. Kelly: They're 50 years older than me, all right? They're both 91.
You happy now? (he begins sobbing)
Alex and I had rented a car. Neither of us had driven in quite a while, and since we were here in Lancaster, we thought we'd kill two birds with one stone--we'd satisfy the driving urge, and we'd satisfy the curiosity of wondering what it was like to drive on the wrong side of the road in the wrong side of the car. I started, and I wasn't very good at it. I know how to drive, but I was so nervous about doing something wrong that I ended up just thinking to much, and therefore I was very jumpy. It made Alex extremely uncomfortable, so he told me he was going to just get out and walk back to campus.
I did have the car, so I thought I'd drive it around some more. I pulled out onto a road from the driveway of the University and almost hit a bus. I decided that I needed to get in a somewhat isolated area so that I could get more accustomed to the whole concept.
There seemed no better place than home, out in the country. So I drove home and decided to practice there. The long drive to Nebraska (over the ocean and the eastern half of the US and everything) must have caused my mind to wander, because when I got home, I just parked and went in. My dad was downstairs messing with the computer because he couldn't get my homepage to load. He said that he was getting a lot of interference. I couldn't understand what he was talking about, so I thought I'd mess with it.
I didn't know what was wrong, but "interference" is the only way I can think of to describe it. It's like there were pieces of someone else's site coming through on mine. They were random enough pieces that I couldn't make out the significance of any of it. Before I could work on it further, my mom called from upstairs and told me to come watch this interview on tv.
Reporter: Has anything else ever made you cry like that?
R. Kelly: No, nothing...not until...
Reporter: Until what?
R. Kelly: Until I heard about what happened at the Pearl Harbor Web
Site...
What had happened at the Pearl Harbor Web Site? I ran back downstairs with the intent of getting on the Pearl Harbor web site (which I didn't know existed). I tried and tried until I gave up--the interference from that other web page prevented me from doing anything. I could load up the Pearl Harbor site, but I couldn't read anything but bits and pieces of sentences. I sat back, and exemplifying Gestalt psychology I guess, looked at the whole picture and immediately realized what was going on.
I got in the car and headed to Pearl Harbor immediately. (Note: I have never been to Pearl Harbor, so this was entirely up to my imagination) There was a visitors' center out in the water. The shore side of it was only about 30 feet out, so the shore-side wall touched the floor of the ocean about 3 feet below the surface of the water. It was a long building, though, and it stretched out into the ocean and over a sunken battleship. One would get to the visitors' center by a ramp from the beach. I ran out onto the ramp and into the center. I saw some Plains Indians in maintenance uniforms going down a series of stairs. I followed them down, but a wall closed off the hallway between me and them, and I was cut off. To my left, and in the direction away from the shore, was a large window, probably 10 feet tall by 4 feet wide. You could look out into the water and see sunken ships littered about. (Another note: I don't remember from History lectures how many ships were sunken there, but there were quite a few in this view) As I stood there watching, I began laughing, because I knew what was about to take place.
R. Kelly was a Plains Indian activist. Everyone knew it. But no one knew the extent to which he was. He had been planning a major counter-attack on White America--only no one knew quite how he was going to do it. He staged his accident (whatever it was), because he knew that if a high-profile celebrity like himself would be in the hospital, the press would be all over him. That would give him the perfect opportunity to give the specifics of the strike to all of his soldiers at once. When he mentioned the Pearl Harbor website, my curiousity accidentally let me in on their plans. R. Kelly's people sent out that wave of internet interference, and by going to the Pearl Harbor site and putting together the pieces that did show through the interference, one could get all the specifics of the plan.
A strike force of indians was to subdue some Hawaiian maintenance workers and take their clothes, so that inside the visitors' center, no one would think twice if they saw them walking around. Then, as the gates inside let out some water (to keep the visitors' center above the water level at high tide), they would slip out in their scuba gear and begin collecting the Pearl Harbor gold--completely undetected. Normally, divers have to pass underwater motion detectors to get into the area, but not if they enter the area from right in the middle. Hours later, after they had all of the gold collected from all of the sunken ships, they would get sucked back in the gates to compensate for the low tide. Then they would hide the gold and make out with it. Part of me said "Tell the authorities!" but the other part of me, the part that was laughing, saw it as almost poetic justice--the Indians were taking away from the military that took away from them so long ago.
The time passed, and eventually they surfaced. I watched from the end of the ramp by the door. They were bringing the gold out in old rubber tires. The cover was that they had fished this litter out of the area and were now disposing of it. That much was true, but inside the tires were gold bars. Because of how the bars were positioned, they had to carry the tires horizontally. Otherwise, if they rolled them, the gold bars would fall out. This was going very smoothly until some of the real Hawaiian maintenance workers recognized the Indians as phoneys. Most of the gold was loaded up into a truck, so it took off. The rest of them, and there were suddenly quite a few, whipped out their knives and bows. The whites in the area all managed to have revolvers and cowboy hats. It soon became an all out battle.
The next few minutes were just filled with fight scenes--not much story. Knives being thrown and hitting their mark...pistols also firing true...people dying and falling...firing and fighting as they were falling and dying...it was just a mess. And in the middle of it all, a Robert Redford lookalike and his 10-12 year old daughter dressed all in pink were having a picnic. I walked through the flying blades and bullets as if it wasn't even happening, and sat down beside a tree near their blanket. The little girl came up to me and asked if I'd like some tea. A "cowboy" fell near the blanket with a knife in his head. We both turned to look, then both looked back at each other, and I said "Sure."
Return to The Dreams Page.