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Free Home Page The screen door on the patio creaks open, and Tommy peers out. Seeing Rain in a vulnerable situation, he chuckles and creeps outside, taking great care to not let the screen door slam and wake up Rain. He tiptoes out to the hammock, stepping around the snoring Daisy. He's carrying a cassette player. He peers at Rain, checking that he is still in a deep slumber. He chuckles again as he rests the cassette player on the picnic table. He turns the volume all the way down, presses "play", then turns the volume all the way up and runs back inside the house. From there he looks out the screen door, laughing heartily at the ensuing mayhem.
The Sugarloaf song, Green-eyed Lady, blasts from the cassette player. Daisy leaps up and runs to the patio, then turns back toward the cassette player, barking loudly and incessantly. Rocky squawks and jumps off Rain's chest and scampers up the oak tree. Rain jumps, screams, and falls out of the hammock. Realising what's going on, and quickly and easily deducing who the perpetrator must be, he knocks the cassette player off the picnic table, then picks it up, shuts it off, and tears the tape out of it. "God damn it, Tommy! Where the hell are you?" He storms toward the patio door.
"Oops!" Tommy mutters to himself, "Didn't think he'd get quite so cheesed!" He runs toward the kitchen, but not fast enough. A hand grabs the back of his shirt, holding him as if by the scruff of the neck, like a naughty kitten.
"Not so fast!" Rain's grip is as hard as iron. He hands him the remains of the tape, whose guts have been ripped out and wrapped around the plastic case. "Here's your stupid tape, and thank you for the major coronary, you little creep! Now you can get Rocky out of the tree!" He releases Tommy's shirt.
"Awww, hell! What can I say?" Tommy grins, no apology in sight.
They gaze at each other, Rain dourly, and Tommy with twinkling eyes, until Rain looks up, and realises that the Readers are back. He sighs. "Hi everybody. Um, how much of that did you see?" He stomps on Tommy's foot without moving his gaze. "Company's come, Tommy!"
"OW!" Tommy turns to face the Readers and elicits a pained smile. "Hey there! Just a little Pentacle madness goin' on!"
Rain sits, unsmilingly, on the living room sofa, which faces the Readers. "Okay, so let's resume Wish of Pentacles, shall we? Chapter three has me still touring and struggling with the dreams, but drawing closer and closer to Wish." He rises and walks out of the room.
Tommy rolls his eyes and mutters to himself,"Oh migod, I can't believe he's so ticked off!" He turns his back to the Readers and opens the refrigerator door...
In the meantime, we had a chance to kick back and loaf along a little bit on the way to our next gig, in Boston. We took advantage of the extra time to take a few side trips and see something other than expressways and cities blurring past the windows. Sometimes just tooling along a back road and watching the cows and horses and chickens go by---and stopping off at a roadside fruit stand for a peck basket of something fresh and unprocessed, or at an amusement park or a giant water slide here and there, goes a long way toward unwinding the overtightened nerves you tend to end up with, out there on the hard rock trail.
Letting Rocky out for a romp or a snooze in the grass now and then helped to get the juices going again, too---for all of us. Of course, I was always careful to keep him on harness and leash while he was out of the bus---I didn't want him running off and hiding and being forced to leave him behind when we had to move on. When I was a little kid, we took our grey Persian, Rowley, with us on a long car trip. We stopped at a rest area, and when we were ready to set out again, we couldn't find Rowley anywhere. We feared he had jumped out the car window, even though it was open only wide enough for him to get plenty of air on a cool fall day. But cats can make themselves very tiny when the need arises. Panic-stricken, we searched and searched, until Dad found him in a tiny space underneath the driver's seat. I guess that, like Steve Martin, he wanted to "get small"!
Fortunately, there was enough of the kitten left in Rocky to set even the sourest member of the band to laughing, now and then. Taking a cat on the road with me wasn't always an easy thing, but I couldn't stand the idea of leaving him in a boarding kennel for months on end, and I had no family to leave him with, so taking him with me was the only option. Thankfully, he adapted to road life pretty easily; as long as he used the litter box and didn't sharpen his claws on the instruments or the equipment, everyone got along with him okay.
Somewhere between Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the dreams stopped, and I found myself thinking maybe that was all there was to it---a long run of odd dreams, but nothing more. Maybe it was just a fluke---one of those weirdnesses that happen in life, and no one's ever able to explain it or make any sense of it.
No such luck.
Mark finally managed to get our play date in Providence properly rescheduled, shoehorning the gig into a tiny little one-day-wide slot in our schedule that would require driving nonstop all the way back to Providence in order to make the date, then turning right back around and driving nonstop all the way to our next date without so much as a pause in between to catch our breaths. And the very same night we hit the road back to Providence to play the rescheduled gig, the dreams started up again.
By then I'd been having those intense dreams about Alex and the song for more than six months, with only a week and a half of respite, and the resumption of those dreams had really begun to bug me. I couldn't figure them out, and I couldn't figure out how to get them to stop. It was frustrating.
And then, four days before the Providence date, things changed drastically. I didn't understand it at first, but in retrospect I realise that it was a significant turning-point in my life. Right in the middle of a pleasant little nonsensical dream about blue dogs driving oysters on the half-shell around a racetrack made of banana-flavored taffy, Alex suddenly appeared right in front of me; his expression was dead serious---totally at odds with the silly tone of the dream, up to that point. He looked me straight in the eye, and in a voice that drowned out everything else in the dream completely, told me,"Hey, pal, figure this out! It's all happenin' at the Ocean State....!"
There was at least another word in there after "state"---I could tell that from the way his mouth kept moving, but the sound fuzzed out at that point, big time, and I couldn't make the last of it out...which is nothing unusual; that happens all the time in dreams. Someone's standing there talking to you, and it sounds like English - more or less - but you can't understand a word of it because the words are all muzzy and scrambled. The funny thing about the whole incident was that even though his voice drowned out the rest of the dream completely, he hadn't yelled, or even raised his voice; it was just that what he said was delivered with such an overwhelming intensity that it simply overrode everything else around it, up to that last word or so.
And then, that said and done, he disappeared without a trace, and that damn song started up again. And the dogs and oysters and taffy all morphed into dark-haired, porcelain-skinned, green-eyed mermaids porpoising through a glassy green ocean and body-surfing down crashing waves onto a beach covered with screaming rock fans...
I woke up with a start and sat up, sending Rocky flying with a squawk; I just barely managed to remember that I was in the bus bunk bed in time to keep from sitting completely upright and braining myself on the low overhead. I dropped back onto my elbows and puzzled over the dream: Did he say, "the Ocean State"? That's New Jersey, or Maryland, or maybe Delaware, isn't it?
Whatever the dream was supposed to mean, at least the "Ocean State" part of it felt familiar....it was just that the way it felt familiar didn't quite dovetail with the notion of it being a state. Alex had said"---at the Ocean State---", not "---in the Ocean State---", so it might not be the Ocean State, whichever state that was, but some place that had "Ocean State" as part of its name---or maybe it was some sort of nickname for something. I just couldn't put my finger on the proper meaning of the thing, though; all I could do was wait it out, and hope the meaning would make itself clear to me, in time, the way these feelings often did.
Of course, it could be something totally mundane, like I was about to meet a green-eyed girl from the Ocean State---whatever state that happened to be. Life loves to throw people curves; just when you think you've got things figured out, it goes and does something completely unexpected, just to keep you off-balance.
The night before the Providence show, we stopped over at a hotel in Connecticut. We got in after midnight, and we were all wired on road fatigue and caffeine; I got settled into my room before one a.m., but I just couldn't seem to get to sleep. Having to leave Rocky locked up in the bus always bothered me, but a lot of hotels just won't tolerate pets in the rooms, so there were times when I had to put up with him having his nose out-of-joint at me for confining him so unfairly.
So, with that irritation piled up on top of everything else, I ended up tossing and turning for hours; the last time I looked at the bedside clock, it was a minute past three in the morning, and I was getting nowhere at all where getting to sleep was concerned. I rolled over, punched the pillow a few times in an effort to tenderize it - whoever bought the pillows for the place obviously shopped at the same supply houses hospitals do, because the thing felt like it was filled with sawdust - buried my face in it and went dead still, focusing on the thought of drowsing off and actually getting some sleep, for God's sake!!
No such luck; a moment later the moon came peering around the edge of the window and spilled light across my face; I thought I'd closed the blinds before I'd crawled in, but apparently I'd forgotten to, and now I was paying for my oversight. I sighed, admitted defeat, and got up to go to the bathroom; at least that was something I could manage okay. I hoped. The way things were going that night, nothing was certain.
The pool of moonlight seemed to spread and follow me across the room as I moved; it seeped into the bathroom as I entered, and flowed up the wall to illuminate the mirror over the sink. I blinked at that in surprise; considering the angle the moonlight was coming in through the bedroom window, it shouldn't have been able to even reach the bathroom doorway, much less the mirror inside the bathroom!
And then, while I was puzzling over the way the moonlight was lighting up that mirror---that song started up. And somehow, Alex was there, inside the mirror, looking out at me. He grinned at me like a kid who'd just scored the first home run of his entire life and said, "Alex! Buddy! Got someone here you need to meet!"
He stepped aside, and I realised that someone had been standing behind him; I immediately flashed back to the end of that dream where Alex had told me about it all happening in the Ocean State---the one where the dogs driving the oyster shells around the banana-taffy track had morphed into dark-haired, green-eyed, porcelain-skinned mermaids. Every one of those mermaids'd had the same face---and they'd all had the face this woman had.
She was very pretty---high cheekbones, eyes that flirted with being almond-shaped but didn't quite make the asian look; long, dark hair that fell in a soft curve to the small of her back and curled around her waist just enough to be visible at the belt line; and a porcelain complexion that looked almost too flawless to be real.
As Alex stepped aside, she moved forward slowly, smiling a little uncertainly, and extended a hand to me. There was no conscious thought in my response; I just reached to touch her, in spite of the glass between us. And as I touched it, the mirror's glass liquefied, yet it remained in place as if it were still a solid pane; my hand sank right through it, and I felt the woman's hand curl into mine, warm and soft and solid---as real as anything I'd ever experienced in the waking world, even though a part of me knew, right then and there, that this was another of those screwball dreams I'd been having lately.
And even stranger---at her touch, I felt a powerful surge of something swell up inside me that I'd never felt before. I'd come close to it on a few occasions, and I'd thought I'd found the real thing, each time, but this surge of feeling told me, with no room whatsoever for misinterpretation or doubt, that I was in Love.
There was no mistaking it; it was as big a shock, and as utterly distinctive, as standing on a beach in calm, sunny weather---and having a tsunami rear up out of the sea without warning and wash you inland at express-train speed.
However, unlike being caught in a tidal wave, this experience was good; it was what I'd been looking and hoping for all my adult life. It took my breath away.
She squeezed my hand, once, hard, and her lips parted as if to say something---and then she was gone, and my hand was just resting against the cool hardness of the mirror, instead of holding her hand. A haggard-looking blond man with brown eyes stared back at me from the glass; it took me a moment to realise that the man was me.
And then I found myself sitting bolt-upright in the hotel bed in the other room; I had finally fallen asleep---and those dreams were back...!
I resisted the urge to scream in frustration. People get weirded-out enough about rockers staying in hotels as things stand; I didn't need to start making loud noises and convince the management we were all about to go berserk and start trashing the hotel and get all of us thrown out on our ears. I mean, the bus is okay for a while, but it's cramped; after just so much rattling around in a bus, no matter how big it is, you need to spend some time in surroundings where the walls and ceilings aren't so close that you can touch all three of them from where you're standing in the middle of the aisle...
I settled back on the bed, laced my fingers behind my head and stared up at the ceiling, wondering who the woman in the dream was; who this blue-eyed blond guy I'd been thinking of as "Alex" was; why he'd called me "Alex", tonight...
I know I wondered about a lot more, but it all got lost in the process of drifting back off to sleep again.
At least I didn't have any more of those frustrating dreams that night.
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