The DreamA Story by Phil HubbardMy head is filled with the dream. The hot shower helps to blur the edges, smudge the images, fool me into thinking it is only a dream.I wake up exhausted.
My body aches. There’s no
specific pain, just the feeling that every part of me is wearing out. I can’t lie down any longer. I want to turn over, curl up, find that sweet
spot and drift off to sleep again, but every configuration hurts. I reluctantly climb out of bed and into my
life again. I stand up slowly, tensing
my body in anticipation of the pain, straighten up and stretch. Years ago, I discovered that stretching,
extreme stretching somehow snapped my parts back into place. Stretching, a very hot shower and black
coffee, the three stages of consciousness to arm me for the day. My head is filled with the dream. The hot shower helps to blur the edges,
smudge the images, fool me into thinking it is only a dream. I look in the mirror as I dry off, rejecting
the thought of shaving for another day, avoiding my own eyes, unwilling to
admit that the dream is swallowing me while I desperately try to hold on to
reality. The gurgling of the coffeemaker is soothing as is the voice
of NPR. Somewhere along the way, I fell
off the healthy eating train and have reverted back to a cold bowl of Life
cereal and real milk. That’s right,
artery-clogging whole milk, not that watery one percent stuff. I prolong breakfast with a package of
strawberry pop tarts. Why is it so
comforting to hear the click of the toaster and reach for these nearly
tasteless rectangles? I’m sure the
comfort is in the routine. When I come
to a crossroad in my head and don’t know where to turn, or when I’m surrounded
by the dream and need to escape, that’s when I seek out the momentary
distraction of toasting a pop tart. Inevitably, I think about the dream when I’m awake. It’s never like a complete movie or even a
short video with a natural beginning and end.
It plays out in bits and pieces, starting and ending at random points,
sometimes crystal clear and sometimes in hazy vignettes. Sometimes, I’m in the dream interacting with
the characters. Sometimes I’m a voyeur,
watching them play out the endless loop of their lives. Sometimes I’m in the
present or in my past or the past of the people I encounter. The dream is somewhat work-related; at least it feels that
way. I’m on the road traveling, but not
on a vacation or a singular journey. I’m
on US Hwy 40, a road that is vaguely familiar to me, yet strangely unfamiliar. I
have a sense that I-70, my escape route, is off in the distance, but there are
no road signs, no directions to help me find my way. As I arrive at the place I
am destined to visit over and over again, I look around and wonder why I am
here. On closer inspection, I have the
uneasy thought that I have never been here before, but only have the memory of
this nameless place. It’s always early evening at the end of summer. I’m tired of driving and bad coffee and
stopping at gas station restrooms that have never been cleaned. I’m weary from my journey. I need a hot shower, a bed that’s not too lumpy
and a burger special. Ah, the burger
special! I can taste it. The patty is hand-formed, the bun is lightly
toasted and there is a generous scoop of potato and macaroni salad. The burger special is the high point of the
dream. But not the pie. The pie is always a disappointment. I pull off the highway into the lot of the Tall Pines
Motel. Funny, I can never remember
whether I am in Illinois or Indiana. The
motel is one of those places that had seen better days since the time it was
built. I briefly speculate about the name Tall Pines, noting that cornfields
stretch out in every direction. The faded,
rusty sign has a permanent “vacancy” painted on it, an admission by the owner
that the place would never be filled. The
obligatory red neon “motel” sign seems oddly welcoming, triggering in my mind
the smell of fresh, cool sheets, hospital corners and a big bulky color TV with
lots of channels. It is a
weeknight. The motel is even more silent
than the weekend flurry of horny kids, cheating husbands and wives and retired
people on their way to somewhere else.
Tonight there is only an aging pickup truck, a local I’m sure, and a
shabby rental cargo van with “Beacon Rentals �" We light the way for your move”,
in peeling plastic letters on its side.
Something in the back of my mind tells me that somewhere down the road,
Motel 6 has left the light on for me, but I’m too tired to care. I pause a moment before I get out of the car. But I always get out of the car. I always go to the motel office. The cheap aluminum screen door is dented and
oxidized. The glass in the door rattles
when I close it and the damn little bell jangles. Tonight Bonnie is at the office desk. Sometimes she is in the back room watching
“The Young and the Restless”. That’s the
reason for the stupid bell. After hundreds of nights, I expect that she is
going to know me but she never does. She
looks up at me with a tight little dismissive smile and looks back at her desk,
signifying that managing a twenty room motel with only two other lodgers is a
frantic task that requires her full attention.
Finally, she looks up again and asks Room 107, like all the rooms, has a picture window that looks out to the back of
the motel where I have a depressing view of the 1960’s vintage pink and gray
trailer that is Bonnie’s home. Next to
the trailer are decaying stakes in the ground outlining the future in-ground
pool. One of the many things I’ll learn later is that six years ago, a fast-talking
salesman from Ajax Pools gave Bonnie a hard-to-believe, low, end-of-season price on an in-ground pool that he
had a crew standing by waiting to install.
Of course, he staked out the pool, collected a $500 deposit and never
returned. Bonnie wasn’t mad too long. She expected misfortune. Her philosophy is that behind every cloud is
another cloud. Sometimes I’m outside the dream looking in. I see myself in the room reaching for the TV
remote, knowing in advance that the reception will be intermittent or at least
fuzzy. I’ve already explored the room
and found the tiny soaps with their limp wrappers and the yellowing pad of
notepaper in the desk. Although I
wouldn’t seek comfort there anyway, I realized by its absence that neither
Gideon nor the chamber of commerce had stopped by here when they were dropping
off bibles. I am reminded by the rumble
in my stomach that something good is supposed to happen at this point in the
dream. Ah yes, dinner! Earlier, with a nod of her head in that
direction, Bonnie indicated that Shelley’s, across the highway, “ain’t a bad
place. Try the burger special.” Given that the only other dining options in town are the
Dairy Dine and the Chik-a-Flik, I head over to Shelley’s, a 40’s era restaurant
with maroon and tan glass panels on the outside and cheap paneling covering the
walls halfway up on the inside. A sign
on the wall announces that “Chicken Fried Steak is available in your choice of
twelve toppings”. The place is deserted
save for a guy in the corner wearing grimy mechanics overalls and the waitress
who I know is named Lorrie. Lorrie looks
up and smiles when I enter and immediately dials back the smile to indifference
when she realizes that I am at least her father’s age. She’s a tiny girl with an uneven complexion
that reveals her teenage battle scars with acne. Lorrie is in her mid-20’s and everything
about her appearance spells defeated.
I’ll learn later that Lorrie dropped out of high school in the spring of
her junior year when Rodney, a local farm boy, the only boy to ever look at her
twice, got her pregnant. Rodney, not man
enough to be a father, escaped to a long haul trucking job. Lorrie had a miscarriage over the summer but
was too sad and embarrassed to return to school. She will confide to me that once she finishes
her GED she plans to take an online course through Ocean Breeze University to
become a shipboard activities director.
In the meantime, the only dim light in her dreary life is sex with Jack
in the sleeper cab of his truck when he stops by every two weeks on his regular
cross country route for chicken fried steak with his choice of toppings. Lorrie refuses to consider the ample evidence
that Jack, a crude fellow in his early thirties with fading good looks, has a
wife or at least a girlfriend in another state. I sit on one of the old fashioned round stools at the
counter, a relic with a washed-out Formica top and dented aluminum side
molding. I could choose a more
comfortable booth but I have been alone all day and need whatever humanity and
minor conversation Lorrie might provide.
I ask about the burger special and she lights up a bit as she tells me
it is her favorite. I order coffee too
but skip the “fifty cents off” deal if I order the combo with fries. I avoid glancing at the cook, who looks as if
he could use a good steam cleaning. Lorrie explains the empty restaurant to me by
saying that the supper crowd, mostly retired folks and feed mill workers, has
come and gone. Lorrie flits nervously around the inside of the counter,
wiping potential spills off the surface, realigning the salt and pepper
shakers, adding more blue and pink and white packets to the already filled
sugar bowls and verifying that there is a full assortment of jelly packets in
each of the little chrome stands. She
reminds me of a frazzled bird, frantically running around trying to gather up
enough seeds to hold her over before winter hits. The worried look on her face says she is
afraid; on edge and afraid of everything. She is afraid of losing her job. Her boss Shelley, as she sits at a booth in
the back smoking, tells her almost daily that she has to keep moving, keep busy
even when there are no customers.
“More coffee? Just passing through? Want some pie?” Somehow I know we must talk more because I know other things
about her. I know each night after work
she walks two blocks over to a sour street where she lives with her father in a
tiny two-bedroom house. Ralph is on
permanent disability after too many years of lifting too many hundred-pound
sacks at the feed mill. He’s technically
not an alcoholic because he drinks coffee all day and doesn’t switch to beer
until after the five o’clock news. He
sits in front of the TV all day and most of the night in his armchair, one of
those faux leather jobs with the built-in can holder. His belly protrudes from his stained
wife-beater tee shirt. He rarely showers
or shaves and never brushes his teeth. It’s depressing to think that working at the diner is the
bright spot in Lorrie’s day. At night
she retreats to her tiny bedroom trying to hide from her father’s mean spirited
remarks. If she passes through the front
room, he calls after her, Her father is right about Jack. Jack never shows her tenderness. He never makes her feel special. The only sentiment he ever shares is to tell
her that she should be grateful that he spends time with her. In her secret heart, she knows that it isn’t the
pleasure that draws her to Jack. It is
simply another way to tear herself down, another way to prove to herself how
worthless she is. Yes, I think a lot about Lorrie. I try to puzzle out why she is in my dream. Is she there as a summation of all my
failures? Is she a reminder that I too
am sad and lonely and empty inside? Is
she there to remind me that there are no silver linings? Sometimes I fantasize about Lorrie. I imagine that instead of me, I am a handsome
young man in my mid 20’s. She smiles
shyly at me as we talk at the counter.
Her face glows as she tells me about her plans for the future. On a whim, I take a risk and invite her to go
to the movies with me after she gets off work.
We go to see some little romance movie where everything turns out
alright in the end. After the movie, we
go over to the Dairy Dine where the chubby girl at the window, a former
classmate and cheerleader, is envious at seeing Lorrie with a cute guy. At her door later, I thank her for spending
time with me and ask her if I can see her again when I’m in town. She smiles and tells me she would like
that. I reach for her hand, but instead,
she tilts her head up and kisses me lightly on the cheek. As she turns to go inside, her heart leaps
because she knows I’ll be back. What does all this mean?
I want to be her prince charming coming to her rescue. I want to be her protector. I want to save her. I want to save myself. Bonnie is a reminder about duty. Bonnie is a reminder that one day follows
another and that there is no choice except to go on. Bonnie grew up at the motel.
Her father Frank bought the motel years ago using his WWII bonus as a
down payment. It was 1946 and new cars
were being produced for the first time since 1942. Hwy 40 was transformed from
a fraying rope holding the country together to a throbbing pipeline of commerce
and high expectations. Frank watched the
growing parade of out-of-state plates, truckers and traveling salesmen and
families with newfound free time and knew the motel was a gold mine. It was
called Sleepy Time Rest then, one of the first motels built in a long row of
ten connected rooms instead of individual tiny cottages. The initial traffic gave him visions of sugar
plums in his head and inspired him to mortgage the place and add ten more
rooms, five on each end of the original building, creating a u-shaped structure. He planted a row of pine trees behind the
units, his attempt at creating a “traveler’s oasis” like the pictures he saw in
the new monthly American Automobile Association magazine. The crowning touch was a new sign out front
and a new name, Tall Pines Motel. The
faded photograph in the motel office shows bulky cars and station wagons with
big tail fins parked behind a grinning Frank shaking the Chamber of Commerce
President’s hand. Betty, Frank’s wife, worked herself to death cleaning all
those bathrooms, changing sheets and taking care of little Bonnie and Frank Jr.
while Frank got fat sitting in the office smoking and drinking cokes out of the
new machine he put out front. Bonnie was
only sixteen, just a junior in high school when Betty’s health began to
fade. Bonnie, a wholly uninspired person
who was never troubled with career plans gradually took on more and more of the
chores at the motel until she owned them all.
Frank Jr. didn’t wait for the draft.
The day after graduation, he joined the Army, not to serve God and
country but to escape the dusty, dreary existence that threatened to swallow
him at home. He had an aptitude for
electronics and proved to be nimble and resourceful in adapting the new
computers under challenging conditions.
In Viet Nam, he met La’nh (gentle), a pretty young girl who hoped to
become a teacher. After the war, he
brought her back to the States and they made their home in California where she
had relatives and Frank Jr. thrived in Silicon Valley. He never returned home. Bonnie was already working mostly full time at the motel
when she finished the business program for non-college bound students at the
high school. Her chief form of
entertainment was watching television and with limited curiosity about
anything, she rarely left town. On her
weekly trips to the IGA for groceries, she met JT who had been a year ahead of
her in school until he dropped out to work after his parents lost the farm and
moved away. JT had a room over the
hardware store and drifted through his days wondering vaguely when his draft
notice would arrive. Bonnie and JT were
married a few weeks before he reported to Ft. Leonard Wood for basic
training. Both had their reasons. Bonnie joined that group of girls in town who
had “somebody in the Army”. The health
benefits and the MSA (married soldier’s allotment) didn’t hurt. Besides, her Dad got a deal on a used trailer
that he put out behind the motel for when she needed her own place. JT’s reason for marrying Bonnie was simple. He wanted someone to come home to. In the morning, when I awaken from the dream, I find that
events from my own life are woven in and out of the story. Reflecting on my failed marriage, I ask
myself why we married just two months before I entered the Air Force. Oh yes, I remember being in love! But, I
recall with regret the repeated months of separations, the poverty of enlisted
military salaries and being plucked out of familiar surroundings and deposited
in alien places both here and abroad.
Fortunately, I returned home safely, but the experience left irreparable
cracks in the foundation of our marriage. JT wasn’t so lucky.
Toward the end of his tour in Viet Nam, he stepped on a land mine and
lost both his legs and sustained a severe head injury. If he had known how his life would play out,
he might have chosen to die in the jungle.
After years of repeated operations, inadequate medical care and
virtually no stimulation, JT spends his days in the long term care ward at the
VA Medical Center in Ft. Wayne drifting in and out. Bonnie tries to get up to see him on
Christmas and his birthday if the weather isn’t too bad. At night in room 107, I call her. She answers with an almost inaudible “hello”,
completely devoid of emotion. I can see
her there in bed, watching repeats of “Law and Order”, shutters closed, a
single dim light on, a cup of tea now gone cold and remnants of popcorn
scattered around. She listens silently
while I tell her about my day. She
doesn’t ask where I am or when I will be home. One of the odd things about The Dream is that I never seem
to check out of the motel, only check in. I’m never getting in my car thinking
about the long trip home or about some intermediate destination. It is always threatening to rain. The thought of driving at night, the rain
pounding on my windshield, the headlights of oncoming trucks making it
impossible to see and the miles, all the miles left to go are too much, so I
pull in to the motel. Something tells me
that I should go on; that at the end of the road it is clean and bright and
there is sunshine, but I am tired, tired of the journey. “Interesting name”, I say to Bonnie about the name, Tall
Pines on the motel sign. I sit on the edge of the bed thinking I should have picked
up a newspaper when I was at the restaurant, but I never do. I glance over at my briefcase feeling vaguely
guilty about some unnamed report that I should be completing or sales data that
I should be reviewing. Oddly, I can’t
quite picture the product my company sells although I have recollections of
endless sales calls on faceless buyers sitting in drab offices with gray or tan
metal desks or cheap sixties desks with skinny chrome legs and wood-grain
laminate tops. The buyers are generally
dismissive in attitude. They buy from me
because they need my product but deeply resent my firm practice of not buying
their business with personal gifts to them. Oh sure, I’ve thought about giving in; imagined my annual
bonus rise along with sales, that is, until the buyer leaves or is fired and I
have to explain why sales have plummeted along with my productivity. Of course, my boss, who has been riding on a
wave of kudos because of the sales increase “he” has produced, begins to
suspect that my drop in sales has been planned by me as a move to get him fired
so I can have his job. All these
thoughts swirl around in my mind and I wish, as I do every night, that I could
slip off this merry-go-round and escape to the good old days. At this point, the nagging truth, that big
hairy monster in the corner, reminds me that there have never been any good old
days. The path of my career has been
littered with roadblocks often too broad and deep to be overcome solely through
hard work, dedication, honesty, and integrity. Sometimes I wake from the dream at night. It’s like jumping off a speeding train. I jolt upright. The events surrounding me melt away and I am
standing there alone. The night sounds
of the house take over. There is always
the silence, the knowledge that if I walked from room to room opening each
door, I would find no one. There is the
tick of the heat ducts expanding as the warm air begins to flow. There is the chill of the cold air being
pushed out ahead of the warm. There is
the inevitable creak of 130-year-old timbers, straining to stand tall under the
weight of the original slate roof. There
is the almost silent gnawing of time, moving ahead with glacial slowness,
attacking the very soul of the once-grand house. I never see ghosts or hear ghosts or envision times
past. If the Haslets are lurking in the
dark corners, they remain silent. On a
bare wall, after removing ancient wallpaper, I found the scrawled signature of
a J. Mosher, one of the workmen who built the house. I wonder about him and what he thought about
working on this extravagant structure. My own experience here has been dashed hopes and plans gone
awry. A family returned home only to
quickly splinter in all directions. I
sit awake and alone at 3 am. In truth,
the silence is comforting. Even alone,
it feels calm here; a refuge from the dream. Sometimes I glimpse the past. The TG&Y south of town, long closed, has
just opened. A shiny new Kroger supermarket anchors the other end of what will
become the South Acres Mall, a strip of stores consisting mostly of downtown
merchants who fled the safety of generations of business on Main Street for the
lure of the future. I watch from my perch at Shelley’s as an older Chevy with
New Jersey plates pulls into the motel lot.
A man and his teenage son get out of the car. I can tell from his body language that the
son is not pleased with the Tall Pines and would rather stay at a chain motel
down the road. The man has a worried
look on his face as he thinks about the cost of gas and food so far on their
trip and now the motel and the other motels and gas and food for their trip to
visit a small state college in Missouri where his son has been accepted in
spite of his lackluster high school performance. Later at Shelley’s, I overhear
them talking about the new Kroger store.
The man works in a grocery store stocking shelves. For him, this trip is a sightseeing vacation
to visit all the innovative supermarket chains he reads about in his monthly
issue of Chain Store Age magazine. It is
impossible to tell from looking at this socially awkward, painfully
inarticulate man that he has a brilliant mind, is a voracious reader of the
Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Time magazines and endless books on science and
math and economics and history. He is
frustrated by his son who flounders in math, yet refuses his help while
neighborhood kids come to him for help in Algebra and Geometry. I linger over my coffee after the man and his son leave and
go back to their room. They will go to
bed early and get up before dawn to complete their trip to Missouri. My mind skips forward and I see them again
sitting in the stately marble hallway of the administration building at the
college while the son waits to register for his freshman classes. A young female student rushes by and the man
notices that she has dropped a handkerchief.
The girl is halfway down the hall by now but the man gets up and
awkwardly bends down to pick up the handkerchief and sets off after her
calling, “miss, miss”. The son is
embarrassed watching his father’s uneven, comical gait, the result of a poorly
set broken leg during the war, not in battle but from playing touch football. Two seats away, a woman, likely a mother
waiting for her own child to register turns to the son, The truth is he did go to college. He chose engineering school and was doing
well until one Friday evening when he had a huge fight with his Dad over using
the car to go out with friends. He
impulsively quit school and joined the National Guard not long before the
United States entered World War II. I wake up in a sweat.
I hope that when I open my eyes, I will be at home. The sound of a big truck accelerating,
heading across the fields, across the miles tells me I am still in the
dream. I open my eyes to the silent room. I can pick out the shapes of the sparse
furniture in the near darkness. I am
awake in my own dream. I think about
grabbing a coke from the machine out front.
There are hours to go before dawn.
I wish that Shelley’s was an all-night place. I would go over and sit at the counter and talk
to Lorrie; let her sadness wash over me as she tells me her story. And just for tonight, her burden would be lighter. Sharing her load relieves my own. After all, my time is limited. My life stretches out behind me. Perhaps if I
can sort it all out; make a list of what I have learned and endured and
experienced and felt, I can share it, share it all and in doing so, find some
meaning in my life. © 2019 Phil Hubbard |
StatsAuthorPhil HubbardNYAboutI'm a retired college administrator and plan to write about both personal and professional experiences. See all my poems, short stories and novels at hubbard85.com. more..Writing
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