Oneironauts

Oneironauts

By Richard Nesberg

Copyright 2012 Richard Nesberg

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Table of Contents

Prologue

Knife in the Wall

Hank The Tank

Saturdays

End of the Board

Jolly Roger

Cages

A Mutual Distrust in French Cinema

A Taste of Maui

A Clown, Warlock, and a Handgun

Saturdays with Stu

Rubber Band Man

Ringmasters

The Sage

Before the Credits

The Great Marathon

Message Sent

The Gummy Bear Picnic

The Dead Language Nexus

The Ape Escape

Recoding Gravity

The Reality She Had Come To Believe

The Bastard Who Knew Magic

Divined Truth

The Millennial Intergalactic Conference on Things in General

What Nerds Live For

The Other Door

Lost

Room 815

Caged

Above the Satellites

The Nonsense

Enter the Ape

About/Acknowledgments

Prologue

From a dreamy beach I compose the final words I will ever need to put down in written form. Beneath my darkened legs and surfer trunks atoms form granules of sand, perfect transmitters of the day’s weakening heat, an excellent location to gaze unrestlessly at whales splashing playfully before a violent setting sun and enjoy a cocktail of your own preference. From here, I compose the only words I will deem fit for memoir, words of remembrance and realization.

To think about all the nonsense involving those silly people in Las Vegas now and in particular how I got so intertwined with it amuses me in a fashion I never anticipated in my younger, hungrier days. But as is typical in existence I have gone on to another stage, a new chapter with new assholes to occupy myself with, and those characters only come to mind at moments like this present one on a beach with a tasty drink in hand, when a thick silence blankets the clutter of the busy world allowing the seeker to see the beauty witnessed by artists, too grandiose to convey via any medium, a moment meant to savor mutedly before it slips to irrelevancy.

While some merit exists to the claim that I am to be held accountable for the events and tragedies of the infamous Vegas Tale, I would wager my role in the affair was less pivotal than the other players. Imagine a mother arrested at the age of sixty because her freak child of thirty-three murdered an ape. There is no correlation between the mother and the blame for that crime, and likewise those allegations against me could never hold up in even the lowest of Intergalactic courts.

All that fuss is in the past now, isn’t it, so why relive that drama when the evening star burns and my drink nears a refilling? Instead of painfully taking the time to dig up all the lefts and rights of who wronged what and why what effected who, a far more entertaining method of remembrance is the casual replay, the slow review of the major events, the comical moments, the unarresting memories. Those are the best dimensions history builds, the best footnotes for an old man to read. Those are the practical jokes that are not funny until years after the prank. They make the great stories from life which becomes the fantastic fictions of legacy.

Old jokes are like old friends, old places, old smells, old roles, old emotion, and old motives. At their time nothing would seem to trump their weight, but in an advanced age, as dusk greets night, nothing can seem more frivolous. And nothing could me more delightfully humorous.

Knife in the Wall

Low woofs in slow meter flow from two PA stacks at either side of Kinryu, a local nightclub. An encompassing sound, it envelops Thurston as he sneaks through the entrance. Inside an older drunk man says, I like dance…yes, dancing! Thurston tries to give him a banana he’d been stowing for some days but he wouldn’t take it, so he resigns to order a drink.

Grotesquely large, novelty sunglasses bob up and down, the guy wearing them smiles and walks off to another world with a much larger sun than ours.

Thurston flanks the dance floor from a counter, watches the human interaction raging before him. From basic animalistic behaviors like gathering in groups or presenting a self-image, to higher levels of humanity like friendships, family—silly concepts beyond animals. Three kids from Israel interrupt these thoughts and remind Thurston how much life in the Middle East really does suck. The fatigue in their faces gets to a person after some time, so Thurston humbly bars them from any further communication for the rest of all of their collective lives, and shimmies to the back.

Away from the irritation of repetitive bass lines, thinking about life in the Middle East, and standing, Thurston sits on a white couch. Next to him another old man, mumbles unintelligibly about a lost love, or a forgotten war—a portrait of a man defeated by modernity. A loud farm boy spills some beer on an expensively-white basketball jersey worn by Big Bad—a half-wit local MC. Big Bad stands, throws a hunting knife across the room.

The depraved patrons dotting the shadows of Kinryu watch the knife pierce the wall.

Later dancing, the first old guy reminds Thurston he likes to dance.

Thurston walks up to the bar and orders a drink. Behind the bar, some sort of scheduling hoopla related to having none of the booked performers show up for the gig erupts into a verbal tussle between Yuji, the club owner, and Mr. Miyamoto, the representative of the company sponsoring the night's event. While Yuji suggests more house DJ music as a temporary solution, the representative of the event sponsor disagrees, and demands the presence of the planned upon line-up.

Yuji reaches back to his ancestral roots and transmogrifies into a golden dragon. The representative quickly deposits the volumes of a nearby whiskey bottle into his bravery. Yuji bellows, House DJ! Mr. Miyamoto replies, Never!

Either utter nonsense or an equation, Thurston decides. All of it.

Hank The Tank

As a boy I hated my name. It repulsed me to consider that the phonetics comprised some amount of my essence. I soon became disenfranchised with the idea of names and those who believe naming things to be imperative actions in some higher human struggle. People were faces not sounds. In those days, as a youth cushioned from importance, my soul lay bunkered in ignorance protected by modern era ramparts: suburbs. Some time after Senior High, I developed a fondness for my name. Hank The Tank Clemens reminded me of adolescent greatness.

A perk from being varsity tight-end—State Champions, 1990; All-State Team four years in a row—in a moderately wholesome All-American city, is that the population recognizes you and will often enough purchase you drinks in local drinking establishments.

No, we took State back in '90.

Helluva run you boys had. Better than them geeks they got frolickin’ around now.

Most people back home referred to me by that handle and would use it openly when drunk, Get Hank ‘The Tank’ a Bare-chested Ethiopian! On me!

Free drinks aside, my name and local legacy drove me from home to places not home. I needed new people, new faces with no need for a name, new names to introduce myself with.

I really needed to leave that State due to warrants for assorted felonies.

I traveled obscurely. I drove a car I thought I owned because I drove it everyday. Country air blew jet streams through my thinning hair when the windshield had that hole. I liked Arizona and New Mexico; those lands sing ancient vibes. I drove into Mexico once, but was drunk for most of the excursion and simply couldn’t understand anyone. I never predicted I’d end up in Vegas. Its allure enigmatic, Vegas is a complete ecosystem. A true marvel of the idiocy human knowledge has brought us (see also: nickelodeons, Alan Thicke, and three-wheeled ATVs).

Gambling’s not my thing, never rolled or pulled once. Moving to Vegas is a gamble in itself. I suppose anything a guy tries is a gamble in some sense of the word is. I figured I could score a solid office job or could eat peaches and look at pretty lights. There will always be offices which by definition are to be filled with the capillaries of any free market economy—lights, plants, copy machines, and quaintly, humans. It’s not a rewarding career by any measure, but steady.

It was in Vegas where I met the woman which made me realize that a long string of ugly women had always polluted my life. I met Joanna in some greasy-spoon, knife-less diner with phenomenal cheesecake on Saturdays. She was crying in a phone booth near the toilets. When I asked her how long she planned to occupy the access to the long-distance telephone lines, she thrust a fist toward my crotch. After the confusion cleared, we sat at the feces-colored counter, shared a cheesecake and stories.

Her world had changed due to an eviction and unexpected move across the nation. She was from some place on the East Coast, although I never learned more than that. She came to Vegas to meet some lunatic with a book, some prodigy who knew numbers. With the nest egg she had slowly stolen from her dying aunt, she intended to make something from it in order to both fund her dismal life and buy her aunt the nice cemetery plot she talked about—a peaceful plot situated beneath a big tree and next to the guy who invented the double-wick candle.

Sluggishly, I made my paces through my personal narrative which she seemed to identify with on some level.

We left a decent tip and made love behind the grease trap out back. She cried as I achieved orgasm, and we smoked cigarettes afterward in silence.

Saturdays

On Saturdays, John usually checks his mail.

See, John’s a Monday to Friday, nine to five kind of guy. In