Nightmare Alley
I WAS IN GRANDMA'S LIVING ROOM IN NORTH DAKOTA. . .
I was in the living room of my grandmother’s home in North Dakota well before dawn. My computer was in the living room. I don't know how old I was or why I was there.
I sat down to write, disturbed that there seemed to be little light in the room. I was online as if I were on a circuit like the Associated Press, and decided to write the command, “LIST,” to see how many of my files that would bring up. .
The machine started clicking like the old AP wires, only that voices emanating from the computer accompanied the clatter. Apparently the command had dismayed the people on the other end as being a terribly overwhelming request. Nevertheless, the files came spitting out.
I was embarrassed and decided to send a “CANCEL,” but my brother Keith took over the keyboard and began typing furiously. The confusion didn’t seem to stop the list of stored files from coming through. The paper, in rolling sheets as on the AP, flowed furiously.
I tried to tear off the sheet to see what was coming through. In the process, I was afraid I would jam the machine. It was so dark in the room, I couldn’t read. I tried to turn on more lights. I pushed light switches everywhere I could find them, but no lights came on. My father and mother were in the room by this time – only increasing my embarrassment and my need to get control of the situation. No lights came on.
I was chain-smoking. Cigarette butts jamming ash trays. Smoke polluting the air.
I found a lamp and wondered if I could turn it on under the lampshade. It triggered a flood of water emanating from the lamp and splashing wildly over the living room floor. How could we stop it without being electrocuted? Would the short circuit cause fire to break out? Dad was raving angrily as the water gushed over rug and furniture.
The voices from the computer were still coming through. I was faced with more tasks than I could handle – or even to know what to do next. ###
I HAD GONE TO A MOVIE. . .IT WAS STILL IN PRODUCTION
I had gone to a movie. it was still in production. I was thrust into a monstrous, uncontrolled crowd which was battling another monstrous, uncontrolled crowd. The cameras were rolling. I couldn’t remove myself from the hostilities. With combatants so thickly gathered that there was no escape from the front line, I was thrust into the action against my will.
I had no taste for what seemed to be jubilant misbehavior, so I tried to duck and evade the fight. But I couldn’t. The camera must have followed my every move from behind my shoulder.
The mob pushed behind me like panicked onlookers all racing to one exit from a raging fire behind them. Except they were running into an immovable throng. Some got trampled. We all bounced against each other violently.
At one point the camera vaulted to a location almost mountain-high overlooking the bay area. I thought it was Santa Monica, but so many tall buildings loomed before the coastal landscape that I was distracted from the onslaught. It was a splendid photo op.
What fool behavior led me into this mess? I hated myself as much as I hated the combatants. Why did I got into such a dumb – and really boring – movie, mindful of a Schwartzenegger flick? ###
IT W AS A CIRCULAR, NARROW PATH. . .
A friend and I had driven out to low mountain country to take a hike.I thought IT would be a familiar trail. It was a circular path, narrow, often over loose rocks or soil falling off of it I was proud of the pace we set at the beginning. We made the first round trip, having experienced only a few displaced rocks and pathway that forced immediate decisions on the next step to take to find a safe landing,
It was a friendly situation, sometimes he took the lead, sometimes I did. But soon we encountered many others on the path that increased the number of hazards since rocks would fall an instant ahead of our planning to land on one of them. I presumed we’d stop after the second round, but my friend urged me on.
Maybe I should stop and introduce him: He is – omigod, a friend of over 50 years, who worked on two newspapers with me, was not a very good writer, but a conscientious and diligent worker, who landed in the business section of a New York metro. We went to the same newspaper parties, and he offered me a summer teaching job for a night class in public relations. He had become a staff member there. I still don’t remember his name. It couldn’t have been too long ago that we were good friends because I remember Barbara going with me to a couple parties at his house before we were married. Barbara was upset because the cats would jump up on the serving table, and no one shooed them away.
Back to the dream: The more we ran the path, the more frightened I became. Boulders unexpectedly shook loose and tore out portions of the path where we’d have to jump, hoping to get a foothold, but never sure.
I must have tried one last leap that could have proved fatal.
I woke up. ###
I AM LEAVING THE CITY ROOM AFTER DARK. . .
I am leaving the city room after dark, homeward bound. On the elevator down, the crush of the crowd bulges the sides of the car. I'm not only burdened with coats, hats, mail, files, but more piled on by others presumably headed my direction.
Getting out of the elevator, coats, mail, hats and files slide and I grab to put them back on the heap I'm toting. It's dark. The street is crowded. I've forgotten where I parked the car. I am embarrassed. Whose coats are whose? Where are they? I am weary. I can't lay down anything anywhere. I keep walking.
I look in parking aisles, lots, garages, street parking places. What make of car am I driving? What are the license plate numbers? I don't remember. Why didn't I notice when I drove to the office in the morning? Did someone drive me to work, and maybe I have no car parked anywhere?
Why don't I call home and find out how, in what, when I left for work? Was my spouse supposed to pick me up? What is our home phone number? I've forgotten.
I retrace the streets back to the elevator. It is not where it was when I left. The sides that bulged out are missing. /The up-and-down buttons aren't available. if I get onto the elevator car, I might be squeezed against the sides of the wall going up. More packages and coats slide off the pile. I try to catch them before they fall. Some won't be retrievable. Whose packages, clothes, mail do I have that will be lost and I won't know which are missing? Why did I volunteer to carry all these things home with me?
Did I take some things out of the office that I shouldn't have? Will these be noted by the guards when they pick up stuff that falls off? I am in a goddamned predicament. I go back to the office. I start again. The trail back to find a car, a phone, where I parked, whose was supposed to pick me up -- or were they supposed to?
I repeat it all over and over and over again. It gets worse each time.###
NIGHT ON BALD MOUNTAIN?
It had been such a night day. Sliffing the waves in a small boat. Off the beach at Laguna. The doctor who had removed my tonsils in his office when I was 18, had driven us through a canyon from his home to the beach. When we got back, I dropped him off at the shore, then move the boat a few hundred yards up the beach before pulling it up on the sand.
Apparently, he had already driven off. It seemed just a short walk, maybe a few miles, over the rim of some mountains and down to his home. Steps carved into the mountainside made it easier for me to climb. They kept going up and up. They led up to a home on a shelf with other houses. I was embarrassed. I was violating their privacy. I tried to sneak through between the houses t o continue up the mountain.
Rocky crust began to shift under my feet. I tried to maintain my balance, but looked over a sharp precipice at the valley below. It was terrifying. Where was the path? There were dividing paths. I didn't know which to choose, but I kept climbing, slipping, falling. Crumbling rock loosened. Huge overhangs of rock might fall on me at any moment.
As I write this hours later, I remember crawling up to a cave entrance on the side of a cliff in the Sandia Mountains outside of Albuquerque. The others managed to crawl up the facte of the cliff eight or 10 feet to enter. I was embarrassed because of my fear. They helped me get up into the cave. Huge rocks had fallen from the roof of the cave over centuries perhaps. I was afraid one would fall on us.
The doctor who had removed my tonsils also was driving us home (this is my recollection now -- not my dream) from a football game in Tucson, Ariz. It was late at night. it was 1938. The fall season. Orson 'Welles' famous play in the form of an announcement of an invasion from Mars was blaring out of the radio. That didn't scare me nearly as much as the fact that the driver was driving his big car 80 miles per hour on a gravel road over the desert floor. I was a young sports writer and he was a fan of UNM's Lobos, who had played at Tucson. I don't remember how the game turned out.
Back to the dream. Storm clouds gathered as the night darkened. Rain fell. The rocks got slippier. They broke loose. I would slide down the channels the runoff was creating on the mountainside. It was thrilling -- doesn't that mean I was enjoying even if I was scared? Overhangs kept looming and threatening to crash down. Other climbers were in the rocks. Some were washed away to their doom.
I had lost all control, all hope of returning to the canyon and finding the doctor's home. Sometimes I found I was on paved roads leading to houses, but the roads would disappear and the rain gutters dig deeper. Pieces of the mountainside kept crumbling around me.###
THE CROWD THAT KEPT GETTING BIGGER. . .N0 WAY OUT
October 1, 2005
Tom Cockrell tapped me on the shoulder and motioned me to follow him. Something was to go on in a big amphitheater. I hurried to get a seat in the front row, but los track of Tom. My seat was so close to the stage that the stage loomed high beyond my vision. The seats were all folding chairs, squeezed closely together.
I got up to look for a better seat, but people jostled and pushed to get the seats. I looked out over the theater and the rows of seats were endless and full of jostling people. I squeezed into a seat and thought I barely nabbed it before a woman tried to sit down. I was embarrassed. She disappeared. The crowd kept growing. The chairs were squeezing together. It was chaotic.
Something was happening on stage. But it was just more people jostling. I felt pushed around and off balance. I wished I could get out of there, but I saw no way out.
Tom Cockrell died four or five years ago. He was a good writer and a nice guy. I tried to offer him a job in our office at RAND. He didn't want it. He liked Ann Shoben and kept asking her to read copy on the fiction he was writing. I wish we could have visited Tom and his wife Jill in Key West. But we never did.
####
I was in the living room of my grandmother’s home in North Dakota well before dawn. My computer was in the living room. I don't know how old I was or why I was there.
I sat down to write, disturbed that there seemed to be little light in the room. I was online as if I were on a circuit like the Associated Press, and decided to write the command, “LIST,” to see how many of my files that would bring up. .
The machine started clicking like the old AP wires, only that voices emanating from the computer accompanied the clatter. Apparently the command had dismayed the people on the other end as being a terribly overwhelming request. Nevertheless, the files came spitting out.
I was embarrassed and decided to send a “CANCEL,” but my brother Keith took over the keyboard and began typing furiously. The confusion didn’t seem to stop the list of stored files from coming through. The paper, in rolling sheets as on the AP, flowed furiously.
I tried to tear off the sheet to see what was coming through. In the process, I was afraid I would jam the machine. It was so dark in the room, I couldn’t read. I tried to turn on more lights. I pushed light switches everywhere I could find them, but no lights came on. My father and mother were in the room by this time – only increasing my embarrassment and my need to get control of the situation. No lights came on.
I was chain-smoking. Cigarette butts jamming ash trays. Smoke polluting the air.
I found a lamp and wondered if I could turn it on under the lampshade. It triggered a flood of water emanating from the lamp and splashing wildly over the living room floor. How could we stop it without being electrocuted? Would the short circuit cause fire to break out? Dad was raving angrily as the water gushed over rug and furniture.
The voices from the computer were still coming through. I was faced with more tasks than I could handle – or even to know what to do next. ###
I HAD GONE TO A MOVIE. . .IT WAS STILL IN PRODUCTION
I had gone to a movie. it was still in production. I was thrust into a monstrous, uncontrolled crowd which was battling another monstrous, uncontrolled crowd. The cameras were rolling. I couldn’t remove myself from the hostilities. With combatants so thickly gathered that there was no escape from the front line, I was thrust into the action against my will.
I had no taste for what seemed to be jubilant misbehavior, so I tried to duck and evade the fight. But I couldn’t. The camera must have followed my every move from behind my shoulder.
The mob pushed behind me like panicked onlookers all racing to one exit from a raging fire behind them. Except they were running into an immovable throng. Some got trampled. We all bounced against each other violently.
At one point the camera vaulted to a location almost mountain-high overlooking the bay area. I thought it was Santa Monica, but so many tall buildings loomed before the coastal landscape that I was distracted from the onslaught. It was a splendid photo op.
What fool behavior led me into this mess? I hated myself as much as I hated the combatants. Why did I got into such a dumb – and really boring – movie, mindful of a Schwartzenegger flick? ###
IT W AS A CIRCULAR, NARROW PATH. . .
A friend and I had driven out to low mountain country to take a hike.I thought IT would be a familiar trail. It was a circular path, narrow, often over loose rocks or soil falling off of it I was proud of the pace we set at the beginning. We made the first round trip, having experienced only a few displaced rocks and pathway that forced immediate decisions on the next step to take to find a safe landing,
It was a friendly situation, sometimes he took the lead, sometimes I did. But soon we encountered many others on the path that increased the number of hazards since rocks would fall an instant ahead of our planning to land on one of them. I presumed we’d stop after the second round, but my friend urged me on.
Maybe I should stop and introduce him: He is – omigod, a friend of over 50 years, who worked on two newspapers with me, was not a very good writer, but a conscientious and diligent worker, who landed in the business section of a New York metro. We went to the same newspaper parties, and he offered me a summer teaching job for a night class in public relations. He had become a staff member there. I still don’t remember his name. It couldn’t have been too long ago that we were good friends because I remember Barbara going with me to a couple parties at his house before we were married. Barbara was upset because the cats would jump up on the serving table, and no one shooed them away.
Back to the dream: The more we ran the path, the more frightened I became. Boulders unexpectedly shook loose and tore out portions of the path where we’d have to jump, hoping to get a foothold, but never sure.
I must have tried one last leap that could have proved fatal.
I woke up. ###
I AM LEAVING THE CITY ROOM AFTER DARK. . .
I am leaving the city room after dark, homeward bound. On the elevator down, the crush of the crowd bulges the sides of the car. I'm not only burdened with coats, hats, mail, files, but more piled on by others presumably headed my direction.
Getting out of the elevator, coats, mail, hats and files slide and I grab to put them back on the heap I'm toting. It's dark. The street is crowded. I've forgotten where I parked the car. I am embarrassed. Whose coats are whose? Where are they? I am weary. I can't lay down anything anywhere. I keep walking.
I look in parking aisles, lots, garages, street parking places. What make of car am I driving? What are the license plate numbers? I don't remember. Why didn't I notice when I drove to the office in the morning? Did someone drive me to work, and maybe I have no car parked anywhere?
Why don't I call home and find out how, in what, when I left for work? Was my spouse supposed to pick me up? What is our home phone number? I've forgotten.
I retrace the streets back to the elevator. It is not where it was when I left. The sides that bulged out are missing. /The up-and-down buttons aren't available. if I get onto the elevator car, I might be squeezed against the sides of the wall going up. More packages and coats slide off the pile. I try to catch them before they fall. Some won't be retrievable. Whose packages, clothes, mail do I have that will be lost and I won't know which are missing? Why did I volunteer to carry all these things home with me?
Did I take some things out of the office that I shouldn't have? Will these be noted by the guards when they pick up stuff that falls off? I am in a goddamned predicament. I go back to the office. I start again. The trail back to find a car, a phone, where I parked, whose was supposed to pick me up -- or were they supposed to?
I repeat it all over and over and over again. It gets worse each time.###
NIGHT ON BALD MOUNTAIN?
It had been such a night day. Sliffing the waves in a small boat. Off the beach at Laguna. The doctor who had removed my tonsils in his office when I was 18, had driven us through a canyon from his home to the beach. When we got back, I dropped him off at the shore, then move the boat a few hundred yards up the beach before pulling it up on the sand.
Apparently, he had already driven off. It seemed just a short walk, maybe a few miles, over the rim of some mountains and down to his home. Steps carved into the mountainside made it easier for me to climb. They kept going up and up. They led up to a home on a shelf with other houses. I was embarrassed. I was violating their privacy. I tried to sneak through between the houses t o continue up the mountain.
Rocky crust began to shift under my feet. I tried to maintain my balance, but looked over a sharp precipice at the valley below. It was terrifying. Where was the path? There were dividing paths. I didn't know which to choose, but I kept climbing, slipping, falling. Crumbling rock loosened. Huge overhangs of rock might fall on me at any moment.
As I write this hours later, I remember crawling up to a cave entrance on the side of a cliff in the Sandia Mountains outside of Albuquerque. The others managed to crawl up the facte of the cliff eight or 10 feet to enter. I was embarrassed because of my fear. They helped me get up into the cave. Huge rocks had fallen from the roof of the cave over centuries perhaps. I was afraid one would fall on us.
The doctor who had removed my tonsils also was driving us home (this is my recollection now -- not my dream) from a football game in Tucson, Ariz. It was late at night. it was 1938. The fall season. Orson 'Welles' famous play in the form of an announcement of an invasion from Mars was blaring out of the radio. That didn't scare me nearly as much as the fact that the driver was driving his big car 80 miles per hour on a gravel road over the desert floor. I was a young sports writer and he was a fan of UNM's Lobos, who had played at Tucson. I don't remember how the game turned out.
Back to the dream. Storm clouds gathered as the night darkened. Rain fell. The rocks got slippier. They broke loose. I would slide down the channels the runoff was creating on the mountainside. It was thrilling -- doesn't that mean I was enjoying even if I was scared? Overhangs kept looming and threatening to crash down. Other climbers were in the rocks. Some were washed away to their doom.
I had lost all control, all hope of returning to the canyon and finding the doctor's home. Sometimes I found I was on paved roads leading to houses, but the roads would disappear and the rain gutters dig deeper. Pieces of the mountainside kept crumbling around me.###
THE CROWD THAT KEPT GETTING BIGGER. . .N0 WAY OUT
October 1, 2005
Tom Cockrell tapped me on the shoulder and motioned me to follow him. Something was to go on in a big amphitheater. I hurried to get a seat in the front row, but los track of Tom. My seat was so close to the stage that the stage loomed high beyond my vision. The seats were all folding chairs, squeezed closely together.
I got up to look for a better seat, but people jostled and pushed to get the seats. I looked out over the theater and the rows of seats were endless and full of jostling people. I squeezed into a seat and thought I barely nabbed it before a woman tried to sit down. I was embarrassed. She disappeared. The crowd kept growing. The chairs were squeezing together. It was chaotic.
Something was happening on stage. But it was just more people jostling. I felt pushed around and off balance. I wished I could get out of there, but I saw no way out.
Tom Cockrell died four or five years ago. He was a good writer and a nice guy. I tried to offer him a job in our office at RAND. He didn't want it. He liked Ann Shoben and kept asking her to read copy on the fiction he was writing. I wish we could have visited Tom and his wife Jill in Key West. But we never did.
####
posted by Paul Weeks at 10:14 PM
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