NUMBER FIVE: Can You Believe It?

You won't believe it. I just had the craziest dream. I dreamt that I flew to Chicago and then had to run through O'Hare International Airport to get on a flight I almost missed. The flight was long and obnoxious and I didn't sleep at all, but I ended up in Paris, in Charles de Gaulle International Airport, where they have escalators wrapped in cellophane like you're in a big chute or a slide. And then I saw my mom's friend Isabelle, and she drove me into Paris, into Montmarte, but first we had to find our way out of the airport parking lot and there were these black people in a car and she said "Noirs dans une voiture noire, c'est dificile voire" and that made me a little uncomfortable, which is a bit intriguing. And in Montmarte, I had to drag my suitcases into this old apartment up three flights of stairs, and the apartment was fucking TINY and the shower was in the bedroom. I dreamt that Isabelle got her nails done as I wandered around Montmarte, up and down these streets full of waiters and foreigners and bucheries and sex shops, cigarettes and raw fish and fromage, shops full of fromages and rosés and frozens quiches, and the hobos, les clochats on the streets were openly drunk and dribbled wine down their fronts in plain view of everyone and washed their faces and their clothes in the water that ran through the Parisian gutters and swept the metro tickets and cigarette butts away. At some point I was in a supermarket with Isabelle, and she was saying something about laundry detergent and tomatoes and juice, and I picked out cereal and fell asleep in the kind of horseshoe shaped courtyard of her apartment complex because I got the code wrong. People kept opening the door to the complex about forty or fifty yards away, so I couldn't have slept more then fifteen minutes and my feet hurt. And I stood in the middle of Montmarte, and I ate dinner at a little place just below the Moulin Rouge and drank wine and felt this rush of drunkeness so I stopped drinking, I had cold tomatoe soup and ratatouille and potatoe something and then climbed up to this church, through the most touristic part of Montmarte to this place where you could see the whole city, all of Paris and that I went on the metro and to the Notre Dame and walked along the Seine. It was almost ten o'clock but it was still light out and we couldn't see the Eiffel Tower because there were trees in the way. I dreamt that I had breakfast in Paris twice, and both times Isabelle smoked a cigarette, every time we were in the house she smoked a cigarette and inhaled the smoke through her nose and emptied her ashtray at night. I dreamt that she smoked Benson and Hedges cigarettes, the kind my mom buys when she's really upset and then throws away.

I dreamt that I flew to Nice, and a little kid kept kicking my seat, and I listened to URAQT on the plane, and Brett Dennen, and when we got to the coast, I kept thinking, Oh wow, there's Nice, it's beautiful, but we would keep going to see identical towns speckled with boats and pink sand. And when we finally landed, it was humid, and when I got off the plane I was listening to "Blessed" or "She's Mine" by Brett Dennen, I don't remember which, but it was very fitting and I was happy. And then I saw Victoria and she led me to her mother, who works at the airport. I dreamt that everyone in my French family worked at the Airport. I dreamt that I talked to Victoria about my friends and what we were going to do during the summer, and then I met her dad and crammed my stuff in his car and drove through this pretty little town and ended up outside Victoria's house, only she had forgotten the key so her dad got angry and had to go get it and we sat around and listened to music. And at some point I was in this church, and then I was with her friends and I had to kiss everyone we met and then we were buying booze and I was uncomfortable and kept picking things up and pretending that they interested me. And then I dreamt that I cried for a few hours while Victoria kissed this boy with a girlfriend who kept calling and she had these two friends who just laughed even though they seemed pretty nice.

And I dreamt that we saw fireworks and went to discothèques and pools and had nothing to do and did hair and makeup and her dog kept growling at me all the time but somehow I knew he still loved me because I didn't ever really understand what was going on on the TV so I just played with him. I dreamt that I saw Temptation Island, Cruel Intentions, two Audrey Hepburn movies, Unbreakable, all in French. At seven in the morning I was still awake and at two in the afternoon I was still asleep, and I remember smoking blacks in a park in front of her high school until I was sick to my stomach and wanted to toss my guts all over this bench that her friends had graffitied a bit. I dreamt that her best friends all worked at the local McDonalds and that her town was incredibly small and that one time I thought I saw Violet in front of the supermarket. Coincidentally, all her friends had good looking, very European brothers and I bought shoes and dresses and watched Victoria smoke Lucky Strikes everywhere and ate ice cream that tasted like a flower, a fucking flower, and I bought it at a place with one hundred different flavors. The whole time I was very quiet, and the quieter I was the lonelier I was so I tried to think of things to say but I could only think of things to think so when I drank and I smoked I said things that I wasn't thinking because I was really only thinking of you guys and assigning you guys places at the table and thinking that if all these people would please stop speaking French I could close my eyes and pretend I was anywhere, I could pretend I was in that parking lot in front of the twenty-four hour Safeway on that night after BFD or on the hill with the goats and the dogs and the cats and the birds and the guinea. And then suddenly I was sitting on the windowsill watching the sun rise with these heartbreakingly beautiful clouds over these green hills and beige old houses with the garbage man below taking away all the trash, and then I closed my eyes and I woke up and it was all a dream.