In the dream that wakes me from the dream, I am looking for keys in an old house. Everything is lit in flat reds and blues and greens like an Italian horror film from the seventies. I keep going down elevator shafts and up impossible staircases, behind bookcases, through intricate secret passages. There are clues in fragments: A face of a long lost friend appears against a white wall. The crease of his lips is vaguely familiar, but he disappears before I can say who it was.
These dark corridors, lined with so many dusty books, change direction abruptly, leading me into another arterial reserve of memory. I hesitate to use language, both in the dream and in the recording of it, for the whiches come to fight with my gerunds.
I tear through texts to get right to the cliché: Death. Get it over with. It’s waiting around here somewhere, so why bother with the whole stupid scene? I am lost among half-trampled sets with broken bulbs and peeling paint on a staircase between two plots in a house that has lost the enthusiasm of being haunted. It hasn’t a single sinister detail in all its tangle of timber. It’s merely reminiscent of the abandoned house I once explored as a teenager in Downers Grove:
Sneaking in the back by prying a board off a window, we had hoped to find ghosts, sacred texts, rituals, even Satan, but there was no dusty furniture covered in drapes, nothing to please us with shivers, only freshly cleared floors waiting to be splintered. My friend and I (it’s not important who since he could be anyone—the person X who has always filled the space near my left shoulder) climbed up into the attic, subconsciously letting our bare hands receive splinters from the building’s old boards to make it all seem more frightful. All we found was itchy fiberglass and maybe a stray paperclip or a forgotten paint can. The real terror, we discovered, was the absence of anything.
That’s how we became immediately certain that we’d never find the opaque haze of evil in some dark crevice of our dead neighbor’s basement. This flat, well-lit existence we’d been conditioned, reluctantly, to accept was indeed everything. The only escape was to cloud over the offensive reality by turning inward to the splintering mind in a simple physical gesture: suicide—a path that seemed too safe and certain. I preferred to leave the clinical white lights on and face the stark, crisp terror with my smart mouth wide open, never gracing banality with an acknowledgement of its impact on my existence.
Later, I would rummage through the cemeteries of Paris, pushing back rusted sepulcher doors to reveal dusty porcelain flowers and shattered crosses, stripped of any demonic resonance by their age and motionlessness. Centuries of history, religion, culture, literature and recipes did nothing to budge one stone on the wall that supposedly separated us from god.
My friend, X, would end up in the psych ward at the local hospital where I’d go to visit him. Those were the days before AIDS and political correctness. The days when hospitals opened their white padded doors to a candy store of alternatives. I was jealous that I was too “stable” to participate in his secret clinical rites.
During my visit, we made a huge portrait of one of the priests from the seminary, where we’d been voluntarily incarcerated together by the Catholic Church during our freshman year of high school, using a deluxe box of 96 Crayola crayons. The glorious result: a gold, tangerine, silver, orchid and bronze drag queen priest poster, perfect for hanging on confessional (or padded cell) doors. We colored it violently, tearing the paper. I was crazier than my friend and thus exempt from serving time in the next level of hell: How to be a Suburban Psycho Fag 101, a program funded by the local, state and federal budgets for health care.