Of Dreams Dank and Fetid

Seattle’s a slimy old town, slick with the self-satisfied excrescences of those who stole the indigenous land and remade it in the service of money. Brooding in the rank strata beneath the veneer of biotech and skyscraper townhouses is the ectoplasm of bone gamers and basket weavers, box-house hostesses and linotype operators, parchment-faced stewbums and chain-smoking cafeteria waitresses, wrung-out old queens and cops on the take. A reticent residue, but as old Chief Sealth once cautioned, not entirely powerless.

At any time of the day or night in the shimmering summer of ’75 you could walk into the Green Parrot Theater at First and Pike and see an enormous cock thrusting into a vagina like a steam piston. Nebulous music accompanied the cock and shadowy figures moved in and out of the little theater, hoping they would not be spotted by a friend or a business associate, or worse, encounter someone they knew inside the auditorium.

Holy crap, Entriken thought when he first saw the thrusting cock. Guess we won’t be bringing Mom and Dad down for a freebie. He had been on his way to the Pike Place Market one afternoon when he noticed the Help Wanted sign at the box office. He was sick of driving cab so he entered, saw the thrusting cock, met the manager, and went to work two nights later running the projector, selling tickets, and keeping the place tolerably clean. When he wasn’t busy inside (which was seldom), Entriken stood in the doorway smoking cigarettes and absorbing the night. He was a tall man in his mid-twenties, with shoulder-length blond hair and a dark mustache, who favored Levis shirts and slim jeans inside brown harness boots. His lanky good looks invited advances from pouch-faced men and epicene striplings, which he brushed aside with easy good humor.

Who, Entriken wondered, would pay to see a cock moving in and out of a vagina? Was there a doctor in the house? Someone’s lawyer, professor, boss? Minister? Entriken considered throwing the house lights on and watching the reaction, but resisted the temptation. Customers were customers and entitled to what they had paid for. His was a sacred trust.

Some days later Entriken sat in his parents’ living room. His mother smiled, his father crunched an ice cube from the evening’s first Old Fashioned. “Movie theater, eh? Which one?”

“Green Parrot.”

“That old place? I must’ve seen a film or two there way back when.” His father looked narrowly at him. “What do they show these days?”

Cocks and cunts. “Oh—mostly foreign films. Obscure things.”

“Sounds interesting. Pay you much?”

Shit no. “Reasonable.” At his age his father had been a junior bookkeeper at a big accounting firm. Over the years he moved steadily up the ladder, and recently retired as a senior partner.

“Well.” His father crunched another ice cube. “I’m sure it’ll do until something better comes along.”

Entriken nodded and stared off into the forsythia bushes. He loved his father for being big enough not to press him, his mother for smiling and nodding and saying, “I’m glad you’re happy in your new job, dear.” He could not tell his parents, who only wanted good things for him, that the idea of putting on a suit and tie every day and reporting to some goddamn office every morning terrified him.

He also knew they would have been shocked shitless if they had been in the locker room at Roosevelt High the day a classmate waved his erect cock at him and three other guys and dared them to feel it. “Come on, just feel it. You pussies need to feel a real cock. Come on.”

No one cared to feel it. The looks on his mates’ faces ranged from horrified to thinly-veiled fascination. “Buncha fuckin’ pussies,” the boy sneered. Entriken was unimpressed. A cock was a cock. No more, no less. “Big deal,” he sneered back. “You think yours is big?”

Smiling secretly at this memory, Entriken lit a smoke then crushed it out. He had promised his parents he’d quit. Yeah, well. He’d promised he’d go to college, too. After midnight, First Avenue was a street of silent yesterdays. A Graytop cab cruised by; the driver, a familiar face, nodded. On the opposite corner, junkies and hustlers flitted in and out of the glaring Donut House. Entriken liked donuts, but unless truly desperate for a glazed, shunned the place because the deep fryer made his clothes stink and too many creeps hung out there.

It was fun to watch, though: guys hustling drugs, guys hustling girls, guys hustling guys, sleaze central. Now and then a Mercedes or Cadillac would pause and let someone in or out, and it occurred to Entriken that such autos would be at home in the rarified environs of Broadmoor or Laurelhurst. At such moments, he smiled tightly and whispered: Gotcha. He thought ruefully that a more enterprising mind than his would discretely photograph the assignations and mail prints to the license-holders along with request for compensation. There was one way to “something better,” a route taken by many a “successful” man. But Entriken was a live-and let-live guy.

Two-thirty and no one in the theater. The pit of night. Entriken snorted softly and slid the curtain aside to reveal the thrusting screen-cock in full view from the street. The mayor, driving by, could look in and see. A visiting President Ford could look in and see. His parents could look in and see. He imagined himself an old-time shill with a megaphone, “Step right up! Cocks! Cunts! Every indecent act known to man!” But no one saw. The blinking lights rimming the marquee went clack-clack-clack over the empty sidewalk, reminding Entriken of his high school typing class. Learning to type, for what? To screen hard porn? Well, thanks, Edison, where would we be without you? What did old Thomas Alva do for sex? Something of his own invention, perhaps. Entriken gazed at the bulbs—stars, he thought: stars for city folk that never got to see the real thing. Truly a marvel, electricity. Would have been considered witchcraft not too long ago. Maybe he could invent something. Seattle slept and Entriken stood beneath the clacking bulbs wondering what cryptic messages of destiny might be hidden in their electrical impulses. A man walked up and purchased a ticket. Entriken closed the curtain and lit another cigarette.

Some days later he walked into the Frederick and Nelson store and clacked downstairs to the Paul Bunyan Room. He was deep into his Frango mint shake when someone rustled onto the next stool. A young woman. Auburn hair, Streisand-looking, sort of. A scent. His heart jumped. They had dated a couple of times in school. Now, here she was, older, more beautiful than he remembered.“Lindy.”

“Hey!” A warm smile.

“Remember me?”

“Yes, of course! I didn’t want to intrude.”

“Nah, it’s good to see you. I never see anybody I know, it seems like.”

It came too soon. “So, what have you been up to?”

“I’m in movies.”

“Really?” Her eyebrows raised. “Acting?”

“I’m a projectionist.” More or less.

“Oh yeah?” Her features fell ever so slightly. “Whereabouts?”

He smiled wryly. “The Green Parrot.”

A cannonball of silence dropped into the hole between them. She pulled her hair, looked him in the eye. “Isn’t that kind of a—what do you call it…?”

“Porn house.” He nodded. “Yep, that’s what I’d call it.”

 A gentle laugh. “Do you like working there?”

Sure. Until something better comes along. “It’s all right. It’s a job. I’m not planning on making a career of it.”

“Mmm. Is that a Frango shake? I love Frango shakes.”

On his next night off he rang her bell and she opened her door to him. A month later they had made each other breakfast, strolled the Public Market arms about each other’s waists, and seen Jaws.

“So,” she said one Saturday, “maybe I should drop by the theater tonight.”

“Not a good idea. I mean, it’s kind of disgusting, the stuff we show.”

“Like—cocks and vaginas?”

“Oh, you’ve been?”

She shrieked gleefully, punched his arm. “So, how’s that any more disgusting than this? She pulled the sheet back and swallowed him. The feel of her lips drove him to white-hot combustion, and he entered her again and thrust, in and out, with ravenous fury, his thoughts turning to the screen, the lone figures in the darkened theater. The lone figure in front, suddenly not alone.

Next morning, over waffles he said, “The other night I pulled the curtain to the auditorium back and let the ‘action’ show out on the street.”

“Nasty man!”

“Naaah, I like to think I’m providing an educational service.”

“Oh yeah? So, educate me.”

He took the next Saturday off, took her to dinner in Pioneer Square, and afterward they sat thigh-to-thigh in the Washington Street pergola staring into the velveteen void of Elliott Bay. He nodded toward the lights of Bainbridge Island glowing dimly through the murk. “Spirits are watching us,” he said. “One day, all this will slide into the Sound, and we’ll all be together.”

“They do look like eyes out there, don’t they. Spooky.”

“Many eyes out there, watching. There’s a whole other world down there, a dream world, waiting for us. I can sense them.” His senses took him often into his own dream world, where a spiral stairway descended into a cool, dark dimension between sleep and awake. A small room, a sofa, a young custodian with raven hair and an easy, slouching way. Jamie. A dream and reality. “Smoke a joint?”

“Sure.” The weed made him cough, made Jamie laugh. White teeth. In less than five minutes, a new thought, of force, possession. Where did that come from? Smoking joints, laughing, short minutes at a time. Then, a hand, hotness, confusion, panic. “Don’t worry about it.” Okay.

“Do you have a dream world?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Tell me some.”

“Can’t.”

“Why.”

“Bad luck to tell your dreams.”

“Who told you that?”

“Everybody knows that. Besides, I never remember them, anyway.”

“I’ll tell you one of mine if you tell me one of yours.”

“Okay, next time I have one I’ll try to write it down.”

He said nothing about his other dreams. The dim, dank basement dreams he never forgot.

She said nothing about her mild crush on him at Roosevelt, about thinking of him years after, about suddenly seeing him walking down Pine Street and following him, heart pounding, into Frederick and Nelson.

She threw her legs over his and kissed him. Music floated over from a bar on the corner. “Shelly’s Leg,” she said. “Ever been?”

“Once or twice.”

“Oooh,” she purred, “once or twice.” Shelly’s Leg was Seattle’s premier gay disco.

“Don’t mean nothin’,” he drawled, giving her the half-lid and stroking her leg.

She ran her knee along his thigh. “Not saying it did.”

“Uh-huh.” He put his hands on her denim-covered butt and pulled her to him. After a long, deep kiss, he murmured, “So, let’s go.” Arms around each other, they crossed Alaskan Way and the railroad tracks, his cock rock-hard. He knew with proper amazement that it would stay rock-hard for the rest of the evening. Anyone want to screen this? He stifled a laugh. They went to the end of the line trailing off into the gloom beneath the viaduct, checking out the clothes and hair and bone structures of the others. Salt air, music, and hope filled the night. After fifteen minutes they entered a maelstrom of bell-bottoms and skinny t-shirts, where wisps, wastrels, and striplings sipped drinks and did the Bump beneath the DJ booth.

I got to know where, you got the notion

Lindy looked around and grabbed his arm. “Come meet a friend of mine.” She pulled him over to an extravagantly handsome young man with mahogany skin and thick black shagged hair.

“Zanky, meet my boyfriend.”

Boyfriend. God, that sounded good.

Green tiger eyes bored into him. A Bengal tiger. “So, you’re Lindy’s boyfriend. Lucky Lindy.” He held Entriken’s hand longer than expected. A strip of brown skin glowed between shirt bottom and skinny belt.

“Lucky me,” Entriken smiled, wondering if he was showing as badly as he thought.

“Let’s dance,” Lindy cried. Zanky cocked his head at Entriken and the sudden trio joined the squirming horde on the floor. Get Down Tonight.

More songs, drinks. Lindy went to pee, Zanky’s eyes bored into Entriken’s. “So, Lindy’s boyfriend, what are you into?”

“I’m into Lindy.” He stared back, thrust his pelvis forward.

Zanky’s eyes flicked down, up. His lip curled. “Anything else?”

“Just feelin’ things out.”

Sip, sip, shoulder bump. “You and me both, brother, you and me both.” Zanky put his hand on Entriken’s butt, and Entriken smiled into Zanky’s glistening face.

Do the hustle

In her metallic blue Mustang he asked, “So how do you know Zanky?”

“Sociology 101.He always had something interesting to say. You like him?”

“Don’t know him.”

“But you’d like to.”

He gazed at her. “Not thinking about him right now. Thinking about you.”

She gave him a pursed smile. “You’re very sweet. But Zanky’s a hard one to ignore. Everybody likes Zanky.”

“You?”

“Yeah, but…”

“But.”

“But he’s a mystery. Cultivates a mystery around him. Won’t let anyone get too close. I get the feeling one day he’ll just be gone.”

“Did you try to get close?”

“Oh, for a second.”

“Ahh. Well.”

 They danced and flirted with Zanky at Shelly’s, boogied to Upepo at the Bombay Bicycle Shop, kissed in Volunteer Park, and ate late night suppers at Tai Tung and 13 Coins. Walking downtown to work, Entriken began lingering at jewelry shop windows looking at rings.

Thirteen years earlier, cars swished along the boulevard in the rain, the night settled in, and the boy Entriken sat with his mother at the kitchen table watching television and gluing pieces of cardboard together. Across the street, the lights in the school burned late, and he wondered what they were doing there. Probably the “custodian,” as the teachers called him. Poor old guy in gray, mopping, cleaning. Would he be doing that when he grew up? People on TV all doing things, people in cars all going places. What would he be doing? The question roared out of the darkness and threw him into desolation. He turned back to his model, a blocky little skyscraper. “Say, that’s not bad,” said his father when it was finished. “You ought to think about going into architecture.” More buildings followed, inspired by the futurism of the Century 21 World’s Fair. Then he saw The Absent-Minded Professor, with scientists in white coats and a box with blinking lights and a screen. A computer. Flubber was funny, sort of, but the computer was cool—a box with a screen that told you things, on a desk. Two evenings later he began gluing cardboard pieces into a computer of his own.

Entriken rode his bike, he watched television, he turned fifteen and started hanging out with guys and girls after school. He was on his way upstairs to breakfast when he overhead his father say, “He seems rather aimless…” The empty feeling hit him again, but any fledgling ambitions foundered in high school’s raging torrent of head-cramming and skanky kid shit, faggot pussy snatch dickweed suck me where’s the flood boot boy, zitface. Hair got long, dicks got hard, dates got made and broken, hearts were expendable. He found a Monkees paperback, with a drawing inside of all four Monkees in bed, wearing t-shirts, shoulders touching. They looked to be smiling in their sleep. He thought of three Monkees beside him and suddenly the bed was damp and sticky. He wondered what his mother would think, but she said nothing and only ever smiled and cooked him hamburgers on Saturday, sat with him at the table in the evening and talked about school and kids and life while his father remained in the den with his Old-Fashioneds and his train books. Entriken wondered why his dad liked trains and wondered why he himself had no hobby. He did not build cardboard models anymore, he went to rock concerts with friends and almost thought about taking up the guitar, but school ended and everything fell away. His best friend started driving cab, so Entriken followed. He didn’t know what else to do.

It came about sometime later that the Donut House blazed, the lightbulbs clacked, the nebulous music muttered, the cock thrust. Maybe leaving the curtain open would draw more customers. Maybe not. A man walked out and was swallowed by the night. Entriken’s eyes swept the street. A willowy figure down the hill—her? No. The idea that she thought of him when she was alone filled him with warmth and strange unease. How could it last? He was a nobody with no prospects, he worked in a porn theater. What would he say when she took him home to meet her parents? He lit a cigarette and pushed the smoke into the darkness.

A tall black man strode up. “Hey Boots, you got a light?” Broad shoulders, nice face.

Entriken lit the man’s cigarette, he smiled at Entriken and put his hand on his mound and squeezed. “Mmm,” he murmured, “that’s nice.” Entriken kept his face neutral and thrust his crotch into the man’s. He held it there as the two men puffed smoke.

“You good, Boots. Now I can go home to my old lady.”

“Lucky old lady.”

“Hah!”

Was Lindy sitting across the way in her metallic blue Mustang, watching? No. The bulbs in the marquee went clack-clack-clack. He phoned her the next day but she did not answer. A day later she buzzed him in. At five o’clock in the afternoon the windows glowed with the promise of evening. It was his day off, they would have dinner, go out, come home…Her kiss was short. “Have a seat,” she said. Entriken felt his mouth go dry.

She took his hand. “You’re a very desirable man,” she said in a small voice. “Smart. Sexy. I really like you.” Her eyes went to the floor.

The room tilted, his gut heaved.

“It’s so hard to say this, but—I feel like we’re not going anywhere.”

Words died in his throat. He wanted a cigarette. “Uh-huh…” His eyes searched desperately. There was nothing to hang on to.

“I feel like I need to be with somebody with maybe a little more drive.”

“Drive.”

“I don’t mean to make it sound like a negative thing. But I sense that you are more—I don’t know—deliberate. I can’t be with somebody as slow as me.”

“Are you slow?”

“I think maybe I am.”

“Am I slow?”

She patted his thigh affectionately, then pulled her hand away. Its sudden absence was a roaring vortex. “I wouldn’t say slow…just maybe like I’m starting to expect more. A professional life, a home…kids. I like to get dressed up…see a man dressed-up. I guess I’m just more conventional middle-class.”

So that’s why I’ve never met your parents.

Or you, mine. And never will, it looks like.

Entriken tasted cold panic. He was who he was. He thought that was enough. “So,” he whispered, “things you don’t like—about me…”

“Oh, sweetie—” Her face twisted strangely, like it was getting older by the second. “Nothing. Really! I just think we’re a little too different.”

I don’t think so. Oh. The sinking sun slotted through the blinds, lighting up a dust bunny in the corner. He realized that it would see her when she went to bed that night, but he would not. He stared at the floor feeling like his insides were melting. The dust bunny sat there, mocking him. “Mm…mm…Okay…I”—his voice came out a croaking whisper. He was not the man she wanted. He imagined her parents, conventional, conservative, full of expectation. No. No, no.

She looked at him sadly. “I’m sorry.”

One less bell to answer

It was twenty minutes after five.

He zombie-walked into the newly-hostile evening, lay down on his bed, and curled into a ball. Morning was a curse, a desert beneath a hateful mocking sun. He got up to pee, went back to bed, got up just in time to go to work, ghosted into night, chain-smoking. He wished her into presence before him, wished her at his feet, begging him to take her back. But there was only the sticky miasma from the bay pricking and plucking at his skin, skin she had caressed less than a day before. A gull glided overhead, saw him, and laughed. He saw her everywhere and nowhere, erased by loathsome faces materializing from the filth of existence. A man bought a ticket. Hating him, Entriken changed a reel and shuffled into the office, crying, softly, louder.

He asked for the next Saturday off, went to Shelly’s, and found Zanky. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself. Lindy not with you?”

“Not tonight.”

A slanty smile, a hand on his butt. “Pool?”

“I’m lousy.”

The tiger eyes, the breathtaking face. “I’ll teach you.” A warm voice. Lindy who?

Get down tonight.

Zanky ran the table, “Told you I’d teach you,” Entriken laughed, cupped Zanky’s butt, and led him to the dancefloor. At last call they ran into the street holding hands, jumped into Zanky’s pumpkin orange Fiat Spider. Top down, hair blowing, blasting up First Avenue, cigarettes glowing, Zanky’s arm on the shifter, muscles rippling, flexing, roaring, exulting. Entriken thumbed the Green Parrot: “I work there.”

“No shit.”

“Yeah, shit.”

“Damn!” A laugh like angels. Zanky nodded at someone outside the Donut House, and again at someone outside Giorgio’s Pizza, and Entriken knew he was only a nod away from more hell. But not now. Now, they went into Zanky’s cool, dark nest on Capitol Hill. They did not emerge until the next afternoon.

Forty years later, the body and the mind still drooped at five in the afternoon, the vision grew seared and heat-waved around the edges, as if daring life to prove its reality. Life proved it, all right, but did not forget the rest.

But Entriken had done his bit. Good bit, too. Best part was, he still had plenty left over, even now. Most of his hair, most of everything that mattered. Right-living. Even so, in the bosom of success, memory knows no limit, and he sometimes hated its persistence.

The soft green apartment walls

The light slotting through the blinds, spectral light of banishment. Loneliness.

The hateful sun of morning.

The hateful weekends of emptiness.

The last clack of her apartment door.

The last clack of his apartment door.

Eyes alert for her downtown, a heartbeat faster, fear of sudden encounter, annoyance on her face, cold, accusatory. If she should see him, his head would be high, his stride proud.

He was standing under the marquee a week later when the pumpkin-orange Fiat raced by. It slowed at the Donut House, someone got in, the car vanished, leaving behind a roaring emptiness. Entriken never went back to Shelly’s Leg. Weeks later he was out to lunch with his father (“Still at the theater?”) when they passed a used-car lot. Front and center as if newly abandoned sat the pumpkin-orange Fiat. Poor Zanky.

Yeah, Pop, still at the theater. But getting time to move on, time for something better. Down the suty aisles of August into September, the light softer, the days gentler. Summer faded, the bulbs clacked, the world turned. Entriken began scanning the classifieds, strolling the Market (wary eye cocked), checking out possibilities. Some small shop might be nice. Enough of sleaze.

It was near two a.m. The bars were letting out, weedy guys staggered by. He sold one ticket, another, lit a smoke, stomped it out. He looked at the sky, saw stars. How long had they been there? Clack-clack, the bulbs went, ordered, regular, recurring, mechanical. No, electrical. A pattern, heartbeats and hoof beats, boot heals and high heels, typewriters and comptometers,

Clack-clack,

Flashes of light from zero to infinity,

Clack-clack,

Two people,

Clack-clack,

Apartment doors,

Clack-clack,

IBM.

Huh?

Computer.

Shit.

Didn’t he make one once, in fifth grade or something?

A cardboard computer.

Shit! Cutting the opening for the screen, going downtown to Lowman and Hanford to buy plastic sheeting for the screen, getting it all to hold together, a tricky job but a job he completed, successfully. The fragile box held together fine, and next day he took it to school and set in on his desk. The kids crowded around and asked what it was.

“A computer.” The screen shimmered with reflected light, like it was really on, the colored paper lights looked ready to blink into life. The kids jostled. “Neat!” “Does it work?”

The bell rang. “All right,” the teacher said. “You can put your computer away, now.” He gently put the computer in the cubbyhole of his desk, and at the end of the day carried it home. A few weeks later he dismantled it and used the cardboard to make a locomotive.

Entriken shook his head. Man, oh man! Why couldn’t he be that creative now? He could almost feel the cardboard, the plastic, the cutting, gluing, fitting, perfecting…the gathering classmates, the sheath-skirted teacher, Put your computer away…put your computer…your computer. The street, the theater, the cock, the Donut House, the lights all swirled and clacked in a mad kaleidoscope. Holy shit! Entriken threw his cigarette down, walked into the office, back out onto the street, lit another cigarette, turned circles.

A man came out of the theater, a short man wearing a charcoal suit and hat, carrying an attache case. He stopped abruptly and smiled at Entriken. “Thinking?” he asked.

“Yep,” Entriken answered. “Thinking.”

“Good night for it.” He nodded and walked away. Entriken peered after him, wondering idly what was in the case. Didn’t see many like him down here. He did not remember selling him a ticket. The man disappeared around the corner. Next morning Entriken walked to Seattle Central and enrolled in fall classes in computer tech and beginning programming. The numbers were mind-numbing—but the feeling of assembling pieces into a new and yet whole urged him on. He finished one job, now he would finish another.

It followed in good time that the people at work thought he was cool. A nice contrast with code development and algorhythm interfaces, in the break room they smiled at his stories.

“So, was this, like, hard porn?”

“Hard enough, so to speak.”

Janice laughed, and brought the sun back. Sweet, sunny Janice.

And so: retirement at forty-five, a nice house, travel. And sex, great sex.

For it was a drug, the internet, the most pervasive, powerful drug in human history. They, and he with them, had invented a new dimension, one transcending space and time. A computer for every desk. Small, smart, intuitive. And his special pet: why not have everyone connected by computer, like we do with TV now? A computer network. A supervisor’s eyebrows lifted and he found himself joined with others in a congeries steamy with the sweat of creation.

It was a grind, Bill could be a pill at times, he slept on sofas, his diet went to hell.

But it was fun.

Put your computer away.

Hah!

Slow. He would show her slow. Yeah, Baby, I’ll slow you, see now, there ain’t no hurry. Forty years later, I slowed into good health. Ever hear of Microsoft? Yeah, you have. Lips, lips all over him, and her. Slow. Yeah, okay, I’m slow. Why would I want you any other way? Why couldn’t that be enough? Even now, he remembered. Only now, it didn’t hurt so much.

And so it came that one Saturday night in September, Entriken drove downtown, parked on First Avenue, and walked slowly uphill. Janice had wanted to come. “I wouldn’t give you up for anything,” she said years before. After he’d told her everything, after he had turned the rank and fetid strata, and admitted her to dreamland, she smiled and said only, “I love you.” She sat in the car and waited, as only lovers can.

A cool wind wafted up the street, a gull shrieked. Across the street shadowy figures milled in the light of the Showbox marquee, sniffing for glamor’s residue. In his old alcove he nursed a cold cigarette and thought once more of Lindy…the man who squeezed his crotch…Jamie…two dudes in a pumpkin-orange Fiat…the man with the attache case. Him! Funny guy, looked like a spy, carrying a case full of secrets to be discovered, unlocked. A good night for thinking. One part stops where the other begins.

Entriken lit his cigarette and stood, legs spread, burning a tiny hole into the darkness. A figure passed behind him and away down the hill, carrying an attache case filled with a million starry nights.