Last night, I was plagued with odd dreams. I woke up several times, mainly to turn off our UltraCool 2000 air conditioner so my testicles would redescend and I could go back to sleep. I dreamt of my future children, mainly triplet boys named Ambrose, Montgomery, and William. I dreamt of carrying one on my back and the other two on each bicep across the room, in a failed attempt to "bring down the old man." Then, a quick flash forward where I catch a teenage Monty smoking a lid on the waterbed of his attic bedroom (Monty has the exact same taste as Greg Brady). I took a hit off the lid and explained to him that putting a few dryer sheets in a spent paper towel roll would mask the smell better. I told him his mother would kill him if she ever found out, so come to all meals and family functions sober. I was proud and scared for the kid at the same time... then my testicles hit the back of my brain stem and I awoke to the gentle hum of the air conditioner.
The second dream took me to morning and was a little more substantial. It wasn't a dream so much as a flash of memory I thought long destroyed in a toxic dip of hitter resin and Irish whiskey. I was a teenager, walking in to my favorite hangout from high school. There was a girl there, I'll call her Alice, because that is her name. I only knew her as John's girlfriend, but she was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen in my short lifetime. She had short blond hair, eyes like dark sapphires, apple cheeks, and her smile, oh God the smile, she had one tooth that was just a bit crooked so it (I shit you not) did one of those little sparkle things like on the Orbit commercials. But she was John's girlfriend. She went to a different school. She was to be admired from afar and seldom talked to. That was all my dream was, me walking in, her looking up and smiling, the orbit gleam of her teeth, and burst of white hot euphoric bliss.
Suffice it to say, I immediately awoke to a tent pitched in the middle of my side of the sheets and my bride breathing hot morning breath directly into my face. I rolled onto my side and thought of Alice as the urge to pee grew.
I ended up spending a semester going to school in Iowa where she was going too. She was the only person I knew in that town. I spent many a night sleeping on her futon, not making a move I so desperately wanted to. Homesickness had gotten the best of me.
When I moved back across the river, she would come down and visit her parents. We once got snowed in while I was house sitting for one of her visits. We drank and talked and the snow fell quiet outside. Around two in the morning, she wanted to leave. The street was shin deep in snow. I wished her luck (she was staying two blocks away) and she drove off down the street. As I was taking my boots off, she came back up the road, distraught. The main streets of the town had been plowed, leaving drifts on the side streets that she couldn't get over. I went with her this time, driving up and down the grid of narrow back streets until we finally found a driftless exit.
When we got back to where she was staying, I shoveled the driveway for her and ended up sleeping on the couch. I woke up, thanked her for a wonderful evening (saying if I could have done it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing) and walked back to where I was staying. She came back later that summer and we hit the downtown bars, saw old friends, shot the bull and when the bars closed and I took her home, she kissed me, long, slow, rhythmic, then pleading, then inside she went. I did not follow. The same happend when she visited the next time. Then a year went by and I didn't hear a thing from her.
She did come back, calling me out of the blue one day, saying that her parents had bought a house in town and she was coming to visit and wanted to see me. I was ecstatic right until I rang the door bell. She opened the door and introduced me to her boyfriend (the name eludes me). We talked while depression used the strings of my heart to grease the treads of despair. I don't know why it bothered me so much at the time, I had only seen her maybe two or three times in as many years, but it hurt. Then she left, and the tide of time took over to clear the beaches of my memory.
I haven't seen her in a few years, the last time being after league night at the bowling alley where myself and four friends would polish off four cases of Schlitz, bowl for shit, and end up picking fights or trying to sleep with the opposing team (depending on gender). She was home from Iowa with her boyfriend. She had changed a little, her hair was long and brown, her legs a little more defined, but the smile framed with apple cheeks and topped with sapphires still remained. I made a drunken ass out of myself and haven't thought of her since until this morning.
My alarm got me out of bed a few minutes after I turned over to think about Alice. I thought about her while I did my routine shower, shave, toothbrushing, and four minute pee, wondering where she is now, if she went back to blond, if she was married. Did she go to graduate school? As I toweled off I could here the steady, even breathing of my bride still asleep under the comforter. So, I did what any man with such thoughts in my mind would do. I reheated some leftover Chinese and ate, standing naked in the kitchen.
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