Exactly one week ago I had the shakes…that cold feeling that the world could be coming to an end with a virus that seemed to know where you live. I went to sleep that night believing that man had bitten off more than he could chew. The things scientists try to generate and regenerate in obscure lab locations in the name of a crazy discipline could be escaping these crucibles and dishes to infect a world with no idea what monsters are lurking in the next bend.
The dream that visited me, ten minutes into ten thousand winks, was one where I was present at a jamboree in Poughkeepsie, New York. A barren, spirited wasteland populated by gin lovers, sex addicts, and persons of acute underhandedness, megalomaniacs, uncanny, sly vagabonds, and sinister elements of the underworld –people rife with all colors of shadiness as they were as cunning as a fox. Among them were Bluesicians, Rockstars and all those who hang out nightly on Prostitution Avenue looking for a quick score. These made up her noble citizenry.
It was a three-day affair inside a disjointed series of the weirdest, non-melodious musicianship known to man; cannabis soaked in bourbon were pulled out on the first day of the festival, five days after a ton of the stuff had been laying fallow in vats of the amber-colored spirit; they were hurriedly oven-dried, and then rolled into sizes as thick as sticks of dynamite. Someone picked me to pass the gems around to the two thousand fiesta-revelers that jammed the semi-hallowed grounds south of Fifth Avenue.
We smoked these African native, Cuban look-alike fat beauties through a wooden pipe originally fashioned as a pennywhistle. The weed’s provenance was a big plus; you see these people, mostly New Yorkers, had never felt a hit, nor have they sampled a humus-grown sweetheart…a rainforest nursed, tropical-wind-cooled Cannabis.
We binge drank on gin and tonic cauldrons designed to reboot stalled hearts. Hearts were racing; minds exceedingly altered, it drove most copulation that resulted on the ebb and flow of those altered minds. But the deliberate, slow-dance orgies you saw or were a part of, were finagled into tight corners, where the new breed of millennia coition happened between those that understood the art and beauty of spontaneity even as it was a standing room only beat down.
You were admitted into the wingding, fearsome frolic on one condition; that you have come to Poughkeepsie to experiment with things beyond all boundaries, push them into illegal territories, and then sit back to rewrite the freestyle menu to include all the perverted, awkward synthesis from these hopped-in-the-mind generation of nitwits.
You were admitted into the wingding, fearsome frolic on one condition; that you have come to Poughkeepsie to experiment with things beyond all boundaries, push them into illegal territories, and then sit back to rewrite the freestyle menu to include all the perverted, awkward synthesis from these hopped-in-the-mind generation of nitwits.
I woke up believing I had truly lived the situation…and that the dream I thought I was coming from was actually not a dream; it was me walking into my one bedroom efficiency in pitch blackness, in my attempt to go to sleep for having not slept in three days. Could I have sleepwalked through the garrisons of all five boroughs of New York in the wee hours of the morning, post stop and frisk…as a black man?
Could I have successfully traversed the crannies, the nooks that guaranteed one a shot in the back, all pun intended…unscathed? I knew then that something was off. I must retrace my footsteps, going back twenty-four hours to the very minute when I stepped out of the Blue Plate restaurant with Molly and her sister Lolly…the two avant-garde impressionists and sex therapists who served me liquor on a flat dish in lieu of that three-some they promised me if I bought them lunch.
Could I have successfully traversed the crannies, the nooks that guaranteed one a shot in the back, all pun intended…unscathed? I knew then that something was off.
The sharp broads they were, the original witches and denizens of Eastwick moved to Poughkeepsie took me to the cleaners: These two had beauty and piety wrapped in one comprehensive hold-all Gucci handbag; they had the gumption and the mechanics of the slithering game as would a Burmese python in untying the wad you were sitting on. And they wear these attributes like a halo. I was fooled. I was out two hundred and fifty dollars for the kind of lunch I could easily have thrown a curve ball at to land me a dinner date with the Dame of Sussex. I lost on both counts.
The nightmare, it appears, has no end to it, even as I am sure I had gotten up a few times to squash it. The issue was that I don’t live in New York, and even if I did, it would be nowhere near Poughkeepsie. But the trajectory my mind was on had a different spin on this mind-boggling narrative; it was telling me my apartment loft was in New York, and that Molly and her sister, Lolly, were the organizers of the fest I had been to.
The untying of this Gordian knot began: If I could undo these metal wirings and earthlings, maybe I would be able to save my mind from jumping off the high promontory. The cliff I was perched on was a solid mile high and I would have to find my way down one stone abutment at a time.
Then, it began to make sense. I was on that half-baked plateau of been fully awake, in a hospital room in Houston, strapped down on a gurney, and the nurse, with her three-hundred and eighty pound frame was sitting astride me, as if the leather straps couldn’t hold me down. She was jabbing me repeatedly with an elephant-sized syringe, sending me deeper into obscurity with cocktail after cocktail of the new and improved melatonin. Crying for help didn’t help.
We were both on lockdown on a desert patch of land. I could swim here or die in my sleep. One mule-like kick freed me from under her. And I am alive today to have another nightmare in the coming days. Good morning!
♦ Professor Don Okolo is an Editorial Board member of the West African Pilot News
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