Nightmare of Past Futures

I'm on the playground and it’s the early nineties. I’m shrunken, sweating, the scent of vinegary boy-smell in a turquoise Looney Tunes tee-shirt, the one where Bugs Bunny and Tweety Bird look like straight-up thugs, the first dumbing down of hip-hop on a commercial scale for a white audience, children included. The Vanilla Ice Syndrome. Billy, Ted Hernandez and I are standing on the platform next to the tallest slide, giggling at a small plastic bucket that the janitor forgot about when he was cleaning the inside of a tire swing at the far end of the playground. We’re giggling because we’ve spent the last five minutes on the platform at the top of the slide, pissing and spitting in the bucket until we’ve succeeded in concocting just about the most vile substance we’d ever seen or smelled. I think I know what’s going to happen next and I shudder. I ask Billy to stop, do we have to go through with it again but there’s two pieces of skin-colored Velcro covering his mouth, identical to what’s strapped across the top of my sneakers. He leers at me, wags his finger. I turn to Ted, to plead with him, no we can’t do this but his mouth is a zipper. When I reach up to un-Velcro Billy, he slaps my hand away, smiles, mumbles something that only Ted understands. The sky turns the same shade of turquoise as my shirt while Ted unzips his lips and yells something to this kid Arnold Weinstein, who’s minding his own business on a swing about ten yards from where we’re standing. Arnold ended up going to Fairport Prep with me, then Penn, then law school at Drexel, but that’s not in this dream. Right now he’s an 8-year-old dork, plain and simple: chubby, quiet, with freckles and a curly orange mess for hair. How much shit everyone gives him. We make fun of him for his orthopedic shoes, for always losing at foursquare, for the fact that he doesn’t know where his father lives. I’m feeling it all again, his snotty tears, my own Velcroed foot smashing into his fat gut the time he wouldn’t give me his last Double-Stuff Oreo at lunch. Ted tells me to stop thinking and waves at Arnold to come to the top of the slide. Arnold creeps towards us, real slow and timid because why would we ever ask him to hang out with us at recess where everyone can see, except that this time it’s only us on the playground because there’s no school. The sky turns indigo. Billy gets excited, rips the Velcro off and shouts out - spitting skin chunks - loud enough for Arnold to hear, the description of this horrific insect that we’ve just captured and put in the bucket. It oozes poisonous green pus out of its mouth, crawls around on at least a thousand hairy legs, has pincers the size of Swiss Army knives. If we move the bucket it might escape, so Arnold, if you want to see it, if you really want to see it, you’re going to have to climb the steps to the platform. I know what’s coming next but I can’t control my arms, and Billy’s cackling, trying to hold it together, and Ted’s already zipped his mouth back up so he won’t blow the surprise. He doesn’t have to worry. Arnold’s almost halfway up the steps when I slide bucket over the edge and his fat little smiling face gets blasted with our juice. But not just his face. His tee shirt, jeans, and sneakers are all completely soaked through. I’m too busy staring at the almost-empty bucket on the ground, trying to figure out how my arms managed to move so fast even when I didn’t want them to, so I never see Arnold run head-down all the way to the nurses’ office. Later in the afternoon, on a bus that’s empty besides Billy and me, Billy un-Velcroes and explains that Arnold’s mother had to come to take him home after lunch. We laugh our asses off the entire bus ride until it’s my stop and I’m alone. The sky is a deep orange, burning. Instead of my mother waiting for me, there’s only Andrew, his skin piss-colored, his eyes shining, holding Billy's severed head in one hand and a dripping bicycle chain in the other. I don’t want to get off the bus. Not now, not ever. An invisible pair of hands shove me forward towards the door, and I’m screaming, clawing at the green fake-leather seats, and Andrew’s skin is melting, congealing into a flesh puddle on the floor and what’s underneath is an elderly half-skeleton version of my mother, smiling a toothless smile and pointing at me with one of her bone-fingers, still clutching Tweety Bird’s head in her other hand. ‘You’ve got some explaining to do, Mister,’ she gargles as the bus disappears and the sky explodes like the scene in Terminator 2 where the robots finally succeed and everything is fire.

(picture by Jimmy Cauty via www.boingboing.net)