Patched Up Dreams

I will let the work speak for itself....

 

 

Sitting across from the vice principal’s office; his cold demeaning voice was like an accountant tallying up pennies on a calculator. To him, I was just a number, or a bunch of change that didn’t equal up to the big fish they probably were going for. No one cared about my other illegal bootlegging business�"even though I could have been bold enough to offer to split the money I was making�"but that wasn’t it. They were after me, not anyone else, just me.

“I heard,” he said, scrolling through his computer files on his old Macintosh computer, blankly staring like a Roman Emperor. God knows what he was looking at on his computer, but when his indignant glare turned to me with his long nose pointing out of his small face, his lips wet and prepared to sink his teeth into my conscience, he soullessly said, as if he was talking about the weather, “from the guidance counselor that you have sold drugs to your classmates.”

This was when I should have kept my mouth shut, zipped, and waited to call my father. This fatal flaw is what all criminals do, and I was no more different than Nicky Barnes or Frank Lucas when they finally met their last day as A-star heroin dealers. When all their cars and money were taken from them, this was what happened. The way his voice stayed low and serious was insulting, because I wasn’t in the business of selling smack, crack, or heroin. This was harmless, but someone thought I was doing something wrong.

“Prescription pills.” I corrected him. “They aren’t illegal. They are prescription pills. I never even sold it to him.”

“But it’s still considered a felony. A doctor prescribes pills! You don’t have the authority to give pills to anyone! So, you gave him the pills.”

He knew what he wanted from me. He wanted a confession. His masochistic glare demanded a scapegoat�"another martyr for his stadium�"another open palm to stab into a crucifix, and I would be his martyr because my physical and mental strength was melted. My nerves were shot; my mind was completely divided between lying and telling the truth.

“I did it!”

It was then that he brought in another teacher, Mr. Armstrong, who had defended me on another occasion to hear my testimony. I always remembered him patting me on the back, and shaking his head in disappointment. His and my disappointment was mutual when I told them what they wanted to hear. I was a good kid that had made stupid choices, but I didn’t care then. Only the vice-principal was happy, grinning as if I was next dinner, and his lips were going to suck the marrow from my bones. He only would have tasted sorrow and bitterness.

“Listen, I’m going to call your father and tell him that you need a lawyer.”

“A lawyer!” I exclaimed.

He nodded, and asked me for my father’s phone number. I gave it to him, and I watched and saw him for that moment tap his finger against the paper, expecting this to be an easy phone call to push him around. “This is vice principal McCalister!”

Silence.

“I am sitting with Louis and he admitted to having sold his prescription drugs to another student.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

Unbeknownst to my ears, my father had been yelling at him for more than one minute and I, personally, saw his face go white as a sheet. My dad had this way of putting fear into people and demand respect from anyone. I was sure he was mad, but I knew I was in for my own set of reprimanding.

“Either way he committed a felony, and he is subject to a court date. He will be suspended until we figure out a court date.”

The Vice Principal stared at the desk, my father’s heated anger pushed his witty comebacks into his heart, and he sighed, trying not to swallow in fear that he was really disturbed by my father’s persuasive anger. Subsequently, I was sent outside.

The last thing I heard was, “His guidance counselor informed me of this.”

As I sat outside, ten minutes passed by when I saw my guidance counselor. She was tall and was a bit chunky, but had a bit of mascara on her face to hide the small wrinkles on her skin. In her best innocent voice, she approached me, leaning over with honest concern in her green eyes.  “I did not tell anyone what was said between you and me.”

I didn’t look her in the face because the principal had told my father that she informed him about our conversation. “Yeah, right!”

“No, I didn’t tell him!”

I nodded, frowning and about to cry from her outright capability to lie and keep a straight face. “Yeah, sure!”

That was the last time I saw her. I had been left for dead, and that was the last time my trust would be given to anyone so freely again until I met a few good counselors.

If Shakespeare proclaimed that “hands that go unclean,” criminals must always leave prints that lead them right back to the crime. To try and be discreet if possible, I made a quantum leap from CD’s to drugs full-knowingly paving the way for my own destruction with my own prescription pills was a bit far-fetched. A few dreams had been in the back of my mind when I was sitting in that seat, his body had become paralyzed, like a wax statue. I was slumping down in the seat, and even as the office assistants answered the phones, dreams began to come back to me that I had forgotten.

 

What these crucial images meant to me at the time, the answer kept leading me to a perplexed question more than a justified answer. As I slept, I kept wrestling inside and out of the pillow, I asked myself, what were these colors streaming across my mind’s eye? As the flow of oxygen kept getting disrupted toward my brain, a milky way of delineated colors floated across my eyes. Like a milk shake traveling up a straw, a stream of ocean blue, inside large green bubbles, and purple plums continued to block all conscious thoughts. What were they to me? Really cool colors, but like a acid experiment in science class, the colors became grainy, and delineated until a fear of indescribable nature was slowly swimming past my mind’s eye like a harmless fish.

But then claustrophobia engulfs me as a strange sensation of becoming the harmless guppy is always the case in dreams. But then the colors began to boil and a sound of burning skillets filled my head, making my ears pop and my mind sizzle with discomfort and a strange sense of being swallowed by flames and passing out seemed synonymous with death. Death always had a face, and out of the bubbling acid, a face with blank eye sockets and bubbles filled every corner of this demented face, blinding my sight. It stayed still for a minute, and when the face opened its mouth, it lunged into my mind’s eye, screaming like a child squealing for their mother’s milk, brushed through my mind as if it were entering my soul. I woke up from the pillow, gulping down waves of air, as I tried to place this terrible dream. Exorcisms and little girls was the only thing that came to mind.

For a sophomore in high school, this was terrifying, as I remained sleepless for three nights; I knew that the Devil had indeed contacted me in my dreams. I eventually fell asleep. Later on when there are demons standing emasculated in their physical prowess in and out of the mind’s eye, try talking about the weather. No one wanted to hear my dreams now or even then. But until now, I labeled myself as an oddity, crying to myself over the lack of warmth and kindness I could not embrace. My sanity was definitely wearing down to a piece of tape, and in that time, I was about to break as my friendships would as well.

 

During that freshmen and sophomore year of high school, illegally downloading music, burning them on a disc, and selling it was the way to go. I had two partners. Chris Lynn and Clifton Turner. They were very different people, Chris was mixed while Clifton was white�"two totally different combinations but they had access to the people and I was the supplier looking for work. The problem was, everyone loved Chris because of his popularity while Clifton was the school terrorist, his manic behavior and garbage pale breath belching obscenities kept everyone on the edge, afraid of him as if they were dealing with a time bomb�"none of them wanted to be in his distance when his anger was provoked.

For the mafia’s golden age in the 1920’s with bootlegging beer, students were demanding the newest songs left and right, from Jay-Z’s diss songs against Nas (who is now on his Def Jam label), and Eminem’s then unfinished album “The Eminem Show”. The music intrigued me (it still does), and their pain is what sells me, because I was isolated from everyone, my family, my friends, in my own pain. I bought CD’s by the bundle and charged 5 dollars for an individual CD. It wasn’t much, but it kept me busy. They kept me informed and I gave them a piece of what I made. It was great, because Clifton, who I didn’t have to pay, was my friend’s brother, and Chris was strictly a business partner. They were great, but after a while, everything turned sour. But it is my strong belief that our sins have a way to come back and haunt us, and this was true when it came to my next dream.

This dream had to be delivered from God because the stress I was under extrapolated the capsule of that time into a state of immortal reality where dreams and the future events coincided on that eerie Wednesday afternoon in study hall.

 

 In my dream, Clifton Turner, whose structure was that of an anorexic tree, was sitting in a chair that was bigger than his entire body. There was a certain relaxed air about study hall where it was perfect to let us set up shop and traded off lists for mix tape CD’s. Only he was sitting in the back of the class with his legs tucked together under the large black rectangular table. His top lip curled up, nervously, as he revealed his pink gums and squinted his eyes when he concentrated on one thing for too long, probably because he needed new glasses. The gold plaque on his two front teeth shined like yellow snow on a cold winter day, as if he was begging a dentist to help him. When he saw me, I sat on the left side of him in the middle of the black wooden tables. Sitting next to him was like sitting next to a broken sewer main, and I tried to hold my breath the best I could as he said in one nervous breath, “I lost the CD’s”.

I was flabbergasted, shocked, and put into a bind because for the insane reason I felt relaxed in this segregated room where the black kids sat on the left and the white kids sat near the door to jump out in case threats were muttered and then blood was exchanged with rock hard fists. Inside those uncomfortable plastic chairs, I asked him, with complete composure, almost assured by his bewilderment that it was almost normal enough not to notice. “How?”

He shrugged despondently, and lowered his head in deep shame. “I don’t know!”

“Have you looked for them?”

His voice rose in a whining octave, and was embarrassed to the extent of looking away, as if he had failed me in the worst way. “Yes,” he continued, “I just don’t know where they went.”

At that point in the dream, I forgave him, and patted his shoulder. “It’s all right!”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I know.”

I knew already that the dream was over when I awoke from my sweaty pillow, gasping for air pondering the origins of how this dream formed from the subconscious of my brain entwined with the god-like visions of a seer. But the next day, everything happened exactly as I had been allowed to see. I had just gotten the preview, the bare bones. I had to deal with the bad breath and the funky B.O., which was only a preview of how we like to deal with things. Only my seer visions should have given me the courage to drop my criminal activities, but until then, God couldn’t decide my actions, but did let me deal with the consequences.

 

Coming back to the story at hand, I was suspended that very day and had been under the extreme pressure of both my parents and a court date. I knew at that moment, I was walking a thin tightrope above a dark pool of insanity trying to reach a ledge of safety that was nonexistent, and not yet even built or in sight.

I was ready to accept my fate all too soon, even as I tried to purge my conscience of the crimes, the truth had still been pressurizing, coiling around my insides like an overturned 2 liter coke-cola bottle that needed to release the air. Only the truth that had been overturned in my body like the coke-cola needed to be released from that bottle, extremely discomforting and exhausting. After a few days when my father’s anger subsided and my mother’s eyes avoided trying to pierce my neatly symmetric stoic face, wanting to be wrong, and maybe being right for her was too hard to bear. So she gave up. When everyone else gave up, I took it upon myself to dig the courage out of my soul and tell them what had been buried underneath the soil of years of isolation, bitterness, and hatred. Taking it upon myself, I imagined myself as a grave robber trying to find a great relic in an Egyptian tomb; it was like digging a spade shovel into the scorched earth�"invigorating and raw. It hurt, but I dug until all the lies remained unearthed beside me, I held the raw wet truth in front of me, hurting my body and soul to the point of tears running down my eyes, but this was more like tears of relief. Relieved, I told them what had really happened.

 

“He made me give them to him.”

“What!” My father was outraged from the intimidation I was put under. With his body and soul renewed by this new piece of information, he took it upon himself to write a point-by-point bulletin about it from my perspective about what I forgot to mention. The scrutiny that my father faced was from a committee of ten teachers who passed out self-righteous passages to him like Communist Manifesto. “Your son sold CD’s while he was in a math class.” They had done their homework. “Your son was carrying around hundreds of dollars in his wallet.”

For every snide comment that they had to make, my father dished it right back without even a pause in breath.

“That was his Christmas money!”

At this point in his life, he didn’t care about what they said. He was right, they were wrong. In their eyes, I was put on the cross for my crimes against humanity. Only he relieved the nails from my palm, as my emotional wounds embalmed and shrouded inside the darkness of Turin, my physical body remained alive and waiting to be dealt judgment or mercy, forgiveness or imprisonment.

 

While the trial for my life was underway I was suspended. I really received no punishments at all except I had to stay with my grandmother, which was more like a punishment now than I imagined it before, but my Nintendo Gamecube relieved the pressure. An odd punishment for a child that was going to face federal charges in a courtroom, but being inside the lifeless house of my grandmother is more tormenting than being inside a gas chamber. Yes, suffocating from her racial biasness and mule headed sensibilities is comparable to suffocation.

After a long grueling day of waiting, my father and mother cleared my reputation from the school and were allowed to go back to class. In that instant, my societal image had been resurrected, and I was allowed to resume school with a clean slate.

Seeing my shadow on the white tiled floors is the only thing I remember now. Shadows can’t change, but bodies and minds do, and under extreme amounts of pressure, souls.

 

The transition from Hermitage High school, a population of two thousand or so students, to Northstar Academy, a total of less than fifty kids, felt odd. In a group of two thousand people, you don’t have the option of talking to many people, but if one does, it’s hard. When there is a small community, people usually glance or stare just to see who you are, and they made me wonder, “What are you hiding? Where are all the bodies being hidden?” I was hiding a great deal, and I didn’t feel like they were apart of me yet to even share my vulnerabilities with them just yet. For a month, I was a mute, just sitting with kids who I would have thought were extremely dorky and in the lower echelon of the class food chain. For its scale, Northstar Academy had a trailer that was positioned at the top of the ramp behind the rear entrance of the school. This was where the crazy old Korean vet teacher, Mr. Vick imparted his wisdom of history and woodshop, and the school’s foreign language teacher, Mr. Rigazzi, imparted his impeccable ability to teach a language. This was when I wore a white shirt tucked in into white khaki’s and my Timberland tennis shoes made us indistinguishable from each other. I was the only one that started wearing red ties on blue tie Wednesdays. As much as I tried, I couldn’t escape people, because the main part of the school was so small that it was an old blue train car that had been abandoned after many failed businesses, no one could walk without missing each other. Right in the front doors, there was a front desk right inside the building; many audacious excuses were made up, and turned into a contest of who could tell the most audacious excuse.

“Why were are you late?” Mr. Sharon would ask us. Many kids had the most constructive and audacious excuses that I had to make one up as well.

“I was late,” and this was strictly out of a hat, “because a wizard named Gandalf the grey came and took me to the Misty Mountains where we had many adventures.”

He didn’t c**k his head, or seem surprised as his widow’s peak stayed carefully poised and he added, with a light-hearted smile. “Did he have his horse Shadowfax?”

“Yea,” I added with sarcasm, “it was cool.”

We both laughed, and then I started to see the many intricacies with people in a smaller school. They could be themselves, and I could be myself as well. After that month, I started to not mind the three large pathetic shelves that had more collections of Hardy Boys books than I like to remember. Nor did the trailer adjacent the cafeteria/gym made me care anymore. This was the last dream where an old shadow, a friend I wished and nervous to talk to, was stomping up the parking lot to see me.

 

In my last and final dream, I saw a boy walking up the ramp, pale as a ghost and wearing a black hoodie over his head. At that moment, I ran down the ramp, and in an ecstatic voice called out, “Cliff!” He was the last friend I had talked to before I had left, and we had a falling out since then.

He stopped. I did not see his eyes but I saw his pointy nose poking out, as his purse lips were dry and unforgiving. But the most unforgiving thing was when he turned around and stamped down the runway. I was ecstatic, I was thrilled to finally see my long lost friend, but his continued evasion from me signified that the throes of my old life had been abandoned and dissolved from my memory banks, but it is this last dream where all the turmoil ends and my life had been resurrected in a new way.

 

Looking back on all of it is depressing and quite sad. How did I survive? Time has passed and people who I hated in my childhood have moved on or become apart of the world. Did anything good come out of all this s**t? Only one-thing keeps me from becoming depressed is what Chris said to me one day in class. “You care about respect more than money. That’s why you’ll be famous.”

I hope so. I hope you’re right. Then if I am, my pain and suffering would not be for nothing, and my talent would speak for itself. 

 

Author's Note

This was an essay that I did for a college Nonfiction course. This isn't my best work, but you can be the judge of that.

Reviews

[Timothy Lawmowe]

I Liked it. only advice i would give is to not go so into detail in between spoken dialogue/monologue, gets confusing, otherwise, great story!

[Tomás Ó C..]

Enjoyable read...

[Rasha]

I really like it!
A lot of detail! x