Return-Path: Message-Id: <9402152134.AA10584@netmail2.microsoft.com> From: Elliott Night To: ipubabu@microsoft.com, lesleyj@microsoft.com, nadinec@microsoft.com, benth@halcyon.com, rone@netcom.com, toska@u.washington.edu Date: Thu, 10 Feb 94 13:30:33 PST Subject: Palm Springs Dream Cc: fawcett@nynexst.com, jhw@wetware.com, kohli@aslmr-serv.med.ge.com, morrisas@autodesk.com I dreamt that I was in Palm Springs. I was at the Ramada Inn, laying out by the pool. You had to check out towels, they wouldn't let you have a towel until you produced your room key. I joked with the pool guy when I picked up my towels...I said, "I'm in room 364.....at the MARRIOTT, heh heh." He slapped my face. I winced. I asked for two towels and he said, "OK, but it's gonna cost you $125.00." I said, "Look Mac, I'm on VACATION! Charge it to my room." He said, "What's your room number?" I said, "346." Then I felt guilty. I laid on the chaise lounge feeling the incredible warmth of the sun burning through my layers of tender flesh to the organs beyond. I moaned in ecstacy and wiggled my toes. I threw my sunglasses onto the pool deck. I wanted to burn my eyelids too. My bathing suit bottoms were creeping up into my crack...it felt good. I could hear the birds chirping in the trees. An old man sat down on the lounge next to me. "Hey girlie, rub this lotion on my back, girlie, girlie, girlie." I didn't want to do it. I opened my right eye and looked at this perverse grandfather. He was my very own grandfather. The one who had died in 1974. I thought, "This is creepy." I sat up and rubbed Hawaiian Tropic Super Slather Rapid Tan into the wrinkley old back of my dead granddad. He was humming Roberta Flack tunes. I hated him for that. "Okee dokee, all done." I cheerfully told him. He scowled at me. "My feet are gonna burn really bad girlie girlie girlie without that oil rubbed into them. Get busy, girlie girl." I was really feeling nauseated by then, but, I was afraid. And fear, makes us to bad things. I rubbed his feet. He moaned in ecstacy and wiggled his toes. I turned my head and vomited into the grass. I vomited Hawaiian Tropic Super Slather Rapid Tan. Grandpa turned to me and said, "Well don't waste it, girlie girlie girl girlie girl girl, rub it on my chest." My hands were shaking. There was no way I was going to touch his chest with the two sorry looking nipples hanging off sagging old man flesh. No way. "Look, Grandpa, you're dead, what are you doing in Palm Springs?" I pleaded. "I'm here for the golf, the golf damn it! I never got to play when your Grandmother was alive. Well, damn it all to hell, I am going to play now! You're Grandma kept me from doing lots of fun things...well not anymore girlie. Rub my chest." "No." And I began to back away. "If I go" Granddad smiled happily, "If I leave, your father is going to come through that door with his bible in his right hand and his vodka and coffee in his left. He's going to sit in this same lounger and he's going..." "You're chest and then I am done. Finished. Finito. The End. I will rub the oil on your ugly saggy baggy age stained old chest and then, Granddad, I am going to go back to my room and take a long hot shower and scrub this event right out of my life. Got it?" "Girlie, girlie, girlie." I threw up a big gob of HTSSRapid Tan and rubbed it into the old man's chest. He hummed "Killing Me Softly". "Top of my head, girlie girlie girl." I vomited the stuff directly onto the top of his age spotted bald noggin. It trickled towards his hairy ears and eyebrows. He said, "You sure know how to make your old granddad happy girlie. Suddenly he vanished. There was a murmuring in the air. I went back to my lounger. I was shaking. A welcome cool breeze blew across my brow. Then, a shadow fell across my torso. I thought, "I'm never going to get a burn at this rate." I looked up into the face of another old man. Thank god, this one was not familiar to me. "I'm here for the Senior Olympics. I had a bypass a couple of years ago. I run track and field. My heart could just explode in my chest when I'm running the 500. BLAM!...I'd be a goner." Then he walked away. The towel man comes over and hands me a Spicy V-8. "Here, I thought you might NEED this." I drink out of the tiny straw. The Senior Olympiad appears again. "Heart explode, they open up my chest cavity...probably look just like that spicy V-8." He's gone again. I take a deep breath. I am not well. But, I am trying to be well. I close my eyes. Frank Sinatra and I are in a chapel. We are getting married. The diamond is so big, that it has to be on a bracelet instead of a ring. Frank turns to me and says, "Don't worry, we'll have your hands enlarged. It's an out patient operation, and I can afford it. I can afford anything." There's a long pause and then he says one word....and I awake in terror.