I had a dream recently that I just have to share.
I was either living in or visiting a futuristic cyberpunk version of 1980s New York City. The city was even more populated than it is now, with buildings on top of buildings and people living on top of one another. No greenery or parkspace anywhere. No indication that the natural world existed outside the city. No indication that anything existed outside the city. The city itself was comprised of everything it needed to run itself. It was a self-sustaining, wholly unnatural ecosystem.
And in the dream I somehow knew that the city was built into itself the way a writer builds a novel. Accretive. Both ancient and modern-feeling. If you’ve ever seen photographs of Kowloon Walled City, that’s kind of how the city felt visually. There’s a book by the American surrealist author Steve Erickson called Arc d’X where a police officer gets lost for what feels like decades in a city similar to Kowloon.
Back alleys ran into other back alleys and strange basement pathways meet between buildings so that you can enter the city via one door and then keep walking through other doors until you are so utterly lost you have become a denizen rather than a visitor.
I had the feeling that the city was a gigantic spider web, or a magnet, because of the way it seemingly captured its citizens. You could run into someone who would say, with astonishment in their voice, “I came here for a single weekend in 1982. I haven’t been able to leave since.” There’s an old interview from one of those black-and-white Jim Jarmusch films from the 80s (I’m wrong. The movie was directed by Wayne Wong and Paul Auster. It’s from 1995 and it’s called Blue in the Face. It is comprised entirely of ad-libbed lines that were said during the filming of an entirely different film called Smoke) where he says he’s lived in New York City his entire life. How one of the central events of his childhood was the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn. And he’s not even a baseball fan! The Dodgers leaving was traumatic somehow. Like New Yorkers were diseased. Like those ball players couldn’t wait to get out and move to sunny Los Angeles. Lou Reed understands the urge to want to go, but can’t fathom leaving:
“I don’t know very many people who live in New York who don’t also say ‘but I’m leaving.’ And I’ve been thinking of leaving New York for…thirty-five years. I’m almost ready.”
ANYWAY, in MY dream, if we can get back to the topic of ME for a moment, occurred inside a 1950s diner that was known to be owned and operated by an aged, crusty Quentin Tarantino who, for some reason, was on-site and working the day I happened to walk into his diner, which was situated in a very 1980s-feeling Times Square. The kind of Times Square where one might get shanked, spat on, thrown down a flight of subway steps, shouted at, handed a flyer, or all five in the span of milliseconds.
In my dream I had gone downstairs to the bathroom, which was a shithole in the basement, like most city bathrooms. There is a seeming by-law that says all city bathrooms must be in the basement. You have to travel if you need a toilet. You have to go on a fucking journey. I knew a guy (he’s dead now) who once spent an hour walking around Sneaky Dee’s, high on LSD, trying to find the damn stairs that led to the bathroom. I lived with him for 8 memorable months in 2008. I remember one night he decided to “take it easy” and just snort coke instead of snort coke and drink alcohol. He sat down next to me on the couch in the basement. I was watching No Country For Old Men for the first time.
“You takin’ it easy tonight?” I asked.
He blinked fifty times in five seconds and replied “in a manner of speaking.” Then he left to do more lines in his bedroom. God, how I loved that guy.
Like other city denizens, like me too, he’d been sucked in. The city had captured him. He couldn’t leave even if he wanted to (and he, at the very least, said he wanted to). H eventually died in the city, early in 2018, living alone in a single bedroom apartment just north of Davenport and Lansdowne. Rest in Peace, S____. I loved ya.
(We lived at 16 Darcy, by the way. I never forgot that address because when I was 16 I loved the Smashing Pumpkins, who had a bass player named D’arcy. It was a mnemonic device. 16 Darcy. 16 D’arcy. I’ll never forget that address, even after Alzheimer’s comes for me and demolishes my identity and childhood memories and adolescent memories and adult memories. I’ll always have 16 Darcy because when I was 16, I liked D’arcy and the Smashing Pumpkins.)
Now, back at the elderly Quentin Tarantino’s diner, I just so happened to enter the bathroom as an elderly man who was unmistakably Robert DeNiro entered one of the stalls. As I was peeing at the urinal I heard a yelp of pain and, finishing quickly, I kicked open the toilet stall door to see that Robert DeNiro had died of a massive heart attack on the toilet. Just like Elvis.
I immediately ran upstairs to inform the restaurant staff. I didn’t speak directly with Quentin Tarantino, but I spoke with several guys in white aprons who then communicated to him that Robert DeNiro had expired whilst perched on the shitter in his diner. They were gesticulating and talking with their hands. Everyone seemed concerned. So Quentin, perhaps feeling a pulse of nostalgia from his film directing days, what with everyone staring at him, waiting to be told what to do, he said (or rather, he brayed) in a very Tarantino way: “Well…bring Bob up, alright? Just…one of you grab his arms and another grab his legs and carry him up on out of here and we’ll call 9-11.”
Everyone stared at Quentin. He glared back as if to say what? As if he’d issued a perfectly reasonable command. Like asking your dishwasher and cook to carry a man who has just shit himself to death through a restaurant, hygiene notwithstanding, would be a good idea.
Someone protested but Quentin shouted at them to “shut the fuck up!”
“Think of how cool a memory you’ll be giving these people, alright?!” he gestured expansively across the restaurant. He was red-faced at this point, more than a little angry. He wanted Bob carried out, the way pallbearers would carry a coffin. Except there was no coffin. They would be parading the corpse of one of America’s finest actors around a tacky 50s diner. There were only five or six people in the entire restaurant, including me. With all the employees gathered together in a huddle, it seemed like there were more workers than customers.
I don’t recall the beshitted corpse of Robert DeNiro being carried out of the restaurant in my dream because just at that moment the dream warped and changed and I was standing outside the diner having a cigarette when the model from the Vampire Weekend album cover came up to me and handed me a flyer for some punk show. But when I looked at the date the show had already happened.
“Hey!” I called out. “This show already happened! Why are you handing out flyers for it?” She turned and said, in a California valley girl voice just dripping with disdain and disgust: “They’re called mementos?”
And then I woke up.