(41 weeks)
SUNDAY.
After helping my parents clean their garage, I decide to sleep over. It was a long night spent convincing my father how certain things were better off being thrown out, like a box of microfiches, considering he doesn’t even own a microfiche projector.
“Once the internet fizzles, they could come back,” he said. “Look at vinyl.”
In the middle of the night, I’m awakened by a dream in which my lap is on fire. Some back story:
When I was a child our family used to eat at a restaurant called Pumpernick’s, a kosher-style tiki bar-restaurant where the husbands made sport of driving their wives as close to the front door as possible. This often involved getting right up on the curb, almost killing anyone foolish enough to lolly-gag after a meal.
When dining there, my sister and I usually shared a hamburger, but my dream was to one day have the flaming Pu-Pu platter, a dish of chicken, onion rings, wontons, and God-knows-what, all brought to the table ablaze.The diner had to blow it out like a plate full of birthday candles, or a stray Molotov cocktail. To a ten-year-old, a Pu-Pu platter turned dining into an act of heroism.
In the dream, even though it closed down years ago, I am back at Pumpernick’s. It is late at night and when I walk in, the cashier tells me they’re closed.
“I’ve come a long way,” I say. “Just one quick Pu-Pu?”
She gives in and tells me I can have one.To go.
The flaming tray is brought out, I pay the bill, and walk out into the night to catch a bus back home. As I ride through the night, the fiery plate jostles to and fro on my lap. I am nervous and want to tell the driver to slow down, but then it is too late: my lap is on fire.
I awake to find Boosh, curled up, asleep on my groin.
I am becoming more and more like my father. Yearnful for things that no longer exist. But in spite of this, my father and I are happy men—happy that, at the very least, we are not on fire.
It’s already morning, but I don’t want to disturb Boosh, so I lie still, staring at the ceiling and trying to decide what to do with the day.
It appears that someone has taken a candy out of the office candy dish, removed its wrapper, sucked it, and put it back in the bowl where it now sits stuck to the bottom, red, wet, and gleaming. Someone who is capable of something like that is capable of anything. There is a sociopath among us. I make a mental note to stop using the communal office dishrag and start keeping my uneaten Melba toast in a locked desk drawer.
FRIDAY.
No one has removed the candy from the candy bowl.
In my teens, when I kept notebooks filled with poetry, the lone candy, tasted but not chosen, might have been the kind of thing that could’ve made me cry. Back then, pretty much anything did—an old man eating by himself in a restaurant. Songs by Carole King. Commercials for long distance calls. And then one day the crying stopped. Sitting at my desk, it strikes me: I haven’t cried in close to twenty years.
When the executive producer of my show, Carolyn, stops by, I share this with her.
“The closest I come is sometimes I dream I’m crying,” I say.
She tells me that her friend had the same problem and her therapist told her that the only tears that are real are the tears you cry in dreams.
Too bad the same can’t be said of the Pu-Pu platters you eat.