The Apartments of My Dreams
Oh, god.
First,
I drew these 4 “posters” for Hyperreal Film Club’s use in promoting their short film showcase, and I’m really happy with the way they turned out. I wanted to introduce them all here at once, because I like the way they look in a set. But I’m going to sprinkle the full-sized versions of them throughout the otherwise incoherent mess that is the rest of this post so you’ll have something nice to look at as you scroll.
Wincingly, I imagine.
Okay.
I’ve been thinking a lot about dreams lately. I’ve been reading Alan Moore and Steve Moore’s new Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. And I’ve been listening to a podcast series about the work of filmmaker David Lynch.
Lynch, at his best, I think, is giving you all the clues you need to solve a puzzle that doesn’t exist. Which is ingenious, don’t get me wrong. David Lynch believes that the time you spend in a transcendentally meditative state is extremely valuable to your creative output and overall mental wellbeing.
The Moores (NR) suggest that the time I spend in the space of my own imagination, in dreaming, could be as valid as the time I spend in the waking world. This is common among comics people.
See: Little Nemo. Sandman.
When I was in college, I lived in downtown Charleston, South Carolina for about 5 years. It was different then. Much scuzzier, but safer, probably, if we’re keeping it real. This is before fraternities became massive Xanax distribution systems. I knew like 2 dudes in fraternities.
On the other hand, I associated with cocaine dealers on a daily, professional basis. We had little secret handshakes and shit. I never did cocaine in my life!
A bartender I worked with went 4-0 one night in fistfights against patrons.
It was different. Rougher, but safer. I mean not for those guys. But: you don’t put your hat on the bed, and you don’t put your hands on the bartender.
The overall vibe, then: More “ha-ha,” less “uh-oh.”
King Street runs through downtown Charleston. I lived in an all-teal apartment on King Street, once, above a hookah bar. It’s difficult to explain, but the experience made me a better bass player.
I have another, much scarier apartment on King Street, in a Charleston where I am all alone, where I have found myself once again, where I can never find anyone I’m looking for.
This apartment is a real urine cake. Peeling wallpaper. A sink that stinks from within. An old gallon jug full of cigarette butts, weird brown liquid sloshing around the bottom. I don’t spend a lot of time there. If I find myself there, I try and leave. It’s no place for a person.
This apartment, on King Street, is like 2 blocks up from where I actually lived once, 3 or 4 from where I worked at the skate shop.
The manifestation of the me that either is terrible or in some way grotesque, or believes that other people either think he’s a cancerous black hole person, or they recognize some inner, irreparable toxicity that he hasn’t yet recognized in himself, who himself feeds on doubt and guilt and shame — this is his rat’s nest.
Thankfully, this place does not exist in the physical realm. But in the dream world, the map of which is drawn from memory and draped over the statues and steeples of Real Life Charleston, it’s up on King Street, near Spring, by where the fabric store was that also sold very nice stereo equipment.
But fuck that place, anyway, and fuck the dude who lives there. I know exactly who he is, and DJ Smokey says I must defeat him, and I will. I’ve been training my whole life.
You want to know how to write good? Rule number one: don’t try to write about a fictional band of musicians. It doesn’t work.
Rule number two: Don’t write about dreams. If you must write about dreams, try and keep it short and fun and obviously related to the “real-world” action within the larger narrative. Writing about just a dream? Don’t.
It’s the same reason writing about fictional bands doesn’t work. You’re using a written language to describe people who are themselves describing their experience in the world using musical instruments — a different toolset altogether.
It can work in a movie, because you can hear the music. But music doesn’t really work if you can’t hear it.
Counterpoint: the team at 5 Points Music Sanctuary in Roanoke, Virginia has lots of ways you can experience music. Then again, reading about it isn’t among them.
You can’t really capture the nuance and elastic weirdness of a dream, of people becoming other people, of places becoming other places, of people becoming other places — with the logic, grammar, and structure of a language designed to communicate real-world ideas.
Dreams are so intensely personal that they make any sense only to the dreamer. When I encounter a dream sequence in a work of fiction, I say to myself, “‘Self,’ I say, ‘this passage will be an exercise in lyricality, in invoking poetics to reveal a great truth. But, unless it’s directly applicable to the action in the “real” world of the story, it will be incomprehensible to me. I was not shaped by the same experiences. I do not share these dreams. I will read this passage, but with the expectation of incomprehensibility.’”
Because dreams really only work in a dream state.
I have another apartment, or house, sometimes, in Dream Charleston. It’s like if you were going the wrong way down Ashley from Spring Street toward MUSC. Or if you took Rutledge down and cut over on one of those little between streets. Ashley/Rutledge/Calhoun/MUSC area. It’s hidden down a gravel drive, tucked back from the road.
It started as a flophouse. And initially it bore some interior resemblance to the apartment Face and them lived in after the Rut, fittingly, right underneath it. That place was like being in a submarine.
From the outside, it looks like this place I dropped a fellow fiction student off after a conference in Atlanta. Later, in retrospect, it occurred to me that this person may have been trying to put the moves on me. Well. Joke’s on them: I can’t really think in abstract terms, so I don’t interpret hints. Look how hard my brain has to work to tell me I have weird unresolved issues with Charleston, South Carolina, ffs.
The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes that I spend a lot of dream time there. I’m realizing I have these weird Inception dream-memories of being there.
Imagine wet watercolors shuffled randomly into a stack of newspapers.
The last time I was in Charleston I drove around the area, right to the spot, just to make sure: it isn’t there.
That said, the last time I was in Charleston a lot of things weren’t there.
I’m always returning to this place after some time. It’s a small apartment building in most incarnations. Like a quadplex, but all 1 story, and labyrinthine. There are rooms I have explored, others I have not. The story I tell new visitors, which I’m now telling you, is that I lived in 2 of the apartments, 2 different times, under 2 different landlords. They never knew each other!
In some of these dreams, I have a memory of a previous time I came to live in this place while I either finished some outstanding work to complete my bachelor’s degree, or to somehow complete an MFA in a single afternoon.
It’s collegiate. Sort of gross. A cruddy, mostly-empty refrigerator. A papasan chair. But it’s Charleston, so old hardwood floors are all over the place, and crystal doorknobs on solid, heavy interior doors, and also a certain spartan quality. Let’s let the light take up this space. Put the couch on the front porch facing the road.
Do you know Charleston? It’s like walking through a ghost story. When I was there, world-famous talk show host Oprah Winfrey interviewed movie star Lindsay Lohan on the Cistern, the jewel of the College of Charleston campus. This is a kind of ghost story in itself. An memory from a now-ancient “monoculture,” since scrubbed from the internet. I didn’t watch it live or anything. I was in class, which, thinking back, is insane.
One dude who —decidedly, understandably — was not my friend then described the Cistern, especially in the fall, as putting our own college on par with an old-timey Ivy campus in New England. And he was right! I wish him the best.
It seems like, in recent years, I have purchased the quadplex on the invisible street. I’m still always returning to it after some time, but now I’m fixing it up. Or it’s looking nicer, anyway.
There is a long hallway in the center of the building. It tees off from the center of the house, and it is not visible from the outside. I don’t know if I’ve ever been all the way down it. Cold, marble floors that look like fancy resume paper. A mirrored console table. Opulanza extravaganza, but sterile. A bit like that room in 2001.
The energy from down there is somehow associated with the preponderance of abusive parents in fancy houses I grew up near. Before it grafted itself onto my dream apartment, it first surfaced in the dream version of an especially scary house in my neighborhood. There’s a Neighborhood Kid character in Redfern who hangs out at the Flopp House instead of his place. He’s based on the kid who lived there.
Maybe it’s about the morally-corrosive nature of material wealth? I do think about that shit all the time. About how if that’s what you look like when you win, then I don’t think we should be playing.
I’m not ready to try and draw this place yet. Not the building itself, and certainly not that fucked-up corridor.
Why am I telling you this even?
TTFN
Bo
