Sammy Loses It About Michael Jackson and Boyce Dreams

Sammy said that when he told a fellow Arby’s co-worker that one of his friends was having trouble with dreams, the co-worker asked if it was because of Michael Jackson’s death and “what his kids must be going through.” Sammy tries to like everyone, and up to that point he had been fine with Trisha. He couldn’t manage it, though. He told her he didn’t know Michael Jackson, that nobody he knew had ever met Michael Jackson, and that if he later found out that Michael Jackson was really a cyborg created by the CIA using a new type of synthetic skin, then it wouldn’t affect either his or Trisha’s life one single bit. That under no circumstances should she be talking about Michael Jackson until she first spoke about the fact that yesterday was the anniversary of the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence, which did a whole lot more to define both her existence and consciousness than anything Michael Jackson ever sang, no matter how many times she watches Access Hollywood. Then Trisha called Sammy gay, and finished getting some curly fries for a drive-thru order.

At Boyce's Charlotte made us chocolate chip cookies which was her way of saying she didn’t mind we were over. While we ate I showed Boyce a mouthguard to wear while he slept to help in the short term with chipping more teeth. We played Risk for a while like we always do. We never finish the games because Boyce comes to peace arrangements and says he’s content to rule the land he has. I always say he needs to keep fighting because that’s the game, and so he swept all the men off the board and said, “There, swine flu wins.” Every time Boyce ends the game this way by sweeping his arm across the board, he says a different disease: ebola, tuberculosis, yellow fever, AIDS, the plague, rubella, smallpox, syphilis.

After Risk Sammy said he was worried he didn't act weird enough and might get chosen for the jury. Boyce said he was afraid there wasn’t enough work for him to keep getting full-time hours as a locksmith. I told them I miss Rachel. Then we figured out which were the five most sensual fruits. Answer: strawberries, cherries, grapes, mangoes, and pomegranates. Sammy wanted it noted that he disagreed about pomegranates, and instead would like to have seen olives on the list.

Boyce slept on the couch, I slept on the floor, and Sammy slept on a recliner. We asked Boyce what would be signs that he was dreaming he was Jud. Boyce wasn’t sure, but singing, hoeing, bidding at a pie auction, and dying were all possibilities.

In the morning Boyce told us he didn’t dream about being Jud, but he did dream about Rachel. I never dream about Rachel. Just like I don’t dream about birds or doubling down on a good hand. I asked Boyce what she was doing, and he said practicing on one of my boomerangs. I said that was stupid. She wasn’t coming back. Boyce said I was stupid, but then he got what I meant.

Boyce as Jud and How to Fix It

A few years ago Boyce finally stopped making fun of me for interpreting dreams when he told me he’d been having a recurring one. He kept dreaming that he was called on at the last second to play Jud from Oklahoma! Boyce owns the album because he thinks the cover is “classy.” It’s actually a rather boring album cover so both Sammy and I think that Boyce actually loves Oklahoma!, testified by the fact that Boyce Jr. will always play “Surrey with a Fringe on Top” whenever you asked him to grind his axe.

In Boyce’s recurring dream, he was rushed into the part of Jud and at first, could never remember the words. A classic dream, I told him, about anxieties of failure, especially in front of others. I told him not to be surprised if future versions of his dream included being naked, forgetting to go to class, or being forced to eat muppets out of jack-o-lanterns at the request of Paul Bunyan and the Buddha, all classic symbols in anxiety dreams. But Boyce told me his dream evolved and he started getting better as Jud. Once he did so well that a talent agent asked him to join Seinfeld, but then she made advances on him and Boyce felt uncomfortable and declined.

The problem was every time Boyce woke up from one of his Oklahoma! dreams, he’d chipped his teeth a bit. He didn’t know if he was punching himself in order to recreate his death at the hands of that unfairly smug Curly, or if he was grinding his teeth due to the pressure of being a Broadway star. I told him it might even be the opposite: his teeth cause the dream to happen, not the other way around. When his mind attempts to represent shattered enamel it chooses a potentially sexually violent ranchhand who sings at his own funeral.

Boyce loves his teeth, and any damage to them is like the poisoning of his soul. He doesn’t have dental insurance working as a locksmith, but he doesn’t worry about the money. He just adores his teeth like a baby rock pigeon adores its regurgitated crop-milk. Sammy told him teeth were a sign of mortality, and pointed him to Edgar Andy Poe’s short story "Berenice." Boyce told him he’d like to tear Sammy’s teeth out if he offers him one more book, and Sammy told me it seems that Boyce had already read the story.

This morning Boyce called me to say he’d dreamed he was Jud again, and this time he was so good he finally got invited to the cast party afterward. When he checked his teeth he had a new chip running up one of his front teeth. He was panicking because there’s nothing he can do about it. As soon as he goes to sleep he can’t control what he dreams anymore than I could control how a Common Merganser flaps its wings (my words, not his). I told him there might be something we can do. Sammy and I are going to spend the night at Boyce’s to try and keep him from dreaming about Oklahoma!, but still making sure he gets some sleep. I’ll report on how things go tomorrow.

I Interpret a Dream and Boyce's Family

Worked at the Sleep Center last night. From the utility closet I listened to a woman named O----- F----- (name withheld: she seemed like she had social problems but was unaware of said social problems, and is therefore the kind of person who googles herself every day) tell her dream to Marcie, the attendant who was working last night.

O------- was in a mall where she saw a man with a machine gun sneak in. She rushed into a store where she and a small Asian woman hid among ceramics. As the man walked by with his gun, she realized she couldn't just sit there and do nothing. She grabbed a bat that was apparently available among the ceramics of angels and small boys in overalls "goin' fishin.'" She hit the man with the gun and celebrated that she stopped any crime from happening. A cop though, in what might be described as the ultimate buzzkill, told her that all she managed to do was stop the murder of a woman who was pregnant with a child who would grow up to murder Batman.

It is much more difficult to interpret dreams without reading the people's files, but a promise is a promise. Just hearing the way the woman talked though, she seems to think a lot of herself, as is evidenced by the fact that she a) stopped the mall shooting, and b) felt she was good enough to hide out with Asians. However, there is a fly in the ointment. The women was in a shop of what can only be described as sentimentalized dreck. She wasn't able in her dream to even hide out in a "cool" shop, or even one that pretends to be a "cool" shop like where kids buy shirts with distressed clowns and aliens on them. She also found her most heroic act to be an anti-heroic act by literally allowing the eventual murder of a hero. Clearly, this woman hides a debilitating lack of self-worth behind a thin veil of middle-class sentimentality and cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, by telling the dream she has a vague impression that sharing with another (even if it is a stranger) could lead to some realized sense of community. She will either come back for more treatments at the Sleep Center or be dead by her own hand within the week.

Today is the first day that Sammy can go in for an interview at the courthouse, so I'll let you know tomorrow how it went. Sammy called Boyce before he left for the courthouse to make sure he was willing to risk a fine/jail time just to stay out of jury duty, and Boyce told him he couldn't be away from his wife and kid for that long.

Boyce's wife is different. Sammy and I don't mind, though, but other people get in a fit about it. Charlotte doesn't really like to be around other people, though she doesn't mind being around us because we don't ask questions we know she doesn't want to answer. We just let her do her thing, and her favorite thing is getting out blank sheet music and writing the musical notation for everything she hears. Commercials, songs, people humming--she writes it all out on sheet music, and it's always right. I once gave her a cd of bird songs and she loved it because it was so hard for her to do, but she eventually got most of them right, I think. Charlotte would then give all the sheet music to Boyce who would then try to play it on his guitar. Boyce isn't very good on the guitar though, but now their son Boyce Jr. is eight and he's already better than his dad is. So now Charlotte gives the music to Boyce Jr. and he plays it for her.

The first time Rachel met Charlotte she used the s-word around Boyce. She called Charlotte a "savant." I didn't even know what the word meant--I thought it meant a kind of medieval sword, so I made this "swushing" sound and tried to cut everyone's head off with an air sword, which was obviously really inappropriate--but Boyce knew what it meant. He yelled at Rachel that just because Charlotte is good at one thing doesn't mean she's good at other things. Then Boyce shouted at Charlotte to add 150 and 146 and she couldn't do it, and both Charlotte and Rachel started to cry. It got really weird there, and Boyce apologized, and to lighten the mood I went to air-chop everybody's head off again with my savant-sword but Sammy told me to quit before I got revved up.