The Dream of Stickyman
Oh my god, I am terribly late for work. It is a quarter to nine! I am supposed to be there at nine! It is my first day! What a terrible way to start the new job. I have no idea what the new job is, or where it is. How am I going to get there? It is forty-five minutes away at least, but where? It'll probably take me an hour and a quarter. Plus I need to shower. I'm not even at home! Who is this fellow here? He is affable and he wants to buy some hallucinogenic mushrooms. He might be a combination of Josh from around the corner and Eric from eight years ago. They're both skinny with black hair and look cool and part Asian. This fellow, I haven't seen him straight on. He stays on my periphery. He has an arrangement to buy some mushrooms -- to buy them from my new boss. This is hardly the sort of thing I expected from my new employer, yet it does not surprise me in the least. Ah, here we are, outside the ramshackle door of the place where I now work. I don't know how we got here and it does not trouble me. I also do not know what time it is, except that it is fifteen minutes after ten o'clock.
My boss comes out, a rasta man with dreadlocks. He gives the affable fellow some mushrooms in a plastic bag and takes some money in exchange. I go into his house and see his whole family, huddled around the television. The whole atmosphere is extremely informal. Nobody minds that I'm late: whew. They don't even notice. There are no offices; it's a house. It's a bit chaotic, even though everyone is just watching television. There must be unseen people running around the edges, clamoring and creating a noisy effect. There is a bowl of tortilla chips on the floor. There is some salsa that looks a bit old. I am not tempted. Besides it looking old and dirty, it's too early in the morning for chips and salsa. It's messy in here. I guess I should get to work. I wonder what my job will be. I know it will involve paper, and computers. I'm dressed pretty well.
A receipt, a receipt for the mushrooms, my boss is demanding. I tell him I'm not getting involved in his dirty drug deals. His dirty drug deals are none of my business. He can handle his own dirty drug deals. What does he need a receipt for anyway, he's not the one who bought the mushrooms. He tells me more clearly: he wants a piece of paper that makes it look like he sold something else besides mushrooms. Oh, you mean as part of my job? Yes! OK, no problem, I didn't realize it was just part of my job, sorry, yeah, no problem, I'll get some kind of piece of paper. I don't even care if I don't understand why you need it. We're on good terms again.
Oh wow, it's my family. It used to be my boss's family but I'm not even at work anymore, and they're not black anymore. They're white and they're my family. Dad, Mom, couple of brothers, a sister, bunch of kids running around. I'm not the least bit surprised, it doesn't faze me at all. It's a backyard barbecue, and the one thing that does surprise me is my family is all a bunch of hillbillies. They used to be middle-class suburban intellectuals. Not super-intellectual, but smart enough to be slightly left-wing and make sure I knew Communism was a good idea in principle in many ways, and that racism was wrong. We didn't care about our lawn half as much as all our neighbors did. We couldn't give two shits about our lawn, and we didn't put stupid driveway lights on our fifteen-foot driveway, like our stupid neighbors did, like you might do if your driveway was half a mile long and dark and winding and you gave a shit, which our neighbors' wasn't, it was fifteen feet long like ours. They went crazy with the Christmas lights too, and their fat daughter stole my wiffle ball. I punched her in the stomach and it made a hole.
Yeah it's my family all right only they're hillbillies. Somehow some sort of change has occurred and they're hillbillies now, which does surprise me, although I don't say anything. I'll play it cool for now, that was my thinking. See how it plays out. It must be my brother's backyard, only now he has a couple of cars up on blocks there right in the middle of everything and he's chewing on a piece of straw. When the hamburgers are ready he is going to say yeehaw. Sis is pregnant and smoking cigarettes. I should really say something but I don't. Nobody smokes cigarettes when they're pregnant anymore. It went out in the 1950s. Dad's shooting empty beer cans with a twelve-gauge and Mom's got her hair up in curlers and my brother hands her a hot dog. "Yee haw," she says. She's about to head off to Atlantic City to gamble away all the meager savings she and Dad have saved up. Dad spits. I have never seen him do that before. All the kids are barefoot and have no teeth and big smiles. They demand all kinds of attention, and I don't like them. Sis has finished her cigarette. Maybe it was just the one. Nope. She lights up another one and pats herself right on the pregnant belly. I should really say something. But I'm afraid. My other brother is standing with his hands on his hips and his dick out, taking a piss on the lawn. His back is to us. Dad says something about how war is good.
I'm soaring now, right over the treetops. I forgot I could fly, damn, it feels so great. Just have to catch the wind just right, lean this way, that way. It's so easy! I better keep a lookout for trouble. How did I get way out here over all these trees? I'm in the middle of nowhere, except now I'm sticking against the a wall of the World Trade Center, which I thought was knocked down in a terrorist attack, but here it is, so I guess I must've been wrong. I must've been thinking of something else. I'm sticking against the wall of one of them, way up high, and there's the other one across from me, so they're both OK. I can leap across the gap and stick to the other one, which means I can unstick just fine. It's so easy. I just decide to go and I go, and when I land, I stick. I don't know what my problem was before, thinking I couldn't come unstuck without some huge struggle. Mind decides, body follows. Easy. I am way high up. Way high up over the city. Planes are going by below me, really close. That is a freaky sensation. Terrifying. Exhilarating. I'm going to leap again. I unstick and leap and stick to the other tower, then descend a couple of floors by sticky rolling: unstick two limbs, flip, repeat. I do this effortlessly. I'm like a sticky ballerina up here.
Uh oh. Trouble. They're shooting at me. The bullets glance off harmlessly, but I don't like it. What if one of the bullets were to hit me in the eye? I have no clue whether my eyes are bulletproof and I don't want to find out. I'm always worried about bullets hitting me in the eye. Besides, they must be criminals. There are criminals in one of these freaky airplanes. I leap.
I'm on the top of one of the airplanes, sticking to it, near the back. I sticky roll towards the front, where the driver is leaning back taking potshots at me out of some kind of open top cockpit. Some kind of crazy giant jet, doesn't surprise me in the least. I'll get that gun and stick it up your ass, punk. But we're not in an airplane anymore. It's some sort of old jalopy, and I think the wheels are made of wood. Everything is fine now. Nobody is shooting. There's a girl driving the car, and I'm just sitting next to her. We're on good terms. She's real pretty. She's saying something to me but I can't hear it. There's no sound coming out. Just the radio.
I feel there's someone in the room, some person or some thing, a presence, moving around the edges. It is very alarming. I'm in bed now, and it's dark, and I'm alone except for this sudden invasion of this mysterious presence that is staying on my periphery. I am extremely alarmed but I can't move. I am completely stuck to the bed. This is terrifying. There is huge danger, urgent danger. I'm trying as hard as I can to move but I can't even lift my head off the pillow. It makes me sick, it gives me a huge sick feeling right in my heart, and I'm trying to scream but I can't even do that. I'm paralyzed, inside and out. The presence is still there, malevolent, mobile. Fucking jesus I have to move! Move! I can't move. I'm stuck. Stuck and paralyzed and terrified and sick, right in the midsection. If only I could scream, or move. I can't lift a single finger and the danger is getting worse! The presence, mysterious black shapes on my periphery, just out of my vision, is murmuring. It's very alarming. The radio is still on. Where's the girl?
Stickyman woke up in the same bed he was dreaming that he was in, in the same position he thought he was in, and the radio was really on. He had a choice between buzzer, radio, or CD player on his alarm clock and he chose radio because the radio is live and the people talking on it are always pretty peppy. It makes it easier to get up. The radio people must use some other method, or maybe they set their alarms to the previous radio person, except the late night radio people aren't terribly peppy. They're more sultry. It doesn't matter. Somehow the early morning crew gets up and gets on the air all peppy. Stickyman liked the stations where there were a couple or three radio people on, talking to each other. They'd always be talking about something, keeping up the banter, and at least one of them was always laughing. It created an energetic, positive effect. Somehow it kept you from feeling too down. It made you feel like life was normal.
When Stickyman woke up this time, he felt frightened from his dream about invading black shapes and being paralyzed, but the radio had him soothed out in short order. In about two minutes he couldn't remember any of his dreams, and he was absorbed in listening to the radio people talk about some awards show they had on television. They were making fun of somebody and it seemed pretty funny to Stickyman and he started to feel peppy. Five minutes later he was getting out of bed and making some coffee. It was so great to have coffee in the morning, and Stickyman always made sure to remember to appreciate how great it was to have it. He always bought whole beans, dark roasted, ground them up himself, and savored the aroma. He made a nice piece of toast, and put some butter on it. Soon he was sitting at his breakfast table, looking out his window at the city he had sworn to protect. His toast was nice. His coffee was fantastic.
There were his sticky boots, in the corner; there were his sticky gloves. Stickyman took a hot burbling sip of his coffee -- he had once been mocked by a girl for the way he burbled his hot coffee when he sipped it -- and felt strangely resentful of his own superhero equipment. He thought of how he wasn't strong enough to unstick himself effortlessly, to move around the way he ought to. He could work out until his biceps exploded but it wouldn't make a difference. Nobody with normal human strength could easily pull those stickypads off a surface once they'd gotten stuck on there. It wasn't Stickyman's fault. It's not like I'm a weakling. I do work out. I do. Those sticky boots and gloves were just too sticky. Still he couldn't help but feel he was always letting the city down. Some hero. He thought of all the criminals he had let get away, how so many of them had taken potshots at him with impunity. Fucking sticky boots and gloves!
Stickyman chewed up the last of his piece of toast. Should he make another? Hell with it. He slammed down the last of his coffee and got in the shower, where he began to think. He thought of giving himself a pep talk, and when he did that, he called himself buddy and soldier. So he thought the following: What's with the negativity, buddy? You may have your problems -- who doesn't? -- but you're the best this town's got, so can the self-pity trip. You see another superhero out there busting his hump for this city? No? That's what I thought. So buck up now, soldier. You're going to put those boots and gloves on and you're going to go out there and you're going to do the best damn job you can, and that's all you can do and nobody can ask any more of you than that. Your time is coming. You're going to catch a criminal and you know what it's going to be? It's going to be sweet, that's what it's going to be. Oh yeah, it's going to be sweet as sugar. You hear me, buddy? Huh? You hear me? Get on out there, soldier, buck up and move!
Stickyman lifted up his arms and made sure he got all the soap to rinse out of his armpits, first one and then the other. He turned around and leaned forward and grabbed his butt cheeks and opened them up to let the water run down to make sure all the soap rinsed out of his butt crack, then he turned back around and lifted up his wibblies to make sure all the soap was rinsed out from there as well. Then he gave himself one last turnaround until he was sure all the soap was off from everywhere on his body, because he didn't like the idea that some soap might remain on him and turn into dried soap. Soon he was out and dry and clean and slipping into his futuristic tight stretch material Stickyman outfit. He stood over his boots and gloves with his hands on his hips, a figure of no small resolve.
He slipped on one boot, then stepped into the other. He pulled on his gloves, first one, then the other. Inhaling deeply, he spoke aloud to the room: "OK, hero. Let's get out there and patrol this crazy old city."
And with that, he struggled mightily to lift one foot off the floor and march right out that door to face the new day.
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