When the fuzz buster went off it didn't squeal, it shrieked. A loud, drawn out seagull shriek. I could almost feel the police radar rolling through the van and over my scrunched up shoulders as I hit the brakes.
Too late. There was a cop car chasing me and I suddenly wished that I wasn't doing 85 miles/hour in a 45 mile zone at 3 in the morning in Alabama. But I was.
Unless I was actually dreaming that I was. After 6 straight days of sleep deprivation, and living on caffeine and gummy bears, it was getting kind of hard to tell. My dreams were becoming progressively more real, nothing but driving, driving, driving, and every time I woke up reality just seemed weirder.
Like a half an hour ago I'd been driving across a wide, golden/brown field that had growing in it, not wheat, but row after row of pedestrians whom I was mowing down without the slightest feeling of guilt. It was actually very peaceful really.
Then all of the sudden Phil said, "Raelinda, wake up. I just won a hundred dollars and it's your turn to drive."
I'd opened up my eyes and looked around. Now I have woken up in some pretty weird places but this was the first time I'd ever rejoined my body to find it stretched out in the back of a truck in the parking lot of a floating casino at 2:30 in the morning covered with chigger bites.
"OK," I'd thought, "which side of the alarm clock am I on this time?"
"C'mon," said Phil. "I'll tell you how you can score some free coffee from the casino. Just find a losing betting slip, they're everywhere, and take it into the restaurant. Look pathetic. They'll give you a free coffee.
It had come to me then, in one of those instant mind flashes, (just add consciousness), that I was part of a caravan of folk musicians driving home to Boston from Kerrville Texas. Barbara Kessler, Shaun Staples, Linda Nawn, Jeff Cannon, and Phil Antoniades. And Phil Antoniade's laptop and cell phone. We'd driven to Kerrville in a rented Windstar minivan and, for the drive home, we'd hooked up with a woman who's name I can't remember but who's truck had become our crash pad. I guess it had been my turn to crash and now it was my turn to drive. Hmmm, probably not a good time to tell the gang I was dyslexic.
So I'd crawled out of the truck and stumbled into the casino in search of free coffee. I still wasn't sure if I was truly awake or not but I was curious to find out if drinking a cup of coffee in a dream would make you dream you were waking up.
I had no trouble finding losing betting slips, the garbage pails in the casino lobby were overflowing with them. I carried them into the restaurant and put on my best tragic face.
"C,coffee-e-e-e," I sighed.
"Sure, honey," said the waitress sympathetically.
"Dooooonuuts?" I tried.
"Don't push it, honey," said the waitress.
Well at least she'd heard me. One of the most surreal things about this trip was my disappearing voice. I have always had a very quiet voice and when I'm tired it just gets softer, although it never sounds that way to me. I can always hear me loud and clear. Of course I'm cheating because I'm using telepathy. But by the time we got to the festival it was like no one could hear me at all. I'd take these deep breathes and say something very loudly to the people around me and nobody would hear it. It was like those reoccurring dreams I have where I'm yelling and yelling at the top of my lungs and absolutely no sound is coming out, people are walking by me like I'm only a ghost. After a while I just gave up on starting conversations and only talked to people who chose to listen to me.
The restaurant lights were too bright. In fact the whole casino was lit up all the way into the headache spectrum. I guess people didn't like to gamble in the dark. Or maybe the light was a lure. I imagined car loads of compulsive gambling moths fluttering by in the dark and being pulled into the light.
I sipped my dark coffee and, when my head cleared a little, I rejoined the caravan.
Driving across county in a caravan is a strange sanctuary. You can't work, and you can't screw up your life. All you can really do is drive and sleep and try not to do them both at once. The biggest challenge we had was trying to synchronize our pee breaks. Somebody had bought a Styrofoam lizard on a stick at the festival. Our peeing signal was for the people in the truck to stick the lizard out the window so that the people in the van could see it. The first time they tried it the wind from driving at 85 miles/hour tore the lizard off it's stick and plastered it onto the windshield of the van.
"Someone's gotta pee," Barbara had said. She was a veteran of the road and felt that pee breaks should be like military maneuvers. Quick and nondemocratic. Unfortunately, the 6 of us crawling out of our minivan was a very similar to opening up a road map. Once we were out it was very hard to get us to fold back in. The frequent pee'ers would go and pee, and the smokers would light up and smoke. Then the pee'ers would come back and see the smokers smoking and they'd feel deprived because they weren't doing something destructive to their bodies so they'd go into the gas station convenience store to score some sugar. Then the smokers would see all the sugar and they'd want some and pretty soon everybody was buzzing and getting philoso phical which would make the pee'ers have to pee again and then the smokers would figure, 'might as well light up another one', and Barbara would go, "You guys should never tour".
It was right after one of those pee breaks, when I'd crawled into my corner of the back seat and taken off my Teva sandals, like I always did as soon as I got back in the van, and wondered, like I always did, how they got so slimy, (my little post pee break ritual), that it occurred to me that we humans had come full circle and recreated the very world we'd evolved in. We'd created a nomadic friendly world. Cars, planes, trains, buses, and e-mail. We were always on the move. Not even fast food and slow digestion could keep us off the road. And it was in that sleep deprived, sugar enriched moment that I knew with absolute certainty that we were going to make it to the stars. It was programmed right into our genes. We had to be going places. And once the world became too small we were gonna need a bigger road.
I only hoped that if we made it to mars in my lifetime, Starbucks coffee would make it too.
Well I finished my bad casino coffee and climbed into the drivers seat of the minivan and pulled out. The rest of the gang was asleep, lucky them. I hated night driving. The more I couldn't see, the more stuff I thought I was seeing. The whole landscape was being smothered in a quilt of fog which meant I could see road ghosts. They were terrible drivers, road ghosts. They drifted from lane to lane, they cut me off, and they reflected my headlights right back at me. And they stole the sense of having driven any distance.
A sign came and went so fast I had trouble processing it. 'Begin speed zone' I think it said. "Well, no trouble," I thought. "I'm certainly speeding".
And that's when the fuzz buster went off. A cop car was on my tail, chasing me down in eerie silence without it's siren. But it didn't need any noise, it's spinning lights were slicing through the fog to get us. They came right through the back window and reflected off my rear view mirror. It was very bad light. Like little icicle knives piercing me behind my eyes.
I pulled over and waited for the cop to catch up with me but instead of closing the distance the cop pulled over back up the road and blared through his loudspeaker that I should get out of my car and hike it up to where he was parked.
So at 3 in the morning I was stumbling up a highway in the absolute darkness towards a blue/white light that kept spinning around pushing right into my eyes, and then moving on to light up the cop and his car for a second, and then coming back around to blind me again so that the cop and his car seemed to emerge from the darkness and then disappear into the light and then reappear again a little bit bigger each time I took another step.
The cop was large with a moon round face.
"I'm dreaming," I thought as he pulsed in and out of the fog.
He took my drivers license and disappeared with it but his voice remained and said, "Uh, huh. Massachusetts".
"I'm not dreaming," I thought. The light swung around and he reappeared holding a ticket for $180.
"You can go now," he said. I reached for my license. He dissappeared again. He came back without it, big smiling grin first. "No ma'am. That's mine now."
"I am dreaming," I thought.
He faded away, big smiling grin last.
I said, "But how-"
"How you gonna drive without your driver's license," he finished smoothly, grinning moon face. He'd obviously been through this before. Out came a little slip of paper. He tore off one end of it.
"This here's your receipt. When we get the money, we'll mail you back your license...to Massachusetts."
I'm dreaming not.
I took the receipt and walked through the dark to the minivan. Step, step, step. I'm dreaming. I'm dreaming not. I'm dreaming. I'm dreaming not. With the police lights behind me it was now the van that was pulsing in and out of the fog. I had the feeling that if I didn't time my steps just right I would reach the van just as it was disappearing and walk right through it into another night.
But just as I was starting to say, "I'm dreaming", and just as I was about to touch the van, and just as it was starting to fade away from me and leave me fluttering in the dark, the van door opened up and the interior lit up, light, light, light, and I was pulled right into it like a moth.
"What happened?", someone asked me.
"A hundred and eighty dollars," I said.
People started reaching into their almost empty pockets. Crumpled bills appeared without hesitation. Within minutes $180 became $180 divided by one caravan of nomadic, sleep deprived, cigarette smoking, sugar scarfing, slimy footed, dreamers.
Which confirmed what I was already starting to suspect. That life was but a dream. And it was a pretty good dream.