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December 3, 2005

fight club - a dream

I dream that a friend invites me to some kind of weird, word-based "fight club." The event takes place in the middle of the night in Downtown LA, and the two of us take my car to get there, me driving and him giving directions that lead me down one way street after another towards a secret location in an underground parking lot. When we get there (somewhere on S. Spring?) we find an anonymous entrance blocked by a metal gate and a uniformed lot attendant. The attendant peers into the car (he knows my friend by sight) before opening the gate and waving us in. I cut my engine on my friend's instructions, rolling into the cavernous, empty space.

Inside I find two or three card tables have been set up in a semi-circle of parked cars. My friend hops up and down excitedly next to me as we approach. He is an expert player, has been here before, and there is a sense in which this outing is really for him. I'm an amateur, a virgin and it's established from the get-go that I have no shot of winning tonight's fight club. He tells me that word fight club is like getting high or laid - you don't get to enjoy your first time.

The contest isn't like a MC battle or cipher, being more like boggle with elbow checks. Game play is simple: six or seven players sit at a table, waiting for the dealer to toss a milk crate worth of large, baseball-sized letter cubes on the table. Each cube has a single letter on all six sides and during each one-minute round players reach and grab and push for the same letters, building words that they hold out in front of them like a pressed together stack of blackboard erasers. You are not allowed to hit another player, but if you have a word in your hands (minimum three letters) you can legally hit their stack with yours in order to dislodge letters you need, or to reduce the opponent's score by making them drop letters. Everyone has a different strategy. Some people are defensive, using their bodies to block out a section of the table, some people are predatory, smashing at opponents with "the" or "and" over and over again, accumulating small scores while others lament the loss of big money words like "satirist."

It turns out very quickly that I'm better at this game than my friend. Although he's bantering and giving me advice, he quickly falls to the bottom of the table's ranking. He's burdened by all kinds of preset/received strategy and ritual, while I just lash out at words and letters with a desperation that surprises everyone at the table, me most of all. I quickly realize that each of the players is engaged in some kind of jokey mental drama to help psyche themselves up, an overlay that they're putting over the game to help structure it. For some strange reason I can see each gambit when I look at the players: some imagine themselves playing poker in the Old West, others are commanding battleships in a war room. Still others see themselves as playing kinky head games, their words stages in an invisible seduction. For a while I try to use an overlay too, picturing myself as James T. Kirk/William Shatner, the rhythm of my reaching and grabbing for words mimicking Kirk's cadences. It's so damned unlikely, though, unstable. The overlay takes me out of the game, so I abandon it. I keep track of what the other players are doing, anyway, hopeful I can use their tricks against them.

The game enters an elimination phase and surprise, surprise - my friend is one of the first to go. I take an uncomfortable amount pleasure in his defeat, wonder when I had started being so jealous of him. He takes up a supporting spot behing my right shoulder and watches my game improve with every round, and the next time I peek up out of the game I find there are only three players left at the table with me. To my right is a pretty, curly haired brunette, Jewish or maybe Mediterranean/Middle Eastern, to my left an anonymous white dude. (I look at the girl and wonder if the dream will include sleeping with her.) Sitting across from me is a brown skinned man in his fifties sporting a mustache and receding, medium-to-low 'fro. He is my main competition, but I don't know whether that's because he's the best player or the only other black person left in the game. I start punching and slamming at his words exclusively, some of them breaking, some of them repelling me. I ask myself what I am willing to do to win, how hard I can hit before the dealer decides I am attacking him and not his words.

It's the last round. Each off us has an accumulated pile of letters and words on the table that we warily watch and protect while waiting for the last toss by the dealer. I make a decision and start shoving letters and words into my pocket, down my pants, down my shirt. The white guy to my left suddenly turns into Larry David and he wants to know what it is I think I'm doing. He complains to the dealer, who ignores him and tosses the last crate of letters. Instead of reaching for words like the other players, I kick at the table as hard as I can. It's too well anchored for me to knock over, but the other players' piles are upset. Larry David is shouting, crying foul in that Larry David way of his. I ignore him and dive under the table, where a handful of cubes have fallen. I can hear Larry above me demanding the dealer stop the game, but the dealer rules that I haven't done anything illegal. The older black man appears under the table. He stares at me impassively, measuring me and conveying a vast animosity without uttering a word. It occurs to me that I have made a blood enemy tonight. I wonder what I should feel about it,

Fight club is over and the dream turns from competition to comedy. All of a sudden I am running for my car like a silent movie burglar, my pockets suddenly sack-like and weighed down by letter cubes. I juggle cubes in my hands and in the crook of my arm, desperately try to keep it together. Larry David is chasing me, high-steeping cop to my crook, and Benny Hill theme music is blaring somewhere - in my head, over the parking lot PA system, out of someone's car. Larry cuts me off somehow before I get to my car and there is a mock set of eye-level camera matches, the two of us squaring off like gunslingers in a Mexican spaghetti western. We circle each other. Each one of us is struggling with our haul of cubes, but we still take one-armed jabs at each other, take full-bodied swipes with elbows or chins. We rear back like Loony Tune bulls about to charge. We bob and weave, little rascals staging a boxing match.

Suddenly we're wrestling, but the clinch is only a set-up for further sight gaggery. Larry's got an arm around my neck and seems to be thinking noogie when his eyes goggle wide at something in the off-screen distance. Exclamation points about pop over our heads and the camera (?) jump cuts to reveal a pickup truck barreling towards us. We leap away from each other onto our respective asses, sending our cubes flying.

Cut to the receding pick-up truck. The brother from the table is driving. He waves back at us without turning his head, his arm stuck out the window, a perfect right angle bent at the elbow. His 3 o'clock wave moves only at the wrist, as regal and disdainful and automatic as Queen Elizabeth's. Next to him sits the white girl. She winks at us lasciviously through the back window, opens her shirt and presses ample tits against the glass. Soon after a hail of me and Larry's combined, previously airborne cubes hits the other side of the glass from where her nipples are pressed, letters banking and clanging into the pickup's cab. Proverbial insult to phantasmagoric injury.

Cut back to a two shot of me and Larry David on our asses, mouths agape, double and the triple taking at the receding pick-up and each other. Jump cut to black and credit, "Curb your Enthusiasm" theme music - Dump dump dump, duhhh, duhhh, duh-nuh duh-nuhhhh - blaring. I have an acute sense of dreaming just then, but instead of feeling tickled at my inventiveness I wonder why I didn't engineer myself into a closing two-shot with dude in the pick-up truck, why the white guy ends up my main ally/foil. (And then, of course, there is always the problem of the girl.)

The dream ends and I wake up all at once, completely lucid. Unlike most mornings, which are marked by dawdling and stumbling, by sleep-drunken grabs at evaporating wisps of dream, I reach for my journal knowing I'll be able to regurgitate this particular dream in a single burst. I tell myself I will go to the gym once I'm done. I wonder about the free boxing class they offer at my Y, decide to take it.

[EnD]

Posted by ebogjonson in dream log, on December 3, 2005 2:51 PM