I just woke from a dream that was unlike all of my previous ones, in that I was a twelve-year-old boy from India.

* * * * *

I’m in the hallway of a large office building. There is a young girl about nine years old who is either my sister or my sidekick. (I suppose she could be both.) She is Indian like I am, since that’s where the two of us were born.

We decide to explore the building a bit, and we walk through a doorway into an unused part of the building. It seems to have been vacant for quite some time, and there are huge piles of flattened cardboard boxes stacked up and waiting to be recycled. We walk through that room and into the abandoned bathrooms. The only light in this area is provided by the small amount of sunlight that’s able to penetrate the layers of grime on the windows. It’s dim, but we can see clearly enough.

Suddenly, a man climbs in one of the windows and grabs SisterSidekick by the leg. He pulls her toward the window, but she is able to free herself and we both scramble away.

This kind of thing becomes a recurring theme of the dream, and the two of us constantly find ourselves being chased, threatened, held at gunpoint (and even fired upon!), and a few other similar situations that we always manage to extricate ourselves from, or simply talk our way out of. I can never quite decide if we’re part of a television show or not.

Then the dream changes, and I’m suddenly an adult—my real-life American self—riding in a car with a beautiful woman. True to the form of the rest of the dream, she seems to be my captor, and is holding me against my will, although not entirely. She is around thirty years old, very slim, with her dark blonde hair tied into a ponytail. She’s wearing simple jeans and a light blue chambray shirt, but I know that she has various small weapons hidden inside her clothes. I also know that we’re in London, despite the fact that she’s driving on the right-hand side of the road, and on the left-hand side of the car, like we do in America, and like they do pretty much everywhere else except Japan and the remnants of the British Empire.

I look over at my so-called captor while she’s driving, and through her window I notice that we’re driving through an extremely elegant and picturesque old neighborhood. I point out a huge cathedral made of weathered red brick, and mention something to her about how We Certainly Don’t Have Churches Like That Back in the States, but secretly I think to myself that we probably do, especially on the East Coast.

I look around the beautiful neighborhood and blurt out, “I wish we lived here.” She says nothing but gives me a little smile that I’m unable to interpret. “Actually,” I continue, “I wish we could have lived here in the Sixties, back when this was the center of the universe.” Her smile fades ever so slightly, and I realize she’s lost in her own thoughts, not paying me the slightest bit of attention. Despite that fact, I attempt to continue. I start to say, “It seems like everyone back then became famous,” but about halfway through the sentence, she makes a strange gesture with her hand and a dollop of water splashes me in the face, rendering me speechless. I brush myself off and curl my lip into an exasperated grimace as I turn to her and say, “You didn’t have to do that.”

I think to myself that from here, this story can go in one of two directions. If this is the cheesiest romantic adventure story in history, she will turn to me and say, “I didn’t have to do this, either,” and lean over to kiss me. If this is one of those surprising adventure thriller stories, she’ll say the same thing but punch me in the face instead.

It is at this juncture that I seem to be unable to decide which of the dream’s possible trajectories will play itself out. I suspect that the punch will make for a better story, but she’s also very beautiful, and I’d love to kiss her. The two disparate trajectories will forever remain disparate, however, because my brain never does decide which story to follow, so the two of us drive together silently for an inordinate amount of time, at which point I awaken from this incredibly strange dream.

I’ve always been a night owl, but the last week or so has found me in bed much later than usual.  The bad thing about it is. . .well, I guess there isn’t anything inherently bad about it, but it does become a cycle that’s difficult to break from.  My favorite thing about sleeping in that late is that that’s when I usually get some good dreams in, and today was no exception.  I had a couple of short ones, followed by a sprawling one that lasted an hour and a half. I’ll have to paraphrase and condense it a bit, because the story didn’t really unfold until the end.

It started at my last job.  Late in the afternoon, a woman came to my desk to deliver a big pile of paychecks that I was expected to ‘sign and mark’ with a yellow pen that she also gave me.  I told her I could have it done by tomorrow, and she said, “Okay, as long as it’s by one o’clock.”  Not a problem.  She walked away, and I got up to do something else, which is when I discovered that I was in my first Portland apartment.  I took off all of my clothes and crawled into bed.

A guy I knew in Yakima came into my room just then (we’ll call him Michael, since that’s his name) with his girlfriend, and he was holding a small gun.  He made a gesture for his girlfriend to get in bed too, so she took off her clothes and slid in next to me.  Each of us put an arm around the other, and Michael sat down on a chair along the wall next to the night stand.  He raised his arm just enough to point the gun in my direction.  “I need your car,” he said.

“What?  Why?”  I turned my head to look at him.  His girlfriend shifted a little bit, and I slid my hand down her back.

“I just need it.”

“You’re stealing my car?”

“Yeah.”

“But it’s a piece of shit.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“No, really.  if you’re gonna steal a car, you should steal something good.”  He lowered the gun, and I continued.  “What happened to you?  We used to be friends, hanging out and stuff.  I don’t get it.  Do you need a ride somewhere?  You don’t have to do all this, I can just. . .give you a ride.”

“Okay,” he said, sheepishly.

His girlfriend got up and stood around naked for a while before she got dressed again.  I stayed in bed and tried to figure out what to do next.  The two of them left the room, and a handful of people appeared and started milling around in my bedroom.  They were both men and women, all professionally dressed, and one woman had her young son with her.  The woman and her son sat on my bed, and I wondered how to get up without just being naked in front of everyone.  I decided that it didn’t matter, so I got up nonchalantly and put on my clothes.  My cat brushed against my leg repeatedly, which made dressing difficult.  Mom, Stepdad and Brother appeared, and told me it was time to get ready for the party.

“It’s a Christmas party,” Mom said.

“Why are we going to a Christmas party in April?” I asked.  “I mean June.”

“It’s more of a halfway-to-Christmas party,” she replied.  “Some people have a halfway-to-St.-Patrick’s-Day party, we have this.”

“Well, crap, if I’d known it was gonna be a Christmas party, I would’ve finished up my stuff at work.  I’m not too excited about a Christmas party in September.  I mean June.”

“You don’t need to go if you have things to do, I just thought it would be fun.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll come, just let me pack first.”  I started to throw a few things into a suitcase.  The walls of the room sort of dematerialized, and my furniture was now sitting on a perfectly manicured lawn next to a nondescript one-story stone building.  By this time, I had sensed that the unknown people were military personnel, and Stepdad was very agitated by their presence.  He and the rest of my family members left to go the party, and one of the military people came to talk to me.

“Good thing you’re a troop,” she said.  “If you weren’t, we’d have to search all your belongings.”

“But I’m not,” I said.  “A ‘troop’ or whatever.”

“What?”

“Yeah.  I’m not a troop.”

She looked dismayed.  A couple of the others heard what I’d said, and they came over to offer her some assistance.  “But how did you get in here, if you’re not military?”

“What do you mean?  I LIVE here.  I’ve been here for a week, and this military stuff just. . .appeared.”

She turned toward the others with a grimace.  “Let’s get to work,” she told them, “we have a lot of stuff to get through.”  They walked to my dresser and peered inside.  Each drawer was filled with a huge number of small gifts and trinkets, except one, which had underwear and socks in it.  Two of them started rifling through the trinkets, and the others went to explore other parts of what had, until recently, been my apartment.

One of them, a Hispanic man around thirty years old, took me aside and escorted me toward a parking garage in the building.  He asked me a bunch of nonsensical questions that I can’t recall, but then he asked, “Why do you hate relationships?”

“What?”

“Why do you think relationships suck?”

“I don’t; I totally want to be in one.”

He gave me a look of disbelief, and shook his head.  “Just be honest.”

“I am.  I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Gimme a break.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying, and I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”

He grabbed my arm and walked me briskly toward the door to the building.  Great, I thought, I’m about to be more thoroughly interrogated.

And then I woke up.

These last few weeks sure have gotten away from me, at least as far as writing is concerned.   My time has been consumed with about a million different rehearsals with different groups, to prepare for the shows that are starting to happen now.  I also had a few out-of-town gigs (in addition to local ones) and an exciting recording and mixing project in the works, which hasn’t left much in the way of spare time.

Luckily, this story won’t take long, since it’s about a dream I had this morning that I don’t remember very well.  It was kinda dumb, overall—well, it was—but it did end with a funny conversation.  The dream was about international spies, which you’d think would make it inherently cool, but people spent an inordinate amount of time discussing the kinds of cars they drove (Mercedes and BMW) as opposed to those driven by the police (boring American cars).  It was as though I was watching a movie, rather than participating in the action, which is probably why it was so boring.  I’d love to be an international man of mystery, but I’ll need to get a passport first.

MainCharacterGuy had a sexy, blonde female sidekick who was twenty years his junior, and there were two other people in the dream, a man and a woman, who commented about her to each other.

“Why’s he with her?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Why’s he gotta pay her?”

“He pays her so she’ll fall in love with him.  He loves her cause—” and the second person chimed in to say, tautologically, “—he loves her.”

That’s when I woke up.

Incidentally, I haven’t forgotten that I owe you a story about hand jobs.  I’ve been trying to think of a way that I can tell it that won’t just be crass, but I’m not sure that’s gonna be possible, so I guess I’ll just keep it simple for once.

I can’t give a woman a hand job.  I mean, I CAN, but that’s not what it’s called, and I only found that out a week or so ago.  You see, I thought it was still called a hand job, whether it was done to a man or to a woman.  My friend thought it was hilarious that I used the term interchangeably that way, and he patiently explained it to me.  Turns out that the term ‘hand job’ is like ‘blow job’; it’s what a woman (or a man, for that matter) does to a man.  If a man (or a woman, for that matter) does the equivalent to a woman, then it’s called one of the million other terms that are floating around in our vernacular—which I will let you discover on your own, rather than listing them all here—but NOT a ‘hand job.’  You’re welcome.  I’m really glad we’ve had this discussion.

This calls for a new slogan.

BFS&T:  Now With 30% More Hand Jobs!

By way of a reward, here’s a hilarious video montage of all the references to hand jobs in the movie Rushmore. If you’ve never seen that movie, then see it.  If you haven’t, then this may be a bit of a spoiler, but I think you’ll find it entertaining.  It’s only a tiny bit of the overall story, and everything’s completely out of context, anyway.  All that being said, enjoy the video.

Here’s another story from the Enigma Files, about the mysterious studio owner I knew in my late teens and early twenties.

Not long after the shooting incident,  a room opened up in the basement of the biggest music store in town, and Enigma jumped at the chance to rent it.  When they were negotiating the terms of the rental, the store’s owner told him that if any kind of disaster affected the store, Enigma would ‘totally be covered’ by the store’s insurance policy.  Enigma asked a few times if he could get that in writing, but the owner always waved his hand dismissively and told him, “Yeah, yeah. . .some other time.”   Enigma thought that was fine; what was the likelihood that anything would happen?  They could always figure it out some other time.  He would occasionally remind Owner about their deal, and Owner would always postpone.  I was there during a couple of those conversations, and I remember them well.  I knew Owner a bit, by association, and I had a friend or two who worked in the store.

Enigma had his studio in the basement for two or three years.  It was mostly electronic, which is to say that it was computer-based rather than tape-machine based.  That’s the norm these days, but in 1991, it was pretty rare.   He had a Mac Classic computer with a synthesizer or three connected to it, and that was how the majority of his projects were started.  If he needed to record drums or anything really big, he’d worked out a symbiotic deal with the drum teacher who rented the room next door.   He’d pull out his tape machine and mixer and run cables through the hall.  Here’s a picture of the studio at that time.  I’m the person in the middle, wearing the weird sweater.  My drummer friend Half-A-Bee (that’s an inside joke) is on the left, and Enigma is on the right.

It was much smaller than the other place, but the location was better, and he saw an instant jump in the number of clients that called on him.  That meant that he also called me more often to play on songs.  By then, my band had essentially broken up, but I had a bunch of songs of my own that I’d been working on, and I banked all the time I’d earned from working on all those other peoples’ sessions into my own blocks of studio time.

One thing about recording studios is that they usually have multiple projects going on simultaneously.  Large studios will sometimes be booked by record companies for weeks or months at a time, but most people these days are financing their projects themselves.   My current studio setup (otherwise known as my living room) puts Enigma’s to shame, and I can spend as long as I like working on songs, for only the price of the equipment.  Back in 1991, however, even the ancient Mac in the picture would have cost a couple thousand dollars.  It was all pretty state-of-the-art back then, and Enigma had lots of people working with him.

My ‘day’ job at the time was the night clerk at a video store.  That was one of my favorite jobs, and I worked there for quite a while.  One afternoon, my co-workers and I heard an unusual number of fire and police sirens racing across town.  We looked out the window and saw a huge plume of smoke rising from the direction of downtown.  We asked the customers as they entered the store if they knew what had happened, and someone was finally able to tell us that the music store was on fire.  My blood turned to ice, and I grabbed the phone to warn Enigma, and to tell him to get over there.  He didn’t answer, but he got my message (he told me later) and raced downtown to hopefully salvage whatever he could.

As afternoon turned to evening, the fire raged at the limits of control, and it took the firefighters until almost dawn to extinguish it.  As soon as the surrounding roads were open, my friend and I drove downtown to survey the situation, and the smoldering remains of the building were pretty terrifying.  Enigma’s studio didn’t burn, but it was buried was under fifteen feet of sludgy water and charred debris.

Remembering their verbal agreement, Enigma tried desperately to contact the building’s owner, who was unreachable for days.  Once the water had subsided a bit, the police allowed Enigma to go to the basement and retrieve what he could.  Most of his stuff, including his tape machine, was completely destroyed, but he was actually able to salvage some of his gear.   He wrapped everything in black garbage bags and carted it to his mom’s living room, where it sat for months while he completely disassembled every piece and cleaned it up.  The computer actually came back to life, eventually, and the mixing board only needed some slight repairs.  Amazing.

After a week or two (if memory serves), he was finally able to track down the owner of the building, who had managed to conveniently forget about their permanently postponed contract.  I told Enigma that I remembered those conversations, and that I’d be happy to testify in court if it came to that.  The owner continued to balk, so Enigma had no other choice but to sue him.  He invited those of us with studio projects in the works to join in the lawsuit, so that we could also be compensated for the amount of time and money that we’d lost.  Some people only lost a song or two, but some of us lost a significant amount of music in that fire.  I had accumulated about three thousand dollars’ worth of studio time, and there was a hip-hop guy whose album was completely finished and ready to be sent to duplication.  Of all the studio’s clients, his loss was by far the most devastating.

The details of the case were these:  the owner had let an employee and some friends dink around in the store after it had closed for the day, and that employee had been smoking a cigarette while he was in there.  I don’t remember if the guy dropped the cigarette, or if he left it in a garbage can and thought he’d extinguished it, but the cigarette was thought to be the cause of the fire.  The police suspected arson, which seemed especially credible since the store owner skipped off to Florida with his two-million-dollar insurance settlement, and couldn’t be tracked down for the next few years, by which time our case had been dropped since the lawyers couldn’t find Owner.  I will go to my grave believing it was arson, because if it HAD been an accident, Owner would’ve been outraged (which he was not), and much more willing to fulfill his responsibilities to his various tenants.  As far as I’m concerned, foul play is the only thing that explains his bizarre behavior, and his unwillingness to deal with those of us who were left high and dry.  Not to mention the fact that the owner was able to salvage a great deal of his inventory and have a huge ‘fire sale’ a month or two later, so he recouped a sizable amount of that money as well.  Yakima’s online newspaper archive only goes back as far as 1997, unfortunately, so I wasn’t able to find this story, but I would really love to find out how they reported the story.

One funny thing about this story was our lawyer’s name.  It was the kind of name that only appears on cheesy TV shows.  I can’t tell you what it really was, since she’s still around and practicing law, but I can tell you that her name sounded like “Money Law.”   Isn’t that cute?

Every once in a while, I search for Enigma online, and I find him.  Sometimes I think it’d be nice to reconnect, but then I remember some of the weirdness, and I lose any motivation to contact him.  Best to let sleeping dogs lie, I’d say, in this particular case.

My last entry was about Enigma, the studio owner I knew back in my Yakima days, and I promised you a couple more stories about him. Well, now is as good a time as any, and I’m ready for one if you are.

After I’d spent a few nights recording my own songs, and Enigma saw that I could play a number of instruments, he started calling me in to play keyboards or guitar on sessions for other people. One of the people was a singer-songwriter who A) fancied himself the next Otis Redding (despite the fact that he was white and had difficulty singing in tune), and B) coincidentally enough, had the same name as my childhood optometrist. We also worked with a group of four guys who were modeling themselves after the New Kids on the Block. Ever the budding entrepreneur, Enigma had the brilliant idea of introducing WhiteOtis to the NewKids and creating a ‘supergroup’ of sorts, which he himself would manage. I was called in to help them write some songs. This relationship proved to be ill-fated, and everybody went back to what they’d been doing separately. Otis continued working on his solo project, “Do It,” which would be the first session work on my musical resumé.

One night, we were working on one of the songs for that album—I should really call it a ‘tape’, since calling it an ‘album’ makes it sound much more glamorous and legitimate than it was—and I invited a couple of my bandmates to the studio so that they could hear what Enigma and I were up to. We arrived early, and hung out with Enigma in the studio’s front office for ten minutes or so, until Otis arrived and we all made our way to the main room of the studio. Not more than a few minutes after we had moved to the main room, we heard a bunch of loud sounds that we assumed were firecrackers until we heard things hit the window and saw the curtains moving. It was then we realized were being shot at, and we ducked behind whatever cover we could find. Otis and I hid underneath the studio’s large mixing console, which was sitting on top of a sturdy wooden table. My two bandmates hid around the corner by the bathroom, while Enigma grabbed his shotgun and climbed up a ladder and into the crawlspace above the ceiling. He intended to climb up to the roof and survey the situation from there.

Otis and I were nearest to the phone, so I suggested that we call Nine-One-One and report what was going on. He lifted the receiver and made the call. “We’re being shot at,” he said tersely.

“Okay, where are you located?” the operator asked.

“Uhh. . .we’re kind of. . .on Lincoln and 26th. No, 24th—” He lowered the handset and whispered to me, What’s the address here?

I happened to know it (it was on 20th), so I whispered it to him. He relayed it to the operator, who said that the police were on their way. We thanked her and hung up.

After that, the shooting stopped, but the five of us stayed crouched and hidden until we saw the flashing red and blue lights of the police cars a few minutes later. Enigma had come down from the roof and joined us in the studio again, although he returned by way of a different route than he exited. He jumped down from the ceiling with his shotgun slung over his shoulder, and he tucked it behind his back as he peeked through the front door’s mail slot. “You might want to put that away,” I told him, gesturing at the huge gun.

“Oh, yeah,” he said, and returned it to its hiding place somewhere. While he was putting it away, the police called for us to come out with our hands up, and we walked single-file toward the door. I was the first one outside, and I was faced with the horrifying sight of four handguns pointed at me. I was told to put my hands on the car, and I did so immediately. My bandmates were the next in line, and they followed suit. Enigma was behind them, and he sauntered over to the car next to us. Otis was the last one out of the building, and he was just as calm and cool as can be. “It’s okay,” he said to the police, “we called YOU.” The guns were lowered and the officers came over to talk with us.

We told them what happened, to the best of our ability, and there were lots of rounds of ammunition strewn about on the ground outside the studio, which the police said were from a .22-caliber rifle. We showed them the holes in the windows and curtains, and even found a few rounds embedded in the desk and shelves near where we’d all been standing only minutes before. It was pretty scary, and I’ll never forget that experience. Here’s a picture of the building today, thanks to GoogleMaps.

I love that there’s a derelict shopping cart in the photo. I could have easily cropped it out or chosen a different angle, but why? The cart seems so apropos, somehow. Also, there used to be a row of tall, beautiful trees across the street from that building, but they’ve been cut down in favor of. . .a lawn for whatever business is located there now.

Anyway. That’s neither here nor there.

The full story came out as Otis was telling his story to the police. Otis and Enigma had been hanging out at the studio earlier that afternoon, when a group of four or five young guys came to the door and said, “Hey, we’re looking for [Otis Redding].”

“Yeah, that’s me,” he replied.

“Oh, uhhhh—” they stammered, “we were looking for the [Otis Redding] who went to Hick High School.” [For the record, I had recently graduated from Hick High School, and there was no one named Otis Redding.]

“No, I go to Redneck High School.”

“Okay, sorry to bother you guys.” They walked to their car and drove off.

Otis stood in the doorway and watched them leave, then turned back and said to Enigma, “That was kinda weird. Don’tcha think that was weird?”

Enigma agreed that it WAS weird, and Otis decided to go out and get some food (and, I suspect, to try and hunt down the group of guys), which is around the time that my bandmates and I arrived, unaware of that conversation. In retrospect, it seems that Otis had stolen a girl from one or more of the guys in question, and they were out for revenge. They knew he was a singer, and that he was working with Enigma, so he was easy enough to track down. The rest of us would have been collateral damage.

That was one of the strangest moments of my life. It was certainly the only time I’ve been shot at, as far as I know.

The shooting incident also scared Enigma into moving his studio to a more secure location, and when the biggest music store in town had an open room in its basement, Enigma jumped at the chance to move in. That’s the starting point for the story I’ll tell you next time on. . .The Enigma Files. Or something like that.

To be continued.