The Forbidden Dance
They are pushing and shaking the old caddy, made of angles ‘cause it’s from the old days.
They are Arabs or Mexicans. I am not a racist. It’s dark and there is loud music coming from that hotel that men live in.
They are shaking the car and I see a man inside, who is not moving.
The mix of anger and joy in the three more-Mexican guys and one more-Arab woman’s face is found mainly in riots. The stillness of the man in the car is that of the policeman who took the wrong turn on the night of the uprising.
He’s actually a head.
Because it is very loud, and I am in a light-based reality, he is just a head.
It’s the head of Harry Dean Stanton. Pickled. Then mummified. Then put in the trash because that didn’t work. But then they found they had no other heads. “What? Do you idiots even know how hard it was to get the head of Harry Stanton?” So then they go and find it and frankly it hasn’t got better. They bring it back. It ends up in this car.
If all this talk of Harry Dean Stanton has thrown you – perhaps you don’t know the actor in question – just imagine instead a regular man who for his whole life was told that smoking cigarettes was food and who found out the truth about an hour ago.
But he is just a head now. And around his brow, and looped at the base of his neck, are LED Christmas lights of many colors. In fact not Christmas: Fiesta. If I had to guess, and I think I do, I would say he festooned them himself. They do not generate the intense white light that holds his face. I can’t locate the source of that miracle.
I get closer and a new sound comes to the front. I think it is coming from the car, like a novelty horn. It is a digital arrangement. But it is still the lambada. The forbidden dance.
I almost knock over their child, who is 2 feet tall and with a towel tied around her head and who suddenly jumped out. I don’t touch her. I touch no one. The whole little puzzle goes behind my head, where it belongs.
[a sketch of something I saw tonight]
This is, wow, bloody brilliant.
I’m always one step two steps behind you two! But at least I am there somewhere.
this is, wow, pretentious
ah found it. knew I’d read this one. Brilliant. I liked it more the second time as well.