Hooligans

BAD DREAMS

I had the dream again that night. The first time in four or five years. It had been so long I had

forgotten it. It had started a year after I got back from Nam. 1 understand that‟s normal, It‟s called

delayed nocturnal shock or something like that. At first it was just this one persistent dream. I could

never remember all of it, just bits and pieces. After a while it was such a familiar nightmare that I

knew I was dreaming and it didn‟t bother me as much.

Then it changed.

The way it starts, I am in a hang glider soaring over a city. It could be Saigon, but I don‟t recognize it.

Suddenly people on the ground are shooting at me. I can‟t see them, but the bullets are tearing through

the wings of the glider. Next the bullets are hitting me. They bounce off as if my skin were bulletproof.

I don‟t feel the bullets. I don‟t feel anything. I don‟t hear anything either. „This is a silent dream. The

next thing I remember, I see Teddy. He is on top of a ridge and he‟s running. I don‟t know what he‟s

running from. Maybe he‟s running toward something. He starts waving at me. I try to soar down to

pick him up, but the glider won‟t move up or down. Teddy starts screaming at me, this soundless

scream. I feel desperate to get to him. Finally I get out of the seat of the glider and I hang over the side

and let go and I fall. There‟s no ground, just me, falling through an empty space.

Then I wake up.

After a while it began to get more complicated, after I got used to it and it didn‟t bother me anymore.

There were other hang gliders trying to collide with me. The other gliders were black and the pilots

were all masked. It was like an obstacle course in the sky. Before I got comfortable with that version,

the people in the other gliders started taking off their masks. One was my mother. Another was a fifthgrade schoolteacher whom I had not see or thought about for fifteen years. Another was my father,

only a face in a photograph to me. Then the parish priest in the New Jersey town where I was born. I

couldn‟t remember his name; all I could remember about him was that he had “silent collections”—

that meant folding money, no silver. It used to make me angry. And there was also a captain named

Grant, a martinet Teddy and I had served under in Nam when we were still second lieutenants.

They were all yelling at me, but of course I couldn‟t hear anything. It was a silent horror movie that

never ended.

A couple of years later, when I was working the street in San Francisco, I became friendly with

another patrolman who had served in Nam. His name was Winfield. He was a black guy and he was

taking college courses in psychology because he thought it would help him make detective.

One night over too many beers we started talking about dreams, so I told him mine and he gave me a

nickel‟s worth of Psychology 101:

“Your values are all fucked up, Jake. One thing is, you think you‟re different. Shit, join the club. I

figure it like this: it was one way here, the other way over there, okay? You get a lot of guilt over such

shit. Gets so you‟re afraid to trust anybody because you don‟t want them to find out. It happened to us

all, man. What you do, see, you decide what makes sense to you. Settle for that and fuck everything

else.”

After that we talked a lot. The dreams got fewer and farther between. Finally they stopped.

That night in Doomstown I had the dream again, only this time it wasn‟t Teddy running on the ridge.

It was Franco Tagliani.

17