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Show -249 the last of a nightful of dreams I found myself back in Los Angeles hunting for Jenny, but, dreams having their own logic, it was Jenny Prudhomme I was looking for. I drove down one canyon after another in Wayne Thorneberry's yellow truck, with artificial flowers taped to the fenders and white pompoms tied to the boom and ladder; that old loosely-built machine banged and clanged over the bumps, the engine popped and wheezed, the gears ground out their own tune. In my dream I was a noisy spectacle but down those dark canyons there was nobody but myself to hear. By one of those inexplicable shifts in time and place possible only in dreams or in those dreamy novels my brother Jacob used to like, I was on foot in a part of the city I'd never seen before. I knew I couldn't be too far from the ocean-under the geranium-smell of the car exhausts was another sharper healthier flavor, the inky iodine smell of the sea. I could tell it was very late at night by the position of the stars (in my dreams I can do things I only dream of when I'm awake) but nevertheless the streets were full of hurrying people. I looked at the buildings and noted without surprise that my friend Hubert Fantom had succeeded in life. Across the street from me was Hubert's Delicatessen; next to it Fantom's Furniture opened a glassy window on the sidewalk; beyond that was a monumental supermarket with a blue neon sign: H & F Groceries. I paused |
