The Night Revel

Car trouble at night in an unfamiliar town. I’m lucky to find a mechanic. He’s a very accommodating, a black man in his 30s, someone who clearly takes customer service seriously and works hard to run a good business. In appearance and personality he reminds me of Rudy, the mechanic who did all the initial mechanical work on my 1996 Toyota 4-Runner I bought off the street in Brooklyn, when I needed a vehicle to move back to Missouri with. I liked Rudy, but he turned out to be unreliable and a big problem, like the mechanic in this dream. So I’ll call this night mechanic Rudy.

He fixed my car, but before I could pay him and leave, an after-hours crowd came filtering in, all men, spreading out across Rudy’s grounds. The repair shop was an outdoor space, with a gully serving as the mechanic’s pit. Equipment and half-repaired vehicles were situated all about, angled however the uneven terrain permitted. A party or a number of parties got underway.

There were men of all ages and types scattered about the place, from down-and-outers to business people, lurching happily this way and that in the semi-dark. Rudy’s junkyard was lit only scattered shop lamps, the illuminated panels and indicator lights of equipment, and what little light filtered onto the place from streetlights and buildings in the distance. It was a misty kind of light, punctuated by the slivers and glints of light on car bodies and other metal surfaces, and by the wet, black shine of oily dirt.

People started doing drugs, Rudy included. There were twist-open vials of various sizes and denominations everywhere, empty ones and full ones, all over Rudy’s work surfaces and floors. I was invited to join in, but I saw  it was madness. I asked Rudy to close out our transaction so I could get going, and he took action to do just that. But he was too high to do it right. He was laughing and stumbling around like all the others. Several times I almost had the invoice in my hand, and my debit card ready to present, when some partier would bowl through bumping into everything, and knock the invoice to the floor. Or Rudy would stumble and slide away to some other part of the interior landscape. It was very maddening. But hilarious for everyone but me.

Then someone injected me with a drug. It was meant as a sociable prank, an attempt to help the new guy loosen up and enjoy himself. Rudy realized before I did what his guest had done, and blubbered an apology. He mustered a shred of sanity, tried to address the problem immediately: he had a drug somewhere that would counteract the drug I’d been given. He fumbled and squinted at dozens of vials, finally found what he wanted, a small plastic snap case of little tubes, very like the plastic cases of drill bits you can buy. I injected the first dose of antidote, a little twist-open needle like the lances I use to test my blood sugar, and tried again to pay my bill. But Rudy was a mess. He slipped on something and was carried away laughing, sliding down a chute of oily dirt like a kid on snow, shouting he would be right back.

The partiers were rollicking all over the place, falling and getting up, falling again, weaving among the gullies and cars and equipment in a conga line of disaster, one person after another falling on his back and curving away downhill. It was much like that scene in the John Wayne movie McClintock, where the whole town is fighting on top of a muddy clay mine, people constantly taking pratfalls and sliding comically into the watery pit.

During this drugged-out chaos, my container of antidote got knocked from my hands. I searched the work surface of a tool chest that was right there, got on my hands and knees and searched the floor. But there were so many vials everywhere, different sizes and different drugs, that it was hopeless. And then someone who was trying to jab himself with another dose lost his footing, swung his arms wildly, and jabbed me instead.

I had only meant to pass through this city of fools very quickly. All I still wanted was to get home to my family. But now I was full of drugs and apparently trapped in a midnight revel of drug lovers. My mechanic was a swell fellow, all the partiers seemed full of bonhomie, but their drug addiction made them heedless, hazardous and apparently inescapable. It was miserable and increasingly scary. This merriment of kind, unselfish strangers who meant me no harm might be the death of me.