Gup, Spiders, & What Might Be Next…
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I screamed out and Aimee shook me awake, saying, “No, no, it’s nothing, babe, just a spider dream.” I was then struck by the odor of Mr. Clean or Clorox or something strong like that, and as I swept the curtains to the side so light could get back into our room, we enjoyed the orangey-yellow-rusty-rouged-fat-pinkish-raspberry circle of the sun rising. We were seduced by the white-capped seas and again three tow-headed triplets playing Nerf soccer outside with their topless, bouncing mother on the dune grass.
“She doesn’t get the message, huh?” Aimee asked. “Is it her youth, perhaps?”
“Possibly,” I said. “She wants a response, but we’ll snub her.”
“Sometimes you say just the right thing,” Aimee said, and so we left the kids and their carefree mom and visited the Pilgrim Monument, otherwise called the Provincetown Tower, which stands over 253 feet tall. “Maybe the Rolling Stones once used the tower as an inspiration for a phallic prop for their stadium concerts in the seventies and eighties and well into infinity, save for the tragic loss last year of drummer, Charlie Watts.”
“He died at eighty-years-old,” I said. “One of the best rock drummers ever, and a spiffy dresser at that.”
“They’re touring again, The Stones,” Aimee said. “With a new drummer, Steve Jordan, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards, and a new album called Hackneyed Diamonds.”
“Ron Wood is the other key piece of their puzzle,” I said. “Each uniquely amazing.”
Aimee and I were exhausted after we’d climbed the tower – which was no simple feat. There were 115 steps, and our calves and thighs burned with the exertion. We collapsed onto a bench around the Town Hall when we were finished and drank Root Beer floats and had chocolate-marshmallow fudge and enormous, multi-colored lollipops. As we had climbed, a skinny female behind us in the tower described a village in Tibet she’d seen filled with monks draped in saffron, and a sizable jade statue of Buddha.
“People came from all around to witness that statue,” one of them said to Aimee.
“The saffron and jade were sacred,” she said. “To us, at least.”
I hadn’t heard much in my life about jade Buddhas but once I read about a best-selling American poet seducing a sexy junior from Wellesley College to shower and sleep with him three times a day during a summer writing conference, or to help him pen sexy verse for a muse in his next collection. I’d also heard of yet another JFK lover, this time a memoir from a ballet dancer from Greenwich who’d told her friends everything that had gone down upstairs in the White House.
“Massive amounts of sex,” she wrote. “I still can’t recall all of it.”
One last aspect of my dream involved these huge muddy boots - they were orange to bright yellow to magenta to olive to indigo to black to pink to violet to lime-green to a more of a forest shade. Everyone got swept away by the appeal of those damn boots; there were Wellington Boots going once, twice, and leather L.L. Bean boots or suede or faux-fur UGG’s or even experimental Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil boots by Prada or faux-alligator shoes by Hermes, and they sold everywhere from Kohl’s to Macy’s Department Store to Ralph Lauren to TJ MAX and they even had a few pairs left at The Dollar Store in town.