It's just past the noon hour here at the Carrillo dash Scott household and instead of doing something productive, like say, cleaning up the twenty thousand metric tonnes of dog shit piling up in the back yard, installing new carpet in the rumpus room or clearing out the lint trap attached to the otherwise automatic electronic clothes-dryer in the utility room, Mr. Carrillo is staring at a twenty-six inch flat screen monitor and listening to his prized copy of an album called The Doughnut in Granny's Greenhouse.
Being a steadfast devotee of the arcane and impossible to fully satisfy cult of mañana, whilst also being vaguely aware of the fact that daylight savings time does not end until next weekend, Rudolfo Carrillo, as he is known to both friends and enemies alike, is sure he has plenty of time to make good on all those chores and many more.
In the meantime, he seems quizzically bemused at the technical innovations available to him in the early twenty-first century; intricate and thermionic complexities which have allowed him to extract previously recorded musical data from a circular piece of vinyl which spins around and around, distributing its aural output into a complex series of tiny circuits through a thin black cable that ends in something described by his fellow humans as a USB port.
He smiles wanly as his keenly developed eye hand coordination lead him to his favorite vector game site and thinks to himself, as level three of Tempest loads, that he wishes he could come up with something to write about.
This primitive and constant urge is satisfied when he recalls - for no other reason than the black and bitter coffee he drinks too much of finally trips the so-called imaginative circuits embedded in his fatty gray matter - the dreams he had last night.
Since they all had something or other to do with Albuquerque and have a persistent vividness which draws his attention away from the bright and tunnel-like vortex arrayed in front of him, he decides to describe them to anyone willing to read what may be best described as the ravings of caffeine-addled constructor of pastiches and literary homages.
En el primero sueño, Carrillo's twin appears magically in his driveway, driving a VW microbus painted with psychedelic colors and peace signs. Listen, his brother tells him confidently, I have joined a Mexican drug cartel and have every intention of rising to the top. Flashing and fiddling with some sort of plastic raygun, Albino urges his brother to join in on the fun.
Rudolfo proceeds to sit in the passenger seat of the gasoline-powered hippie transportation device and asks if he can have a raygun too. Instead he is handed a black metallic rod which his brother tells him is a bullet-throwing atlatl.
As they drive off towards the south valley, Carrillo is informed that his fellow writer and sibling's close friend, Jefferson Adams, has been kidnapped by a rival gang and is being held in a vat of ice cubes somewhere along Isleta boulevard. It will be his job to rescue the poet.
Though he protests and reminds his doppleganger that they are all straight-edge punks, the van soon pulls up in front of dilapidated house near the interstate. A man carrying a large TV set and smelling of burnt rope emerges from the building. Carrillo exits the vehicle and his brother shouts at him not to worry, it will be just like that Johnny Depp movie. Inside, Jefferson has been buried up to his neck in ice cubes and Rudolfo uses a complex series of pulleys and ropes to extract him.
Just then, back in reality, the nightly hot-refueling procedures begin at KAFB and momentarily awaken Rudolfo Carrillo, who shakes his head and says out loud, I hope we got home safely.
En el segundo sueño, unknown architects have built an enormous skyscraper on the corner of Tramway and Montgomery; our author is offered a complementary tour of the facility. There is a fountain within the edifice and it is surrounded by dozens of glass elevators. Carrillo randomly chooses one and is transported to the one hundred and thirty-seventh floor. Once there, he is confronted with a group of strangers who are preparing for Halloween and are frustrated that he has been absent through the pumpkin carving portion of their holiday activities. Everything on the one hundred and thirty-seventh floor is painted in pale green and he thinks this has something to do with the passage of summer.
After having a lengthy discussion with an elderly, mustashioed man about the selfsame principles, leaves begin floating and drifting through floor 137. The old man begins crying and grasping at the leaves, just as the telephone rings in reality.
It is a wrong number, Carrillo cusses in Spanish at the unknown caller, then drifts off again.
En el tercero sueño, Rudolfo Carrillo finds himself going through the cafeteria line at the student union building on the campus of the University of New Mexico. He wonders what happened to the Sonic and Saggio's but then remembers that he must have gone back in time, to the late nineteen eighties. Eschewing the greasy pork sausage patties, he instead chooses two pancakes and cup of chocolate pudding, then wanders over to a table where Exene Cervenka is sitting.
She asks if he would mind running the sound board at her concert that evening; the next thing you know, the two are driving towards downtown Albuquerque in a black soviet automobile that was manufactured specifically with communist party members in mind.
Downtown Burque is, for some inexplicable reason, unpaved and rivulets of muddy water appear at every intersection the two cross. At one of the watery crossings, hundreds of oversized tadpoles frolic at the stream's edge. The punk rock singer winks at Rudolfo and leads him into a ornate apartment across the street from Maisel's Indian Jewelry. On a cupboard in the kitchen, he recognizes his Blackberry and it is buzzing like a fridge.
Picking up the telephonic communications device with his right hand, he notices a new text message. It is from his partner, Samantha Anne. All it says is this: don't forget to pick up some toilet paper on the way home.
At this point in time, the rosy fingers of dawn begin streaming through Herr Carrillo's bedroom window, causing him to rise and say to no one in particular: Man I better get on those chores.
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