I’m at a party of some sort. I’m out of cigarettes, so I buy a carton off this middle eastern vending cart guy. They’re odd cigarettes, the carton packaging reminiscent of both British and Indian culture, as if the maker came about in pre-Ghandi India, an investment of a Raj. I open the carton, and there are a multitude of different sized packs, exterior wrappers, etc. This carton is hard to navigate.
I keep digging through the carton, opening different packs. Some are empty aside from paper filler, some have normal looking smokes, one package is cylindrical with many very narrow cigarettes inside. I pull on box from the carton, and it is wrapped in what I originally think is plastic, but I now discover is actually plastic sandwich bags with no small amount of cash in them. I now have odd cigs and a happy amount of cash.
I don’t know if someone explained it to me or if I remembered some bit of trivia, but it comes to me that this is normal. This cigarette company randomly puts cash in its cartons as a thank you to its customers. I just get a really good carton.
I want to tell some of my friends, but they’re all heading towards the windows outside of one of the rooms at the party. I follow. There are big windows in this room, so the view from outside is unobstructed, aside from the outdoor crowd in front of me, clamoring to see. The room is filled with lesbians. The funny thing is, virtually every one of the women weren’t doing anything to indicate that, I just know. Two of the women, however, are indicating all over the place. In a somewhat cinematic array of moves, these two women (while fully clothed) are kissing, touching, and flinging themselves passionately around the room from surface to surface, while the indoor lesbians cheer them on and the outdoor heterosexuals do the same. This keeps everyone’s interest for a few minutes.
Afterwards, I start to walk around to the front of the house, as do many others, to investigate the commotion that is rising out front. There are literally thousands of lesbians in the street and parking lot in front of the house (once again, I just know.), having something akin to a lesbian pride parade in the middle of the night. This keeps our attention for a while.
Then the black men show up. A large group of African-Americans, numbering as many as the lesbians, begin to approach the house. This is not a happy group. Although first instinct would be to link the activity to a million man march type of ideal, this group does not have the look of peaceful, yet serious, demonstrators approaching Washington. This group has some anger. This group looks like a photonegative of a Klan march, without the robes.
Interestingly enough, the lesbians seemed to be expecting it. They quietly, if unhappily, leave the area, not dawdling, not running either, just leaving efficiently. It’s as if this is a frequent occurrence, and everyone’s doing what had long ago been set down as the best thing, considering the circumstances.
The group of men arrive, but by now the lesbians are all gone. The men look quite let down, and begin to disperse, very slowly and with angry and displeased expressions.
Time to call it a night, I think to myself. Oddly enough, it turns out that I’m not only part of the party, I’m a cop, and I’m here with several other cops to keep an eye on the evening’s trouble between the two groups. Once again, it feels like a frequent occurrence. The other officers and I take a moment to relax, then begin to head home.
I’m walking to my car, and I’m talking with two other cops on the way to their cars. The feeling is very mid 90’s cop show. I’m telling them about my good luck with the money in the cigarette cartons, and they are half happy with me, half pissed that it didn’t happen to them. We approach our cars, and I freak out a little. If I’m a cop that just got out of a near violent situation unharmed, just won some cash, bragged about it to my friends, and I’m in a cop show, I do NOT want to start my car. My car will blow up. There is a bomb in my car.
I do an about face and head back toward the building. I’m crossing a small grassy area in the parking lot when a large SUV type vehicle tears into the lot and drives up on the grassy area, multiple headlights blazing. I fall to the ground, stay still. It’s six or eight of the men from group earlier, and they all have big guns. They don’t seem to notice me, but are instead looking up and forward at something (I assumed one of the two other cops I was with before). They say something to each other that I don’t hear, but they seem exasperated, as if they missed their intended target. They rev up to drive away, but before they do, one of the men eyes me, unsurprised to see me there, pulls a pistol (a Colt .45 actually) and shoots me in the gut.
Things get a little hazy here. Time goes funny. I feel like people come to help me, but they apparently don’t, because I’m still there. My breathing is terribly shallow, but it seems to be working and I’m not in any pain. But I can’t seem to move. Time stays funny.
My sister calls. I guess I answer my cell phone, but I’m still on the grass, not moving, as far as I can tell. By now it’s morning. She says hi, wants to talk about nothing in particular. “I’ve been shot,” I say, but not really, because my mouth isn’t moving. It’s dry, the tongue is still and pressed forward and out a bit so the sides are poking out a bit between my teeth (like I would bite my tongue a little on both sides if I pressed down), and my jaw is locked open, my front teeth about a half inch opening in the front. You could feed me a grape in the space.
“I’ve been shot.” My sister doesn’t listen, she just talks as if I’m being a little unreasonable and silly. “I’ve been shot,” I say for the third time. She gets tired of the conversation, hangs up. With the click of the phone, everything goes black, hard black, like a TV going off, but for five senses. There’s nothing, and I hear myself say “Where Did Weather Go?” I’m genuinely upset.
I hear a voice say “Hey Lee Hey Lee Hey Lee.”
At this point, I woke the hell up, genuinely terrified. I have never heard anything like that voice in my life. The closest thing I can equate it to is that it’s what it would sound like if the Devil spoke to you through one of those voice box synthesizers that they give to people who’ve had their voice boxes removed.
I was awake at this point, but still in that terror haze that comes after a nightmare. I was genuinely concerned that I was dead. I wanted a cigarette very badly, but I was out, so I had to go to my car to get another pack, but I was scared to open the door and see nothing outside. I opened it nonetheless. The outside was still there, but everything was that funny pre-dawn color, so that didn’t help all that much. I got my cigarettes and went the hell back inside.
I lit up, took a drag, and realized that I hadn’t seen any people of moving cars outside. I decided that turning on the TV would help. It started on a channel that was blank, so that freaked me out a little, but I got to C-Span (I needed something that was live, tapes programming wasn’t gonna do it) and calmed down a little.
At this point, I’ve been up and writing for about a half an hour. The waning terror and the fact that I didn’t get enough sleep are urging me back toward the bed, but I might leave C-Span on for the comforting noise. The only concern at this point is that I haven’t seen another flesh and blood person yet, but I’ll go get some breakfast after I get back up and take care of that problem.
I honestly never want to hear that voice again, either in real life or in my dreams.