...
He's asking me if I forgot to write down the lipsticks I took, four neutral and one other color, and I'm all immediately guilty except I'm not confessing. He accepts my denial and we go over to where Billy's trying different styles of those goofy headlamps they put on the top of truck cabs, and I'm telling him, no, I just want the cheapest normal kind. He comes back with them. They attach like a belt, like a saddle girth. Big wide white one with a blue stripe down the middle.
My brand new pickup is blue, too. I want to get in it for a test drive. I'm in there rifling around to cover anywhere those stolen lipsticks might show, but now I have to drive it, too, to make it seem as though nothing is wrong. It's night. It's Novato. The cops are looking at me funny as I'm backing my truck down a long side strip of their stupid little parking strips between the shops and the main road.
I stop at a big pasture gate and go in to visit Duke and then go back to the hardware store that sells Christian Dior lipsticks and fixes trucks. Scott's there, Scott's now either my attorney or the owner of the store and I'm trying to work up the moxie to tell him about the lipsticks, but then I'm back out in Duke's pasture with Trish, who's gotten herself in some sort of scrape, not able to deal with Duke.
I handle it for her, get it all straightened out, and then I see her through a tiny gap in the hedgerow, like looking the wrong way through a telescope, and she's walking off into the sunset with her daughter, away from me.
Then I was awakened by a chainsaw and jackhammer, all freaked that I would dream I'd stolen lipsticks from a friend, and then wouldn't even come clean about it... that the buddhas would be disgusted with me. Look. I tried it a few times when I was very young and it was no good. Felt horrific. I couldn't even keep the items because the remorse was much stronger than the coveting, and I don't know why I was so goddam guilty of theft in this dream, but... I didn't do it!
always and any time....
