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f l i g h t i n t o e g y p t
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E D B A R R E T T
I saw former Red Sox pitcher Bill "The Spaceman" Lee take something from a dumpster in
front of the Corbett house. "Watch it!" said Lee, "dreams are not hard science like
colonoscopy and laser hair removal-dreams don't even know your name, Mr. Wally Cox,
and therefore they come to you but could just as easily visit someone else when all
you wanted was to have your head patted like a child. And I am Bill Lee, making a
voodoo doll of Carl Yazstremski whose dream came to me by mistake and said Yaz was
living in the Corbett house, upstairs under the eaves." "Is Bill moving?" I asked,
"What's he need a dumpster for, anyway?" "Ask him yourself, here he comes," shouted
Bill Lee as he ran down Columbus Avenue, sideways like a crab. "Bill, I don't
understand, what is this all about?" "Dreams," snarled Corbett, "Who the hell is Bill
Lee to talk about dreams!" And we walked into his study which was filled with
life-size voodoo dolls of Bill Lee, each wearing a different set of legs: deer legs,
grasshopper legs, rat's feet, and still twitching in the corner, a doll with legs of a
blue-claw crab taken from the Gowanus Canal when Bill was visiting Brooklyn where the
crab population, long crushed under the weight of pollution, now floats and copulates
in the currents around Brooklyn like a blue halo. "Dreams know your name, Ed Cullen
Bryant, like a real estate agent knows a price. Through my black art I torment Bill
Lee with more sets of legs climbing up on him than some of the poor souls who once
worked as prostitutes on Columbus Avenue. But now Boston has these dumpsters where
our true past, which is unclaimed dreams, gets shoveled out each morning!" And Bill
kicked the side of the dumpster so hard some trash spilled out revealing a child's
Burger King paper crown from a lost day in the lost life of the nameless real, its
gold paper glistening in the sun. Just then the soul of John Wieners stood beside us
and when he picked up the Burger King crown and set it on his courtly brow, you could
see it wasn't paper at all, but the live body of a blue-claw crab, its shell
delicately balancing on top of John's bald spot, its legs in the air like a Boston
prostitute, and in each of its needley pincers a birthday candle glowing in the blue
smoke of the Virgin Mary's cigarette.
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