A Place at the Table
Today, I’d like to talk about a dream I once had. Or, maybe it wasn’t really a dream. Maybe it was just something I imagined, but have thought about so many times over the years that it now feels like it had been a dream. I don’t know.
Anyway, in this dream that I once had, or imagined I had, I am walking alongside a highway that runs straight through a white desert. When the dream begins, I know, in that dream way of knowing, that I have been walking a very long time and have seen nothing for many hundreds of miles.
After I have walked for some ways, I come across a round table standing on the side of the road. Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Philip K. Dick, and Cormac McCarthy are all sitting at the table, passing around bottles of beer and liquor, talking boisterously and laughing amongst each other. But all at once they fall dead silent as I approach, and turn their heads to look at me.
I notice that there is a single empty chair at the table and ask if I can sit.
They exchange glances amongst each other, all of them grinning, except for Hemingway who bores into me with his eyes. “You’ve still got a long walk ahead of you,” Hemingway says. “A long, hard walk ahead of you.”
Hunter chuckles. Bukowski gulps down some beer before he busts up laughing and spraying suds all over McCarthy who just laughs.
“But I want to sit down here with you,” I say.
Bukowski nods towards the horizon. “Then you better get walking, baby,” he says.
They all laugh and start talking amongst each other again. Their voices turn to shouting and they shove each other around, trying to knock each other off their chairs. I can’t understand what they’re saying, anymore. They’re using some language that I’ve never heard before. I wait a bit longer, hoping they’re just putting me on, but they ignore me, so I turn around and walk away.
After I’ve made it a few feet, Hunter calls out, “Hey, kid!” I turn to face him.
Hunter speaks around his cigarette holder as he screws a smoke into it. “Remember, doing it isn’t enough,” he says. “Any asshole can do it. But doing it your way…that takes some fucking grit.” The other writers nod solemnly at each other before returning to their wild, unintelligible conversation.
I turn around and walk away. With telescopic eyes I see that the road continues for vast miles ahead, and I know in that dream way of knowing things that nothing, not a single thing, about my future is guaranteed. Even an end to the highway is uncertain. It could very well continue forever, and my journey might never stop until I finally drop dead in the sun on the roadside. Knowing all that, I just keep walking.
It’s been almost five years since I had that dream, or first imagined that I had that dream. All this time later, I’m still walking alongside that highway in the desert. Some days, and lately most days, all I have to keep me going is the memory of that dream. I have no idea how many miles still lie ahead of me. I gave up hope a long time ago that things would ever get easy.
All that keeps me going is this idea of coming across that table in the desert again, seeing Jack Kerouac kick the empty chair out from the table and nod for me to take a seat, sitting down between Charles Bukowski and Cormac McCarthy, and knowing that I have the fucking grit to belong among them.
