Dreams

On the winding two-lane blacktop, Michelle Templeton handled the Mustang with an expertise that Antonio Ricci admired, but she drove too fast.

“You’ve got a heavy foot,” Antonio says.

Michelle grins at her beau.. “Better than a big butt.”

“You’ll get us killed.”

“Mom has rules about being late for dinner.”

“Being late is better than being dead for dinner.”

“You’ve never met my mom. She’s hell on rules.”

“So is the highway patrol.”

Michelle laughs. “Sometimes you sound just like her.”

Bracing himself as Michelle takes a curve too fast, Antonio says, “Well, one of us has to be a responsible adult.”

“Sometimes I can’t believe you’re only a year older than me,” Michelle says affectionately. “Twenty-three, huh? You sure you’re not a hundred and twenty-three?”

“I’m ancient,” Antonio says flatly. They had left New Brunswick under a hard blue sky, taking a four-day break from classes at Rutgers University, where they would eventually earn master’s degrees in elementary education. From New Brunswick, Michelle had followed Interstate 95 through Philadelphia and across and through the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel .Now, in the gold-and-crimson sunset, scattered clouds burned in the sky, and the countryside unrolls like a radiant tapestry. Michelle had departed the main road in favor of a scenic route; however, she drove so fast that Antonio was seldom able to take his eyes off the highway to enjoy the scenery.

“Man, I love speed,” Michelle says.

“I hate it.”

“I like to move, streak, fly. Hey, maybe I was a gazelle in a previous life. You think?”

Antonio looks at the speedometer and grimaces. “Yeah, maybe a gazelle or a madwoman locked away in Bedlam.”

“Or a cheetah. Cheetahs are really fast.”

“Yeah, a cheetah, and one day you were chasing your prey and ran straight off the edge of a cliff at full tilt. You were the Wile E. Coyote of cheetahs.”

“I’m a good driver, Antonio.”

“I know.’

“Then relax.”

“I can’t. You’re lucky I let you drive. You know how much I hate not being in control.”

Michelle sighed with fake exasperation. “Do you ever relax?”

“When I sleep,” Antonio says, and he nearly jams his feet through the floorboards as the Mustang takes a wide curve at high speed. Instead, Michelle effortlessly holds the Mustang to the pavement. The car sweeps out of the curve and up a long incline.

“I bet you even worry in your sleep,” Michelle deadpans.

“Well, sooner or later, in every dream there’s a boogeyman. You’ve got to be on the lookout for him.”

“I have lots of dreams without boogeymen,” Michelle says. “I have wonderful dreams.”

“Getting shot out of a cannon?”

“That would be fun. No, but sometimes I dream that I can fly. I’m always naked and just floating or swooping along fifty feet above the ground, over telephone lines, across fields of bright flowers, over treetops. So free. People look up and smile and wave. They’re so delighted to see that I can fly, so happy for me. And sometimes I’m with this beautiful guy, lean and muscular, with a mane of golden hair and lovely green eyes that look all the way through me to my soul, and we’re making love in midair, drifting up there, and I’m having spectacular orgasms, one after another, floating through sunshine with flowers below and birds swooping overhead, birds with these gorgeous iridescent-blue wings and singing the most fantastic birdsongs you ever heard, and I feel as if I’m full of dazzling light, just a creature of light, and like I’m going to explode, such an energy, explode and form a whole new universe and be the universe and live forever. You ever have a dream like that?”

Antonio had finally taken his eyes off the onrushing blacktop. He stared in blank-faced astonishment at Michelle. Finally he says, “No.”

Glancing away from the two-lane, Michelle said, “Really? You never had a dream like that?”

“Never.”

“I have lots of dreams like that.”

“There’s something wrong with you. Could you keep your eyes on the road?”

Michelle looks at the highway and says, “Alright. Alright.” She knows she’s hit a bit of a sore spot. She drives in silence while Antonio sits and broods.
_______________________________________________________________

Antonio Ricci is now sitting in what appears to be some kind of recreation room. He sits upon a brown leather couch and a red felt pool table can be seen in the background behind him. Ricci himself sits wearing a pair on black jeans and a fitted black t-shirt.

“Normally, when I prepare for a match, I immerse myself in my subject matter. I like to find and pick apart the little nuances of my opponents. With Magdalena Lockheart, there is no need for me to do that. I know Maggie. I breathe Maggie.I live Maggie. As for Lex Collins, I’ve watched him. I’ve studied him. I’ve beaten him. The wild card here is Don Tirri, but I will touch upon that later. The reason I have forgone my usual preparations is because I want to talk with all of you about something.”

Ricci reaches forward and grabs a navy blue coffee cup. He takes a sip then carefully places the cup down on the coaster in front of him.

“I was talking with a friend of mine the other day about dreams. People have different dreams. For some, like Don Tirri, they dream in gold, adorning himself in titles and championships. If that is how you want to measure your success, old man, you go ahead and do that.”

“What makes me different is I don’t dream. I remember. When I “dream” there’s always a threat. Every so often, I am cast back in memory to an incident that I had long tried unsuccessfully to forget: Still, this memory molded me, turned me into the man I am today. fourteen years ago, on a lonely Florida highway…” Ricci’s voice trails off for a bit while the memory comes back to him. His eyes glaze over. Ricci might actually be holding back tears. He looks off, as though the entire scenario is playing out, once again, in front of his eyes.

“Maybe we were in the Everglades, maybe not … but the land was swampy like the ‘Glades. There weren’t many trees, and the few you could see were hung with Spanish moss. Everything was flat as far as you could see, lots of sky and flatness, the sunlight red and fading like now, a back road somewhere, far away from anything, very rural, two narrow lanes, so damn empty and lonely. I had been with my egg donor and a man named Carey Murray, a Key West drug dealer and gunrunner with whom we had lived now and then, usually for a month or two at a time, during my childhood. The man’s name literally meant ‘Black Lord’, which I guess should have been a sign.We were on… I guess you could call it a business trip and had been returning to the Keys in Murray’s vintage red Cadillac, one of those models with massive tailfins and with what seemed to be five tons of chrome grillwork. Murray was driving fast on that straight highway, exceeding a hundred miles an hour at times. We hadn’t encountered another car for almost fifteen minutes before we roared up behind an elderly couple in a tan Mercedes. The woman was driving. Close-cropped silver hair. Seventy five at least. She was doing forty miles an hour. Murray… he could have pulled around the Mercedes. We were in a passing zone, and there was no traffic in sight for miles. But he was high on something,”

“Not like that was a surprise. He was most of the time high on something. Maybe it was cocaine that day. I don’t know. Don’t remember. Don’t care. He was drinking too. They were both drinking, him and my mother. They had a cooler full of ice. Bottles of grapefruit juice and vodka. The old lady in the Mercedes was driving really slow, and that incensed Murray. He wasn’t rational. He was coked out of his gourd. What did it matter to him? He could’ve pulled around her. But the sight of her driving so slow on the wide-open highway infuriated him. I mean, really pissed him the hell off. Drugs and booze, that’s all. So irrational. When he was angry … red-faced, arteries throbbing in his neck, jaw muscles bulging. No one could get angry quite as totally as Carey Murray. His rage excited my mother. Always excited her. So she teased him, encouraged him. I was in the backseat, hanging on tight, pleading with her to stop, but she kept at him.”

Ricci is completely zoned out, as though he was having an out-of-body experience.

“For a while, Murray had hung close behind the other car, blowing his horn at the elderly couple, trying to force them to go faster. A few times he had nudged the rear bumper of the Mercedes with the front bumper of the Cadillac, metal kissing metal with an ear piercing squeal. Eventually the old woman got rattled and began to swerve erratically, afraid to go faster with Murray… so close behind her but too frightened of him to pull off the road and let him pass by. Of course, he wouldn’t have gone past and left her alone. That’s not who he was under normal circumstances. By then he was too psychotic. He would have stopped when she stopped. It still would have ended badly.”

“Murray had pulled alongside the Mercedes a few times, driving in the wrong lane, shouting and shaking his fist at the white-haired couple, who first tried to ignore him and then stared back wide-eyed and fearful. Each time, rather than drive by and leave them in his dust, he had dropped behind again to play tag with their rear bumper. To Murray, in his drug fever and alcoholic haze, this harassment was no game.It was deadly serious business, with an importance and a meaning that could never be understood by anyone who was clean and sober.”

“To my mother, it was all a game, an adventure. In her ceaseless search for excitement, she says to him, “Why don’t we give her a driving test?? Murray says, “Test? I don’t need to give the old bitch a test to see she can’t drive for shit.” This time, as Murray pulled beside the Mercedes, matching speeds with it, my mother, in all her infinite wisdom, says. “I mean, see if she can keep it on the road. Make it a challenge for her.”

Ricci still sits staring forward intensely. He is rocking slowly back and forth, unaware of his own actions.

“There was a canal parallel to the road, one of those drainage channels you see along some Florida highways. Not deep but deep enough. Murray used the Cadillac to crowd the Mercedes onto the shoulder of the road. The woman should have crowded him back, forced him the other way. But, she wasn’t that kind of person. In this world, you are either the predator and the prey. This woman, she would definitely not qualify as a predator. She should have tramped the pedal to the floor and pegged the speedometer and gotten the hell out of there. She was driving a Mercedes. She could have… would’ve outrun the Cadillac, no problem. But she was old and scared, and she’d never in her life encountered anyone like this. I think she was just disbelieving, so unable to understand the kind of people she was up against, unable to grasp how far they’d go even though she and her husband had done nothIng to them. Murray forced her off the road. The Mercedes rolled into the canal.”

Ricci’s eyes get wide. It’s as though he’s reverted back to the seven year old boy instead of being the twenty three year old monster he is today.

“Murray had stopped, shifted the Cadillac into reverse, and backed up to where the Mercedes was swiftly sinking. He and Anne had gotten out of the car to watch. My mother had insisted that I watch too: “Come on, you little chickenshit. You don’t want to miss this, baby. This is one to remember “ She wasn’t wrong. The passenger’s side of the Mercedes was flat against the muddy bottom of the canal, and we could see inside through the driver-side as we stood on the embankment in the humid evening air. We were being bitten by hordes of mosquitoes but were hardly aware of them, mesmerized by the sight below, gazing through the driver-side windows of the submerged vehicle.”

“It was twilight,” Antonio says, putting into words the images before his closed eyes, “so the headlights were on, still on even after the Mercedes sank, and there were lights inside the car. They had air conditioning, so all the windows were closed, and unfortunately for them, neither the windshield nor the driver-side window had shattered when the car rolled. We could see inside, ’cause the windows were only a few inches under water. There was no sign of the husband. Maybe he was knocked unconscious when they rolled. But the old woman … her face was at the window. The car was flooded, but there was a big bubble of air against the inside of the glass, and she pressed her face into it so she could breathe. We stood there looking down at her. Murray could have helped. My mother could have helped. But they just watched. They just made me watch. The old woman couldn’t seem to get the window open, and the door must have been jammed, or maybe she was just too scared and too weak.”

Ricci continues in his catatonic stupor.

“I had tried to pull away, but my mother had held me, speaking urgently to me, the whispered words borne on a tide of breath sour with vodka and grapefruit juice. These words… These words stayed with me. We’re different than other people, baby. No rules apply to us. You’ll never understand what freedom really means if you don’t watch this,” so watch it I did. I had closed my eyes, but I had still been able to hear the old woman screaming into the big air bubble inside the submerged car. Muffled screaming. Then gradually the screaming faded … finally stopped, When I opened my eyes, twilight had gone and night had come. There was still light in the Mercedes, and the woman’s face was still pressed to the glass, but a breeze had risen, rippling the water in the canal, and her features were a blur. I knew she was dead. She and her husband. I started to cry. Murray didn’t like that. He threatened to drag me into the canal, open a door on the Mercedes, and shove me inside with the dead people. My mother made me drink some grapefruit juice with vodka. Remember, I was only seven. The rest of the way back to Key West, I lay on the backseat, dizzy from the vodka, half drunk and a little sick, still crying but quietly, so I wouldn’t make Murray angry, crying quietly until I fell asleep.”

Ricci quickly snaps his head to the side so he is facing the camera.

“So, you want to know why I am the way I am? There’s your reason. That is why I am going into this tag match against Magdalena Lockheart and Lex Collins like it’s a handicap match. As Magdalena herself has pointed out, she hasn’t had the best luck with partners. Maggie, baby, I feel you. I wish I could have once again had the privilege of teaming with Sidroy Covington IV. Alas, it is not meant to be. I am being saddled with the deadweight who calls himself “Old School Cool.” I’ve learned that in this life, we simply cannot count on others to look out for us. Don Tirri has already started making excuses blaming me for a loss that likely will not happen.”

“The last time I showed up here, I spoke of teaching others how to take accountability. The first time we faced one another, Magdalena, I lost. You were the superior warrior that night. That’s on me and I own that. Let’s look at the path of destruction I have carved since then. I don’t need to run down who I’ve beaten, what I’ve done, and the punishment I have endured. My performance speaks for itself. I accomplished those things because of you, Magdalena. You taught me a valuable lesson. You took a raw piece of steel and forged it into a sharpened steel sword that will one day impale you.”

“As for you, Lex, I have to say that when I see you speak, I feel like you understand Don Tirri, but you do not understand me at all. In your last YouTube video you talked about that “one guy who refuses to let it go.” The fact of the matter is that I am the man who eliminated you from the Last of Us gauntlet. I question now if you are going to let that go or if you are going to hold on to that moment. While I acknowledge things that have happened, it is far more important to me to make more moments. I don’t want to be the man that creates YouTube videos in hopes that one day future generations watch those videos and remember me. I want to be the man that is so common in the lexicon of this business that people simply know who I am. How do you make a moment? You make a moment by finding the man who is the top dog on the leaderboards and beating his ass in the middle of the ring. You do that by taking on the Final Boss champion and walking away victorious. That is what my goal in this match is.”

“I recognize the fact that the two of you are two of the best we have in Level Up Wrestling. Your track records precede you. But you both need to recognize that you are dealing with the face of Level Up Wrestling, the hardest working man in Level Up Wrestling. I step up when others step away. I stated from the beginning that I have an unhealthy obsession for being the best. That means that I will do whatever I have to do in order to assert my dominance. That means I willingly and unflinchingly face the Black Legacy once again. This means that I will step into the ring with the best and IF they are able to defeat me, it will once again take two of them to do the job. This means that Don Tirri, for all of his wisdom and experience, will be able to sit back, relax and enjoy the show while I take care of business. I don’t need his help. I don’t want his help. But if he steps out of line, my foot is going to connect with his head. Then it’s a short ride with a bad landing. However, you’d all be wise to remember that.”

Ricci stands up and walks off as the picture fades to black.