It began with going through the internal rooms in a multilevel structure like a hotel or apartment building. I was trying to navigate through very byzantine corridors which were mostly dimly lit bathrooms, which was obvious from the white tiles. On at least one occasion I thought I had found a new passageway, but instead discovered that it was just something like a steam-vent which connected multiple levels. I peered down one of them, and could only see a bit of light coming from the room one or two levels below. So I kept going, moved through a few other spaces and it was a bit confusing, but I never panicked– it felt like I was getting somewhere, making progress.
There was a transition, or else maybe just ‘blank tape’, but the next thing I recall is being outside with some organized crime guys which seemed to be trying to figure out their next move. It was like the end of a prior job which had perhaps somewhat gone awry, so it was like ‘ok what now?’. I didn’t feel like I had significant rank among them, but I was standing there with a pistol in my hand while the gray-haired ‘boss’ guy analyzed the situation. There was a moment where I concluded that he was considering just killing me as a way to tie up loose ends, so I piped up, saying “Hey I’m really smart! I can make you some extra money!” which was a successful pleading of my case. The boss guy seemed to feel I was at least useful enough to let me live a bit longer. I still got the sense he considered me to be quite expendable, so my guard was up from then on, in case that sense ever came that the guys felt it was time to turn on each other. Briefly before we got going there was a guy who resembled Tom Cruise standing to the right of the boss guy.
We got going, then it transitioned into loading up a car and heading somewhere. It was an older style station wagon, very much like an Oldsmobile company car that my dad had in the mid 80’s, and it was dark red. It had three rows of seating and a trunk area. I thought about sitting up in ‘shotgun’ but figured it wouldn’t be in alignment with my rank, so I checked out the middle and back seats, but they were filled up with the family members of one of the boss’ lieutenants. I went to the back/trunk area. As we got seated I couldn’t help but wonder about this particular ethnic Asian-Indian guy who had gotten his wife and kids involved, even remotely, in his ‘business’ matters, doing gangster-shit, etc– just didn’t seem right, and I was curious about what may have led to or compelled those decisions along the way which had everyone in this particular situation together.
I sat in the back and tried to hide my pistol under my leg. The guy’s young son sat across from me, maybe eight or ten years old, and was curious about the gun and tried to grab it so he could handle it. I kept telling him ‘No’, so he pleaded with his mom who was sitting next me on the right. She seemed ambivalent and just tired of gangster shit altogether, and now her son was showing interest, so she was just expressing helpless resignation. Then we arrived and there was a moment negotiating the unloading process, which meant having to fold down the middle seat in order to get out of the door on the right side. The seats were black, and basically, rather than folding down to flat it made a small ramp or slope which I used to get out of the car.
From there it was more like the ‘action’ scenes in a movie. It seemed like I was with a buddy who was an ally of some kind. In this case it was Zavier Schusster, a guy who I played club soccer with as a teenager, and is currently a full-time dishwasher at a large athletic apparel company’s headquarters.
The sequence went as such: 1) there was a gathering in a building that was like a cafeteria, then some shooting broke out, so there was a quick dive and take-cover move under the table for the few of us sitting together– myself, and a middle-aged man and woman. 2) There was an opportunity to ‘escape’ the crossfire out through a door so we made a run for it. 3) It went through some hallway, where there was a chase, and a guy threw a handful of knives at us which flew in slow motion and in a cluster formation, so they were easily dealt with. 4) Once through a doorway at the end of the hall it was a right turn which then became an upper level in the adjacent room. The motion was along the wall of this larger room, and Zavier was sort of hanging on to me. We dropped down at the end of the wall, pausing for a moment to investigate the stuff that was on a series of a few large shelves, and I was thinking in my mind “I need a gun,” so I looked for one that I hoped would be sitting there in a holster but did not find one. 5) No time to waste, so we kept going down and went outside the building; the immediate threat seemed gone. 6) We flew down a slope, somewhat like as if we had a hang-glider, but without any equipment, down to a grassy brown field– a dry thicket type of landscape, then up an adjacent slope on the other side, which seemed to head toward a more urban, public/city type of area. 7) The area transitioned into something like the area behind the stands in a stadium complex, where a bunch of people were; there was a party feel to the atmosphere.
I saw a familiar person, high school friend, Boots, and I just navigated my way through the crowd. It was dark. I reached a spot where suddenly I observed some guys who had a particular style that gave me that ‘douche-bag’ vibe– just with the clothes, haircuts, etc. They were standing on a wooden box. We (I say we because suddenly it seemed like I had a ‘crew’ or entourage with me) stopped there, and one of the douchey guys seemed to gather that he had become the object of a negative judgement held by ‘us’ or myself– so he wasn’t happy about that. He tried to verify that he or his guys were sort of selected as the stopping point, then when I acknowledged that yes, they were, he took offense rather than getting into the details about why. He wanted to pin it on me, so I would be the representative of the anti-crew that he and his crew could beat down. But then he wanted to know how long my crew had been together– his thinking was that if my crew had a long history then he’d take the negative judgement more seriously, but if not, then it would probably not be worth a fight since he reckoned we would probably disband quickly. I let him know it was something relatively recent, so it took the sting out of the insult enough that the focus shifted to one of his buddies who was holding something that looked like a gun. He squeezed the trigger and it quickly became obvious that it was a plastic thing and the stuff inside was a dispensable cannabis wax. Then I jumped up and did a bit of crowd-surfing on the people there in the stands.
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