cimorene

so i dreamt a story that didn't have me in it! there were two guys named ray doyle, for starters. one of them was the one from the professionals and one of them looked like hugh jackman as wolverine (eeeee sir ian!) (ahem). the hugh-jackman ray was on a bus along with a nice little old lady and my friend karti and some other people, and he and karti were living together in a rented house in new york city somewhere--a nice one. and karti was paying for it. i think they were married, um, or something. but he was also living at the same time in another part of nyc (not easily accessible by bus or subway!) with the OTHER ray doyle. like, er, gay lovers. yes. so neither one of them knew about the other (pros-ray and karti, that is). so there was this very weird sequence where they came to a stand of phone booths that were, like, auctionable. that is to say, you could make a call for whatever price you cared to put in as long as you put something in, so needless to say a lot of people used pennies. but the first phone you came to, someone would put in a penny, and someone else would run in and put in a dime over their shoulder before they could make a call, so the second person would have the rights to the phone (auctionable, i said! like the phone KNEW). finally, the entire contingent from the bus was clustered around the first phone except karti, who started putting quarters in the other, even though you didn't have to, to pay for it, and hj-ray was kneeling on the ground at the back of the kiosk, where you could see the money falling in through a little wire grate, and all the quarters were just falling straight through to the coin return, not letting her make her call, you see. and then the things dropping through started to be flipflops--pale seafoam green ones with lilac trim, all the same foot, ten or fifteen of them in a stack. and yes, they were foot-sized. hj-ray and moi (the narrarator, natch) were watching this from the back, so we didn't see her put them in. and he was yelling around to her (hey! they're just falling through, none of them are going in), and then she was all, 'what do you mean?' and he had to explain it to her. the end was getting back on the bus, trying to con a ride out of the little old lady to take him up to see pros-ray (a Secret Assignation, natch--to live there for a week or something), and she was being deliberately very obtuse and telling him all about the bus schedules and how it was too late to go wednesday, but maybe he could manage it next sunday. and karti was sitting there with her hands on her knees and the bus was swaying back and forth the whole time. i think she had on a leather jacket.