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Dreaming on Public Buses

Remembering Everything I’ve Ever Dreamt

I have been lately dreaming of becoming a different person, and of dying. I have been dreaming of the phrase “shuffle off this mortal coil,” which I first heard at about age 14, when I added William Shakespeare to my list of obsessions, a list that previously included NWA, the television show M*A*S*H, Spike Lee’s movie She’s Gotta Have It, and Hydrox cookies.

That year I won an acting competition in Los Angeles — my first time ever getting paid for artistic work. I did some random monologue from a contemporary comedy, the name of which I will never remember. The runner up performed the monologue in which this phrase appears. I assume he didn’t win because no director or casting agent ever wants to see an amateur perform To Be Or Not To Be from Hamlet. But it was my first time ever seeing it and I sat in the wings of the Beverly theatre watching this random guy who I would never see again say the most riveting words I’d ever heard spoken. On the long bus ride home from the theatre to the hot stucco apartment in Van Nuys I shared with my mom, clutching a $500 check and a card from a Beverly Hills television agent in an envelope, I nodded off into sleep among the piss and fumes and etched graffiti, the engine sputtering and sweating under my seat, the fruit stands…