2004-10-02
Life with Leif
Ever have one of those nights where you wake up every hour or so, only to look at your alarm clock to see just how much time you have left to sleep? I don't have them as much as I used to (due largely, I suspect, to the fact that I am no longer going to bed with my insides fairly sloshing with bourbon), but it does still happen. Frighteningly, I also seem to be able to resume where I was in the dream I was having prior to making this hourly "time check."
Such was the case with the dream vignettes which I am going to call:
Leif wants YOU!
Lo, chickens. I am at a total loss as to why I periodically have these bizarre dreams involving that impossibly pretty 70's poster boy. I mean, I was never really a Leif Garrett fan.
Leif and I are married. We live in some sun-dappled netherworld with our infant son, Daniel. The baby has a perpetually hangdog look about him -- the heir apparent to the hangdog teenscream throne. We are crazy about this boy. We are crazy about each other. I wake up. 3:30 AM. Four more hours.
Leif Garrett was scary to me in my early adolescence. Tiger Beat boys were supposed to be unthreatening. Asexual. Tiger Beat boys liked ice cream and puppies and you weren't supposed to want to do anything other than go to the amusement park with them, have them win you a stuffed animal, maybe hold their hands. Not that Leif Garrett, though. One look at him with his flyaway tresses, twitching away in his black spandex britches and crooning, "I was made for DANCING...ah-ah-ah-all night lo-o-ong" and you KNEW what he was all about, even if you didn't know the word for it yet. Older girls in tube tops and dolphin shorts, girls who smelled like Coppertone and Tickle antiperspirant -- they liked Leif Garrett. I was still having difficulty surrendering my Star Wars action figures; how could I consider the seamy possibilities of a day at the amusement park with Leif? Ick.
Our first argument. I am baffled, as I am in waking, that I am in this improbable pairing. What does Leif Garrett see in me? What do I have that Leif Garrett could possibly find enticing? I'm a dumpy little recovering Goth. Surely he is still carrying the torch for Nicolette Sheridan. And why not? I've seen "Knot's Landing." I know the score. She's a FOX. My hair is coming out in clumps from my last dye job. I become shrill and paranoid. He leaves in a huff. Oh, God; what have I done? 5:27 AM. If I skip my shower and coffee, I can sleep until 8.
I blame this on VH-1. I do. I'm a total Behind the Music addict. I am ashamed and disgusted, yet I cannot stop watching these shows. On the Leif Garrett episode, they arranged this reunion between Leif and the guy who was paralyzed from the waist down when Leif smashed his car down an embankment. Have you seen this, chickens? It's just the most twisted little piece of voyeuristic "telejournalism" that I've ever seen. There are some things that are just none of my business, and yet there I was, riveted. Riveted! The pathos!
What I really want, though, is for Leif Garrett to stop wearing that damn bandana. He pulls it forward so you can't hardly see his eyebrows, and it makes him look like a fucking goon. It really does.
I'm sick as a dog, on some sort of life support. Leif Garrett is at my side, crying, saying: "Don't leave me, Lees; don't go." I smile around my many and varied tubes. "You know what I liked?" I whisper, "When you were hosting 'Eight Track Flashback' on VH-1 and you had your head shaved. You were really kinda hot then." Leif is surprised, pleased, flattered. "Really?" he says. 7:10 AM. Wakey wakey...
I'm not even going to get into some of the more, um, detailed vignettes in the series.
Well -- okay: at one point Leif Garrett and I are in flagrante delicto, when suddenly he morphs into my actual husband, and my waking self, the one who's observing this whole scene not without a little bit of fascination-cum-repulsion, lets out a plaintive cry: "No, no, NO! If you're gonna consummate this fucked-up epic, for God's sake just DO IT so maybe you'll stop having these dreams!" So Leif Garrett gets cut-and-pasted back in there, but I wake up anyway, plagued with guilt.
I wish that I was making this shit up, but I'm not.
lisamcc at 10:06 p.m.
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