Her name was Bambi and she stole my heart the instant I heard her voice.  Is that wrong of me to say?  Sure, she was only 17 or so but it's not like I fucked her or anything.  I mean, dreams don't count, do they?
    She was beautiful, man.  Big orange glasses and matching hair and delicious pale apple skin - the kind of skin you're just dying to kiss.  You know?  Forbidden Fruit.  I know what you're thinking... "Bambi?"  I swear it, man.  That was her name.
    It was March.  Early March, 2000 when I first drooled over her beskirtted teenage body.  M2K.  We were at Denny's: me and Jef and Wade and the Mouse.  We sat at the corner table by the front door by the Bear Claw Machine filled with shitty stuffed animals.  Bambi didn't seat us.  It was an older lady.  Older like our age and ravaged by time.  Like a mirror, she was hideous and old.  She seated us and promptly vanished into the clatters of cookery emanating from the kitchen.
    That was when Bambi approached our table.  She didn't glide over like a fragrant breeze across a poet's page or softly hum the songs of forgotten angels.  She was real, man.  100% Grade A High School Flesh.  She was beautiful.
    "Has anyone gotten your drinks yet?"  She was exasperated.  Clearly the hag who seated us had been dysfunctional all day and my lovely Bambi was fed up.  The poor thing.  My heart went out to her.  I looked up and fell madly in love.
    "No."  I don't remember who spoke.  Maybe we all did.  It doesn't matter.  All that matters is that Bambi's response was perfect and beautiful.
    "These people are so rude!"  She said aloud, damning the hag and her kitchen cronies to some kind of Hell waitresses know about.  She didn't whisper it to herself or wink slyly at us.  She said it aloud for anybody to hear.  My brave Bambi.  How I love thee.
    She took our drink orders: cokes for the men and coffee for the Mouse.  She came back promptly with the bevvies but offered us no straws.  I know what you're thinking... "No straws?  How could you praise a waitress so openly when she didn't even give you straws?"  But dig this, man.  Dig this:
    "I'm sorry I'm moving slowly.  I'm having problems with my foot so I'm in tennis shoes today."  I don't know why she felt it necessary to tell us this and I don't care.  All I know is that her saying it gave me an excuse to check out her legs.  She was wearing tennis shoes, as she had said.  Cute little white things contrasting with the black stockings running up under a sexy-as-fuck black skirt cut just above the knee.

    I've been a connoisseur of women's legs since I was six.  No joke, man.  Dream and Reality intersected in my backyard two decades ago and I've not been the same since.  I can't remember which parts of the following sidetrack story are true and which I dreamt but I truly did dream the parts that I dreamt so it's all true somehow.
    Deep.
    I lived here then.  I've always lived here.  We moved here when I was four.  I have photographs of my fifth birthday party in this front yard.  It's raining.  It rained on my birthday every year until 1997.  Now we have summer until mid-December and it snows in May.  Anyway, I lived here on Cherry Street across from the big white house the Ludins lived in for a while.  Now a family of hillbillies live there and the father recently committed suicide.  I'm six or five or seven or something like that.  Too young for sex.  I knew that it was about getting naked and kissing but not much more.  The point is I lived here across the street from the big white house.
    In that big white house (or maybe in the version of the big white house that only exists in my dreams) there lived a girl about my age.  She was probably a year or two older than me.  She had raven black hair down to her waist and nearly Mexican skin.  I love Mexican skin.  She wasn't Mexican though.  She just had sun-browned legs like that girl in the Rush song.
    Analog Kid.
    I don't know her name.  I don't know if she was real.  I remember being in her room upstairs in that big white house across the street and seeing a large stuffed animal - a dog.  It was blue.  No dogs are blue but this toy was powder puff blue like some ugly pastel alien St Bernard.  It was the kind of stuffed animal that has no hair or fur or anything.  It's essentially a molded pillow with the face and details drawn on it.  I've always hated those kind of stuffed animals.  I have that distinct memory of being in her room and seeing that dog but I cannot remember if it really happened.  I cannot remember if the girl existed at all.  I may have invented her so I'd have somebody to dream about.  And dream about her I did.
    We were in my backyard playing on my swing set.  This did not happen.  This was a dream.  The swing set was real.  I got it when my parents were still married.  I have no memory of them being together but I've seen pictures and I've heard stories.  The swing set had a slide on one end, two yellow hard plastic swings in the middle and a horse on the other end.  The horse was the best part.  Ask anybody.
    The swing set was white with coloured stripes running around the poles.  It was the traditional pair of angles with a bar connecting the topmost points and crossbars dividing the two end-piece angles.  Dig?  You couldn't really do much with the crossbar on the slide side because there was little room to maneuver but on the horse side you could like climb on the cross bar or, if you were more daring and coordinated than I, you could hang upside-down by your knees from it.
    Summer: 1981.  Enter the girl.  I don't know her name but her lovely, young brown legs were dangling from that crossbar - dangling out of a pair of pastel yellow shorts as she sat on the crossbar by the horse.  Her long black hair was being blown by some invisible breeze and her voice was challenging.  I can't remember exactly what she said but it was at once a dare and a command.  All I know is I then kissed her legs.  From ankles to shorts bottoms I kissed my way up and down her legs.  There were other kids there, playing.  Craig Wells, I think.  Maybe Casey too.  It doesn't matter.  This was a dream.  Other kids.  That's all they need to be.  Just other kids watching me kiss this mystery girl's legs.
    I can still taste her even now - twenty years later and wide awake.  That's where it all began.  Explains a lot, doesn't it?  I woke from that dream aroused but not erect I don't think.  I was only six or seven or five or something.  I remember that I woke up baffled and happy.  I've spent the last twenty years in pursuit of that dream and drooling over the legs of many a foxy young girl.

    "Do you have any straws in your magick pouch?"  I asked.  I hoped Bambi would realize the obvious sexual connotations in my words.  I was, of course, ostensibly referring to the little pocket on her Denny's waitress uniform where traditionally the Denny's waitresses keep straws and ketchup and fuck knows what else.  I made eye contact when I asked her that.  I don't usually but I was in love, man.  Not just with her but that's another story.
    "No."  She didn't giggle.  Not exactly.  But she did smile and there was something being humored in her voice.  "I'll go get some for you."  I was ecstatic.  She was adorable.  My shyness began to melt away and I began to talk myself into talking to her.
    She returned with straws and took our order.  I had nothing clever to say at that point.  I got a real bargain of a meal though.  Some kind of double cheeseburger thing with fries for like $4.13 or something.  Cheaper than the chicken items which is what I really wanted but money was an issue.  It still is.  Money will appear again later in this story.  Lots of it.  You'll see.
    There were a few other parties in the restaurant and Bambi had the responsibility of feeding all of us.  The hag made occasional trips out of the kitchen to perform some strange ritual at that weird waitress altar where they keep the pitchers of water.  What the hell do they do there?
    We ate our food and talked amongst ourselves and I noticed that Bambi was chatty with the other parties.  That made me happy.  I decided that I too would chat with this dream girl.  I even had a topic ready.  Jef and Wade and the Mouse knew nothing or at the most very little about my infatuation with Bambi.  I'm not easily read.  The same is not true, I hope, of my writing.
    We were nearly finished with our meal when Bambi came over with the sweeper.  I say "sweeper" and not "vacuum cleaner" because this was not an electronic device.  This was one of those things shaped like a vacuum cleaner but you just roll it over the carpet and it picks things up.  My grandma had one and she called it a sweeper and so so do I.
    "Can I get under your table?"  I tried not to think dirty thoughts as she began running the sweeper under our table.  Jef was talking about the Nazi Carpet and how it wasn't there anymore.  You remember that?  Denny's used to have this green swastika carpeting all over?  Well, it's gone now and Jef had just noticed.  It's been gone for a couple years.  I don't think the Mouse ever got to see it.  Kinda sad.
    So as Bambi was pushing her sweeper under my feet I made my move.  "Can I ask you a waitressing question?"  I was smooth and cool and charming as fuck, man.  I swear it.
    "Sure."  Bambi stopped sweeping and gave me her full attention.  I was stunned by her lack of devotion to Denny's and her seemingly genuine interest in me and my words.  Mentally wiping the drool from my brain, I entered the Game.
    "I was here once, well, over there in the smoking section (not my idea) a few years ago, maybe like 5 years ago and I ordered a shake, a strawberry shake, and the waitress, I don't know her name, the waitress brought our food and everything but she didn't have my shake and she turned to me and she said 'There's been a mishap with you're shake.  I'll go make you another one.'  And I said 'What do you mean, 'mishap'?  Did you drop it?'  And she said 'No, I didn't drop it.  There was a mishap.'"
    I paused to make sure Bambi had followed all of that.  She had.  I was enticed.  Bright and beautiful, my Bambi.  Even in my too-fast-flirt-talk she understood me.  I pressed on.
    "Now, she wouldn't own up to what she meant by 'mishap' but I've always wondered what the hell she was talking about.  What exactly goes on back there that would merit being called a mishap?"  Yes, I said "hell" with no regards to any possible offense she might take at my coarseness.  Bambi would understand that I meant no harm.  She would see my mild cursing as an attempt to both colour my statements to make them more interesting and also to show that I genuinely care about this question and whatever answer she may bring me.
    "Maybe she ate it or she forgot to make it.  That happens sometimes.  I'll forget to make a shake and I'll have to go back and make it after I've brought their food."
    I was in love.  "Maybe she ate it..." she had said.  That was her first thought on this matter.  Beautiful.  Bambi was crazy.  That or Denny's waitresses are secretly eating our food behind that mysterious wall.  Either way I was overjoyed by this answer.
    "You really think maybe she ate it?"  I wanted more.  I wanted more of Bambi's mind.
    "Maybe."  She went back to her sweeping.  I took another bite of burger.  This was before I started seriously reconsidering my omnivorhood.  Jef said something about shakes elsewhere.  Some place in Chicago claimed to have the World's Greatest Shake or something.  Bambi chimed back into the conversation saying that Country Style Ice Cream has really good shakes.  She used to work there and she got free ice cream all the time.  God, how I loved this girl.  She also said that Porky's has really good shakes.  She worked there for a time too.  I've never eaten at Porky's.  The name puts even me off.  I did share some Porky's french fries with Adam once though.
    That was pretty much the end of our conversation with Bambi.  Dreadful name, that.  Lovely girl but a dreadful name.  "What were her parents thinking?" Wade said later in the car.  By the way, all of this really happened.  I left her a two dollar tip.  Everyone tipped her pretty well but I made sure mine was the biggest.  I hoped she would realize that I liked her and remember me the next time I came to Denny's.

    That night I dreamt of Bambi.  I was working.  I'm a mystery shopper for the local movie theaters and I was auditing a shitty but large theater attached to a mall.  We don't really have any theaters attached to malls here anymore but I've dreamt of this theater several times.  I've dreamt of several places several times.  There's a different gigantic mall in my dreams often and certain houses and places that pop up from time to time - places I've never seen in real waking life but revisit in dreams again and again.
    Bambi was working as a cashier at this mall theater in my dream only her name was Candi.  Yes, I know what you're thinking... "Candi?  With an 'i'?"  I swear it, man.  That was her name.  In my dream, Candi and I had met a few times here at the theater.  Denny's was forgotten.  Candi was clearly Bambi though: same ridiculous orange glasses and matching hair, same smile, same attitude, same legs.  Oh yeah.  Same legs.  I'm really into legs, man.
    Well, I was meeting friends at the theater to see a movie.  I have no idea which movie.  It doesn't matter because the dream changed before we got that far anyway.  My friends were already there.  I don't even know who they were.  It was one of those dream things where there's like a group of people across the room with the label "your friends" on it.  That's all.  I approached the desk to buy my ticket and was happy to see Candi working.  I purposely moved to her station instead of the other girl's.  No, the other girl wasn't the hag from Denny's.  I wish it were though.  When I make this story into a movie maybe it will be.
    So I asked Candi for a ticket to the 9:45 showing of whatever movie it was I was supposed to be seeing with "my friends" but my lovely goddess told me they were out of those tickets.  Not believing her, I picked up a small cardboard box sitting on her desk and started to root through it.  It was filled with tickets for various shows arranged by time.  She was right.  There were no tickets for the 9:45 show.  I pulled out a ticket for the 7:30 showing of the same movie.
    "Can I just take this one instead?  You could like write a note for the ticket-taker explaining the substitution."  In my dream this all made sense.  The tickets were plastic and transparent with black writing and designs much like the laundry tokens I had to use when I lived in the dorms at NIU.  Those things sucked.  They cost $1 and there was a 50% chance of the washing machine eating your token without turning on.
    "I suppose you could take that ticket.  There are plenty of seats for the 9:45 show.  I just don't have any tickets left for it."  There was something sexy and playful in Candi's voice and eyes.  I was in love all over again.  I know what you're thinking...  "What else is new?"  Yeah.
    Playful, eh?  "Well look, ma'am," I put on my best snotty the-customer-is-always-right voice and pretended to be outraged.  "I don't see how you can have seats to sell but no tickets to mark which seats have been sold.  I demand a refund or something."
    Candi smiled a knowing I'm-playing-along-with-your-weird-game smile.  "I'm sorry sir.  I'll get my manager."  She then walked over to her manager who was already on an intercept course with pretend-angry me.  They talked in hushed tones and then Candi returned to me.  How sweet that sounds.  Candi returned to me.  Wow.  Heaven.
    Yeah.  So Candi came back and looked around in an I'm-really-not-supposed-to-be-doing-this-but kind of way and apologized and opened her cashier drawer and took out a hundred dollar bill.  It was one of the new ones with the crazy Mongoloid Ben Franklin - his head filled with lightning and dreams of turkey plastered currency.  Dig?  Again with the money.  I told you, man.
    "I'm sorry sir.  Here's a refund and I hope this helps you see how badly we all feel about this."  Our hands almost touched as she handed me the money.  I leaned in close.  Almost close enough for a kiss.  Instead, I whispered conspiratorially.
    "So, how much of this do I slip you later?"  It was clear to me she was giving me more than the manager said to give me and I assumed she would want half to be delivered later on in the parking lot or something.  The hundred dollar bill was all I had on me too.  Which would entail the two of us going out somewhere so I could break it and get change to give her her share.  Thoughts of the clandestine meeting were already dancing behind my eyes when she smiled and said:
    "You can just pay for my movie tomorrow."  A date!  Wow!  She was bold and beautiful and smart and a thief!  I was so in love.  And not just with her but that's another story.

    The dream starts getting fuzzy at this point.  I remember that I was supposed to meet her the next afternoon at the theater and take her to see a movie.  This part was all a dream, remember.  There is no Candi.  There is only Bambi.  And be patient; Bambi does return in this tale.  As soon as the dream is over and reality begins again we will see more of Bambi.
    Back to the dream.
    I remember that Adam dropped me off at the mall the next day around noon.  He drove me there in his mother's old brown van.  Adam's mother has polio and her legs are useless so she drives by pushing the pedals of the van with this big silver thing and steering with a ball on the steering wheel.  We always called it a Nancy Ball on account of Nancy was Adam's mom's name.  It still is, as far I know.  When we were kids, Adam used to drive the van around his housing district using these devices.  Sometimes his dog, Blue, would run away and we'd go chase him down in the van.  We could easily have just walked but any excuse to drive and Adam was instantly behind the wheel.  (My parents have a dog named Blue now.  I said earlier that no dogs are blue.  I guess I was wrong.  Maybe all dogs are blue.  Either way, I still hate that stuffed animal.)  Adam sometimes used the expression "baking cookies" to mean sex.  This is relevant in that in my dream, Adam baked some cookies for me to take to Candi.
    I exited the van and thanked Adam for the ride and for the cookies which somehow were sometimes a bundle of hockey sticks or really tall flowers or something.  Like I said, the dream gets fuzzy here.  I then started riding through the mall hallway on some sort of wheeled object.  I was propelling myself with my foot the way you can with a shopping cart but I don't think it was a shopping cart that I was riding on here.  It feels more like a small wheeled table.  Adam and I used to ride shopping carts in the grocery store parking lot while my mother was inside.  Inside the grocery store, I mean.  Not the cart.  That would be crazy.  We also rode a small wheeled TV cart down Cherry Street until it disintegrated from underneath me.  How and why this dream and subsequent story became about Adam at this point I cannot say.  I can only hope to entertain both myself and others.
    I made my way down to the theater and tried to find Candi.  I had broken the hundred dollar bill and was ready to pay for our tickets and hopefully dinner afterwards.  A man working at the theater stopped me and asked me what I was doing.  I told him I was meeting Candi here and I asked him if he'd seen her.  He told me she wasn't working today and then turned around to summon Mall Security.  I told him that he didn't understand; I was meeting Candi here for our date.  He didn't care.  He was totally that snooty rat-faced host from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  That and the fruity guy in Mannequin played by the scientist from Stargate.  This guy was totally both of those guys at once.  "No good" as Jenni would say.  I wonder if she got that from me.
    Mall Security arrived.  Large, faceless men in blue shirts.  They took my hockey stick flower cookies away and said they had to confiscate them.  "They're for Candi!" I protested but to no avail.  She was still nowhere to be seen.  Frantic, I asked the snooty guy if I could at least leave Candi a ten dollar bill to cover her movie ticket should she show up and find me gone.  I am a gentleman after all and if I'm going to be hauled away by Mall Security I'm going to at least make sure my date can afford the movie.  The snooty guy didn't respond.  Or maybe he did.  Either way he didn't take the proffered money from me and instead ordered his goons to take me away.
    This is the part where the chase music comes in.  It was that silly.  Suddenly I'm in Mallrats or Smokey And The Bandit or something.  I'm running through the mall and there's two large, faceless men in blue shirts chasing me and I see now that they have nightsticks or billy clubs or blackjacks or something with which to hit me.  So I run outside into the parking lot which is a gravel road.  I realize that this gravel road is the very one that Adam and I used to drive his mother's van on when we were kids.  The mall I've just run out of is exactly where Adam's house should've been.
    Crazy, man.  Crazy
    Parked on the gravel road are many cars.  Many people are milling about in sundresses and shorts and tank tops of various colours.  Summer: 1981.  According to the colour scheme anyway.  It was sunny and picnicky and old.  Not old like aged but old like 1981 is old.  The important thing is that this is where I stole the semi-truck.
    It was purple.  I realize now that when I make this story into a movie it will be powder puff blue like the dog that may or may not have existed in the upstairs bedroom of a girl who may or may not have existed in the big white house across the street.  In the movie, the dog and the truck will be one and the same just like Señor Droolcup and the Giant from Twin Peaks.  I'm sure I can make it symbolize something.  I'm a fucking writer, man.
    The semi-truck was purple.  There was no trailer, just the cab.  I didn't check to see what clever pinstriping it had on the doors and hood but I'm sure it had some.  They always do.  I climbed inside hoping to hide from the large, faceless men in blue shirts who had chased me out of Adam's house.  Yes, I could now see that I had in fact just run out of Adam's house.  The mall was gone.  Mall Security was not.  They saw me.
    I cannot drive a vehicle which contains a manual transmission.  I've experimented with it with minimal success using an ancient VW Van.  Adam can drive a stick.  So can Wade.  Adam drove buses for a living for a while.  Big buses filled with octogenarian gamblers or soccer kids or something.  He loved it.  In my dream, I looked at the controls of this big purple truck and saw to my surprise that this was an automatic semi.  Pausing only briefly to remark to myself that I didn't know they made automatic semis, I started the engine and popped her into D.
    She handled fairly easily.  The steering was hard to get used to as this was a large truck and I normally drive a small 2-door Buick Skyhawk.  1986 or '87 or '85 or something.  1984.  Orwell's year.  The year I entered double digits.  The year Gremlins came out.  Ghostbusters too.  I'm filled with information like that.  Sam once said that I am the cataloger of the times.  She may be right but that's another story.
    I drove the truck with some difficulty down the winding gravel roads of Adam's housing district.  Nice houses.  Always brown though.  He hasn't lived there for ages.  Strangers live there now.  Our old math teacher lives across the street from where Adam used to live.  He gets TP'd nearly every weekend.  Mr. Oltman.  Not a popular guy.  I shot a paintball at his house once.  It hit his bedroom window.  It was the middle of the night and I guess we scared he and his wife half to death.  I felt badly.  Autumn laughed.  I wrote an essay about it later.  History repeats itself, man.
    I came upon a fork in the road and there were loads of people having a party or something all wearing their Summer: 1981 sundresses and shorts and wide-brimmed hats you wear if it's summer and you're in a movie and it's the turn of the century or something.  As I drove by / through the party, I realized it was a wedding and that I knew the lucky couple.  It was Derik Falk and Jessica Patterson.  Jessica (in my dream) had just returned from Brazil and had finally agreed after years of waffling to marry Derik.  This is ridiculous as they dated in high school but broke up many years ago.  Derik has since gone quite mad and moved to Boulder and then Boston leaving a trail of slime all across this great nation of ours.  (Turkey indeed.  What were you thinkin', Ben?)  Jessica vanished from my radar screens in or around 1994.  Thundarr's year.  The year I turned 20.  The year Ed Wood came out.  Clerks too.  Cataloger of the times, man.
    I nearly ran over Jessica as I struggled to turn this great purple behemeth around the gravel corner they had chosen as the spot to unite their souls under the fiery face of God.  I remember that the minister performing the ceremony had a microphone and a PA system hooked up and he was going on about how Jessica had just returned from Brazil and had finally agreed after years of waffling to marry Derik.  Bullshit.  She deserves better.  In real life, she's probably found better.  She's feisty though.  Poor guy.
    That's my last memory of the dream about Bambi which it turns out isn't really about her at all but is instead about Candi who is really Bambi in another form or something but then really it isn't about her either.  I think oddly enough it's mostly about Adam who's been a good friend of mine since sixth grade and who does not appear again in this story.  Bambi does, however, as promised, appear again.

    The next day I recounted this dream to Wade and Sam and the Mouse as we were preparing to go out for breakfast.  Josh was in the next room halfway listening to my tale.  "Hey Grahm!  Lay off the cough syrup before you go to bed, okay?" he shouted.  In telling this story to my friends, I fell even more in love with Bambi.  Before I could tell the story of the dream, I had to explain about Bambi to Sam.  I told her of the straws and of the sweeper and of the orange glasses and matching hair and of the tennis shoes and mostly of her theory that that other waitress long ago actually ate my strawberry shake.  Then I recounted the dream and they all thought me mad.  When it was time to decide where to go for breakfast, I, naturally, voted for Denny's.  But, as I was not actually going to be eating anything, money being an issue, my vote held little sway and we went to the Village Inn instead where we received dreadful service and left no tip.

    It was several days later when it happened.  Wade and I had just pulled out of the Burger King parking lot.  An illegally burned CD copy of The Fragile was blaring in Wade's stereo and we were discussing the odd time signatures Trent uses in his music when we drove past UT.  It was 3:00 and the school was letting out.  When UT lets out, policemen arrive and direct traffic so that the surly high school kids can get safely across the street to the Eagle's parking lot where they stand around and smoke and talk about girls and how dumb their teachers are and whether or not the lead singer of Korn is really gay or whatever it is kids talk about these days.
    We were sitting there waiting for the cop to allow our lane to go when Wade suddenly laughed and said "I think Bambi just drove past us."  Immediately somewhere between amused, skeptical, hopeful and horny I turned around and frantically scanned for my beautiful dream girl.  I saw nothing.  No orange glasses and matching hair, no sexy little smile and sadly, no legs.
    "Really?"  I tried not to sound too sad.
    "Yeah.  I think so."
    Silence.  Should I ask?  No.  No, I shouldn't.  "What kind of car does she drive?"  Damn.
    "It was a light blue two-door Ford Escort or something."
    Wade was clearly amused by my interest.  As was I.  It is only a game, after all.  I'm not really in love with Bambi.  I don't even know her, man.  She's just this cute young waitress who brought our food on time and was pleasant and chatty and fun.  I may never see her again and that's fine.  I haven't dreamt about her since that first time but I do find myself scanning the Denny's parking lot for her car.  If I ever see it there I'll probably just keep driving.