Terms of Service

I warned Mochamer about this a long time ago. He never said, "Don't print that, you freak." Oh, well. Dreams are funny things, sometimes. I make no claim that what follows is at all funny, but it woke me up.


In actual life, I tend to go to some of the bid-auction sites to obtain hotels, rental cars, etc. So it made perfect sense that I would do the same in the dream. I kind of like the randomness and unexpected nature of the way those things turn out (usually). Sometimes it’s not quite as good, like in this sequence:

I was booking a trip to the East Coast. (DC to be specific. It was raining the entire day I was out there a couple of weeks ago, so even this made sense. In real life, I was a little upset at first that I’d been booked into a Crown Victoria, but the thing ended up getting pretty decent gas mileage, and I know that now. All is well on that front.) In the dream, I upped the ante this time, and decided I didn’t even want to know the name of the car rental outfit. You can do that to a more limited extent in the room booking game, but when the card info for payment passes hands, you know who you’re dealing with. In this dream, my car rental outfit wanted cash, and wanted to meet me downtown where I live, in an abandoned grocery store turned antique mall.

This should have been a red flag. Most car rental companies want just about anything but cash, and they usually don’t have operations in antique malls, but whatever. It was a hell of a good deal, and they were placing me in a special vehicle, so they said. I’m of the opinion every damned one of them is special in some way or another.

So the day arrives that I’m to leave, and I get a text message to meet my man at the antique mall. I go down there, and there’s a tour bus parked out front, just running. There isn’t anyone there at all. Just a running bus and an open door. I get in the thing, and there are directions on the seat for where I’m to drop the money for this rental.

I get in the thing, and somehow I end up at Target a couple of times before getting the money to the drop. The bus was hard to stop. I noticed the hell out of that right away. Also, the transmission was more than a bit iffy. One of the trips to Target involved me shopping for a bicycle because I was quickly losing confidence in the bus’ ability to get me anywhere. The bikes (which I honestly don’t even know are sold at Target) were too expensive, and I set back out for the drop with the cash. But first I stopped at a local supermarket for…groceries, I guess.

When I got to the grocery store, everything I wanted in the produce aisle was not available. They did, however, have massive quantities of marijuana and hashish, both products I bought in abundance. I might have been spending the bus rental money…I seemed to be well funded in this dream, for whatever reason…

So now I’m walking back out of this Target with a bunch of illegal drugs dispensed on some construction paper. The guy at the weight kiosk had plenty of plastic bags, which are really more up the alley of illegal drug transport, but when the guy at the checkout asked “paper or plastic?” I answered with stupidity.

Back to the bus and on to the drop zone. I get to the so-called office, which is nothing more than a ranch-style residence. It had an old-time door buzzer, which I rang and was admitted to the facility. It was just a house. Someone was working a booth near the front door, and she inquired if I’d received what I was looking for, and I had mentioned that I thought a bicycle might be in order.

“Bicycles are complimentary,” she told me. “Look on the bike rack on the front of the bus and tell me what you think.” Sure enough, there was a bicycle hanging off the front of the bus. I’d not noticed, but then again this was a dream. Hell, I’m barely observant at all in actual life.

The bicycle featured a Schwinn-looking frame circa 1965. It was a metallic blue, with braking mechanism only on the right handlebar. The wheels were bent. I took it for a quick test ride, and even the seat was uncomfortable. I went back to the service desk, but the woman working couldn’t help me with my many complaints, so I asked to see the manager. “We don’t usually do this,” and I didn’t at all know what it was that she didn’t usually do—rent out shitty equipment or make referrals to her management. It didn’t matter, because now something was being done.

She finally came back to the desk, and asked me to follow her back to the manager’s office. She took me into what appeared to be a very large closet/bedroom multi-purpose area, and I’ll be damned if Todd Mochamer isn’t sitting there at the desk reading over my paperwork. He looked concerned. And nervous. I hadn’t seen the guy in several years, so we spent a little time catching up, and I finally asked him, “So what’s up with this bus?”

His eyes got all shifty, and he asked, “What do you mean?” I explained the issues with stopping, and how the bicycle was totally unfit for even emergency use. “You’re going to love that ride. It’s clean diesel,” he explained, and went on and on about the efficiency and overall wonderfulness of this ten year old bus that was still billowing black fumes outside his office/house. I tried repeatedly to address the issue of the feasibility of renting a bus to a person who had requested an economy car, and he told me, “Just take a bunch of passengers, and charge them money.” Fair enough. I asked him what I should do about the drugs. He told me to raise the rates on the fare if I chose to share the drugs with the passengers. That wasn’t much what I was talking about, but we had to make this damned arrangement work, so I was all in.

It wasn’t until I hit the road that I realized none of my questions about the bicycle had been answered, and I didn’t have much of a way to market a now mobile bus bound for one destination. That pretty much ended the dream, but I could have gotten a lot more bang for my buck on that rental from Mochamer.