Awaking from a dream can be like a phreatic explosion, all that rising magma of sub-consciousness suddenly coming into contact with the cool water of the waking world, and in the split second it erupts into view, the ancient fire issued forth is fuelled by such a strange collection of mental debris. Last night, I had a dream of a gas station which, upon waking, didn’t seem so very powerful or strange (in fact, it seemed downright pedestrian) until it occurred to me that I haven’t seen a gas station in many years. By ‘gas station,’ I mean the old kind, you know, with ‘full-service’ lines and jumpsuited men checking under the hood, and twin-bay garages with cars vaulted high on hydraulic lifts. Invariably, there would be a soda vending machine, and out back, all manner of salvaged auto parts littering the yard.
The truly strange thing was not the dream itself, but what the dream brought back, or recovered. I made a note to myself how incredibly clean my imagined gas station was, and then all at once, the first line of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Filling Station’ flooded into my head—‘Oh but it is dirty!’ The poem is one I’d read years ago, and like a french fry or morning shower, I’d forgotten about it almost as soon as it was over. So to have this underappreciated poem find its way back to my conscious mind over a decade after reading it, I find bizarre.
Half-awake, I then trundled over to the book shelf, pulled down Miss Bishop, and read:
Filling Station
Oh, but it is dirty!
—this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!
Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.
Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.
Some comic books provide
the only note of color—
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of a set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.
Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet?)
Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO—SO—SO—SO
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.
The unseen, yet obvious, female who is responsible for the doily and sibilant oilcans is a beautiful touch, but I don’t think this poem crawled out its deep, subconscious abyss to make plain to me the virtues of womanly, domestic order, even though the station attendant in my dream was an old woman with long red hair that seemed at odds with her aged, craggy face.
You see, living in New Jersey without a car is rather like being a fish without gills. On late evenings homeward bound from Manhattan, God help you if you forget to buy cigarettes on the New York side of the river, because the mom-and-pop stores in my neighborhood close in the early evening, and for the true nicotine addict, that can only mean one thing—hoofing it over to the Hudson Tunnel approach, beside which there are numerous all-night mini-marts. Sating a late-night nicotine fix is the only reason I would ever venture to the row of mini-marts, and it would be an utterly unremarkable experience were it not for the surreal divine absence of it all.
It is not a long walk, but in a matter of blocks the early 20th century is left behind, its working-class sturdiness and human scale traded in for a depopulated strip of light and fumes and apocalyptically open spaces. Even the cars and trucks seem to glide along on autopilot, their drivers screened from view by tinted glass, and I imagine the vehicles to be trained like circus animals sidling up to the gasoline troughs and taking a sip without their owners having so much as to leave the driver’s seat. Striding into this New Jersey for a pack of smokes at two in the morning leaves one dispirited; when you finally come upon a fellow human being, it’s a few disregarding glances and a little bit of business transacted between a scratched and warped panel of Cyrolon, and then it’s back out into the unremittingly bleak night humming along to constant stream of diesel fuel and kilowatts. It’s mid-January, and the cold, filthy of rain of northern New Jersey stings my face as an air pump’s coiled tube hisses at me like Cerberus’ tail.
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