I dreamed I was at work again in that filthy, dirty shop. Yuba City Honda never changes in that regard. The floors were a dingy, oil tinged grey, sanitized by a layer of automotive grime. The lighting from the ancient fluorescent fixtures cast a sickening green pall, reminiscent of a monster movie viewed on old TV with a bad picture tube.

 As usual, I was failing to look busy, and I kept finding myself under the watchful eye of Reiner. I supposed that I should have been cleaning something, but the layers of scum on every surface seemed to indicate that this wasn't something that anyone there ever actually considered doing.

One might grab a mop or a broom upon seeing management, but that was as far as it went. As soon as they left, the mop went back in the bucket, into the silty soup of never changed, long neutralized floor cleaner, and the tiny piles of swept up debris slowly reintegrated themselves into the general population of floor garbage.

Some bigwigs were showing up for a party, and Reiner was making a final round out in the shop to clear out the deadwood, sending home employees who were just standing around.

"Do you mind clocking out, Drew?" he told me, more of a command than a question.

Not wanting to be sent home just yet, I made a faint attempt at picking up some garbage, a couple of bags of potato chips that had welded themselves to the bottom of a service cart. 

The abandoned snack bags had been there longer than some employees, through several managerial administrations, and the overprocessed contents, which had begun their life as a preservative and additive based product with minimal nutritive value, and which had a normal shelf life exceeding that of radioactive plutonium, were even showing signs of decay. Some resistant form of super-mold had eroded the bag from the inside, and was possibly threatening to take over the world one potato chip at a time.

"Wasn't that Silva's cart?" Reiner asked. "Might as well just leave 'em." Silva would have probably eaten them had he still been working there.

I went to the break room to get ready to leave. David Chanh was there, changing out of his uniform. He was always the first to leave after racking up his ten hours in half that time, thanks to the flat rate system. Efficiency was rewarded in this way: Working hard, you could finish jobs at a faster rate, clocking more hours than you were actually present. Being a family man, David was a "ten and out" kind of employee, meaning once he'd gotten his ten hours for the day, he was out the door.

"They sending you home, Spark?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said glumly. "Caught loafing again. Too much unapplied time."

I was just heading out the door when I saw my friend Steve Waugh crouching behind a trash can. This was quite a surprise, as I hadn't seen him since high school. I'd looked for him over the years on Facebook, but having an uncommonly common name, he had proven elusive, so I'd finally given up. 

"Surprise!" he said, popping up like a Jack-in-the-box.

Another surprise came as I glanced over to his left. It was Dennis McGuire. Dennis was another friend from the same era, and one whom I'd had very little hope of finding, outside of maybe an obituary. He was another one of my punk friends and had come from a long line of alcoholics with violent tendencies. His most likely trajectory after high school would have been a short career in the military, terminating in dishonorable discharge, followed by death from advanced liver disease. 

But here was Dennis, alive and well, a bit pale, and smaller than I remembered him, but smiling and greeting me with a hug and an Irish kiss on the cheek. Many of them, actually, with a lot of "I love yous" thrown in. He was nothing if not effusive in emotional loyalty. It had been decades, and yet here he was practically licking my face like a long lost puppy.

I told him that it was great to see him, but I had to leave, since I was being sent home for the day. I don't know if we were to catch up later or not, since the dream ended there. I suppose I spent more time trying to describe a bag of corroded potato chips than I did focusing on my friend's reunion, and that, I'm sure, says something about me as a person.