This your brain on Popeye's spicy chicken

More precisely, this is my brain on leftovers: Popeye's spicy chicken, green beans, baked beans, a hard biscuit, and an Oreo (which, in some parts of the world, is also a biscuit). Turtle, at least, attributes last night's dream—an unlikely mishmash of plot elements seemingly stolen from The Core, Get Smart, and Pee Wee's Big Adventure—to the choices I made when I prepared my own dinner last evening.

It all started when two men showed up on the stoop of my Miami-style bungalow. They were wearing suits the same greenish-yellow color that was all the rage at The Limited stores in the mid-'80s, which I think was called "mustard". Under their jackets, they wore t-shirts printed to look like a tie and vest.

They looked like live-action versions of Bert and Ernie, from Sesame Street.

"You have to come with us," Bert said. "Your house is the epicenter."

I glanced down and saw that both men were wearing red leather clogs. This rendered me momentarily incapable of speech, but I took a moment and finally found an appropriate response.

"Huh?"

"Come on," Ernie said, placing an arm around my waist and nudging me toward a battered tow truck that looked like it had been on its last legs since the early '60s. "You don't want to be here when it comes."

"'It'?" I muttered, reluctantly allowing myself to be led to the truck. "What 'it'?"

Ernie smiled the sort of reassuring smile usually reserved for small children and the very senile. "Everything's going to be all right," he said. "Everything's just fine."

"The hell it is," Bert said. "There's a space-time rift [insert dream-ish technical mumbo jumbo here] alignment that's going to cause a softball-sized tunnel all the way through the planet, and it's going to come out through your kitchen."

Ernie rolled his eyes and scowled at Bert, irritated. "You know he's not cleared for that information yet."

"Look, just shut up and get in the truck," Ernie said, not unkindly.

[At this point, some of you may be wondering where Turtle was while all this was going on. She wasn't in the dream, which suggests to me that she has a better agent than I do.]

The next thing I knew, we'd arrived at a checkpoint that looked just like the turnstiled entry gates at Disney World.

"Here you are," Ernie said. "ESCIA headquarters."

"What's ESCIA?" I asked.

"'Extra Secret Central Intelligence Agency'," Ernie said.

"Wait... if it's so extra secret, then why's there a big sign over the entry that says 'ESCIA'?"

"Shaddap," Bert said and slapped me across the back of the head. "Just go."

"Aren't you guys coming?"

"Nope," Ernie said. He pointed to a torpedo dangling from the tow truck's hook. "We have to get that over to research ASAP."

"It's a torpedo," I said.*

"Dang, this guy's good," Ernie said, poking Bert. "Poke, poke, poke."

I walked over to the turnstiles, where I became the charge of a guy who looked just like Francis, Pee Wee Herman's arch nemesis in Pee Wee's Big Adventure. He was wearing a gray suit, white shirt, red tie, and white patent leather shoes.

"C'mon," he said. "Let's get you checked in."

Francis then proceeded to take my thumbprints using an electronic scanner, and then various other combinations of digit prints, including my pinky toes ("The most important ones!"). I was photographed and blood typed. Finally, Francis punched a button and a machine spat out an ID card with my holographic likeness, thumbprints, and transparent window with a drop of my blood all laminated in.

"Here you go," he said. He handed me my ID card and nudged me toward the turnstiles. "But before you go in, I want to share a tip that will help you to assimilate."

"What's that?"

"We all wear suits in the ESCIA, but the way you dress can make you or break you," Francis explained. "Take me, for instance. I've chosen my ensemble to convey a sexually disingenuous image that cuts way down on distractions on the job."

"I bet. But don't you mean 'sexually ambiguous'?"

"I MEANT WHAT I SAID!!" Francis snapped. "Now get in there!"

Next, I was taken to meet my mentor, a veteran agent played by Stephen Dorff. Dorff was wearing a black pinstriped suit, a black shiny shirt open at the collar with no tie, and full-quill ostrich skin boots with silver toe caps. His hair was spikey, and he slouched insouciantly with one hand in his pants pocket and the other holding a cigarette.

He took a slow draw and squinted through the smoke. "So you're the new guy, enh?"

I shrugged and looked at my surroundings. We were in an office building, in a common area that looked quite a bit like the waiting area at an airport gate. Off to one side, there were about a dozen men and women wearing brown suits, doing some sort of slow line dance to the tune of Trio's "Da Da Da".

"Weird," I said.

"Yeah, well don't let 'em fool ya," Dorff said. "They're the ones with the power around here. Those are the office manager moles. There's nothin' goes on that they don't know about."

"I always heard that you shouldn't wear a brown suit to an interview because brown gives an impression of untrustworthiness," I said.

"Shit, I don't know," he said. He paused for a moment to drop his cigarette on the floor, ground it out with the toe of his boot, and ran his fingers through his hair. "I always figured it was because office managers order the coffee service, and coffee's brown."


From there, I don't remember details. There was some business about crawling through ventilation ducts and having to time it so we were only moving when the fans were on, but my alarm clock went off before I had a chance to find out what that was all about.


* I know what prompted this, at least. Last night, I watched an old Peter O'Toole movie called Murphy's War in which O'Toole's character sinks a German U-Boat using a recovered torpedo, which he drops on it from a crane on a barge.