Last weekend was fun. The big event was on Saturday, spent all day kayaking lazily down the Little Miami River in southeast Ohio.

But there were repurcussions. Although I used waterproof SPF 30 sunscreen, I still came out badly burned lobster-red around my armpits and feet by the end of the day, and bad enough for my body to react as if it had food poisoning the next day.

And while I lay in bed in sick-sleep, vivid dreams floated their ideas through and beyond me.

Dream One
I am a successful businessman, sitting in an office with dark-paneled walls and oriental carpets. I have gotten a gift. Someone has left a silver cardboard box with a blue bow on the corner of my desk; inside is a bottle of expensive liquor.

Who sent me this? There is no card.

Hmm, just the kind I like. I unscrew the cap and sniff it. I should be civilized and have it in a glass, but everyone's left for the day. I take a quick swig and screw the cap back on. Ahhh...

As I'm considering the quiet of the early evening and the bottle's weight in my hand, and looking again at the label, something seems not right. Nerve endings along my throat and around my stomach are jumping to life and shooting a collective message to my brain. A split-second for my brain to ask if this is a joke and a split-second for the nerves to fan out an answer along the perimeters and for my skin to erupt in sweat.

No, this is not a joke. Do I remember putting the bottle down, heavily, on the desk? Oh! My stomach. It is expanding, exploding from the pressure and already my brain is asking Is this how it ends? No! It can't be! It's not supposed to be like this!

And now all I can see are the stubby legs of the desk, the ropy fibers of the oriental carpet pressed down where the weight of the legs meet it. I see chords, for the telephone, the computer, the light, tangled about and running off into dark. I register fingers twitching on one hand but I can no longer feel what I see. Is this how it will end?

Is it true what they say? That you see your life flash before your eyes? I feel my brain. My brain, full of tiny needles burrowing their way inwards, a hundred metal worms wiggling in synchronicity to get to the center of my head. I feel my heart, charging on, fighting, a decorated soldier on the front line.

Already it is too much, the worms are gorging on their fatty fruit, the fingers disappear, the chords beyond the desk go dark, the desk leg and carpet with its fibers gone. This will be something for the cleaning crew to discover. As the dark rushes in, I hear my heart beat--triumphantly--one more time.

Dream Two
Los Angeles, 1935, in the middle of a heatwave. How is someone supposed to get ahead in this town? I've been involved with over 30 pictures but still no special circumstance, no breakt-through. Am I destined to become one of those 'lifers'; the ones you vaguely recognize from somewhere but are already too old, too common, too average to be anything special. I've been a desk clerk, waiter, soldier, galleyman, pirate, cowboy (and Indian). I've held open doors, bowed and scraped, delivered telegrams, answered telephones and driven taxis. I smooth my narrow, carefully-trimmed and waxed mustache and watch myself blow cigarette smoke stylishly in the mirror.

I've snickered and snarled and laughed and howled, sobbed and begged and pleaded, staggered and waltzed and fox-trotted. I've been haughty and humble, irreverent and serious, bland and outrageous. Observe how my linen pants break nicely over my black-and-yellow wingtips.

The mirror is silver, heavy with venetian glass, and the stuccoed wall behind it is painted a dull green. The windows are shuttered, to keep out the smog, but shadows flitter on the dark walls. Birds twitter and sing and you can almost hear their wings.

Oh it must be something, to be in pictures, she or he will say, even if you aren't mentioned in the credits. Do you know what you'll be in next?

Yes, I say. I got a call just yesterday. A comedy, to take place in Paris--France--of the last century. This morning I was fitted with a costume, a velvet blue coat with tails, hot and suffocatingly tight, a green velvet stovepipe hat, and white pants with gold piping. A swanky affair this comedy. Quite.

Who does it star, anyone we know?

I don't know either. It could be anyone. It could be someone new, a complete unknown. We never know until we show up that morning for makeup and sometimes not even then.

I should go for a walk. I wonder if they'll prosecute Bernard Hauptmann for the Lindbergh Baby kidnapping...