Dear Editor: I’m a longtime reader and contributor to the paper. I know The Star itself is one of the oldest if not the oldest in America and I can’t compete with that, but I’m 78 and have been around a long time.
You published my stories when you used to publish fiction. I’ve contributed reviews, many “Guestwords,” and most recently poems.
No one wants to hear about dreams, but I had a doozy last night. A peculiarity of my condition is that I have never after all these years met one person at the paper I write for. I’m betting there are others just like me who get “their kicks on Route 66.”
Maybe it goes with the territory, but here is my dream. One more thing, and I don’t know if this is influencing me: I went to see a very well-intentioned play about book burning that was totally bad. The audience was screaming praises, and I stuck out like a sore thumb.
Does anyone care about art and artistic devices anymore? I wanted to explain that you might not like Leni Riefenstahl and obviously hate fascism but could still admire “Triumph of the Will” (1935) for its classicism and the cinematic spectacle it creates out of its, to say the least, misguided ideology.
You can like Marinetti, who wrote the “Futurist Manifesto” (1909), though he too was a fascist.
I know my words would have fallen on deaf ears. It’s lonely to feel out of step with a crowd, particularly when it’s well meaning. I felt like a little kid not chosen for the pickup game. I went home crying.
Anyway, here, at last, is my dream.
And I should add one more piece of existential background. I heard about a distant relative who had lost his job, his wife, his life to drugs. I didn’t know this person, though it made me very sad since I have had my own battles with addiction.
I’m a lucky guy, since I emerged relatively unscathed.
All the bad things occurred in my other life, which ended 39 years ago. They talk about half-lives in physics, and I guess you could say the half-life of this element, which I call my “self,” is 39.
Finally, to get to my dream. I am riding my bike down to Main Beach. Driving toward me is the editor I have never met. He slows down.
I identify myself, at the same time saying, “Ha, it’s you.” I guess he turns around, but next thing I know he is with me down by the concession with the lifeguard stand in the distance and the warning sign about not fighting against riptides.
We both look around and agree life has changed. For one, the ropes that are thrown out to people struggling in the waves are worn and have grown thin. I hope no one is going to get in trouble in the surf, since the very thing that is there to help them will no longer do any good.
Since it’s a dream, I have to wake up, and the action suddenly shifts. It’s Thanksgiving, but in the middle of the festivities I realize that most of my cohort have one or another neurological dysfunction, be it dementia or Alzheimer’s itself, and that I’ve had a slip and gone back to drinking again.
It’s just like the old days. The few people who notice what is happening try, unsuccessfully, to get me to stop, but I say to myself just what I did way back then. I’m just going to have one more. I’ll get drunk just one more time and then I’ll stop.
Even though I was happy to finally meet my editor, this was one dream from which I was happy to wake up.
Francis Levy is a Wainscott resident and the author of the novels “Erotomania,” “Seven Days in Rio,” “Tombstone,” and “The Wormhole Society” and of the short-story collection “The Kafka Studies Department.” His poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Evergreen, The New York Times’s “Metropolitan Diary,” and Articoli Liberi. He recently completed a collection of poetry, “The Unavoidable Imminence of the Inexplicable.”