I am totally grown up, and living with someone, when I have this dream that I am at an event at a coliseum which has two levels. A kind of concrete stadium on the edge of a lake. I’ve come to watch a performance, and I think I look great. I am dressed very sexy. I seem to know someone is going to be there. And someone is: Jerry Reed! A bit older than he was in Smokey and the Bandit, but not much older, and he seems thrilled to hang out with me, a much younger woman. He sits with me at the edge of the lake, very sweet-like. We hold hands.
Then I see a couple of friends, a poet and his wife, but they are on their way somewhere else. It’s the poet’s birthday, and I wish him a happy birthday, and kiss both him and his wife and then they get up to leave with hardly a word. Why are they going so soon? I ask Jerry. He shrugs. Perhaps they disapprove of me being with Jerry who is pawing me and making jokes and cracks; I mean everyone knows I live with this other guy (the one in real life).
From there I go with Jerry Reed to the upper level of the coliseum. It reminds me of this bullfight arena in Arles, in France, where I went once, the first and only time I ever saw a bullfight. But there is no bullfight, and I think that maybe where I am with Jerry Reed is not a bullfight arena, but is more clearly the ruins of the fortress structure on the edge of the Mediterranean in Cassis (also in France) where I lived for a few months once (in the real world). The fortress ruin is where I often walked alone, in the afternoons, to a place called the Tennis Club, which was an outdoor cafe which in France means it was open until late afternoon and then it closed up. You just sit and drink a coffee and when you are done, you have to find the guy who runs the cafe and give him some money. Presumably, this cafe was also somewhere you could play tennis, but I never actually saw any courts or anything, or anyone dressed to play tennis. There were no courts, in the real France to my knowledge. In the dream, there were courts. In the dream, it is dark as Jerry and I walk around the old fortress and the Tennis Club has already closed for the day, and all the chairs are up on the tables, and the awnings are rolled in, and the blue and yellow umbrellas are shut. We walk to the end of the fortress, and end up on a secluded little beach below, where Jerry attempts to seduce me. He promises me that the guy I live with will never find out. This makes sense of course, because the guy I live with exists in the real world and Jerry Reed only exists in my mind. We do it. Just dissolve right there in the dark on the beach, in the tiny little cove. He’s pretty good, is all I remember; he’s better than I would guess because he shuts up, and stops with the jokes and is very present.
Later someone finds my body and, oddly enough, my dog’s body, on this little shore, but by then I am asleep and my dog is asleep, and Jerry is long gone. I try to convince the authorities it is not my body, and that even if it is someone else’s body, Jerry is not involved. That’s how it goes in dreams. You are both dead and asleep and you are awake outside your dead/asleep body and you still have to make all your own excuses. It’s like I never stop trying to defend myself, even after I’m dead in the dream. And I’m trying to defend Jerry Reed too, and what do I know maybe he did kill me? My poor dog is just along for the ride.
I pursue Jerry to another town where he is performing at another stadium in a costume, dressed like a rodeo clown. He seems pretty put off by my turning up a second time. He is not interested in having me follow him like a groupie, but then I explain the situation. I mean really! Who the hell does he think he is? He wasn’t that good! What an ego. Anyway, the situation in the explaining seems too restrictive. Too many anxieties about whether or not it was my body I saw there, washed up on the beach. I give up. Jerry invites me over for lunch at his house, which is close by luckily. His house is very nice, with a lovely central staircase!
Do you think we are still in France? I wonder, I wonder what kind of a mind takes Jerry Reed out of his element and sticks him in a coliseum in France and nearly gets him arrested for double murder (humanimal double homicide, I call it in the dream).