I'm sitting in a large, tiered lecture hall at college. What college, I don't know. But I don't know anything that anyone in class is talking about. I know that I haven't read anything that's been assigned all year. If I'm called on, then I'm going to just have to say, sorry but I haven't read that.
But at the beginning of class the professor finds some notice on his desk. He can't make heads or tails of it and begins trying to analyze the meaning of the notice.
Good, I think. Take the whole damned class trying to figure it out. Maybe I'll get by. It has something to do with shopping carts not being allowed in the hallways but only on Sundays. Something like that.
The students are all into trying to prove how smart they are by telling him what the paper might mean. Maybe this is a a law class? Philosophy? I'm not even sure what class it is, that's how lost I am. But I realize that I need to complete it to get my degree.
Well, finally they get on with the lesson and I still don't have a clue. But about halfway through a wind blows through the classroom and the paper they had been discussing at the beginning about shopping carts blows out the window. The professor asks for volunteers to go outside and retreive it, and my hand is up first.
So out the window I go. And straight into a lake. The paper is floating around, but I fugre I'll just take as much time as I can before getting it so that the class will be over. And sure enough when I return the class is over and two men are standing there in the classroom with duck hunting outfits on and cracked shotguns.
After introductions they inform me that they are going to teach the next class on duck hunting and I hand them the paper which they explain is not about shopping carts but about how many ducks each hunter is allowed to bag.
Whatever. I walk into the hallway, and realize that I've just graduated because of this nonsense. But no sooner has this thought hit me, then I find myself with the professor at a party on the lake, or more properly on a series of rafts on the lake - and the professor looks like James Coburn and he's reading from the same book as in the classroom and I still don't have any idea what he's saying. We get to talking and he remembers me as one of his students and tells how he left teaching and went into writing for Hollywood which is where he's been for the last ten years.
I tell him I too wrote screenplays for a while. Ah yes, he says. He thought he recognized my name. He's smoking cigarettes - one after another and now he's out. For some reason, I'm just as eager to get away from him now - because he's mentioning these writers as if I'm supposed to know them - but I've not heard of a single one. So I'm just nodding that so-and-so was good and getting deeper and deeper into lies. So when he mentions that he's out of cigarettes I volunteer to go off and get some for him. He tells me that they're called Woosherfields. Something like that. British I think.
Which I do.
When I return his wife is handing him a tape. It has a soundtrack for a movie they're working on. She tells me that this is a new rap version of RESPECT. Ugh, I tell her. That's a bad idea.
No, she assures me. Good idea.
I hand the package of cigarettes to the James Coburn Professor of something and he takes one out and smokes it. Offers me one while he continues name dropping names I should have heard of. I take one cigarette. Light it. But I don't get any draw. I'm sucking on the thing - but no smoke or air or anything is coming out.
He's going on debonairly about more things I never heard of - and I taste this funny plastic tip that is stuck in the cigarette. Ah - so that's what the problem is. I pull the white plastic tip out. Coburn explains that this is how they keep each cigarette fresh. I toss the tip into the lake and watch is float off. And then as I'm about to take a drag - I wake up. No smokes for me. Not even in dreamland.
