I was watching a movie, and I was in it, and I was watching it, and I was in it. A classic I recognized. I tried hard to fix it in my mind so I’d remember it when I awoke—I somehow knew it was a dream. The thing that I knew would identify it was that Albert Brooks was in it. When I did wake up I realized it wasn’t a real movie—not “Broadcast News,” not “Lost in America,” not whatever. It was a madcap road movie in which a group of friends play banjos in cars as they head down the highway. It was playful and poignant. Other things happened that I can’t remember. Later, I was given heroin gumballs. A handful of them: red, blue, white, yellow, green. I chewed one and began to get high.

I was in a van with J. P. going to some kind of adventure in the woods, like a zip line or God knows what. We were in Mexico or Costa Rica or something, and the activity was run by locals who accompanied us on the way. One of them busted out some coke on a big mirror and passed it around. It was a beautiful chalky, pale blue. I smashed some rocks with a credit card and made myself a fat line. I snorted it with some difficulty, clamping my nostril shut to keep it in. One of the local guys chuckled.

When we got to the location I was directed to sweep up the pile of coke and hand it to the woman who had driven the van. Evidently there was a risk the authorities would see us, so I was warned to be discreet. I stood around with the coke formed into a ball in my sweaty hand. There were two women standing around and I couldn’t tell which one had been the driver. Finally a man held out an opened paper bag and I dropped the coke inside.

Donald Fagen needed a title for his new novel.

“Candyland,” I proposed. However, we agreed that as the setting for the denouement was a theme park of that name, it was a little on the nose.

I went with a friend to his apartment building and climbed the stairs. They were very narrow, steep stone steps and soon we were very high up. You could see out a window that we were hundreds of feet above the ground. I told him, “These look like stairs from a dream.”