FRIDAY, JUNE 14, 2002 — He came to me as if in a dream: Matt Damon, standing at the foot of my bed in the dark.

"Matt Damon!" I yelped, turning on the light and flicking the Pringles crumbs from my sheets. "What are you doing here?"

"I am everywhere," Matt replied. "I am promoting my new movie, The Bourne Identity, which opens in theaters today."

"Well, go do it somewhere else." I knew that Matt, having been raised on the mean streets of well-to-do Cambridge, would appreciate the candor. Although he suffers from amnesia in his new movie, he still hasn’t forgotten his Harvard Square roots. But Matt just hung his head, that million-dollar chin coming to rest on his glistening, distended pecs.

"Matt?" I probed. "What’s with the long face?" And then I thought: wow, Matt Damon really does have a long face. It’s the chin.

"It’s the Boston Globe," Matt said after a long pause. "They didn’t like my movie."

"What, The Bourne Identity, which opens in theaters today?"

"Yeah." And with this he began to sob. Poor Matt. After The Legend of Bagger Vance, I knew this could kill him. To complicate matters, Matt’s childhood buddy, the equally large-chinned Ben Affleck, was enjoying no small success with an action flick of his own. What if Matt’s movie bombed? "The sum of all fears," he kept mumbling. "The sum of all fears."

I had to do something. "How do you know the Globe didn’t like it?"

"They said it was ‘bad.’"

"Oh." Think, Chris, think.

"Well, they put you in their ‘Names’ section 67 times last week," I offered encouragingly. Nothing. "Um, we liked it." By "we," I meant the Phoenix’s film critic, who tends to speak for the entire paper on these matters. "We gave it three-and-a-half stars!" This seemed to perk Matt up a little, and for the first time I caught a glimpse of those preternaturally white teeth.

"Let’s go," he said, reaching out his hand. And with this he took me on a magical junket.

After soaring high above the American landscape, with a brief stopover in Minneapolis, we found ourselves in a small conference room at the Hyatt Regency in Bloomington, Indiana, where a reporter from the Indiana Daily Student, Larry Cheesbottom, was picking his teeth with the corner of a press release.

"Matt," Cheesbottom began, "your previous films have, dare I say, relied on a degree of directorial ... " but before Cheesbottom could say another word, Matt leapt from his chair and snapped the reporter’s neck, just like his character in The Bourne Identity, which opens in movie theaters today, would do.

"Matt," I said, giggling, "that was a bit strong." And yet, as I watched Matt going through Cheesbottom’s wallet in search of ID, I felt somewhat uneasy. The thing is, I had taken my 15-year-old nephew to see The Bourne Identity a few hours earlier, and as the two of us had walked out of the theater following two hours of nose-smooshing, bowel-excavating violence, I had felt somewhat uneasy then, too. I looked at my nephew beside me, pink-cheeked and innocent, and I thought to myself: "Jesus, I cannot fight!"

We hear a lot about body image these days, how Elizabeth Hurley and the hotties in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions can make women feel physically inadequate, and so on. But what about us men? When we see Matt Damon going schoompf, schack, pfitt-pfitt-pfitt, disposing of villains with ice-cool flair while the helpless female looks on, how do you think we feel? We know we will never kick the gun out of anyone’s hand. We know we will never use massive explosions as a diversionary tactic. So we have potency issues. And who’s to blame? Matt bloody Damon, that’s who.

Come to think of it, I had a similar reaction when I saw Matt in Good Will Hunting, in which he was not only tough, but absurdly clever. I walked out of the movie theater that night knowing I had a brain the size of a raisin. And I couldn’t fight. It was awful. To make things worse, I had a date with me. I could almost hear her thoughts as we walked home afterwards: "Matt’s so smart, Matt’s so rugged, Matt’s so handsome despite the big chin."

The experience did do me some good. From then on, I only took women to movies that were filled with abject losers, social lepers, physical nightmares, characters beside whom I might actually look good. John Cusack was out. George Clooney was a definite no-no. As were Brad Pitt, Hugh Grant, and Brendan Fraser. Carrot Top? Bring him on. Adam Sandler? Book me a ticket. But Matt Damon? Even though I had only my nephew with me, I still got those old feelings: I’ll never get laid again. Worse: I don’t deserve to.

And then, as Matt went about stuffing the body of Larry Cheesbottom into a small cocktail cabinet, it hit me: I hate Matt Damon. "So, Matt," I said as he pushed and prodded at a stubbornly inflexible ankle, "have you seen The Sum of All Fears?" Matt froze, his back to me, and said nothing. "I hear it’s quite good." He remained motionless. "People say that Ben ..." And then there was an almighty flash and I was back in my room. I awoke surrounded by Pringles crumbs, the television on. Weirdly, my neck was killing me.