Waking Before The Nighmare's Over

This morning I woke up as if I'd been worked over all night by the most exacting demon surgeons that my subconscious could conjure up.

I became conscious, or came to, a little bit ahead of my simple hopes for the day and I wondered, before opening my eyes, is this all there is, and then hell?

I imagined myself on a flat dusty plain, overlooking a bluff that looked down into foggy swirls of white, and purple and blue. Down, not up.

I saw a robed angel without wings, I think. Anyway, plainly we weren't going anywhere.

This was about two minutes, maybe less, and I didn't move because I thought it would stir something unpleasant in me, something emotional, not dead weight but living, liable to float up.

I knew if I prayed, so I prayed. I knew if I wrote a letter, so I wrote a letter. It was to my brother, I'm worried about. Work was two hours off.

I felt much better, except now I remembered again what we each have to face sometimes.
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I miss sitting at the bars, I miss the entertaining possibility of finding some sweet, drunken trollop with an English degree and a family fortune.
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Once I went home with a daughter or niece of the Tone Spice family; me, her, and her drunken lawyer, who passed out on the couch.

She and I went to bed with our clothes on and she kissed me good night first thing and rolled over to sleep. So there I was, but I couldn't sleep. I remember the room, the light after midnight in the tall windows. Sheer curtains lifted by a September breeze. Shadows of the window sash. I remember thinking this drunken lawyer in the living room might not be my friend in the morning. Anyway, I had to get up.

In her bathroom there were 1500 million little glass bottles of beauty products, crowded on a tall set of white wicker shelves. I thought to open her medicine cabinet and see if she had any hydrocodone for headaches, but I didn't dare because with all the tinkling little bottles already before me, what might be crowded in that little secret space behind the gilded mirror?

I was within walking distance of home so I let myself out, careful not to wake her lawyer, who was her boyfriend too,I imagined. I walked,leaving my car for when I was sober. More sober.

The next day I couldn't remember which apartment complex. So my car was lost for a few days (really, my not wanting or needing to make any special effort...I'd wait for a friend to help me look). I couldn't remember her first name, or which EST. 1889 it was where we met. One of those on Ingersol, of course.

I wasn't trying very hard. Not at anything, is my point.

What did I ever want. In my formative years I drank and day-dreamed of being Billy Shears or someone. Dad told my very first psychiatrist that I lived in a dream world and I was flabber-gasted, it couldn't be true because how the hell could he know?

Music fell away. I wanted to be alone, but alone with someone, seeing and hearing whatever the present medium allowed. To talk, to drink, to go out--- she had to be beautiful and smart---and be seen talking, or be seen being talked to.

No, not heard, seen.
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I'd lost my last bookstore job and unemployment benefits were running out. My apartment building was full of people who got government checks. I traded Serax for little bottles of methadone, until the guy got mad at me once and sort of roughed me up, yelling his head off and shaking me and dragging me around my room because I owed him ten dollars and didn't realize it was such an immediate big deal to him. I was so high I had to pretend being scared or he might not stop, he might actually punch me or kick me in the head. He was just out of prison, and looked it.
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I only had a radio to listen to, and I loved it at night, getting the BBC and falling asleep for a few hours at a time, then waking up and drinking a little more to get that especially warm spine-sleepy kind of nod.

That night, or one of those summer nights, Princess Di was suddenly WHAT! killed in a car crash. I was bolt upright, crying. I couldn't believe it, the news or that I was crying. Then I walked down Bright, Quiet 3 A.M. Ingersol to get the paper, but I was of course way too early.

I don't know why but the memory of walking down Ingersol that night, looking for someone, anyone to share the news with, is so vivid and colorful to me, it's somehow pleasant. Just one shock that wasn't my own private trauma, I suppose. I enjoyed the walk back too, empty handed. I went into one of my neighbor's---the door was ajar as usual--- where the TV was on and he was passed out in his chair. I sat and drank and watched the news coverage. That was another good thing about that apartment building, besides the methadone: there was round the clock visiting. Everyone was crippled, finished. (There was even a young man dying of AIDS, wandering the halls stoned on his medicines, starving too, within weeks of dying.) Most were kind and generous.

I was known not to open my door sometimes. I was known to answer it and yell in your face to go away. I was asleep, a dreamless sleep I'm sure.

"Some of these memories
you can learn to live with,
and some of 'em you can't"

-dylan ("sugar baby" from Love and Theft)