Uncomfortable Places Where I've Slept

 

There are no chickens in this story

MY LIVING ROOM FLOOR, NORTH CHESTNUT STREET, 

NEW PALTZ

 

I’d met this guy Jonathon while working semester opens at the college bookstore. He was really introverted but we got along. He invited me to a party in The City, although who he knew there I never figured out. The two of us rode out on the Trailways bus and took a subway to wherever the apartment was. I’m necessarily a little hazy on the details.

Most of the night for me was in bursts and flashes. I remember drinking tequila and then fashioning some concoction from other alcohols. I remember making out with a woman in a room away from the party but other than long reddish hair I don’t remember anything about her. This is a big part of the reason Jonathon later stopped being friends with me because I found out she was someone he liked and had hoped to get to know at this party. I wasn’t much of one for niceties like that in those years.

When the party broke up at 1 or 2 we took the subway back to Penn Station but there were no busses leaving until 7. So we joined the ranks of the homeless who squatted in the one room inside the station the cops kept open for them. Once an hour they rousted us to another end of the room, saying “No one sleeps!” But I did as I was riotously drunk and between bouts of laughing at the cops (not a practice I’d suggest) and trudging from spot to spot, I huddled on the floor and slept the fitful half-doze known to both the inebriated and those trying to have conversations with them. Jonathon spent the whole time standing and trying both to stay near me, like I was protection, and being as far from other people as he could.

Eventually the sun came up and at 630 we could buy tickets, with which we could stay the half hour to 7 while the others were bounced into the street. The bus ride was two hours but to me it seemed both like hours longer and just a few moments. We reached town, I walked with Jonathon as far as the corner of Main and North Chestnut where we parted, him to his room and me  to my apartment.

Now this is where it becomes uncomfortable.

I’m one of those lucky few born with some immunity to the bad effects of drugs and alcohol. I’ve never had a bad trip from LSD, never gotten paranoid while smoking weed or hash, never experienced anything but stupendous and unremembered epiphanies on shrooms or peyote. Never had a hangover no matter how much I drank. Except that time.

My headache began on the bus but I put it down to the sun in my eyes and lack of solid sleep. As I walked, I could feel each step travel from my foot through my body to the tiny hammer banging my brain. I had never felt so happy getting to my apartment, so much so I opened the door and did a faceplant on the floor. I didn’t feel like I could make it to bed, I just laid there and slept.

Or I tried to. It seemed that day everyone in the world I knew chose to visit me, either in groups or singly. Again, only fleeting memories but I do remember a stream of drool from my mouth to a small pool next to me when the first person, whoever it was, knocked at the door. Stupid me, it never occurred to me not to say, “Come in,” although that wouldn’t have accomplished much as I had a habit of not locking my door and encouraging people to walk in.

I alternately curled into the fetal position or spread full out like DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man. I may have even resembled that drawing a little as my hair was curly and long and sweat-plastered to the floor. I vaguely recall Jonathon coming by with another friend of ours, I don’t remember who, and looking smugly down on my pain. I probably cried once or twice. No one, fortunately, stayed long, or I don’t think they did, because I kept drifting back off to sleep after a few sentences describing my head variously as a deflated basketball, a cracked egg, a fishbowl full of fecal water, a balloon blown up by a congested drunken bum. There may have been more.

Eventually the night came, and far from being refreshed, I was so worn by the exhaustion of breathing through a mouth equal parts dry and swampy I fell finally into bed wearing the same clothes I’d worn to the party now 24 hours before and drifted in and out of consciousness until 5 or 6 the next morning, when I got up, stretched my 45 minute routine, and then put on running shorts and took a ginger mile and a half jog. Outside the day-long, incessant hammering, that was my usual start to the morning, which may have been why I didn’t usually suffer otherwise

umbilicus

About a year ago I picked up a pair of hitchhiking sisters who I convinced to stay with us a few days while they had the kitten they'd found treated for infections.  While here, they turned me onto a website I'd never heard of called Lookatthisfuckingoogle.tumblr.com.  It's primarily a spot for train kids to post photos.

Since then I check in on it at least once a week and it's become a place where I can waste hours a day.  I've seen all the photos, but attached to each are often notes from members liking the photo or making a comment.  Each member has a tumblr and clicking the link leads to multiple pages of odds and ends.  Notes, gifs, pics, quotes, all chosen by idiosyncratic people in their idiosyncratic ways.  It's a reminder that, as we drift ever further apart as individuals, we remain ensconced in a larger community, and even if I never meet any of these people, I feel attached not to them but to the same thing they're attached to.  The site acts as an umbilicus between us.

nights at the new paltz trailways

cold, crisp days like this remind me of the days when I wanted to be jewish. I was attending suny-new paltz and took the bus to and from kingston where barbara and I lived. in the morning I took the small bus operated by the old fellow bob, who got you there for a dollar and a half, and in the evenings I took the trailways that dropped me off at the broadway end of elmendorf.

I remember the evening rides best, or waiting for the bus in the evenings. I generally caught the 645 and the sun would already be down and the cold closing in. I don't remember what I was studying--it may have been philosophy--but I had a long, thick beard and hair down past my scapula. I wore a bowler hat and thick winter coat that reached my knees and affected an accent sometimes. I imagined, standing there in the cold busroom, a single room with a single bulb in the center of the ceiling and a pinball machine that never worked and a pistachio dispenser that was always refilled (they were always green but tasted so good), that I was a hasid studying my torah (when what I was actually reading, holding it close to my face and licking my thumb before turning the page, was probably science fiction). I had to walk around because the room had no heat and the few seats were already taken up by mothers and broods of children, and that was as it should be. sometimes it was warmer and friendlier to wait outside.

it's hard to imagine, perhaps, but I loved those evenings. I felt a real part of some life outside the normality barbara and I tried to project, that of a couple who had middle class aspirations. I felt like I was searching for something bigger than that, not necessarily god--had I really been a hasid it would have been god--but a context and community that looked at life differently and more deeply than most people did. I was certain there was a frontier out in the cold somewhere I could enter, if I only could decipher the directions.