Walking the Sleep (10 page)

Running. Running. Running. I am fourteen years old and I am running. I run all the time. I run in the morning and I run at night. I ask my dad to pick me up ten miles from home because my knees are buckling and my Kmart running shoes cannot keep up. They are falling apart. And the other kids on the track team laugh at my shoes. But I pull out ahead of them and run. I run. Months before I was smoking weed, and hash. I stole alcohol. I slammed cold medicine, Comtrex and Nyquil in doses that should have killed me. I tried so hard to slit my wrists. It’s harder than you think. The flesh, the nerves, the skin is much harder to cut through past the nerves than most know. I tried hanging and the rope had failed leaving me with a tear across my neck. Thank God it was the middle of winter and I could wear a coat.

And there I was months later running. Running. Running. I ran and I ran. And the drugs melted away. They sweated out of me. The hallucinations and horrible thoughts melted into sweat and ran down my legs until my sweats were heavy with despair and pain. And my dad. With his premature bald head, and his pain, and his sadness, and his look. The look that said the world had won. It had beat him down. It had won. It had humiliated him and kicked the life from his eyes. My dad understood. He understood the running. He understood having to come and get me when my body failed.

When I ran to failure. When I collapsed and the cheap canvass and rubber
from my shit shoes failed. My dad understood. And he drove over and picked me up. And maybe then, in those times, I saw a glint of pride in me, but he was looking through the fog of despair. I think I saw that approval when he helped me into his blue 1970 Nova. Maybe. He couldn’t figure me out or what I was doing. I kept telling him I was running cross country for the track team.

He liked that but wasn’t sure. I only know he was there when I failed. He picked me up. Helped me into the car and gave me water. This approval was not shared by my mother, who by this time was far removed from the beloved pastor and Navajo missionary she once was. Now she was a self-proclaimed activist for women’s rights, a mean lesbian,
living with a mean woman, and me, and my sister. I think I was twelve when she called me in and told me she was a lesbian. I forget all she said but I remember thinking, if I don’t have to go to sleep without dinner, maybe this won’t be all bad. It was. All bad. In and out of those relationships and the worst, “Barbara.” She was a horrible person and she wanted me gone. By this time my sisters had fled to parts no better, abusive husbands and boyfriends. Younger sister to an older sisters’ where she would be sexually abused by the husband. So I was left alone at fourteen with two very angry and abusive lesbians who, began to see, that men where the root of all that was evil, and I was the perpetuation of that evil in youth form. The mom that I remembered. The mom that loved me and took my hand as a youngster was long gone. I hadn’t ever trusted the hand truly. She was loving but she was always harsh. It was the hand that combed my hair and brushed my cheek. The hand that lashed a belt across me, and later punched my face with the ferocity, Beat me with belts. Silver belt buckles, hot-wheel tracks, cords, and fists.

There was nothing that couldn’t be used that wasn’t within reach. Once the beating was so bad I remember trying to breathe, crawling to the bathroom, laying my penis sideways into the bathtub to pee because I couldn’t stand enough to piss – now that’s a real beating my friend, that’s a real beating at any age.

I’ve been gone a long time now and here. I am here. I know there is no time here but it seems like a long time watching my life here. No compulsion to leave but to watch.

This is death to me. My life, as it was, has become my life. No wandering about for now. Now. Time is here and it is standing still and it is moving before my eyes. And I stare transfixed into the abyss of what I was and what I am. I stare transfixed. I listen for a voice. Nothing. I stare transfixed into my past, my present, me. This is death for me. This is life. I can pick up and leave but I don’t. I watch as TIME passes and it does not. I’m here and I watch.

It’s late in the year. October, maybe November. Not sure but it’s very cool for southern California. I think it’s November. I go out for a run. I watch my fourteen year old body run. I run. I run. I have no destination but I run. I run with the team. I run alone. I run when no one tells me to run. I wear out shoes and hear my mother berate me day after day. I hear that horrible wretch of a partner. They accuse me of using drugs. They accuse me day in and day out. I arrive home after a ten mile run to their berating. Why am I out into the night? Why am I running at eleven at night?

“Where are the drugs?! Where are the fucking drugs?!”

There are no drugs. Just me sweating and heaving on the floor. I forget the exact night they pushed me to the wrong side. I remember a long run.

One of many nights, after nights. And collapsing in a heap. I recall them screaming at me and threatening to call the police. I remember the bright light of rage. I recall grabbing the lamp and smashing it through the window. Kicking over the coffee table as they screamed. Running. Running into the night. Finding a place, a safe place of a friend to sleep. Collapsing on the floor and falling into an aching sleep where the body fails. Where the mind decides and the body complies. I am shaken awake by my friend in the early morning hours.

“You have to go, dude.”

“Yeah, right. I know. Sorry.”

“Sorry, man. My mom is freaking out. Says you need to go home.”

“Yeah, I know. Sorry.”

How long I was crashed on his floor I will never know. I just gathered my aching fourteen year old body and trotted across town to the house I called home.

My mother is waiting there. She isn’t threatening. That’s good. I was worried. I worried about the belt. The fist. Anything that could hurt.

“You’re sick, Son. You need help.”

I look up at her and wait for a punch, a belt. My Hot-Wheel tracks are long gone now, or I would have been waiting for one across my head. I remember the rolling into a ball and turning to take the sting of the Hot-Wheel tracks into places that hurt less. But I see she is not angry but scared. Is that fear. I’m expecting punishment but I see fear. Is that fear?

“You need help. Will you come with me to a place that can help you?”

I’m aching from hundreds of miles of pavement. So tired and aching. I need help? I haven’t done anything except run. Wait. It comes back to me slowly, hazy, fading in and out. I had smashed the living room apart. Why? Why had I done that? Should I run now? Should I run again. Maybe I should run. Maybe she is right. Maybe I need help.

“Ok.” I whisper from beneath a cat pissed blanket. “Ok.”

Walking the sleep. There’s a boy and he is picking cotton in a field. There are spiders that jump on him. He screams and slaps them but he keeps picking. A full bag and he takes it up as the sun sets low in the Arkansas afternoon. He takes the coins and starts running. He stares in terror as he looks back at the setting sun. Running against the nightfall. Past the graveyard. The terror. The crows sitting on the fences. Running back home. Back home to safety. He runs and the terror of being alone in the black night pushes him forward faster and faster he runs.

I wake on the beach. NIGHT. Night never seems night at the beach. I lay on the beach near the pier. A group of teens are laughing and drinking a bottle of Vodka. It’s a huge bottle like a gallon of milk. Large squid are all over the shore. I walk over and pick up a large squid, maybe two feet long. The long haired teens approach.

“Ahh shit, look at this fucking thing!!!! Kid has a monster!!!”

I hold it up to a long blond haired surfer and he grabs it. He pours vodka into it. It spit and sputters, and sprays all over.

I’m not awake I realize because I am looking at me. And I am looking at a memory again. But I am not walking the sleep.

There is a reality now I perceive between watching casually. Very aware. And walking the sleep where I am part of it and no longer watching but inside of it. These lines are sometimes hard to see or decipher until I can stand back. When I can stand back and say, I am watching this. I may have lived this, but I am not in this. When you watch a movie there is a part of you that becomes invested in it. Part of your reality becomes part of the reality that unfolds before you. If it cannot, then you disconnect. If you buy in, then you allow a part of your being to become part of what you are seeing on the screen. You are cognizant of the fact that you are not there, but in effect, part of you is, in fact there. So it is with me at times. Sometimes I watch the movie. Sometimes I am the movie.

I watch as my mom takes my hand. She leads me to her 1969 Dodge Dart. I climb in the back and crawl into the back seat. She drives. I awaken as the door opens. She takes my hand and leads me into the building. We are met with smiling people. We walk. We walk through doors. They open and close with keys and locks behind us. A small white room.

“This is where you say goodbye,” The smiling large man in the doctor’s coat.

He isn’t a doctor, this I am aware of. My mom begins to cry. I look beyond the glass interlaced with wire into a bright room. I never see her leave. I never watched her leave. I will see her face again but I will never see it again as I had saw it. Through the haze of love and pain. I will never see her face again. I will see her again many times, but at that moment she was no longer my mother. Maybe it should have been when she punched and kicked me into a crumpled ball for whatever transgressions I had done, but never until that moment had I stopped thinking of her as my mother.

The one that gave me life and, for the better part, had protected and kept me. She was gone that second in my mind and forever. And in that second of time, in watching, I realized why she had come back to me so many times on that side, once she had left. Why I had so many dreams. Why I was always, and so many times visited in my dreams by her. Why on her dying bed I held none of the grief that others wailed into nothingness. Into the abyss.

My first roommate in that mental ward was Timothy. He was pure evil. Evil I still cannot understand. He had raped his sister, and let his intentions for me be known very soon after arrival. I slept fitfully. I watched him watch me into deep hours of the night. My only friend at first was a lesbian alcoholic from the barrio. She had deep blue eyes and was half Hispanic. Amber. We used to create problems to get subdued and thrown into a soft room with heavy doses of Thorazine. We laughed and joked until we fell into deep states. And then we saw each other again shuffling for breakfast. And we laughed from our haze, acknowledging each other.

Once Timothy was gone I got a new roommate, Phil. Thankfully, I could sleep. Phil didn’t want to fuck my ass. That was good. Phil loved girls. He was the son of a doctor. We talked into all hours of the night. I was happy to have a friend. A friend I could close my eyes to. Phil had been on a very long acid trip before he came to this place. He was convinced his dad was doctor Frankenstein. Not then, but when he was on one of many long acid trips. He decided that for the best of humanity, he should destroy the evil that was his dad, Dr. Frankenstein. I connected with him.

My grandfather was a minister. For some reason, when he presided over funerals, he took pictures of the deceased. I found these in his dresser drawer because I was a curious and nosey child. Grandpa was also a thick, strong man with a squared forehead accentuated by the squared off haircut of the time. I had also believed him to be Dr. Frankenstein at one point. I remember on a trip to the reservation. I sat in the extended cab of the truck fighting sleep across the endless highways of the California and Arizona deserts – not wanting to end up as part of his macabre collection of pictures, the deceased in caskets. So, I could see Phil’s point of view. I understood how his dad, the respected doctor, had become Dr. Frankenstein. And we were both very cognizant and aware that the people we loved, and respected the most, were not monsters, but they were dangerous, could hurt us, and maybe, just maybe evil enough to be killed. We walked of it. I had many times thought of doing what he had tried to do, but just never had the courage to set about killing the evil. He was a good person and he allowed me restful sleep for the many weeks that I had not rested. Had awakened next to a sick sociopathic incest rapist. Had fought sleep with one eye and awakened in thankfulness to have not been raped and murdered. How many nights I had fallen asleep with the wicked and evil eye of Timothy on me, I cannot say.

Sometimes it was a test of wills that I apparently won. Fighting sleep. Fighting the tugging and pulling of sleep against the terror. Knowing that closing my eyes I might awake to being fucked in the ass and smothered. How many nights I fought that fight, I cannot remember. I remember going to sleep the first night when Phil came and Timothy left. Sleeping soundly for the first time.
Phil was deeply and darkly disturbed, but he wasn’t a rapist.

He wanted to kill his father. He had gathered many things to kill his father. A noose to strangle him, a collection of knives so that he could decapitate the head, a collection of materials to burn the body. Everything to stop the doctor’s evil reign of terror. But he hadn’t counted on the weeks of no sleep catching up to him He failed. He drifted into a deep sleep and was discovered. And thus, he ended up next to me. And I was thankful for him, for his friendship, for his love of girls, and for his realization that he was safe with me and away from the doctor. Phil had a girlfriend in there. I was his lookout on many nights when they fucked. I was very happy to do that.