Walking the Sleep (11 page)

When the psychiatric orderlies made their rounds I would pop my head up and point to his bed covered in pillows under blankets indicating he was asleep. Sometimes I posted outside of Shauna’s room in the hall and gave a signal when they were coming. When Phil got discharged he asked me to look after Shauna and call him. I vowed that.

Later that afternoon she pulled me into the room and kissed me hard. She was blue eyed, thin, and smelled like flowers. She had need in her eyes. And want. I unbuckled her tiny shorts and pulled them down to tiny pink panties. I licked and sucked her. We fucked for so long that we fell asleep.

Her pussy was honey blonde and the most beautiful and sweetest thing I had ever tasted. We kissed and sucked, and fucked every minute we could. It was the happiest I had ever felt in my life. I felt guilty for my friend, but the beauty and sweetness of her body was intoxicating and drained my guilt with each kiss.

I left a few days later. I never saw her again. But I always remembered her eyes. Her taste. Her sweetness. And the comfort of her arms and kiss.

At the pier again in
San Clemente. I wonder if I should just be a stayer. Stay here. It’s a safe place and nothing evil comes this way. I sit. I watch I walk. I go by the bars I frequented here in and around the pier bowl in San Clemente. It gets old but time after time, I find myself at the end of the pier staring into the vastness of the sea. I watch the blue waves roll in. Giant swells of power that crash onto the shore. I can watch this for hour after hour, if it were, and day after day if it were. No concept. I wish for another second with her here and now. That which I call now, Won’t be. How many days DAY. I sat here. NIGHT. The pier is calm at night. A few determined fishermen baiting and casting. DAY. Early morning nothing but the few regulars. My mom comes by now and then, wandering around and smiling. We don’t speak. I recognize her but she is in some state I cannot connect with. I watch her and I do enjoy watching her. The ocean was her favorite place but usually I only see her at Redondo Beach pier, or at River’s End in northern California where the Russian flows into the cold northern Pacific.

We never speak as she doesn’t see me. She seems quite happy and I wouldn’t want to interrupt that peacefulness I see in her even if I could. It’s of no use to try and initiate a conversation here with anyone you know that you cannot break the haze with.

It’s hard to explain except that if you were in a city full of people, saw a person you knew from long ago, but knew they didn’t want to be disturbed.

Or maybe like when you pass someone in a crowd. You know them very well but you don’t want to bother them. And, even if you did, they might not want to see you. I’m sure my mom would want to see me but for whatever reason, we pass each other and smile. And she might have a tiny feeling of something, but she doesn’t see me. And maybe I passed her that way too here and there, wherein she knew it was me, knew I was here, but then also knew there was no point in trying to talk to me because I would never hear her. Such is the way things are here. You will see people that you knew, know, want to talk to, but for some reason, you cannot. I have caught a passing glance that was clearly an acknowledgement but that was all. An unspoken message that we know each other. We know we are here. But we are about our business, even it be nothing.

Amber was so beautiful. A tall girl with the biggest softest blue eyes in a Hispanic girl, any girl, pools of aqua blue that swam and swirled forever into a pond of unattainable desire. We spent many days in the crazy house together. We laughed at people and vowed not to go crazy together. She was from the barrio. A home-girl. She was hard and she was soft. Her heart was so full of good and laughter. She was funny and witty. She had me rolling on the floor in fits of laughter so many times. We fucked with the craziest of the people in the hallways, and we talked about how to avoid the dangerous ones, because we knew who they were. She told me of growing up in Casa Blanca with the home-girls, how she had started drinking so hard, and how she had ended up in this place with me.

She never got why I was there, or how I ended up there. Neither did I but I pulled up everything crazy I had done, and fabricated the rest. We kissed once and then we both laughed and rolled on the floor. She was a lesbian in 1976 and in the barrio no less, and that wasn’t okay. I never realized the hell she had been in until much later. We said goodbye one day. And we didn’t say goodbye. Because it was like that there. You made friends and then you went by their room to talk and they were gone. And you never saw them again.

But I did see her again. I know she left before me and I sat around bored and angry. Two years later I was with some friends at a gas station. We were out on a Saturday night in Riverside, California. I saw two cars and there were a lot of girls. Home-girls. Cholas, from the barrio. She stood out from the rest tall and the ice blue eyes.

“Hey!”
She saw me and ran over to hug me.

‘What the fuck are you doing here!”

“Nothing, just cruising, you?”

It was a fun, short, and happy moment because we were out and we were with our friends. I remember I was with a car full of blond girls and white boys. The Cholas were staring at us and I remember one of them saying, “Que pasa! Who the fuck is that?”
Amber laughed and we hugged again before saying goodbye.

I saw her again. I was in my early twenties and driving to take my grandmother to lunch. I had a daughter by then and was working several jobs. Taking classes in junior college. I always went to
Riverside to take my grandmother to lunch at least once a month.

I stopped to get some gum at a market store on the edge of the barrio. There she was in ragged and worn clothes. A shell. Begging for change in front of the store. I walked past her. I stared into her vacant eyes. They were the brightest, softest, blue eyes I have ever seen, and there they were. She was a wreck at twenty three. Her clothes were torn and tattered. Her beautiful blue eyes were hazed and vacant. She held out her hand and looked right through me. I paused for a second of recognition.

Nothing. I walked to my car and walked away from a dead person. A person I called friend. A person I kissed. A person that held me and laughed with me in a dark place. I walked away from her with not so much as a quarter for her hand. How do you take that back? I couldn’t accept it? I couldn’t see you? I didn’t and wouldn’t see you, Amber? Oh dear God! Oh my fucking God forgive me. I walked by you and didn’t stop for a second. But I think I saw, through a haze in your eyes, you recognized me, Amber. And that hurts the most of all……because I walked past you like I was better than you. But I carry that, Amber. I carry that in my soul. That day and that moment, Amber. I carry that pain in my soul.

And she’s here.

I know that.

She’s here.

She’s been here so long.

These are things I know.

Walking the sleep. How many days DAY. How many nights. NIGHT. I’m so in and out of awake now that I cannot sense reality as it were. I thought none of it mattered, DAY. NIGHT.
But when I come back it seems to matter. I tried to stay where I was.

The pier.
San Clemente. Seems a safe place for me but then I wake walking. Sometimes it makes no sense. Sometimes it all makes the perfect sense. DAY. Today it makes no sense. There is nothing around me that makes sense and I am out of my TIME and SPACE.

My place. I have no clue of where I am today. DAY. It’s green and there are many trees. There are explosions all around me and screaming. How long have I been walking the sleep? Where is this place. Cannons smash down trees and there are bullets whizzing past me. I cringe though I am not in danger. I cannot be killed. I wish I could be. There are people dying all around me and I see their souls leave their bodies as people scream and cry around me. I’m wearing a Confederate uniform. A young man screams in front of me. His leg is gone and his intestines are shining, gleaming in the spring morning sun. I reach towards him and he screams louder. He stares at me in terror. “No!!!! No!!!! get away from me!!!”
I scream to his friends. A kid no more than sixteen rushes to him but he stares at me. A bullet rips through the skull of his friend and he is standing next to me. We watch together as he writhes in agony. Slowly he turns his head to me.

“Are you Jesus?” I shake my head as I watch his friend die.

“How old are you?” I ask.

‘”Fifteen sir, is he going to be okay?”
I shake my head. He leaves his body and stands next to us. “What’s going on!!!!!” he screams. The explosions erupt around us.

A cannon rounds blows the head off of another soldier and the three of us stand watching the mayhem. A silence falls as they all stare at me.

It’s suddenly very quiet

“What should we do, sir???”

“Huh?”

“You’re an officer. What should we do????”

“You’re dead.”

“What do you mean?” asks the youngest. He has long golden hair and a fresh uniform.

“I mean you’re dead and you’ve been dead for maybe a hundred and fifty years.”

I turn and walk. They follow me for a few miles. I finally stop and sit with them.

“What should we do, Sir? Should we flank them?”

I stare hard at the oldest of the group. He’s maybe eighteen and his uniform is encrusted with crimson stains. A scar above his eye that is blue. Blinded blue.

“You’re dead. This war ended about one hundred and fifty years ago! All of you are dead! Your parents are dead. If you had kids – they are dead. Guess what – if they had kids – they’re dead too!!! No one even remembers you. Get it!!!”

The youngest looked at me hard. Sad. “What do we do, sir?”

“I don’t know, son. Where did you grow up?”

“
Arkansas, sir. Walnut Creek.”

“Well, walk there and maybe there will be someone waiting for you. Same thing for you two. Head home.
If no one’s there, maybe it’ll be better to at least wander around some place you know”

“Thank ya kindly, sir.”

They all nod and one by one, slowly begin walking into the distance.

The first one stops a few hundred yards below a bluff and salutes me. I send a salute back.

“You’re not dead, Sam.”

“I never said I was.”

“Yes, you did.”

“Did I?”

“What’s your game?”

“No game. Selling booze and smokes, kid.”

“You’re a thousand years old, Sam. I figured that out.”

Sam punches numbers into the cash register and takes money for a tall boy and a pack of sunflower seeds. He wraps them in a brown bag and bids a good day to another dreg.

I watch and see that he is not dead because no one sees me, but all see him here.

“Why do you see me?”

“I see lots of things. I’m a stayer.”

“Fuck you, Sam! You’re not dead. Why do you see all this shit, see me, know shit I can’t?”

“I don’t know. I might have told you things you couldn’t hear back then. You might have ended up like a lot of these…”

A man with half of his head missing buys a pack of Camels and is searching his pockets. He looks confused as he searches his pockets for money.

“Take em’ on the house, brother.”

The man looks at him with confusion in his eye. The left eye is dangling near his chin. He smiles.

“Thanks. I guess I left my wallet in my car.”

“Where’s your car?”

“I don’t know.” He looks outside to the parking lot. “I was driving on the 55 freeway. South. Going to my son’s graduation in
Newport. I guess I got lost.”

“Walk out and go left. Here’s some matches. Keep walking south to MacArthur. and head left about two miles down the road. You’re dead. People waiting for you over there.”

The disfigured man lights a cigarette and turns. He looks at me.

“What happened?”

I have to look down for a second. His one blue eye is piercing me. Pleading.

“You’re done.” I whisper. I look into the blue eye. “You’re dead. Go now and don’t wander around. Don’t talk to anyone else.”

He looks at me again for an answer. A last glimpse and a muffled “Thank you…” he walks out and heads south.

“More dead people are seeing me now, Sam.”

“Yeah, I can see that.”

“Are you sure I died out there?”

“Yeah. I saw it. I saw the guy who paid for it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I heard the conversation. A big biker thug. He met those two out there. Door was open. He handed both some bills and your picture. He has been back here a few times.”

“Why?”

“Some biker club you were with a long time ago? You used to be a biker, right?”

“Years ago. Way before this happened!”

“Not long enough ago seems. He paid those guys to kill you. That’s about all I know. Looked like a simple robbery, but you were a marked man.”

“Is that what I was doing here? I don’t remember living here.”

“Looks like.”

“So, you’re not dead are you?”

“I’m here and I’m there. Yeah. I’m dead. ”

I decide to hang around in the store for awhile. I sit in the corner and sip a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I watch the people come and go. Some are dead and some are not. I watch Sam direct the newly dead back to where they ended.

Sometimes I make eye contact with the dead. Newly dead. They are more cognizant it seems to see me. The living do not see me but sometimes they sense me. A furtive look. A shudder. A nervous glance over their shoulder. A scratching of the head and a quicker decision on what they want to buy.

And sometimes I see the marked. The ones that are making their last purchases and I know, within the hour, that they are going to die very soon. I watch them.
I can’t explain it completely, but I know when someone is about to get killed, kill themselves, or just die.

And things start coming back. My life starts to unfold as the fog lifts from my brain. Slowly, still foggy. Not a hundred percent clear, but returning, I am seeing things as they were before I came here. Before I began wandering, walking, dreaming,
and seeing.

I sip the whiskey from the bottle and think. And I see myself. I was running when I came here, to this place in
Santa Ana. I remember sleeping for days in my apartment, or some place I called home, not far from here. I remember wandering the beaches alive. I recall, before arriving here, that I was a teacher. A professor of minor note, but a teacher at a university. I began to hear my name in my mind, see my name, and sense my real person. I recall walking into personnel where I was a professor. Some college, somewhere, and handing in my resignation. I was slurring my words. I recall their looks of embarrassment.

“Take care of yourself, Mr. Thomas”

I took the last of my payroll check and stumbled out of the offices. I drove left the university. I rode off on a black Harley swerving around cars. I rode and rode until the bike stopped. I pushed it on its side like a wounded beast and walked. And there is a fuzziness there.

I am cashing my check and taking money out. I have quite a bit of money it seems. And I walk. I walk from
San Clemente to San Diego. All the way to the Mexican border. I cannot cross because I cannot find my passport. So I walk back again through the beaches and towns. Mostly I stay on the shores. I stop and I eat. I drink. I walk the darker streets at night and buy whiskey. And I sleep on the beach. I am aware that with each day I am regarded with more disdain by the people I pass on the beaches. People sunning, and surfing, and swimming with friends. I take a board from the beach in Carlsbad and paddle out in my boxers. I am drunk but I catch wave after wave. As I paddle in I see three young surfers waiting for me.

“What the fuck, you kook!?”

He grabs the board from my hands. A yellow Infinity. I mumble Sorry. The other two are laughing.

“Back off, Brad!” a long haired surfer yells at him, laughing, “That old kook shredded with yer board, leave him alone. Surfs better than you!”

I shuffle over to my clothes. I hear them all laughing but I’m glad to not be punched because I feel weak.

“Hey, you old fucking washout, kook! Next time ask!” Yells the one they called Brad. I wave and say sorry as they keep laughing to each other. I feel ashamed but a little good as they laugh at Brad.

I dress and stumble on.

I finally noticed my stench when I could not enter the smallest restaurant, or café, along the beaches. With money in hand I was yelled at. I was in
Capo Beach and I walked in to get a bowl of chips and salsa. I had begun to survive on them for some time I believe. A small place near the shore. Mexican café and people everywhere. People stepped away and back from me. The looks of disgust and disdain. A woman covered her nose. I walked in and grabbed a beer from the cooler, a bowl of chips and threw a $20 bill at the waiter. The manager grabbed the $20 bill and shoved it in my hand. I’ve become ragged and filthy without knowing it. I didn’t know.

“Stay the fuck out of here!”

He pushed me out the door as people parted before me. The looks on their faces burned into me. I walked with my chips, crossed over to the beach, and never walked back over again, except in the darker hours to get a bottle from a liquor store.

That was shame. That was disgust. Watching the little blonde haired girl in her pink sundress wrinkle her nose and look at me with fear. That sent me quietly into the night. Sleeping under the pier. Finding a safe place to sleep in the day so I would not offend or scare anymore.

Sam set up a place for me in the back. I sometimes helped serve the dead. I sat in the back when he went home to his family, or wherever it was that Sam went. I didn’t ask. When there were too many dead asking, and sometimes pleading, I would come out and serve them when he was gone. The others couldn’t hear or see the dead. None of them stole or walked out.

They wanted to purchase and when Sam was gone, it was only me that could help and see them. Beer, whiskey, vodka, tequila, and smokes. A favorite snack. I attended to the dead when Sam was gone. I gave them what they asked for, I told them where they were dead, directed them away.

I warned of the ravens and told them not to wander, not to walk the sleep, and to cross over. I was rewarded each day with Sam’s friendship and whiskey, and cigarettes. I no longer had to ask for things and I no longer had to pay. I had long since run out of money anyway. So I worked and was paid in whiskey and cigarettes. When Sam was gone I sat in the back with the mops and cleaners. I came out to service the dead. When there were none, I sat and reconstructed my life. Sam gave me a place. A place not to wander, a place not to fall into the abyss of walking the sleep.

In my corner, when I was not shaken from my place from the dead pleading for cigarettes and booze, I wandered safely through what brought me here. And I sat. I sipped whiskey. I smoked. I dreamt, I wandered safely.

Sam had saved me on many levels. I wasn’t looking over my shoulder for ravens, falling into someone else’s tortured memories, waking in places that made me scream and pray. This was a safe place for me.

Before I had crossed, before that night, I saw in my little room, the days before. I walked many days on that side. Many days at the beach and on the piers from
Newport Beach to Redondo Beach. Walking north to Santa Cruz, watching the big wave riders at Mavericks in awe and wonder.

Men who paddled into waves that were thundering, freight trains, waiting for their mangled bodies to be washed to shore, and seeing them pop up again, paddling through walls of white water high as a three story building. I watched many days in amazement at feats I was never brave enough to ever consider. I walked north to the foggy shores of
San Francisco. Sleeping and walking there was peaceful and less judgmental.

On further north. Inland to walk the
Russian River. Picking blackberries and occasionally being welcomed for dinner here and there along the winding Russian River by people that loved and didn’t judge. People with guitars and fire-pits. Offering a meal and laughter to a torn and ragged man. A man who looked without a dime to his name but carried thousands of dollars in his torn and ragged clothes. I had occasionally stopped and counted money. I had near fifty thousand dollars at one point.

I’m not sure but I have hazed memories of cashing everything in, walking away with fat pockets of money that I didn’t really want but knew I should take. I had given away so much money. Bought so many people so much but I never checked the balances much. Just out of curiosity I counted it from time to time. I was eventually in the ten thousand dollar range. Never robbed, never lost a dollar that I didn’t give away. I washed my face in a beach bathroom near Jenner as I walked to River’s End. Where the
Russian River flows into the icy Pacific at Goat’s Rock. My mother’s favorite place in the entire world. I was a mess. No wonder no one ever thought of robbing me, no one would want to touch me. But there were many kind people along the way. Sometimes I slipped away into the night as everyone slept. A scribbled thank you and a few hundred dollar bills. I never wanted to take anything even with Charity expressed, I never wanted to take without giving back.

So I continued. I walked down to the end of the river and was birthed back again into the pacific ocean as it poured warmly into the frigid northern
California pacific. Here there are no surfers or bathers. Fog rolls in and out. The waves are treacherous and pounding reef and rock to formations that worship. The seals swim up the river looking for a freshwater snack, poking their heads out to curiously watch the ragged man sitting on the shore, smoking, smiling, and then back to their business. It was cold there even in spring, but I stayed through summer. I ventured inland to find a thrift store, changed my clothes, secured my money and my .45 auto into the lining of my jacket. I wasn’t so worried about losing the money but the gun was for a purpose. I was searching for the right time and place for that. I hadn’t found it. But I would need it when the time came. How many days I slept in the sand. Rolled into a ball with my bottle of whiskey, my money and .45 hugging me closely, but not caring to lose the booze, nor the money, but the gun would stay with me. As fall approached I began my trek south. The mornings were so bitter cold and wet, I couldn’t take the rattling of my bones and teeth in the deep hours of the night. When my bonfire ran out, and the whiskey was gone, my bones rattled and shook. The dampness and fog crept through me and the loneliness began to poke it’s sharp face and ugly nose into my dreams.

And when there was no more comfort in a place, I had to move. I can’t remember how many months I walked back and along the coast until I reached the oil dykes and tar stained shores north of
Long Beach. But I continued on until Huntington Beach. It was a good place to be in the fall. Long stretches – miles of empty beaches as the children of summer hibernated and went home. Only locals surfing or walking the beaches.

And I was invisible to most. I ventured onto the pier when my stomach began flipping and churning after days of no food. So many offers of free food there I kindly refused. I always paid and sometimes received an odd look when I pulled a roll of bills from my tattered jacket. I only ate when I had to. There are times the body forces one to eat, when the whiskey, and vodka, and gin – refuse to go down. When you drink it down and it rolls back out of your throat foaming and crashing in time to the surf. Then it’s time to force food down. The best I could go was five days before forcing a burrito down and then rolling in agony in the sand. Waiting and hoping, praying it could stay down. And when it did I felt better for a few minutes. A few Gator-aids and a nap under the pier. Then a hike over to the liquor store for a bottle to begin my trek again.
If I could force down some food and a Gator-aid, suffer the pain, then I could get another five or six days of straight booze. It was my way of life. I always had to come out for a short while if I wanted to continue this way.