The rats come at midnight, the raccoons at one, the demons sometime later. I watch the first two from my darkened bedroom, the glare of the nearby streetlight just bright enough to illuminate the garbage cans they’re picking their way through. Lately there’s also been a pack of unidentifiable varmints–a gluttonous throng of dachshund-size things that sounds like a gang of men as they hack their way through the underbrush on their march to the cylindrical mess tents. Every night, as I watch the animals on parade, I make a mental note to call the rodent control bureau to see if they’ll come by and force the landlord next door to buy covers for the cans. But I never do–maybe because it wouldn’t do any good, or maybe because the show is more entertaining than the Magnum reruns or the woman on six different cable channels who uses a giant drill to turn soybean oil into low-cholesterol mayonnaise. Besides, if you press the slats of the blinds back together and climb into bed, the demons might reappear–the illuminated dial on the bedside clock that suddenly is running on double time, the usually placid mind that races like a Corvette burning nitro, the dark reminders that morning is closing in and sleep is as hard to come by as an oriental rug store that isn’t going out of business.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Every night around 11 I remember that I forgot to drink a cup of Sleepytime tea, which I hope may be the answer to my problem. By then it’s too late, because even if the hawthorn berries and passionflower leaves perform as advertised, the hot liquid will force me out of bed and into the bathroom, so what’s the point? That sort of thing happens when you get old, which makes me worry about what else will go wrong with my body to further reduce my chances of sleep.
A friend of mine who also has insomnia tells me that I should call her when I can’t sleep, and we could go out and do something. There are a few reasons this doesn’t appeal to me: first, I worry that I’ll call on the one night that she actually managed to doze off, and I’ll be riddled with guilt for the rest of my life; second, I worry that her husband will start getting funny ideas if I drag her out of bed in the middle of the night, and without him as a friend my miniature-golf companions will be reduced to one; third, I can’t think of anything I really want to do in the middle of the night except sleep; and finally, the only other people you’re going to meet out there at that hour are other people who can’t sleep.
Once when I was in college I had mononucleosis. This, of course, is an insomniac’s dream, since the disease leaves you unable to do anything but sleep. Not me. After five consecutive nights of sitting in front of the television waiting for Sunrise Sermon or Modern Farmer to come on, I decided it was time to consult with my family physician and plead for pharmaceuticals. He said he had never heard of anyone having insomnia and mono at the same time, but this was the doctor who got sick when my aunt once showed up in his office with a hand accidentally bloodied by a serrated bread knife, and who years later would be forced to take a sabbatical when it was revealed that he was drugging his unclothed female patients and masturbating behind a screen, so the fact that he wasn’t up on everything having to do with medicine isn’t particularly surprising. Anyway, when I told him my problem, he reached up into a cardboard box behind his desk and pulled out a small bottle of factory Quaaludes. This brought my eyes out of my head like a pair of Slinkys, and soon made me the envy of all my friends. The drug didn’t exactly help me sleep, but it did mellow me out enough to be unconcerned when my anxious mother stood over me and wailed that my skin and eyes were still as yellow as number-two pencils and that she knew sending me away to school was a tragic mistake.
