Did you ever have a dream that kept you awake at night? And then kept you awake many nights later, just thinking of it, even though you hadn’t actually had the dream again?
Got a curse I cannot lift
Shines when the sunset shifts
When the moon is round and full
Gotta bust that box, gotta gut that fish
I’d been haunted for weeks by something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was out there, just beyond the sightlines of my consciousness, driving me to distraction. And it would not let me peacefully sleep.
There was no peace where I lived. Some cosmic thing had gone awry, and nothing worked like it should have. I was having dreams and premonitions. It was no good. The light was getting smaller and smaller. It felt as if the walls were closing in. Only one thing could have saved me, and I’d just swallowed the last handful of that. What I really needed . . . I needed a girl to wrap her arms around my head, and bring me back down to a human speed. I needed a girl with the words to soothe me, and slow down my racing mind and heart. I needed a place to go where I could rest, and get some peace from whatever the fuck it was that came at night and fucked up my equilibrium and everything else.
But what I needed, I could not find.
I remember one time my brother and I were sitting out on the beach in the middle of the night, watching the lights on the horizon and listening to the waves. I don’t think we’d said anything to each other in quite awhile, maybe hours; and in fact, I wasn’t even sure he was conscious anymore. It was probably 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning. I looked over and I thought he was slumped down in his lawn chair, but it was pretty dark, and hard to make out. Being slumped over in his lawn chair was not all that unusual in those days, but I wasn’t sure. He was far enough away from me that I could have yelled at him and he might not have heard me. He wasn’t really that far away – maybe ten yards or so – but between the wave action and the stiff onshore wind, he might not have heard. I chose not to yell. I was straining my eyes, trying to see him move or something, and it was giving me a headache. Then, all of the sudden, the big light came.
***************
I was restless, and could not sleep.
That was unusual for me, especially in those days. I always fell asleep within minutes of my head hitting the pillow, no matter what. People who knew me used to marvel at this, and I came to recognize it as a gift. No matter what external thing was going on, I had been programmed so that as soon as I got horizontal and closed my eyes, the natural narcotics kicked in and, before you knew it, I was in la-la land.
Charge me your day rate
I’ll turn you out in kind
When the moon is round and full
Gonna teach you tricks that’ll blow your
Mongrel mind
That particular night, I was in my old apartment, the first one I had after I moved out of my parent’s house . . . and I found myself up at midnight, pacing the floor. I didn’t know what the fuck was wrong with me; but I couldn’t stand it, and I needed to talk to someone. I didn’t call the girl I was dating at the time. She was nice and all, and enjoyed a good time, and we’d been going out a few months by then. But there was no deep emotional connection there at all. I needed to talk to someone who knew me, who was ready to jump down the rabbit hole with me at a moment’s notice and help me try and figure all this shit out.
After thinking about it awhile, I called Callie. Callie was a cousin my age who I’d grown up with and thought of as a sister, kind of. She was my confessor and confidant in those days. I called her and told her I couldn’t sleep – it was probably 1:00 a.m. by then – and I told her I was going crazy and I needed her to listen to me and tell me what the fuck was wrong and help me get everything back on an even keel. That may sound like a lot to ask, but Callie was special . . . and she’d saved me before.
In her usual assured manner, Callie said she’d be over in 15 minutes or so – we were living in the same town then – and she said we’d go for a ride and talk about it and work it all out. Very calm and matter-of-fact, she was – and I immediately felt better, like things were in good hands.
***************
I thought I was falling in love with this girl named Angela. She was a particular friend of mine. Very pretty, and she had a perpetually upbeat outlook on life. Always cheerful. That is something that can be taken for granted in a friend, but on the other hand it can be so fucking valuable, just having someone positive around when one really needs it.
Another good thing about Angela was that she was in pharmaceutical sales – she was some kind of district rep – and another thing besides a positive outlook that can be valuable in a friend is having one who usually has boxes and boxes of sample prescription drugs stacked up in her living room at any given time.
Angela had it in her mind that I needed to be taken care of. Perhaps I was projecting that at the time, I don’t know. Anyway, she thought I needed to be taken care of, and she thought she was just the one to do it. She may have been right, too, but damn, it just seemed too easy to me. There had to be a catch.
The first time I thought I might be falling in love with Angela was the night she gave me a baggie full of sample amphetemine capsules, 50 mg a pop. In truth, I preferred the tabs, which gave one a quick jolt. The capsules were supposed to be for time release.
But of course there were ways around that. Angela said to crack the caps open and then wash them down, or even mix them in a drink. Instead, I was eating them like Pixie Stix and then washing away the acrid aftertaste with wine or beer. Worked like a fucking charm, from the get-go. The first few days I was getting an hour or two of sleep here and there, and I kept forgetting to eat. After awhile I leveled off with it, and I rode the buzz for a good long time. Then, when I felt like maybe I was starting to burn up the circuits, I weaned myself off of that shit. Speed can be a wonderful thing, but you have to always keep in mind that it can’t go on for too long. You have to always have in mind when and how you are going to kick. But for awhile, it was a nice little ride.
I remember when I was in college, some of the people I hung around with started getting into opiates. I was afraid of those, but it was fascinating to watch someone you knew descend into that netherworld.
My best friend at the time was this guy named Phil, and Phil had got into heroin. He wouldn’t shoot it up – he was as afraid of needles as I was – but someone showed him how to mix it with his weed and smoke it. So he smoked it. I don’t think the effect was as direct or as powerful as from shooting it into the bloodstream, but still, when Phil smoked that shit he’d get this certain look in his eye only a junkie gets, and you knew he had got himself knee deep into the Mexican brown again, some kind of way.
We were sitting around his place one day, getting high, and the fucker mixed up his stash and we ended up smoking one of those heroin-laced doobies. I could feel the difference almost right away. And, wow, I realized I was made for that stuff. Just fucking wonderful. Somehow or another I managed to keep myself away from it after that, even though it was all around me. All I can guess is I was being looked out for; and thank goodness for that.
Meantime, Phil had got himself a habit, and it went on for awhile, too. When he finally decided to get off the stuff, he didn’t go the conventional route of detox and withdrawal. He kicked “city style”, withdrawing from the heroin while taking handfuls of prescription narcotics to ease the sting. Damnedest thing I ever saw, and it worked, too.
I thought about Phil and his “city style” practically the whole time I was with Angela. That was a swirl of bennies and Seconal and Darvon and Xanax and I don’t know what-all else that went on for nearly a year, I think. Pretty much ended when she was fired from her job, for consuming more of the samples than she distributed. She eventually ended up in the loony bin. As for myself, I walked away from the wreckage; with psychic scars, and some lessons learned.
Phil ended up dead, but that is another story.
***************
I woke up with that weird sensation you get when you think someone is watching you. Someone was, too.
I was in bed at the beach cabin, in the old cabin, the one down at Emerald II. I squinted one eye open and could make out the form of someone sitting at the end of my bed. Once my eyes started to focus a little better, I looked again and realized the person looking at me was my cousin Mark. He was sitting at the foot of my bed, dressed in jeans and a Dickinson High School hoodie, drinking a Coors Light shoved down into a plastic coozie that advertised something or other. I looked at my watch on the fake bamboo nightstand. It was 7:30 a.m.
A bunch of us had been staying down at the beach for several days, and on the spur of the moment Mark had decided to come join us for a day. He was a sophomore in high school, like 15, or 16. It was a pretty weekday in the spring, and he had left his house early, then decided to ditch his classes, get some beer, and drive down through Galveston and across the ferry to our cabin.
He said when he got there, early that morning, everyone was asleep; so he decided to start drinking his beer while he waited around for us to wake up.
I really didn’t know Mark all that well. He was younger, and I never spent much time with him growing up. His older brother and I had been pretty close, though. So, he was family. And he had apparently reasoned that a few hours of partying on the beach was worth all the trouble he was probably going to get into later. I could definitely identify with that ethos. So, as much as I wanted to just go back to sleep that morning, I forced myself not to. I got up and started drinking beer with Mark, instead. Back then I had a strict rule about drinking before 8:00 a.m., but this was a special circumstance, so . . .
The night before, we’d been partying and things sort of dissolved into chaos as the night went on. I really don’t remember much about it. I remember coming to in the middle of the night on the beach in my lawn chair, with the blanket I kept behind the seat of my truck wrapped around my upper body. The onshore wind was strong, and the surf was really choppy. I looked around, and about 10 yards off to my right I saw my brother, also sitting in a lawn chair. He was not moving much, and I could not tell if he was awake or not.
I was still pretty groggy, trying to process information and wondering if I was really on the beach, or just dreaming I was. It was really dark and hard to make anything out. That is when, suddenly, everything lit up.
I saw my brother kind of jolt awake in the periphery of my vision. We both watched intently as a large halo of light floated above the ocean, maybe out at the first sandbar or so. And, no, it wasn’t a fucking flying saucer. What a fucking joke. It was a natural light. We just didn’t know what the hell it was.
I don’t know if it really happened or I imagined it, but afterward in my recollection there was also a voice, and a figure in the light. My brother said he did not remember any of that, just a very bright light. It was weird, I felt like I had not seen the figure or heard the voice, either; but somehow it was imprinted on my mind to remember that I had. To this day, my brother and I do not talk about that night much; we apparently saw two different things, and there is no way to resolve it.
Not to mention, I began to discount what I thought I saw to myself, right away. That next morning, sitting there drinking beer with Mark, I started to think about it again. The figure in the light was so improbable, and the words the voice said were so impossible, that almost right away I figured it was my mind playing tricks on me. I never have been able to completely convince myself of that, but for the most part, in order to live normally (well, more or less), I have put the event entirely aside.
It is just lately that I have been awakened at night, with those words from the light in my head again. Goddamn it! Once that happens, I can forget sleeping anymore. And all the pills in the world cannot make it go away.
***************
Callie picked me up, and we drove down Interstate 10 in her Cutlass 442 in the middle of the night, headed more-or-less in the direction of Jacksonville Beach, on the Atlantic Ocean, at the eastern terminus of IH-10. I’d always wanted to go to Jacksonville Beach, for the surfing.
Along the way we talked, and I told Callie about the stuff that was bothering me, and about the vision I had that I’d put out of my mind, but how now it was back to haunt me. I told her what the figure in the light looked like, and the words the voice had said to me.
She was quiet throughout, which was not unusual. Callie was a terrific listener. I would unburden myself to her, and while I was talking, she would never say a word. She would just listen. If she had anything to say about it, that came later. It was one of the things about her I loved so much.
On this night, after I’d told her my terrible secret, and why I could not sleep at night anymore, I stole a glance over at her, in the driver’s seat. I wasn’t looking to see if she had a reaction so much as I was wanting to see her calm, beautiful face. For my own reassurance, more than anything else.
When I looked over, I could make out most of her face, cast in a greenish glow from the dashboard lights. I could see she had been crying, that there were tracks of tears down her cheeks.
Goddamn it! I’d made Callie cry. All because of my stupid bullshit. I resolved right then to just shut the fuck up about the figure in the light and the voices I’d heard, maybe forever.
***************
By the time we got to the Atchafalaya causeway, I could sense the pre-dawn glow all around us. It wouldn’t be long until sunrise.
We pulled the Cutlass off the Interstate at one of the exits off the causeway, Henderson or Whiskey Bay or one of those. We eased down the ramp and turned down a state highway for a bit, until we found a good spot near the river to pull off the road. Callie put the car in park and turned off the engine.
I heard her unclip her seat belt and turned to see her pull back the console and slide across the seat to where I was. I put my arm around her as she leaned into my shoulder and grabbed my other hand in hers. Then we sat there like that, in silence, and watched the sun come up, rising slowly up over the great river and swamp.
I told Callie that I felt like it was a new day, and that everything would be different now. Whatever had happened before was done. I had been changed.
I will always remember that night and morning with a sort of bittersweet fondness. Telling my cousin all my troubles, and then testifying to her at sunrise, about how I was changed, and how everything was different.
But it wasn’t different. Not at all. And what I will remember more than anything from that night was Callie’s silent tears, after I’d told her what I had seen and what I had heard. About how I had denied my vision, and turned and walked away from it. And how I had refused to listen to the message that came with it.
She knew. She knew even she could not save me, not after that. Callie had been crying that night, silently and to herself, because she knew I was fucking doomed.
***************
I remember, I remember
What life was like in the yard
‘Cause you can’t ever think about dying
And it just makes a person get hard
I keep wondering if my friends feel like I do
I don’t know how someone could stand it
To go through what I’m now going through
So every night we party
And every night we get too high
And I put myself so close to death
‘Til I think that I ain’t gonna die
And I realize just a little
Why sometimes I like to feel like dirt
It’s the only thing in this day and age
That can make me feel close to the earth
But if I ever get to heaven
If I ever reach that door
I will ask them why I had to go through this life
When I just couldn’t take any more
But everybody’s going to heaven
‘Cause already we’ve all been through hell
Everybody’s going to heaven
‘Cause already we’ve all been through hell
_____________________________________
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