Walking the Sleep

by Mark McGhee

  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. Mayb
e 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.

  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.