Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise

by Paul Monette

  A spokesman for Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said, “Our office has no institutional memory of this case.” Officials in the New York City Police Department’s Pedophile Squad and in the Special Victims Squad … could not recall a case resembling this one.

  Quick, somebody go get Nancy Drew a Prozac! Of course there were no records in their files, because the whole story had taken place elsewhere. Place-names had been doctored to protect the victim, as the publisher made quite clear on the copyright page. It’s standard procedure; I’d done the same thing in Becoming a Man. The magazine’s update ended with a nourish worthy of Dragnet:

  Apart from Dreyfous, no individual has come forward to claim he or she has ever met Johnson in person. Newsweek continues to report the story.

  How’s that for playing hardball? So far as I know/ their further investigations haven’t posted a trenchcoated gumshoe outside my house. My phone remains untapped. Curiously, what Nancy Drew failed to investigate from the get-go was the parallel between her own debunking of Tony Johnson and the forty-year campaign to deny the truth of Anne Frank’s Diary. In Europe there’s a whole crypto-fascist industry whose only raging purpose is to prove that the Diary is a Zionist hoax. All part of a master plan to deny the Holocaust. Not crypto at all in fact, but put forth boldly by so-called scholars, and repeated often enough that in the end it becomes just another breeze in the climate of opinion.

  I don’t know why we expected any more of the media, those of us who nursed the publication of Tony Johnson’s story. Not this summer anyway, infected as it is with shrieking bulletins about Heidi Fleiss (Madame to the Stars) and the Menendez killings and Michael Jackson’s trial by headline (“At eleven, more celebrity reaction to the Michael Jackson story!”). Not to mention Woody and Mia. “Tabloid” doesn’t mean anything anymore because there’s nothing else.

  But the disappearing of Tony Johnson’s account of the unaccountable world is rather more sinister. Because it’s a way of denying AIDS as well as him. And a hundred years hence, when all the tabloid victims of 1993 will be dust and ashes, the names no longer ringing the teensiest bell, the course of the plague will still attract the bewildered gaze of history. And when the Elvis sightings no longer fire the populace, and everyone has chewed Howard Hughes’s two-foot fingernails to the quick, the storm troops of revisionism will trumpet their distortions from the rooftops.

  So Nancy Drew, as it turns out, has just got an early start on the trivialization of AIDS. A picture from Cobb County, Georgia, in the current issue of The Advocate shows a crusty old coot proudly displaying a placard which reads PRAISE GOD FOR AIDS. If things get tame at Newsweek, I’m sure there’s a good position available at the Cobb Gazette, or whatever they call their hate sheet down there.

  One small piece of advice, Nancy: Don’t forget to bring a lot of sugar. A boxcar full, because the snots get harder to swallow every day.

  1. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), page xvi.

  SLEEPING UNDER A TREE

  “I’LL SLEEP when I’m dead,” declares my friend Dr. Barbara, petulant almost, as if she’s far too busy running her clinic to waste good time in bed. Except in her case the lack of sleep is due to the throb of pain, for she is four years into the miasma of bone cancer, having exhausted all the “easy” treatments. Yet she refuses to languish now in a fog of Demerol, barely conscious of the fiery advance of autumn in the glade outside her window. And so—over the protests of her own doctors—she drops the milligram level, weaning her body from relief to get her mind back on course.

  Not that she’s ready to don a white coat again, or even to hold out hope of resuming her rounds. She possesses too keen a sense of reality for the bootstraps brand of magic thinking. The clinic has been passed on to her hand-picked staff of doctors, even though officially at least Barbara is merely on hiatus, a medical leave. That euphemism is a measure of their boundless esteem for her healing gifts—their hope for her return. The reality was clear enough two weeks ago, when she stepped out of bed and felt her ankle snap like a leafless twig.

  Her patient-load of outcasts hasn’t been given the least hint. To them, Barbara’s a force of nature, something on the order of a household goddess, the world without her inconceivable. They pay her with guava jelly and the feet of chickens ritually sacrificed and bled, the latter an especially signal honor. Then they cook up the chickens for dinner, never quite long enough to kill the microbes, so the ones with AIDS end up with toxo. The taint of poverty always ends up in the viscera—bacterial, viral, fungal, all manner of rotten colonies. I suspect those so afflicted don’t sleep much either, between the vomiting and the runs. But then they have no expectations otherwise, where life itself comes down to a chronic bad gut, nothing to be done about it unless they put it in Barbara’s hands.

  By contrast, I suffer a wimp’s insomnia—no pain unless the itching counts, no place to have to get to in the morning. The ravages, in other words, are purely existential. If I weren’t so prone to whining it would just be par for the course of things, hardly terminal in any case. Besides, I can’t possibly sleep as little as I imagine, though the most minimal of morning appointments—leaving the car to be serviced, a two-minute blood draw, eleven A.M., the only available slot at neurology—will tend to find me rigid as if on a marble slab all the night before, waiting for the alarm to ring.

  Forget about catching an early flight (in my case, anything before two in the afternoon). My psychic seat belt is fastened as soon as I get into bed, tossing and tumbling till I ball myself in a fetal crouch, the nearest I can approximate the crash position. And a single time zone change, or even daylight saving, a princess and a pea’s worth, puts me out of synch for a week.

  Insomnia is practically the original sin when it comes to crying wolf. Simian hominids in caves presumably complained of sleepless nights—a spur of rock in the den that jabbed them in the kidney, a mouthful of straw from their makeshift pillow. Even back then, nobody really gave the problem half an ear. You didn’t sleep last night—so sleep tonight. Or take a nap. What’s the big deal?

  Implicit in the sleeper’s want of sympathy—those blessed folk who can turn themselves off like a light—is the suspicion that the sleep-bereft exaggerate. You didn’t sleep at all? they ask with incredulity. And to be fair, we who are the exiles of the dark aren’t above embroidering the long night’s vigil. Perhaps the whistle was blown most forcefully on that technique by Proust himself, whose Tante Léonie would summon the household every morning in Combray, to bemoan her wide-eyed night of anxious wakefulness, counting the agonized hours as they chimed on the village clock. Only to forget herself five minutes later, soaking up her tea with a madeleine as she started in discoursing on her dreams, so vivid and so populous they’ve left her utterly limp.

  Insomnia’s midnight country is a sort of parallel universe, lunar and featureless, so it shouldn’t come as a revelation that most people haven’t been issued a visa. Or that they harbor a secret certainty that it’s all our own fault—at best a failure of will, at worst a proof of guilt and shame, Poe-like in its intensity, blood seeping out of the walls. What the uninitiated can’t seem to understand is the core banality of our empty nights. We may see ourselves in zombie terms, as a species of the undead, especially when we gaze at our gray and clammy faces and raccoon eyes in the mirror. But we most definitely lack the glamorous enervation of the vampire, pricked by insatiable hunger and a ravening of need, the fallen-angel mascot of the waking night.

  Really, we are if anything the opposite of vampires. All we desire is sleep, the very thing that eludes us. In that half-moon state the carnal is about as appealing as an emetic. The loneliness may be unbearable, but the last thing you want is company. And when dawn finally streaks the sky with pewter and coral—damning proof of another lost night—then Dracula gets to fold his Batman cape, pull up his stone sarcophagus lid like an eiderdown, and drowse away the indifferent daylight. Whereas we, the li
ving, barely half-alive by morning, have to rise from the twisted sheets and face the quotidian world and keep our promises on coffee alone.

  It was not ever thus. In my stunted adolescence, sleep was the only reliable escape from the freakish burden of the body. A virtual coma that extended twelve hours at a stretch, with nary a complaint even from my bladder, nothing to interfere, as if I traveled the dark with the constitution of a camel. This was mostly weekend fare, of course, to make up for the reveille call of the chapel bell at school, and dozing through “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” the spiritual equivalent of castor oil and gelid porridge.

  By the time I got to-college one could get away with sleeping in on a much more regular basis, dead to all eight A.M. lectures (physics invariably) and strolling into The Nineteenth Century Novel at eleven, balancing a double cup of Java and a powdered doughnut from George and Harry’s. I think my ancient lecture notes on Thackeray still bear a fine snow of powdered sugar, as if the FBI had been dusting for prints.

  Now it did not require an advanced degree to recognize the linkage to depression in all of this, nor the hiding under the covers that went hand in glove with the bleak condition of sleeping alone. But if you’re going to be despondent all day long, you’re probably better off unconscious. Interestingly, insomnia is equally symptomatic of despair. Given the choice, I’d take the coma any day.

  But then when I started falling in love—or at least confusing it with sex—the spell of anesthesia lifted. I crawled out of the cave of self like Rip Van Winkle, blinking at the light. Suddenly I could stay up half the night, alternating embraces with out-of-season plums, or running outside buck naked to make angels in the snow—and still manage to make it to school to teach my eight o’clock Senior English, with only the barest post-coital yawn to betray me.

  Is it just that being happy is better than sleep or anything else? Years on end, I don’t recall a single night staring at the ceiling. Even when I would brazenly order an iced cafe au lait for last call at the Casablanca. Then I would put the night to work at writing poems, the self-appointed life of the solitary candle. No more sleep than Keats’s nightingale, singing being as good as dreaming.

  And when at last I found my way to Roger—eros and spirit and mind in perfect balance—the night was never solitary again. Within two years I’d given up my day job—those seniors agape with boredom over Paradise Lost—to take up the frontier challenge of writing freelance. Filling the day with paroxysms of typing, the evening saved for Roger always, but once he’d gone to bed a last flight of revisions and a sketch of the next day’s plot. Sometimes it was two or three in the morning before I’d creep into bed beside him—but oh what safety was there then, what seamless merge of reverie. Falling into syncopation with his breathing, I was out before I knew it. Before I could even give proper thanks to whatever god of harmony had fated us with night after night in one another’s arms.

  The night didn’t turn on me even when the writing started coming hard, four or five years later when I hit the skids of Hollywood. I’d lay down a patch of midnight dialogue, trying to keep it shallow for the overseers who couldn’t swim. In a fit of dissatisfaction I’d get in the car and cruise the Boulevard, radio wailing the drunken sorrows of Country/Western. Or stand at the back of a bar out of Dante, lost in the smoky shadows, nursing a beer like bitter herbs.

  Pointedly unavailable. Until such time as I drew the attentions of those to whom unavailability was the very musk of turn-on. And then following one or another home to his digs in lower Hollywood, to have a go at Eros detached. The spoor of the trail nearly always more engaging than the act. Lastly, the flight from naming names, the merest swipe of a towel and I’d be dressed and out the door. Fleeing those plaintive words that veteran nightfolk would sooner have their tongues cut out than utter: Will I see you again?

  And even when it was three or four in the morning by the time I beat it home, I curled to sleep beside Roger the same as always, out like a light, sound as the bottom of the sea, untrammeled by guilt or hypocrisy. That would all come soon enough, in the train of the calamity. I come from a generation of queers who valued carnal freedom at all costs, to whom faithfulness was the rankest sort of bourgeois folly. Faithfulness to what? The riddled vows of heteros? Well, no—but then I never got the hang of sportsex either, the etiquette of meaning nothing, pleasure for its own sake. Not for want of trying, believe me. And while my back was turned, so to speak, the night recoiled on me with the kick of an M-16, shooting Sleep between the eyes and leaving me the carcass for a bedmate.

  Like so much else that would never be the same again, it began the day of Roger’s diagnosis—or more to the point, the night before. I was alone in our bed at home while Roger spent the first of a thousand and one nights at UCLA. Figuring over and over the odds of the next day’s lung biopsy, already knowing in my heart that it wasn’t a winnable match.

  And once the doom had fallen—two weeks back and forth to Room 1028 at the Medical Center, Roger husbanding all his strength to recover—I began the twenty-four-hour day. A class-A insomniac will tell you there’s no difference in the end between the dark and the daylight. You are just as witless, just as glazed, just as alien to any life you thought of as your own. Except by day you are actually falling into catnaps, no matter how inappropriate the setting. Slumped in the subway past your station, sprawled at your desk in a parody of cardiac arrest, as likely to pitch over into your plate as negotiate a forkful of food. And a holy terror behind the wheel.

  Within days I was pleading for pharmaceuticals, who never took a sleeping pill except on intercontinental nights, trying to cheat those time zones. I was so wired and frantic that I had no trouble getting scrip, whatever I wanted. A kid in a candy store of slumber. I started on Halcion by night and Xanax by day—but “only as needed,” warned the doctors. Oh, reason not the need. These things only work for a while, of course—but offer in the short run a dreamless black hole to crawl into, midnight to dawn, succeeded by the tranquil float of a nerveless day. They worked for a matter of weeks, and then they backfired. This was well before the Halcion controversy, when the drug was fingered for various psychotic episodes, people confusing the local post office with the Vietcong or blowing away their bowling league.

  But I kept the regimen up long after it made no difference, and probably would have been yelling in the checkout line at the Mayfair with or without the drugs. I remember thinking that a man could probably live for months without sleep, as long as there was someone beside him to protect. Roger after all was the one who required the restorative of a night unbroken. It was enough sometimes to listen to him breathe, one arm around him lightly as if to prove anew every second that he was still alive.

  Six months later he lingered closer to death than life, the first of the experimental drugs having proven a better murderer than cure. I was delirious from keeping vigil; hadn’t worked in months, but by then we were counting the days to AZT, the so-called miracle breakthrough that brought a whole generation of us to the brink of an early grave. But who knew then that science could get it all wrong; or that the drug conglomerates never met a disease they couldn’t prolong the suffering of, if the price was right? All I know is, I had to set the alarm at four-hour intervals, day and night, and mix three IV bottles in a glass of juice and somehow feed it to Roger without really waking him up.

  Here at least I swear that I’m not whining. This part had nothing to do with insomnia proper. It was a privilege, frankly, to have so clear a purpose for keeping watch all night. I recall thinking the same as Barbara, I’ll sleep when I’m dead, when what I was covering up was the truth I couldn’t swallow: that I’d sleep when Roger was dead. The last six months of his blindness, the drenching sweats all night long, helping him change before he took a chill—it was all in the nature of having a night job, the graveyard shift in a factory that manufactured hope, or at least the illusion of endurance.

  I took my forty winks when the nurse arrived at eight to set up the m
orning IV drip. And when one day she came in to shake me awake because something was very wrong, I bolted up as if I’d been caught sleeping at the wheel. Too late: the ship had already run aground. In the tortured final day and a half I watched Roger go from horrorstruck half-consciousness—fighting it like drowning just to take my hand, or later to moan my name when the brain shut down his power to speak—to full-bore coma, a body that couldn’t do anything now, not even breathe on its own.

  I’d been home in bed a couple of hours, a handful of pills barely keeping me under, when the phone call came at six A.M. to say it was over. And almost exactly four yean later, September instead of October, I’d barely shut my eyes when the phone rang just after four, to say that Stephen was gone. Victor, who was holding me together at the time, took the call in the other bedroom, but I think I’ve never stopped hearing that twice-tolled ring in the night.

  For the longest time now, probably since my own first incarceration at Midway Hospital (4 West, the plague unit), my sleepless nights have been marked by a weird anomaly. I read till three or four when the drugs kick in, heavy-lidded at last, and I douse the lights and drop off like a stone in a well. Only to come to, goggle-eyed, precisely an hour later, more often than not in a panic, still waiting for that call. Sometimes the ghost of an echo, as if I’ve already missed it. And that’s when the real insomnia sets in, the hours that seethe with dread. You can almost hear the stonecutters chiseling your name.

  It’s questionable whether you needed quite such a detailed history of my sleep loss. (Not quite as bad as Stravinsky, at least, who regaled the breakfast table every morning with the minutest details of his bowel movements.) But because I’ve hit a new phase these days, unlike any that’s gone before, I find myself following the thread backward over the course of the long night journey that’s brought me here. The past as prologue.