Take the Cannoli

  My mother says that when I was small she’d wake up in the middle of the night and find me calmly playing with my toys. Once when I was eighteen months old, she got up to check on me and panicked when she saw the front door swinging open. She found me outside crawling around the pasture, giggling. I continued to sneak out as a sleepless teenager. Most nights, I’d go for a walk around three A.M., which was lovely and starlit and safe in Bozeman, Montana. Now I live in Chicago, a city which proudly just edged out New York’s murder rate—don’t call us the second city—so the three A.M. joy walks aren’t an option anymore.

  Not that I mind being up at all hours. I give the wee small hours the same extraterrestrial exemptions as airplanes. Just as planes are guilt-free, work-free zones in which to watch Drew Barrymore movies and read Vanity Fair, I refuse to do anything productive at four A.M. So until I realize my dream of having an apartment big enough to accommodate a Ping-Pong table, I listen to Elvis or watch TV. Which is amusing when you’re visiting old friends such as “Suspicious Minds” or Hitchcock movies for the zillionth time, but less enjoyable the next morning when you wake up after only two good hours of sleep clutching a remote control.

  I’ve had enough. I’m not the advice-seeking, therapy-going, professional-help-getting kind, working under the theory that I know my problems and I’m unwilling to change. But to overthrow insomnia, I pledged to break my personal declarations of independence and ask for help. I’d give it five days, I thought. A work week. I’m can-do when a job’s involved.

  DAY ONE: MOM

  The last time I took advice from my mother I was in high school. She forced me to take a typing class, arguing it might come in handy in later life, and I have never quite forgiven her for being right. But she’s a bit of an insomniac herself. I called her up and asked for suggestions on how to handle it.

  Mom says, “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to drink my herbal tea.”

  So far so good. Herbal tea: sensible, basic, the boiling of water. Maybe this advice thing isn’t as scary as I thought. But Mom’s just getting warmed up: “First of all, Sarah, do some serious soul-searching.”

  Oh, God. I have a policy about that word “soul.” It is strictly prohibited except in cases of conversations having to do with okra recipes or Marvin Gaye. My mom doesn’t observe these simple, commonsense restrictions. She says, “I want you to get rid of anything that might be bothering you.”

  “Like my whole life?”

  “Your whole life? No, I’m talking about things you need to let go of, things that in the past have upset you or hurt you that you need to let go of. Know what I mean?”

  “No. In the New Agey sense? I can’t sleep because I have emotional problems?”

  She’s exasperated. “No, Sarah, I don’t think you have emotional problems.”

  Translation: Yes, Sarah, I do think you have emotional problems.

  Normally, any soul-searching on my part is purely accidental—and it’s always brought on by a liquid other than herbal tea. I brew some chamomile, telling myself that in the right light it looks a lot like scotch. I sip three cups and search my “soul.” More precisely, I search for my soul, but I seem to have misplaced it.

  So I try something else. I put on a Billie Holiday song and feel like I’m making progress. But when “Why Was I Born?” ends two minutes and forty-eight seconds later, I wonder if I’m confusing introspection with depression.

  Soul searching: How do you even know if you’re doing it right? How searched is searched?

  I take another approach. John Ehrlichman’s obituary was just in the paper and I decide to take a personal inventory by comparing my soul with his. Guess what. I come out on top! Do the math with me: The occasional late payment on my college loans . . . Watergate! Forgetting Mother’s Day in 1983 . . . Secret bombing of Cambodia! I can’t sleep . . . He can’t breathe.

  I fall into bed immediately and drift off into the sleep of the just. Sadly, I wake up four hours later and never get back to bed. I cross soul-searching and herbal tea off the list. Sorry, Mom.

  DAY TWO: THE FRIEND

  I ask my friend Barrett Golding for advice on getting to sleep because he’s ten times more keyed up than I. That, and he’s never had a problem telling me what to do. His method, he says, is “from an Eastern tradition. I can’t remember where it’s from, but you can think of it as a yogic or Zen practice. When you go to sleep, think about everything you did that day. You relive your day in minutiae. It will calm you. It will turn off the madness.”

  I try it. I lie in bed and recap every event of the day. Woke up, probably around 6:45, tired as hell. Pulled up the window shade and looked at the sunrise over Lake Michigan. This sounds corny, but every morning, the lake is a shock, and I always have a brief, Calvinist moment when I wonder if I’m worthy of such a view. Like, am I Great Lakes material? Then, my robotic ritual: walk to coffeemaker, pick up pot, fill with four cups of water, pour said water into machine, take out filter, fill with five and a half spoonfuls of coffee, turn on. While brewing, ingest one stress vitamin, the kind with a picture of a candle burning at both ends (get it?) on the wrapping, open door, grab Chicago Tribune and New York Times, which I read, Times first, in unwavering order: arts section, business section, front page, editorial page, rest of front section, Trib gossip column (it’s really gone to hell), and the TV column (still good). In which time I have had two cups of coffee, a bowl of cereal and glass of orange juice, and a third coffee when I got to the Trib. Checked email. Sent email. Took shower. Wrote a review of the new Tom Waits record. I’m fond of the ballads, so I wrote that I’m fond of the ballads. Which obviously takes one sentence to say, but I spent five hours stretching this into four hundred words. Then lunch—turkey sandwich. Did some dishes while listening to Ray Charles. Phone rang. It was Dave, a writer friend. We talked for over an hour, mainly about punctuation. He has big plans for the ellipsis. He’s mad for ellipses. I tell him, yeah, I have similar affection for the parenthesis (but I always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I think only in short fragments or long, run-on thought relays that the literati call stream of consciousness but I like to think of as disdain for the finality of the period). Dave is trying to decide whether he wants there to be a space before or after the ellipsis. He’s unsure. Is the ellipsis approach powerful because of what is not said after the dot dot dot, or is it a cheap excuse for not being able to verbalize? Conversely, do we parentheticals want to communicate by cramming more in, thus slapping what we’re not saying in between what we are, officially, saying? Or is it because we can’t decide? After I hung up the phone I turned on the radio and a Randy Newman song was playing, and I thought, oh no, Randy Newman’s dead. But he wasn’t dead, some of his film music had just been nominated for an Academy Award. So that was nice, Randy Newman not being dead. Went for a walk on the lake, for maybe an hour. Read a novel for a couple of hours. Called my sister. Watched Melrose Place.

  Miraculously, though, Barrett was right. By the time I get to what I cooked for dinner, I start to drift off. I’m drowsy. This is working. But then I remember the UPS man. I hate the UPS man! I am suddenly awake, seething. He’s always bossing me around. Not only do I hate him because he’s a bully, I hate myself for caving in. He scares me. So when he barks at me to take everyone else’s packages—like I’m the postmaster general of the apartment building just because I work at home—I tend to acquiesce. So I’m always tripping over the other tenants’ oriental rugs and Tony Robbins packages in my living room. The UPS man looks exactly like the late character actor J. T. Walsh but his voice is more sinister and clanging, an evil Gilbert Gottfried yelp. “Buzz me in! Meet me at the elevator!” he commands. No door-to-door, no please and thank you. No polite FedEx guy exit line like “Have a good one.” I waited at the elevator ten minutes this morning, as he apparently delivered other people’s packages. For a change. “Sign here!” he screamed, slammi
ng his electronic pencil into my hand. I have heroic fantasies of someday having the guts to just jab it into his eye.

  In the middle of this memory, I have gotten out of bed, turned on the light, and started pacing, mumbling under my breath about the service industry and that there’s nothing more depressing than bad capitalism. And I realize that even for people who don’t leave the house, Barrett’s strategy will only work for those whose days don’t include some incident that makes them mad enough to wake up. Until the world is rid of telemarketers, pit bull–owning neighbors, gas leaks, and George Will, this personalized update of the old counting sheep routine is not going to help. Because every day, no matter how cheerful, how innocuous, always contains within it some little speed bump of anger or hate, some wrong place, wrong time, hell-is-other-people moment of despair. Nighty-night.

  DAY THREE: THE DOCTOR

  I seek professional help from a doctor at the University of Chicago’s sleep disorder lab—one Wallace Mendelsohn, professor of psychiatry and medicine. According to him, there are thirty or forty different sleep disorders. “Among the many causes of insomnia,” he says, “is a condition called psychophysiological or conditioned insomnia.”

  I don’t know if he’s a good doctor, but because of his lifeless voice and dead-wood delivery, if his patients want him to help them get to sleep, all they have to do is sit him down and ask him to say a few words about his job. As he talks about rest and the patients he’s cured, it hits me that I’ve never been rested. I have no idea what it feels like to wake up refreshed. I start feeling really sorry for myself and tears come to my eyes and I’m wondering what I’m missing so I’m pretty much ignoring everything the doctor says. Though he does get my attention when he tells me about a disorder called sleep apnea in which the patient can’t sleep because of suspension of respiration—the nonsleeper can’t breathe. This is treated by being hooked up to some Frankensteinian machine, sometimes for years. The cure sounds a thousand times worse than the problem: Congratulations, you’re a cyborg! Later, I’ll tell a friend about it and she says her father’s on one and now he can sleep but her stepmother can’t because the thing’s so noisy. I don’t cope so well with equipment. Am I up for attaching myself to a breathing machine when I haven’t even gotten around to owning a toaster?

  The doctor refuses to give me any personal advice, arguing that I’m not his patient. Maybe he holds out for the paying customers. I do manage to squeeze a few pointers out of him for “someone,” maybe one of those psychophysio people, an ailment I’m interested in having because its treatment sounds so low-tech: “For that particular subgroup one of the things that can be helpful is to try to strip the bed and bedroom of any associations except for sleep and loving.”

  Loving? Somehow he makes that word sound so dirty.

  That night I take Dr. Mendelsohn’s advice and clear everything out of my bedroom, half of which contains my bed, the other half of which just so happens to function as my office. I will be precise, because this is science. I remove seventy-eight books, stacking them in front of the closet in the other room. I transport fifteen pens, a turntable, a transistor radio, a tape recorder, and twenty-three magazines. I take away dozens of scraps of paper (some of which were handily stored on and in the bed itself). I unplug the computer and the fax machine and lug them out. Clearing away all this dusty stuff takes two Kleenex-filled hours. Then I get into bed—in the nude because the stacks of books are blocking the closet where I keep my pajamas—and I think about what a mess the living room is and how I’m going to have to haul all that crap back in here tomorrow. I never get more than about thirty minutes straight of sleep, though somewhere in there I manage to have a dream in which my bedroom is empty because I got robbed.

  DAY FOUR: THE INTERNET

  Doctors and mothers and friends—so old-fashioned. So twentieth century. If I want an insomnia-free future, I must look to the future. To the World Wide Web. It promises so much.

  I do a search on insomnia. The first page I find is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. It posits the three main causes of insomnia are old age, depression, and . . . female gender. Well, no wonder I can’t solve my little problem.

  Then I log on to something called the Virtual Hospital at www.vh.org. In the insomnia advice section, one of its suggestions is “Don’t engage in stimulating activity before bed. Examples include playing a competitive game of cards or watching an exciting program on television.”

  I vow to avoid exciting programs on television. Which means one thing: turn on The Tonight Show. Jay Leno’s monologue features humor about airlines and Viagra and Linda Tripp. A skit called “Presidential Jeopardy” pits Abe Lincoln and George Washington against President Clinton, who scores big in the “Hooters Waitresses” category. Then one of those animal guys comes out. The conversation goes like this:

  Jay Leno: These must be pretty endangered.

  Animal guy: Yeah. They are.

  I’m asleep before the musical guest comes out. This advice is working the best so far. I stay asleep for five whole hours. Does everyone know about this? That maybe this is the reason Leno’s ratings are better than Letterman’s?

  DAY FIVE: A DAY WITHOUT CAFFEINE IS LIKE A DAY WITHOUT . . . I’M SURE I COULD COME UP WITH A GOOD ANALOGY BUT I’M JUST TOO TIRED

  Consensus (or should I say conspiracy?): I haven’t mentioned it until now because it was just too painful, but every last one of my sources—my mom, my friend, the doctor, the Web—advises against caffeine. Which is a problem in that I have been addicted to coffee since I was fifteen. I no longer drink nearly as much as I used to but still, my motto: Sine coffea nihil sum. Without coffee I’m nothing. So today, I’m planning on nothing. I go cold turkey, starting with a brisk pot of peppermint tea at 8:30. By 10:15 I’m splayed on the couch with a cardigan sweater wrapped around my eyes. My head throbs. The phone rings every fifteen minutes. One of the calls is from a telemarketer, who hangs up when I start to cry. At 12:38, I crawl over to the cabinet where I keep the coffee can and sniff its contents. I turn on the television and watch North by Northwest. You know you’re in agony when it hurts to look at Cary Grant.

  It is a very long day.

  And guess what? It doesn’t work. I’m awake all night watching the clock, waiting for morning, when I can make coffee. At five A.M. I tell myself “close enough” and suck down six cups before 5:15.

  Now that reason is restored, I come to this conclusion: If there’s anything worse than insomnia, it’s taking advice about insomnia, especially from people who can sleep. Being up in the middle of the night is kind of nice actually. It’s quiet and dark and the phone doesn’t ring. You can listen to records and weirder movies are on TV. I’ve never known another life and now I’m not sure I want to.

  One of my earliest memories is listening to my dad, in the middle of the night. He was awake. I was awake. I called him to ask for advice about doing away with insomnia but he didn’t have any. He sees no need to fix it. I recited for him the exact sequence of his nightly wakeup routine, how from my room on the second floor I could always hear him turn on the buzzing kitchen light, open and close a cabinet, turn on the faucet, stir bicarbonate of soda into a glass, even the way the spoon sounded when he set it down.

  “Wow,” Dad said. “Did you hear my ears wiggle, too?”

  Then he goes back to bed, but not back to sleep. In the middle of the night, lying in bed, he invents these machines I don’t pretend to understand. The night before we spoke, he was up plotting out something called a spoke duplicating lathe, adding, “I feel sorry for all those people who slept through the night and didn’t accomplish anything.”

  We are flawed creatures, all of us. Some of us think that means we should fix our flaws. But get rid of my flaws and there would be no one left. If I looked in the mirror someday and saw no dark circles under my eyes, I would probably look better. I just wouldn’t look like me.

  American Goth

  I’M SITTING AT MY DESK, quietly ?
??minding my own” as they say in the rap songs, when my torturer darkens the doorway. She drags me into a cramped bathroom, shoves my head under a faucet, shines a blinding light in my eyes, cinches my neck in plastic sheeting, and comes at me with scissors. She douses me with chemicals and makes me sit there, dehydrating under the plastic while the acid stings my flesh. And so, when I look up from my desk and see her standing there with the scissors, I shudder.

  “Hi, Mom,” I say. “Guess you think I need a haircut?”

  My mother had been a hairdresser before my twin sister, Amy, and I were born. More precisely, she was a hairdresser in Oklahoma in the 1960s. That era is usually characterized as a time when men and women were letting their hair down, but in Oklahoma, they were spraying hair up; the beehive was enjoying a golden age. Since Mom gave up her career to take care of us, all that energy that used to go into whipping hundreds of histrionic heads into an architectural frenzy was focused on the two of us. And since we were as bald as pharaohs, she killed time while our hair was growing in by Scotch-taping bows to our newborn noggins. Her ardor for our appearance increased as we got older, and her attentions never stopped at the neck: There were clothes, there were shoes, even the dreaded accessories. Amy liked to think about such things, shop for such things. Unlike me, my sister did not threaten to call Amnesty International every time Mom wanted to give her a home perm. I was a bit of an embarrassment to my mother—all scuffed shoes and stringy hair and lint.