At one point, back some time ago, I rented this tiny hut over in the ghetto. It was super cheap and the day I signed the contract was the last time I ever saw the place in daylight. My schedule was like this: Go to work at the boiler plant at six in the morning and work until four. Then at five, go to work in the restaurant and work until two in the morning. Then at two in the morning, meet up with my girlfriend at my hut and hang out until about five in the morning at which time I would catch an hour of sleep. When my girlfriend would show up at two in the morning the first thing she would do was to pull a giant butcher knife out of her sweat pants. She carried this to deal with the hoodlums who inhabited the railroad tracks that she had to cross by the hospital. She told me that she once gutted someone and pulled out their ribs for messing with her. She also liked to drink and when she showed up with her butcher knife she was usually blasted out of her head. I never understood this since she worked at the same restaurant as I did and would often get done with work at the same small hour of the morning. Somehow, between leaving work, going to her apartment, and arriving at my hut twenty minutes later she would down some astounding amount of alcohol to pickle her brain and ensure that we were going to have interesting times while we conversed about sleep deprivation and the traumas of love. We lived in a haze of sleeplessness and booze until, finally, one day I found myself hallucinating from lack of sleep. I was sitting in the locker room of the boiler plant looking at the floor. I saw a dust ball blowing out from under a bench and as I watched it cross the floor it turned into a spider and then back into a dust ball. It was so real that I knew something profound had happened to my brain and that night I mentioned to my girlfriend that we might want to think about leaving. A week later we did leave, packing everything we could into a giant Cadillac Eldorado convertible that I had received as a half assed graduation present. I left half of my belongings in the hut and never saw them again. I also left both my jobs without notification or the slightest bit of guilt. I remember blasting up through the north east corridor on the way to god knows where with my girlfriend sleeping on the seat next to me. It was our hour, about three in the morning while I was roaring up 95 in the snow when I lost control of the car. We turned sideways at eighty miles an hour and slid along the highway with a wave of snow blowing up in the air behind us. Somehow the car righted itself and I found that we were driving like normal people again. I looked over at my girlfriend and she hadn’t stirred. I realized that sleep was the best place to be no matter what was happening outside. She was safe as an egg and didn’t even know it. But, really, I have to admit, I didn’t know it either when you get right down to it.
