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Never
Go to Sleep
By
Bob Shattuck
Never go to sleep. I did and I woke up feeling a bit dull. But before that I
was up for what seemed like days and in fact I think it was––days and days. I was drinking coffee with Baileys, getting strung out and then hopping off
the Bailey train and chugging along on straight caffeine.
I was trying to get somewhere without leaving the table I guess, even though
it was more like the bed or the couch although one time I did actually fall
asleep at the table and to make it worse, I was in this café, convinced I
could somehow function in daylight.
I was wearing sunglasses, covertly dozing and staring down the girl behind
the counter––an inspiration of curves, lust and coffee drinks, but still––
I turned off in the middle of a certain thought, better left out of print and then my elbow jumped off the table, like it was slipping out of joint
and my face almost tasting Formica before I woke up.
I caught myself in time to notice someone had lost a crushed pack of
Marlboro on the floor and I decided there and then to smoke what was left.
Got the major buzz off that but it felt too much like waking up and so I smoked them all right there to put an end to that urge. I think I got sick,
but I was too tired to wait around and find out.
Before I left I saw an old man catch on fire, sort of. The bus was coming so
he used his fingers to rub out the ash and put the cigarette in his shirt pocket and I had to think about how much he must have smelled like one big
ashtray, but then he started slapping at his pocket, all lit up sort of––it
smoked and got black real quick and he must have done that all the time. Probably had a closet full of smelly white polyester shirts with their
pockets all burnt up.
I made it back to my place that was still my place since the money hadn’t
run out or more honestly, the girlfriend hadn’t moved out yet. It wasn’t so
much that she moved out––That would have been too orderly, to predetermined––she just left––like they do in the movies and you’re thinking
about them, wondering how they start life over with a suitcase full of underwear and hangers. That’s how it was when she left, but I hardly noticed
because I was mostly asleep.
But I was there enough to remember when I was a kid and my dad bought me a
comic book about the adventures of Huck Finn and I asked him what it meant
when Huck said something like, ‘we lit out of there’, and I learned what
“lit out” kind of meant.
My girlfriend, who by the time she was “littin’ out, could probably have
been considered not my girlfriend anymore, but maybe more like Huck and on
to new adventures––she just said, see you later, and closed the door in a
most definite way.
But I just laid there, this song in the back and the front and the sides of my head. I couldn’t get rid of it and I didn’t know the words or even like it that much, but it was there that morning while I was trying to be loving
to this woman about to lit out on me and I just let it play and by the time
she was smushing the last bit of underwear in her bag, I was humming out loud, I was back to forgetting and into hooking up with the dream team and I
didn’t really know what I wanted––to sleep or not to sleep as Shakespeare or
that Marlowe guy might have said it and I was thinking sleep, believe you me, but I decided that more java was in order. I couldn’t stand the thought
of waking to another day.
Copyright © 2005 Bob Shattuck
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