Too Many Sleepless Nights

Doug Draime

          Ray sat on his couch, leaning over his TV dinner, bleary-eyed and exhausted, watching the Gulf War over CNN.

He flipped on the TV as a reflex. A remote control was a wonder of technology. It had become like an extension of his arm. He ate the white turkey meat, potatoes, and peas as he looked on at the night bombing of Kuwait. Flashes of colorful lights in the night

sky. He wondered how many people died with each flash, how many were injured? Ray had lost both his father and uncle in the same fire fight on the perimeter of Saigon in 1965, when he was twelve. In the 1960s and 70s, the Viet Nam war was on the nightly news; now in the 90s, war was a grand event, mass entertainment 24 hours a day. The constant justification from the media, with verbiage inspired directly by White House double-talk. Stock in CNN and all the corporations that bought time on air raising, as the war continued. The rich get richer and the poor are annihilated.

          After watching for a few more minutes, as usual, Ray begun to feel anger and depression. He saw himself, at twelve, standing by his father’s closed casket, the American flag draped over it, his mother holding his hand.

This moment always came back to him, standing there with his mother, her body shaking uncontrollably with sobs of grief. But Ray didn’t cry on that day. It was months before he was able to shed any tears. He clutched his mother’s hand tightly, trying to steady her, as they watched the casket being lowered into the grave.

          He switched channels to clear his head. It was a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby movie, On The Road To Morocco. He must have seen the movie twenty times, at least. Surfing from channel to channel, he tried to focus on something, anything. But he was too tired and on edge from the three-day binge of Benzedrine and booze to focus.

He turned the TV off, got up from the couch, and walked into the tiny kitchen and took a beer from the six-pack he’d brought home with him, to help him come down. He took a long drink from the bottle and pressed the cool glass against his forehead.

He was walking back to the couch when the phone rang. It was 3:15 AM. The phone hadn’t rung for a week, or more.

Someone must be dead, he thought, as he picked up the receiver.

                 “Yeah?”

 “Hi, Ray,” said a female voice he didn’t recognize.

          “Who is this?”

          “It’s been a long time,” she replied

           “Who is this?” Ray said again, taking another drink from his beer.

           “You really don’t know?” she said, answering the question with a question. He could hear the surprise in her voice, with a short intake of breath.

          Ray took the portable phone with him back into the kitchen, where he drank the rest of his beer and opened another one.

                  “Look, it’s after three in the morning and I’m very tired. Sounds like I should know you, but sorry, I’m at a loss,” he said.

          “Joan. Ray, this is Joan,” she said, a sight trace of indignity in her tone now.

          How many months had it been? Seven, eight?  He never expected to hear from her again, after he had thrown her 13-inch TV out the window on the fifth floor of the Wilton Hotel. They were both too drunk for rational reasoning. Joan threatening him, at one point, with an ancient Derringer pistol her grandfather had left her. He had heard she was living with a cop on the Glendale Police Force. There was talk of marriage and real estate.

                  “Ray?”

                  “Yes?”

                 “You’re awful quiet. Thought you hung up”

          “I’m still here. I just don’t know what to say. Well, how the hell are you, Joan? ” Ray slugged the beer down in three huge swallows.

          “I thought you’d be surprised. I mean, after all these months and me calling this time of night. But I thought you’d recognize my voice.” Slurring the last word, he knew she had been drinking.

          There was a long silence, as Ray studied her breathing.

          “I’m living in Glendale now, but I’m working in Hollywood, not far from you, at that rubber stamp place on Garfield. I’m doing their books. I have my own little office in the back of the shop. Can you imagine me doing books for anyone? I mean, I can’t even balance my own check book, for Christ’s sake. I passed the math test they gave when I applied, and they hired me right off. You remember how I hated math.”

          “I remember you weren’t too good with numbers,” Ray said, opening the refrigerator for another beer.

He wasn’t ready for the conversation, far from it. He had been up a straight 74 hours without sleep. All he wanted was a little vitamin C, a couple of beers and a 12 to 18 hour sleep-off. He felt like asking her how her TV was, what kind of mess it had left on the sidewalk, and regardless of the answer, just hang up. He thought about that for a moment, just hanging up. But he felt he owed her more than that, for throwing it out the window, in the first place . . . or maybe not.

          “I’m tired, Joan. Rough couple of days. What is it exactly you wanted? It’s been awhile.”

          “Well, I guess I just wanted someone to talk to.” Joan paused, her breathing deep and uneven. “Did you know I got married?” she asked, sounding almost angry.

          “No, I didn’t. Last I heard you were living with a cop. So, you married him?”

                  “Yeah, about five months ago. But I haven’t seen him for two months,” slurring her words.

          Ray lit a cigarette and drank the third beer a little slower.

           “Ray?”

           “Yeah?”

                  “You’re not saying much. I keep thinking you hung up on me.” She was reading his mind.

          “So, where’s he been the last two months?” Ray said, taking his shirt off and tossing it across the room.

                  “What?”

          “Your cop husband.”

          “Oh  . . . He joined the army. Can you believe that?”

          Ray didn’t respond. He sat looking at a spider web on the ceiling he had not noticed before.

          She was laughing. “He’s a real dumb shit. Volunteered for Desert Storm. Over there now . . . that’s where he’s been!”

          Ray put his cigarette out in the beer, walked down the hallway and into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed and took off his shoes.

          “I’m sorry to hear that, Joan,” he said, meaning it. He stood up, unzipped his pants and took them off.

“You don’t have to be sorry for me,” she said, as sharp as a razor, “If he gets his head blown off, it was his call.”

          Ray sat back down on the bed and was staring out the window at the night sky over L.A.

                  “Look , Joan, I’m wiped out. I need to get some sleep.”

          “Oh . . . OK. Ah, can I call you tomorrow, or maybe come over? You know . . .  stop by after work, since I’m so close?”

           “Not a good idea, Joan,”

          “Why not?” she asked, slurring her words indignantly.

                “Because your husband may be a dead man right now in an Arab country, and that’s  because this country thinks our oil is under their land, and that you have no concept of the horror that  implies, and you don’t even care if your husband is killed. That poor bastard, dead or alive! Goodbye, Joan. Never fucking call me again.”

          Ray hung up and lay down on his bed.

Within a few minutes, he was sound asleep.

“Too Many Sleepless Nights” was published first as a "magsheet" by Ragged Edge (Appliance Books) in England in 2005 and then again by ZYX Magazine (Arnold Skemer) in NY in 2007.