So Many Ways to Sleep Badly

by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

  On the plane back from LA, Eric gets this headache so bad; he thinks something’s going to break. Then he thinks he might die, better go to the emergency room. They tell him he has a cyst in his brain, probably aggravated because of the air pressure. Eric says: I can deal with anything else in my body going wrong, but my brain? Andee says how old did you just turn? I say thirty, she says I knew it would happen to me, but I never thought it would happen to you—well, at least now I know someone else who’s thirty. You don’t know anyone who’s older than you? Well, sure, but I don’t know anyone else who’s thirty.

  Andee says she just bought a shirt on sale at H&M because there’s nowhere else to buy clothes in Berlin. Well, you can bet their workers are on sale too! Then she bought some Diesel jeans, but they’re cheap in Berlin. Are they the ones with acid-washed asses? No, Mattilda, they’re just regular jeans, I like that they have a stitch on the back of the knee.

  This is the best story ever . . . I’m trying to get someone to drive me around to search for rainbow flags to snatch—gotta burn a couple and make an outfit, right? My mother sends me a package, inside there’s a fucking rainbow flag from Italy, PACE written in white. She says the flags were hanging everywhere, and I’m confused that I’m touched by this misguided gesture. Well, at least it’s made of cloth—here, they’re all plastic—it goes right up, hello beautiful. It’ll look gorgeous with the burnt American flag, wrapped over my rainbow fishnets and not much else.

  Every Pride weekend, we have a heat wave. Benjamin says all the gays who come here from everywhere else probably don’t realize this isn’t how it is here. The gays, polluting the air until my head is nothing but sinuses, my poor poor sinuses—I should be on The 700 Club. But seriously it’s HOT, the Walk of Shame is gonna be a long long walk, honey get me a stretcher!

  Did you hear that? It’s so hot out, I’m wearing shorts. At home, there’s dried come on my leg and it looks like a scar. I taste some, crunchy, but leave the rest for realness points. How do I write about activism? My moment starts with burning the flags for my outfit, wrapped around the rainbow fishnet bodysuit like a frat boy realness mini-sarong, the Prada label shoes, new wig-of-all-wigs—purple with all the plastic flowers in the world growing there. But the magic begins when I’m speaking on the bullhorn because the sound system hasn’t arrived, and then Karoline comes up with the sound system mike, and then boom from then on it’s flawless. I do mean flawless. Everyone’s brilliant. Somehow the police negotiators get us a whole side of Market Street, we march all the way to the Castro with only our own interruptions. Of course we give out more awards. Best Front-Row Seat to Watch Police Brutality goes to the Center, with Bagdad Café a runner-up because that’s where the cops gunned down Jihad Alim Akbar. Harvey’s gets the Auntie Tom Award for supporting Gavin Newsom while making money off the legacy of Harvey Milk. The highlight is when we light an effigy of Gavin Newsom on fire in the middle of Eighteenth and Castro and it burns to the ground, a fire truck arrives to disperse us. Even Chrissie Contagious is there, I think this is the first time she’s ever shown up to anything I’ve ever done.

  We move the sound system to an impromptu after-party in Collingwood Park. Spin-the-bottle is the highlight for me—my first time, really. I make out with Benjamin, Rhania, Yasmine and Brodie—ready for more, but for some reason the game loses energy. The walk back to Eric’s car through the Castro is a spectacle of its own—all the gays gaping—yes, darling, we are mixing Chanel with Prada!

  At Whole Foods, Ralowe says: what I’m attracted to is so fucked up—it’s like my desire is still informed by Disney movies—I never get hard about anything in the real world, I searched the internet but couldn’t find any pictures of Gore Vidal when he was young, so I found some other porn. Ralowe says everyone’s trying to look like Gay Shame—Miss Thing, are you having delusions of grandeur? Then she says it’s Tokyo ’96, but I put her in her place—Tokyo ’96 was just New York ’92—club kid realness, please. Ralowe says: but have you seen Tokyo ’97?

  My trick is jerking all over the place because of alcohol and some crazy meds. Celexa in the bathroom cabinet—that’s an HIV med, right? He says let me tell you something, sometimes you’re like a psychiatrist—yeah, no kidding. On the way out, he shows me the living room: that’s the sofa I’ll die in, he says. You’ll be bringing me Meals-on-Wheels, and you’ll say hey I remember that guy.

  Jeremy has Sarah’s car, so we go to visit the sea lions—it’s been so long. On our way there, some guys yell faggots—are you kidding? There aren’t too many sea lions around, but this one dock is covered by wet ones who keep pushing each other into the water, then a closer dock where they’re all snuggling together. Way in the back are the big big ones who rarely move. Jeremy likes to talk about what the sea lions are thinking—those two are in love. That one wants the other one to sit on him.

  We drive to Baker Beach ’cause I want to see the ocean, but the entrance is locked. Same thing at China Beach. I remember the trick that had his friends kidnap him and then I sucked his dick while he was blindfolded, but he freaked out when he felt stubble on my face, he wasn’t ready for faggotry. So Jeremy and I rush to Ocean Beach ’cause I have a trick at 11:30. The ocean is so big, I get that little kid feeling—I just have to figure out how to get there without Jeremy. The sea lions. I tell Jeremy it’s weird reading the beginning of this book, because it starts when we just met and there’s no foresight at all about anything. Sandy’s moved into Jeremy’s room. Jeremy says: every two weeks, Sandy has a breakdown about being in an open relationship, but other than that, it’s great.

  Chrissie calls from downstairs: I’ve got a gift for you, something you can use to decorate the neighborhood. Knock knock and when I get to the door, she’s already back by the elevator and there’s a brick on the floor. I can’t stop laughing. Andee’s on the phone, telling me how she was on Oranienstrasse in Kreuzberg shopping, well not shopping because she can’t afford to buy anything—shopping for what she might want to buy, if she had money. Then she heard some commotion and it was a punk-rock record store that’d just appeared out of nowhere.

  Andee went inside, and there was the back of Zan’s head. Zan said: I just turned thirty. Andee said: I turned thirty months ago, are you having a crisis? Zan said I’m dating someone who’s nineteen. Andee said that sounds like a crisis.

  Rue and I walk to North Beach, there’s a stuffed animal shop and I get excited looking in the window, tears in my eyes and all. Then I see the panda, oh the panda—and actually now I’m crying and I’m not sure whether Rue thinks I’m laughing. I start thinking up plans to rescue the stuffed animals I had as a kid—the panda, the mice, Henry the Hippo. What’s the difference between riding a bike and bike riding? Bike riding is what I did with my father as a kid, our time together—he screamed and screamed and screamed. Of course I screamed too, scared of the bridges because I might just fly off.

  In the morning, I wake up to the sound of squealing mice. Are they having babies in my cabinets, or is it just the pigeons in the ceiling? I try to convince myself that it’s the pigeons, but I still can’t sleep. When I get up, there’s a roach crawling out of the drain—are the mice in the drain, scaring the roaches? At least when I go to yoga, I know that I’ll stop eating for an hour and a half.

  I’m having a Provincetown nostalgia moment because of the heat wave, which is over now, but my moment goes on. Thinking about running with sweat pouring down my face, riding a bike with my groceries attached to a rack with bungee cords, walking through the sand on the way to the beach. When will I be able to use my body again?

  Okay, so there are plenty of possible reasons why I get kind of high at the Power Exchange, well not kind of high but HIGH really fucking high. Like towards the end, when some song comes on, and the song isn’t that good but the beat oh the beat—I just have to do runway, and even if my runway isn’t that inspired, it sure is better than whatever else is going on. Then there’s the moment that guy with the newsboy hat—well, the
one with the newsboy hat who actually looks British, the one whose dick I’m sucking and it curves upward and then he pulls away. But when I get high is later, he holds his dick all the way in the back of my throat and shoots, oh I just want him to hold me like that forever. Even though someone else just came in my mouth, and then I hugged him—that wasn’t as good as this, and then the guy punches me like we’re on the soccer team together—have a good game!

  That almost makes me crash, but then there’s the contact high from all the drugs, though more likely it’s the actual drugs going through everyone’s bodies, into their dicks, through their come and into me. News bulletin: yoga made me stronger! Today I actually did the plow and shoulder stand, two poses that I haven’t been able to do in at least a year. But did I really just sign up for classmates.com?

  Ralowe says she wants to get a job at summer camp, teaching kids to scream. But wait—the new Abercrombie catalog has arrived. Ralowe says: I might get super-aroused and have to self-suck. But is my jaw ache worse than my headache? One-thirty a.m. comes around and I can’t even think: dog-walker or dogcatcher? I take three dropperfuls of passionflower and one of cactus grandiflorus, get into bed and hope for sleep.

  But no luck. I lie in bed trying to fall asleep by concentrating really hard on any sounds that might be mice. I figure that might put me into a trance, but by 2 a.m. I’m completely sky-high wired. The exciting part is that I get to make spaghetti with radicchio, fresh corn, basil and scallions, scallions, scallions. Then I mix up a miso dressing with lemon for days, and I’m flawlessing all over the room. But in the bathroom, I hear a gnawing noise coming from the plants—are the mice up there, swimming in dirt, devouring the roots?

  I’m still amazed how much kidney beans taste like the idea of meat sauce. News bulletin: I’ve figured out a way to get rid of my tan line! I’ve been pulling my boxers down lower and lower on the fire escape, but today I realized that around 4 p.m., the sun shines directly onto my bed—so I can lie there naked and get tan. On the bus, this trannyboy asks if I think leather bars are part of the gay mainstream. I say well, with a lifelong history of racism and misogyny, and a masculinity fetish that borders on fascism . . . what do you think?

  How long does it take to get the brim of your baseball cap to fray, or do you buy it that way? And why do so many blonde women take yoga? On the BBC, they’re trying to figure out whether President Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, fabricating evidence to fool the American people. The reporter says—with President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, the issue was: did he lie? The reporter asks, is there anything of that scale going on now? No—just a couple hundred thousand dead Iraqi children.

  My mother sees Take Me Out on Broadway, or maybe it’s offBroadway, about gay baseball players and there’s a shower on stage. My mother says: I’ve never seen anything like that, a real shower. I wonder what my father thought of the naked men. Then my mother tells me about the Fourth of July in New York. She says: everyone stopped to watch the fireworks, and tears were rolling down my face because I’ve never seen anything like that, then Macy’s put on a show with really good entertainers.

  Kayti says she has the answer to all three questions, starting with number three: yoga inspires women to dye their hair blond. Number two: you purchase hats like that, just like you buy ripped jeans—you’re gay, right, it’s fashion, I thought you people were supposed to know about that stuff—it’s not cool to have a flat baseball cap. Number one: doesn’t Britney Spears have a whip in her friggin’ videos, and if Britney Spears has it then pretty soon all the sixteen-year-olds will have it. And more importantly, what did you wear to the fashion show the other day when it took you nine friggin’ hours to get ready?

  Ralowe says it’s amazing what your body can do—almost as amazing as what it can’t do. I get up in the morning to go to court; I can’t believe people get up like this every day. I know I’ve said that before, but I really can’t believe it. When I get home, I’m a mess. The rest of the day consists of lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, and then getting up to shit, my nerves and my useless digestion in a bag on someone’s doorstep, an unwelcome mat. Every time I think will I ever fall asleep, something wakes me up and then I realize oh, I was asleep.

  Today’s the trick who wants a prepped-out photo shoot and I have a zit on my dick, thought it would have healed by now but instead it looks like something between a scab and herpes. At the photographer’s apartment, it’s full porn formula crap. Every pose hurts, and I can’t stay hard in any of them. When I’m on my knees in the bed it’s all fine, but the photographer doesn’t like that pose. He loves the one where I’m on my stomach with my ass in the air, and I turn all the way around to look at the camera. He says: that’s a really cool pose. It’s the tackiest thing imaginable, and my back hurts. Three hours later and we’re both hypoglycemic as all hell, I can’t stay hard worth shit, finally I come all over myself—I mean, it’s a lot of sticky come—and I’m not even sure if he gets any pictures. When we’re done, he shows me the photos—nothing I can use for an escort ad, which is what I really wanted. I mean I did this photo shoot for free—just don’t tell anyone, okay?

  Back at home, the kids in the stairwell are arguing: Pinoy food is not the same as Vietnamese food because Vietnam lost the war to America! Interesting theory. I can’t get out of the house before 7 p.m., so I miss yoga. I go on a walk instead, and within a block, my neck hurts. Then the right side of my jaw starts to go numb, and pretty soon my hands are burning and I can hardly breathe. Am I going to die? The arches of my feet hurt, what’s the point of those fucking arch supports? At home, I stretch and stretch. After I eat, I feel a little better. Aaron says he owes me because I lent him money when he was really poor, but he’s still really poor. He says he’s been spending so much time reading Plato that his neck hurts. Benjamin calls, she says I’m calling to tell you about this really intense conversation I had with Timothy; my skin looks really good today.

  I just saw a rat in my house, really a rat—not just a mouse—it’s behind the bookshelf but my hands hurt too much to check for sure. It’s late, I’m scared of the rat, like it’s going to grow larger than the sofa and when it opens its jaws, each tooth will be bigger than my neck. Shit, I just saw it again—it’s fast—and why is it making that scratching noise? I was in denial about the rats in the ceiling, but pigeons don’t scurry. Some people say pigeons are just flying rats, but I’ve seen them up close and they’re definitely birds.

  The only thing worse than live rats in my house would be dead ones. Thinking of all those animals bleeding and cut open by my father or parents or some people—and every time I see them sliced apart, it’s those anti-vivisection ads and I haven’t dealt with those ads, I mean those memories. The ones that keep coming up, but not as much any more because I haven’t been in therapy.

  There’s a parasite that eats out a fish’s tongue, then replaces the tongue, so when the fish needs to chew, there’s a parasite doing the work of its tongue. There’s another parasite that’s a one-cell organism that makes a rat forget its fear of cats, though I’m not sure that would help me. Socket says a rat chewed through her mother’s dishwasher, and Rue says rats’ teeth grow an inch every few hours, and that’s why they have to keep chewing. Finally a day with three tricks—first one makes sure to take exactly fifty-nine minutes. Second one touches me too softly. Third one wants to cuddle for three hours and treat me like a little boy, which is kind of relaxing, actually.

  At the bus stop, there’s the cutest boy ever created, he’s maybe kind of cruising me and I’m staring into the distance trying to look emotionally open. He’s not cruising me enough, so I sit down and study the weave of his jeans. Then I get another call, but this trick doesn’t know where he is—the bus comes and I lose my chance at a new boyfriend. I eat Thai food and then another trick calls me, says he’ll pay me 850 dollars tomorrow just for showing up, and how much would it take to make me his boyfriend ’cause he likes my smile. He’s just com
e from a business dinner where he had eight or nine martinis, but he could drink forty-eight martinis and fly a plane to New Zealand.

  The mice or rats or cats or whatever’s in my walls wakes me up at fucking 5 or 6 a.m., sometime before dusk I mean dawn at least because, well, it’s still dark out. The clock is dead, so the only way I can tell time is if I turn on the cellphone, which I have to do with my teeth because the button’s fucked up and I can’t push hard enough with my fingers or they’ll hurt. The rats are scratching in my cabinets and just as I’m about to get in bed, I see plastic bags shift, imagining Cujo in my kitchen/bedroom. Rats falling out of holes in the ceiling and onto my heart attack.

  I don’t notice I’ve fallen asleep until there’s someone talking to me: I’m the exterminator. What—it says NO SPRAY on my door—what are you doing in my apartment, I’m sleeping! He says I’m here for the mice, I say just don’t put traps out. I keep my eye mask on.

  The five-hundred-dollar trick from last night takes me to Millennium, which is so delicious I can’t even explain it. He likes me to call him Daddy while I lie on top of him and pretend I’m falling asleep. He says you feel so safe with me that you’re falling asleep. Right. He wants me to stay overnight—he’s offering to pay for the pleasure—his pleasure, of course. Because I know better. He says you’re already sleeping with rats. Then he wants to know about the senior discount. Sure—that’s 300 an hour. The California discount? 400. How ’bout forty dollars? No, just give me four dollars and pay me in pennies, I want some chewing gum. He says how ’bout pesos?