The Mystery of Lost Sleep

Sleep is the most important thing in life. I learned that lesson during a turbulent and sleepless weekend last winter. I felt like a wreck. My mother took a bad turn and passed on a Friday night, the night of my concert in LA. Saturday night I'd be in blizzard-blown St. Louis with no sleep. Mother gave me a solid gold locket with a picture of us in it, and I didn't have time to put it away, so it went with me in my "crossbody satchel". The flight to St. Louis was a layover, and I got to the city at around 10 am, on no sleep, with my trusty hat, a duffle bag, and my crossbody satchel. I was out of energy and clarity to properly grieve, but maybe it was better this way. Tthere was no time to rest until late afternoon, but whenever I had a chance to sit down, the locket would end up in my hands. It was a gray winter's day.

I'm a gun hire of sorts, a piano player by trade, and sometimes, saying “no” to one gig means a door shut that you don’t want shut. You meet a lot of strange people, the artists who seem to have held on too long to certain thoughts, memories and feelings. It is easy to imagine these people as caricatures, elongated and separated from the world around them, trying hard to bend reality into something better. Don’t bother talking to those types.  I stuck around her and the roadie-types. The roadies are all caricatures in their own right, but they belong to this world. These are the people you can talk to. Brian, a plump, blond, chin-stubbled fellow who looked as tired as I felt, was one of these. The two of us talked over a brief green-room lunch. I told him someone I knew had recently passed.

"Sorry", he said, rubbing his chin. I moved the conversation along.

"So how did you get roped into all this?" I asked.

Brian explained his connections, and we told each other tales of the road. My mind threatened to short-circuit as I talked, but I didn't care. Brian spoke like someone who has lost sleep gradually over a long period of time, until memories go dull. He ran a hand through his short blond hair when he thought of something humorous. He seemed like a quiet person.  

"I used to say 'yes' to everything," I said, "or else I let people speak for me. Mom always said 'it's not show art, it's show BUSINESS." I wanted to get drunk but then I wouldn't get any sleep. Brian informed me that the band was staying at a house with a door code. before getting to comfortable, I called a car to take me to the house.  

"Give me a call when you get there," he said, "and I'll tell you the code." He seemed tired but not jaded, yet. The whole time, his expression seemed to say "work's a bitch", rather than "life's a bitch". You can't help somebody with that latter look. I felt sorry for him. He still had life on his side, as Mom would say in recent weeks. Maybe he enjoyed something about it, the music, the free food; I never got to the real questions when we snacked.. In fact I never saw him again in my life.

...

I walked out into an alleyway and the door closed and locked behind me. The frozen winter air perked me up, but I got cold almost immediately and I walked out from the alley. I was expecting a car to arrive soon. The sky was dark grey, and I reckoned the sun was about set. Trusting my app, I walked to the front of the club to wait. My boots crunched in snow, and after several paces a gravelly voice checked me. “Nice day for a walk, sir.” Those words must have been said thousands of times to passers-by just like me, but I was giddy and a car was coming very soon, so I entertained

him. 

“Sure is,” I said, “Warm!” He had on a banana-colored trench coat, matching hat, and some alligator boots with ridiculous stud-work, similar to those I once saw at a high-end boot store in Austin. In fact, with it’s black buttons, the trench coat helped him look very much like a big banana.

“I like your hat, sir. Do you know what time it is?” he said. I saw a grin and an exaggerated shifting in his eyes, and he hardly looked menacing. I half expected him to be hiding a bunch of bananas in his coat and a single,and more precious banana in his hat. I reached into my satchel for my phone.

“Stop right there!” he said.

“What’s the matter, friend?” I said, bracing for the banana circus to make a stop on the corner.

“You don’t seem to have a watch, sir! Do you think a man such as myself has the time of day to wait for you to whip out your gizmo? These are sad times indeed! Is it hopeless?”

I was amazed. Such drama. He nearly drew me in. I let him walk towards me. His boots left a print in the snow that struck me: Two stars, one under the heel and one under the toe.

“Listen,” I said, I’d love to talk, but I’ve got a car to catch.

He suddenly flung open his coat, revealing dozens of fine-looking watches and other jewelry.

“I take cash or card, new friend!” he said. “See something you like, you’ll know where to find me. I’m everywhere! And I don’t sleep.”

I started walking away from him and my car pulled up. He didn’t hand me any business card. I looked behind me and he stood still and quiet, and his white eyes glared at me and the car. I've seen cows do that. One will start looking at you as you drive by and never stop looking at you.  .

I realized I had been shivering and I was very cold and exhausted. Shutting the car door from the outside felt like turning off a bad radio station. The roads were covered with brown slush and we went slow. I rummaged through my duffle bag, looking to no avail for ear muffs. 

"How are you doing?" I asked the driver. Talking was easy.--my teeth were already chattering--and I had to tell someone about the yellow apparition back at the venue.  

"Been better," said the driver, a woman, probably college age, with dark hair, big eyes and a colorful sweater, "I hate the snow." She sighed and looked like she might just plant her face into the steering wheel and drive us crashing into the nearest Seven Eleven.

"Long day?" I said.

"It's just getting started," she said, smiling politely.

"Did you see that, uh, gentleman in the yellow with the shoes?"

"That's Sal," she said. Her smile was now more of a neutral pucker. "I see him everywhere around here. He doesn't cause any trouble. He buys ribs at my mama's Barbecue place, and I see him walking around with the ribs, eating out of foil. He doesn't bother anybody over there. He always wears that coat and those shoes."

"I heard that Barbecue is good in St. Louis."

"You heard right. You from out of town? I like your hat" After she spoke she moved her mouth like she was getting her face painted and it started to itch. I thought about how I sometimes frightened my mom when my own nervous tics got bad.

"Los Angeles," I said. I wanted to see more of her face. When she heard me say Los Angeles, her eyes must have lit up a little bit.

"I've always wanted to go there!" she said, "That's where I'm saving up to go. I gotta get out of here. It's like twenty degrees! Excuse me!" She honked at a car hesitating in front of us.

We began to converse with more enthusiasm. Her name was Cindy, and one thing she did not want was to be stuck in her hometown working at her mother's barbecue shop, stuck living so close to her parents. I didn't tell her that I still lived with my, well, my father.

"There's mama's restaurant," she said. It was a small but attractive establishment on a corner with a parking lot. The Smokin' Pig. Then I noticed my phone was almost out of juice. "You can charge your phone right here, sir!" she said and twirled a hand toward the cigarette lighter.

I reached into my little satchel and pulled out my charger. It was tangled in many knots with my mom's locket.  I freed enough charging cable to get up and push it into the cigarette lighter, and then I sat back and began to drift off. Cindy was now in the mood to talk. She must have sensed me drifting off and she spoke just to herself. We were 5 minutes away.

"Sir!" I woke with a jolt. Where was I? "Is this your destination?" she said.

"I hope so," I said. It was a strange, tall residence with three doors close to each other in the front, and each had a separate staircase. I couldn't see very well in the car, and I grabbed my phone, which had fallen under my duffle bag some how, and I got out of the car as quick as I could. I could only think about the prospect of a warm, quiet room. I trudged to the stoop, feeling like the hero of a gritty winter's tale on the American frontier, the snow crunched beneath my boots, and the car behind me drove away with my charger...and my mother's locket. I realized it only seconds too late. The car was down at the light a block away and I ran to the brown slush of the street, flailing my arms, but Cindy evidently did not see me, and I watched her car speed away.

I was so exhausted that my mind put the locket issue on hold. More pressing was that it was getting dark, below freezing, I was miles from the venue, there was no one at this house, and my phone was at ten percent. When your mind is tapping out, anger is the last thing to go. Still on the steps, I looked up nearby phone accessory stores that were open. Nine percent. I called and waited for another car, freezing cold. Seven percent. I bought a fifty dollar charger and called another car, waiting outside so as not to be rude to the shopkeeper, tracking every movement of the car on my app, praying he wouldn't cancel. Five percent. When I got back to the house, I was at four percent. He said it was the middle door, and he gave me the code. There was no keypad, and I called Brian back. Three percent. He said it lights up when you touch the handle. It lit up in a blue number pad, and I entered the code. Incorrect. "Try pressing star, then enter," said Brian. Two percent. It worked, and I was inside. I rushed to a couch, found a nearby outlet, set an alarm for an hour, and passed out.  

...

I woke up to the alarm, groggy, and despair flooded into my mind almost immediately. The sky was dark in the window, and showtime was in forty five minutes. There were some beers in the refrigerator, left by the band, who had all gotten there the previous night. In fact, the kitchen was already a mess, with opened, half-used packets of barbecue sauce strewn across the island counter like the dead and dying on a battlefield. Barbecue sauce. For a moment, a desperate scenario went through my head, but it seemed impossible. I gathered myself and my belongings to take another car ride back to the venue (I would later discover that my total bill for all those rides was in the three digits). In all my rides after Cindy, I had been quiet. Now, with the locket taking all my attention, I felt all sorts of things. How tired I was, I thought, but then, I'm always forgetting things, and what did Mom always say, that we forget because we don't care? I always begged to differ, but right now, I felt like a selfish prick. I deserved it for going ahead with these shows instead of grieving. Could I have said no? Would they all have understood? Maybe I really don't care all that much. I was too wracked with these thoughts to pay any more mind to the antics and attitudes of my bandmates. They were all preoccupied. The singer was practicing warm-ups in a steamy shower room, the drummer was on his little practice pad, presumably taking a swig of whiskey after every hundred taps of his sticks. The lead guitar player was throwing a fit about a wine stain on his new shirt. The rhythm guitar player was talking to some record label person. The bass player, Mildred, was sitting baked with a muscular fellow on each side of her. Mildred was the only one who noticed I wasn't feeling so hot. 

"Honey, how you feeling?" She was a bit older than the other band members, but she had a youthful face and a healthy glow to her skin, a departure from the pale, even sallow appearances of the rest of the band members, even without their makeup. The two muscle men sat quietly in their tank tops. The two of them looked very dissimilar, except that they both were lean, muscular, wore the same color tank tops, and sported identical mustaches. They seemed to be "special fans" of hers. I told her I was okay, but she was one of those people who in another, sober life, could have been a very kind and empathetic person. But she wasn't responsible.

The show went well, as far as I could recollect, though the singer was unsatisfied with the crowd, to the point that it depressed him, and several band members began to squabble about "putting on a good show", and "dicking around", and they all drank more and more until their antagonism turned itself outward and like a phalanx they began to destroy the greenroom. There was nothing for me to do but to go back to the house, sleep a little, and then take a car to the airport to return to LA. I wished I could see how Brian was doing, but he couldn't be found. Mildred caught me at the door. She had one of the muscle men with her.  

"Great Show, how did you feel?" Said Mildred, with a bit of an inebriate drawl.

"Okay," I said "But I am so tired. And I left something very valuable in a car. A locket my mom gave to me. Gone forever. I feel terrible about it." I didn't want to say more, for Mildred's sake. I just wanted to leave and forget I came to St. Louis.

"I'm sorry, baby," she said. Her sympathy was genuine, despite everything. "There's a man selling stolen jewelry outside. He's got a yellow coat on. Maybe I can kick his ass"

I laughed. "No, I appreciate it. I saw that guy earlier today. Apparently he's 'everywhere'. Even the driver of the car where I left my locket seemed to know him"

"Maybe he's got her phone number then," she said, joking.

"She said he goes often to her mom's barbecue place, what was it called, something Pig"

"The Smokin' Pig?" She asked.

"Yes!" A dangerous excitement took hold of me

"I went there for lunch earlier, alone like always, these fuckin vegans. Now wait a minute," said Mildred, a new gleam in her lazing eyes, "maybe you can still get your little locket back. All the pieces are coming together here"

I knew what she was thinking, but I wouldn't hear it. "I've got a flight at six-"

"I'll get you a different flight. Is this important to you or what?"

"Someone else probably already found it-"

"Listen honey, I'm giving you a chance, here. You're the only person here who isn't driving me into a death spiral. You're gonna say yes to me." I felt then like I had suddenly inherited a very troubled, but loving, big sister.

After a pause, I said "alright."

"Great! I'll help you! See you tomorrow when you wake up!" Then she disappeared with her muscle man back into the backstage chaos.

I learned later that the next day she had no memory of our conversation.

Outside, saw a yellow figure in the distance, but then I disbanded all crazy notions and called one more car back to the house. I thought about the adventure laid out before me. The detective and his sidekick solving the mystery of the missing locket. I thought about how we might wake up, well rested, head over to the Smokin' Pig. Someone there would know how to reach Cindy or her mother. Or maybe we'd see Sal there in his banana coat. I imagined that Cindy had already planned to sell the locket to Sal so she could buy a one way ticket to LA to finally live her dreams. I imagined a great chase through the snowy alleyways of St. Louis, and a climactic showdown. I imagined all this instead of sleeping. My alarm rang at 5am, Sunday morning, and I called a car to the airport to fly home. Mom would have told me it was the responsible thing to do, and she would have been dead right. After landing and walking to my car, i drove to the mountains to look out at the snow. I parked on a turn out and fell asleep, at piece, and the mystery of the missing locket was never solved.