There was no two-night stand

Sleep and I? We’ve never been on friendly terms. In fact, sleep treats me as if I owe him money. Or I did it with his girlfriend. Sleep treats me like he’s a bartender and I’ve overstayed my welcome. "You don't have to go home, but you can’t sleep here.”

I can’t sleep, and this means that in every city I’ve ever lived in, I know what goes on at night. I know who is up and who is down and which corners of the darkness are safe and which are trouble. I know who I can call and who will be annoyed if I wake them up at all hours. I know what dawn looks like from a fire escape, from a rooftop, from a hammock, from the back of my pick-up truck, a diner window, an airplane at 30,000 feet.

I can’t sleep.

I can’t sleep and this is why I sometimes call my exes when I shouldn’t. When I know better. But knowing better at 11 a.m. is totally different than knowing better and not giving a flying f*ck at 2 a.m.

Once I called Hilda because I needed to rehash our break-up and I said, “In three words, why’d you leave me?” And she said, “You can’t sleep.”

She was yawning as she said the words, and she disconnected the line before I could ask for more. But I did remember that my insomnia had bothered her, and also the fact that I could (and can) exist on less sleep than anyone she’d ever met. I don’t know whether or not she was jealous. I always felt as if she was.

In college, I had a professor who kept the same nocturnal schedule as I did. Once during office hours, she said casually that she’d be sleep drunk if she got more than four hours in a row. I said, “I know. What is that? Why does everything feel weird and murky if I catch extra winks?” She couldn’t explain. But she did have me over for tea and cookies at 3 a.m. and we watched the lights of the town twinkle from her front window, and she showed me her favorite poem she’d written, and she said, “If only you were older,” and I thought, if only you were younger. But nothing happened.

Coffee’s for closers, but decaf’s for losers

The dregs are for beggars and Oolong for choosers

I sip from a second-hand teacup at daybreak

and wait for the dusky light o’er the dark lake

and think of a man who once was on the make

But he slept at my feet…

while I stayed awake.

I can’t sleep for any extended amount of time. I snooze here and there. Hither and yon. I never go down for more than a handful of Z’s in a row except on the rarest of occasions when I am in the exact right motion. Like once on a bus going across country, when I worried the driver by not waking up at any of the scheduled stops. He said I was out for 17 hours and 16 states. He thought I might have died. Been dead. He’d been afraid to shake me awake. I came to somewhere in South Dakota. Nobody wants to come to in South Dakota. I took the most blissful leak of my life and then slept the rest of the way home.

I can’t sleep and this is why you will find me at 24-hour coffee shops having dinner at 5 a.m. One of my wives said that I stay awake because I drink so much coffee. I told her that wasn’t the truth. I said I could drink caffeine or not and it made zero difference to my system. She said, “Prove it, big guy,” so I went a year without java and slept less than I ever had in my life. She was a sore loser. I came home from one of my midnight strolls to find a "dear John" letter taped to the fridge, or in this case, Dear Ramon.

I went out and got myself an extra large coffee at a quickie mart and passed out for three hours.

A bartender once asked me what I do when I can’t sleep. I said I play a lot of solitaire. And online Poker. But the truth is that most of the time, I meander. I wander through quiet, sleepy neighborhoods. I don’t intentionally look through windows, but I do look through windows. So maybe it is intentional. I see the blinds up or the curtains open, and I pause and I think about the people inside, and wonder whether they are sleeping, and if they are, are they dreaming, and if they are, what are they dreaming about?

I never remember my dreams. I don’t even know if I have any.

One of my one-night stands said, “You don’t dream because you don’t hit REM sleep.” She had zebra-print sheets and a bright green parrot in a cage by her bed. The parrot said, “Rem sleep. Rem sleep.” She said, "People only dream in REM sleep.” I said that I didn’t know about what type of sleep people dream in or not, but I didn’t like any songs by that band.

She didn’t think I was funny. There was no two-night stand. I thought the parrot was cool, though. His name was Chester. Parrots sleep 10-12 hours per night.

My third wife said I should join a sleep study. Let people poke me and prod me and stick electrodes to my skull. I said she should try it first. We didn't make it to our next anniversary. I tend to give back the same energy that people give me. Turns out, they don’t often like it.

I can’t sleep, and someone once suggested I do boring things before bed to put myself into the right mood. But who wants to spend their lives doing boring things? I fill my hours fine. I want you to know that I don't even bring up the fact that I don’t sleep. It’s always been a girlfriend or a wife or a roommate who raises the subject. She or she or he will say, “You know, Ramon never sleeps,” and then someone else will say, “Oh, are you a vampire?” And I will say, “Vampires sleep.”

When my favorite professor died, I went to her grave after the cemetery was closed. Cemeteries are places that you generally can putter in the middle of the night and nobody will try to stop you. I found her plot and lay down next to it. I stared up at the stars and wondered if she were finally sleeping, and if she was, was she dreaming?

She slept at my feet…

while I stayed awake.