Darling

These days, I wake up at all hours of the night, as if jolted out of sleep by some powerful force, suddenly wide awake in the darkness of the bedroom, heart racing in the chest, bewildered, fleeting thoughts and bits of memories rushing through the head faster still, one after another, unstoppable. Checkered remembrances from a distant past. Like this morning, thinking about the time I could barely make the rent and regularly had to sell blood to buy me something to eat until the next paycheck came along. Must have been late 1986 or so, back in Milwaukee. Winter for sure with the wind blowing mean and steady off Lake Michigan and on down Brady Street where I roamed the streets after work in the blistering cold. Covering ground at high speed to keep warm in my worn leather boots and light suede jacket, speaking to myself loudly in French and hesitant English, acting off kilter to ward off potential mugging through sketchy neighborhoods. The few dollars from the blood deal guiding my feet to the cheapest burger in town at some ratty old diner off Farwell Avenue. Must be gone by now. The tired waitresses in their sixties having seen and heard more shit than a lifetime of taking orders while pretending to care could possibly store. Must be gone too. Dead. Have to be. All of them. The down-on-their-luck poring over the stained menus for the longest time as if intrigued by the daily specials before ordering the same usual cheap fare and fifty-cent draft. The crumpled newspapers on the counter. The racing forms. The short-order cooks taking it all in, unfazed. The ever silent Greek owner who never cracked a smile manning the cash register his back to the wall. The tip jar and the fat cat sleeping next to it. The year calendar pinned to the back of the exit door a solid reminder of impending mortality, due alimony, late rent and gone lovers. Anyhow, that's what I remember at night when sleep eludes me. Stuff like that pouring in with no end to it or so it seems. Like that sweet old black lady who liked to wait on me and call me darling. "Take a seat, darling, don't you stand in that freezing cold by the door, I'll be right with you." Soon I matched my going there to her night schedule, just to hear her say "darling" over and again in that raspy voice I romantically associated with the blues and Motown and Luther King and the Panthers and everything I was voraciously reading about late at night in the books I borrowed by the dozens at the city library. Piles of them stacked around my sleeping bag spread out smack in the middle of the room rented by the week. Like a drifting raft at sea in which I buried myself up to the chin and clung on to like a lifeline of sort in the frigid room with a single deficient heat register. No table, no chairs, no couch, no TV, no furniture whatsoever, nothing in that bug-infested room but that one bag and some clothes stuffed inside an English postal sack lifted in London years prior, one pair of Dr. Marten boots too, I forgot, and a single lightbulb hovering over it all like a lone star in the night. That's what I used to think back then, I remember that too, when I would look up from the books and light a smoke lying on my back while staring at the ceiling and that bare lightbulb throwing down 120 watts at me. That I was adrift at sea, away from kin and lost to a world I didn't care for anyhow. The kind of thought a lonely twenty-three-year-old would have. Anyhow, all this comes back to me when I can't sleep, tossing and turning for hours on end. Don't know what to make of it, but more often than not the uninvited memories feel like a dubious thread to a past so tenuous and blurred as though belonging to another man whose life I just happen to know well. A man I keep a close watch on night after night in the dark bedroom of a large house by the sea, fully furnished and bug-free, where I now live with the woman I love in much warmer climes some thirty years later.

June 18, Key West, 2016