Big Guy Sleeping

(10/1990)

He was a huge man, towering over all of us. His legs carried him across the big dining room in less than three steps. The doorways were only big enough for him. You couldn't get around him in the front hallway. You had to turn around and walk back to the living room and wait for him to go enter with you, go out the front door, or begin his gradual climb of the front stair to his large, green carpeted bedroom.

HIS bedroom was his bear cave. He would go in and turn on the space heater and the television set and be all set to stay for hours. There was no bathroom upstairs but he made up for it by urinating into a large coffee bottle, the same instant brand he had been buying for years. A trip to the bathroom would have meant to go back down those stairs, through the hall and kitchen, a turn in the dark coldness of the old kitchen, and finally the toilet in the small room to the right., There was a space heater in there, also. One for the master bedroom and one for the bathroom, and those were all. The long avenue in between was a dusty, drafty reminder of the money this house took. Hundreds of dollars every winter to pay the oil bills. He wouldn't hesitate to remind the children of energy costs when they would leave the door to the old kitchen ajar or turn the heat above seventy two degrees. They learned their own energy conservation lessons well as he reminded them from his chair in the dining room with a pained, slow voice of the countless hours of overtime he had been forced into by staying in this old sh-thole. He spoke and his shadow seemed to darken the entire room and all of reality as the agony of his condition was once again told. Two double shirts in six days time and not a moment to himself.

Not a moment to himself except for many hours of desperately needed sleep, beginning and ending with the thoughts of solitary worry. His children, who showed up in his long and terrifying dreams, cried for food and protection, desperate with neverending fear and neglect. He was always close enough to touch them but they couldn't see him. He could not make hid presence known or do anything to relieve them of their suffering. Indeed he had not presence at all in his nightmares. He could only see and feel but he could not be. Six hours of sleep made him feel as exhausted as he had felt after six hours of work. Sleep, once his only sure salvation from the mountainous difficulties of real life, had lately become more terrifying than life itself. At least at work he knew he existed. Every action, no matter how inane, had tangible results, no matter how negative.

Negativity was still affirmation, after all. To be nothing but a perceptive non entity was more frightening to him than any other concept. Existence was all he struggled for.

As his sleep was torn by repetitions of the ghastly vision of not being, the children were made constantly aware of his entity by his electric saw snoring, a noise as tremendous as the man himself. They were amazed at how loud it was, audible even from outside the house near the garage. It was nothing more than an extraordinary grunt repeated at four or five second intervals. The children remarked to one another how consistent and mechanical the noise was. They knew from experience that to disturb him at this stage of sleep--which began a half hour or so after he went to bed--was possible only through much shouting and clamor. When he slept quietly he was easy to disturb. They dreaded having to wake him for phone calls while he snored.

(written October 1990)