She asked me if I needed another beer – not if I wanted one, but needed it, and the understanding was unspoken, for at that hour one in fact did need another beer to stay awake, that was the paradox we all loved to put ourselves into. Of course I hadn’t slept, neither had any of us, except perhaps she, though now I can’t be too sure, for back then she seemed liked she lived there, in town, like any normal person would, though later I was to see how she drifted in and out of that house like the flies who know no home other than where they land, and the unslept hours were to add up between us all like so much bad credit weighs against the collective ledger. We took our part of that with us before we could see the group default as a whole, for the tension was high; we crept into the weekend. It was Friday morning, and I accepted that other beer, the second to last one left.
Of course it was warm, it was still dark out. Somebody had put the homebrews in the fridge upon our arrival, and not the freezer, and as every boozehound knows, you might as well not even put them in there at all because they’ll be drank before they even get cold; such was the case now, though it was still dark out. I had lost track of the hour once I’d gotten a little drunk, and once drunk I never need to know what time it is unless I’m looking for a beer run. I even wear a watch, which isn’t fashionable so much these days, and I never bother to look down at it once I’ve started drinking, despite my habitual glancing which I normally do throughout the day. I knew it was late, and I didn’t want to know the time. I knew it was late because I hadn’t slept, not a wink, not at all, since god knows when. I couldn’t be sure if any of us had, and weren’t we all on the same schedule? Didn’t Erica drive me back from the block the night before, at 4 a.m., when I was already so exhausted and underslept, from since god-knows-when? I remember falling asleep in the backseat of her car, a ten mile nap at fifty miles an hour – what was that, twelve minutes? I couldn’t be sure of the time. And then there was Gato, who woke me up at 9:52, to tell me to hurry up and find a ride to Miami; he was going to take either Erica’s or the hot girl from Gainesville’s ride, and decided to alert me to his decisions. So how much sleep was there, was it five, or was it six hours? Like I said, you can never be too sure when you’re drunk, and thinking back it might have been 4:30 when Erica drove us all back to the farm, but definitely 9:52 when Gato called out my name to ruin my day forever.
Days can be so long, I forget that somehow. From 9:52 a.m. I had felt like I had been cut like a Chinese birthday card and strung between Waldo and St. Pete along numbered highways and already-forgotten named towns. My ashes were being buried at dawn and my guts still hurt from being spooled at daybreak. My head was an acheing trepanned hunk of minimal perception. I could scarcely understand my surroundings, my brain was shutting down; my cerebral cortex struggeled to produce thought, to follow the abstractions from audial cortex to speech center, muscle groups, along nerve ganglia, speech cortex, back out into the void where apparently lucid people were listening. ‘Help me,’ I could have said, and they would have listened from across the gap of air and space. In a way, our souls could have touched. I reach out with my eyes closed and her voice comes to me and I feel it touch, not just first in the ear but all over, from the cerebellum to the cordial ganglia, perhaps further, I do know these things. The point is that I was feeling her, through sound, the last thing on earth I knew, as my mind shut down and I slumped away and away, further into disassociation. The only reason I wanted another beer was to stay awake, the only reason I wanted to stay awake was to talk with the girl, the only reason I wanted to talk to the girl was to hook up with her, the only reason I wanted to hook up with her was because she was hot, the only reason she was hot was because…
I lose myself sometimes, in self-recursive asymptotic analysis, the kind that complicates a simple word like doubt. She was hot, that much was certain. And she was cool, pretty much, that was clear too. A little naïve, yes, I had noticed that rather quickly, her life being explained away to me in bulleted accomplishments, but I still chewed on the goods, feeling for the fat; it was there, to be sure. I liked her, and I was feeling the reality of a soul on the other side of that void like I’d not done in a while. She had it all, and she was sitting across from me, next to me, on the ground, in a chair, and our voices were our only medium for that contact we both must’ve felt. It was drunk o’clock, I couldn’t even be asked if I wanted to know the time; all I knew was that I woke up in Waldo, Florida and ended up in St. Petersburg with a carload of drunks and one mystical quiet calm ferocious little dog, and I was the designated driver, a condition which no longer applied at this hour. All I knew was that I had woken up with my dick in my hand and now I was half an hour away from having this girl’s tits in mine – and I still had not slept. Tired was long irrelevant, this situation called for presence, and if I could not be all there then any amount would do, and in planning we had all provided the means for staying awake. The beer was warm all night and I drank it with ice cubes for the sake of refreshment; everyone else just drank Ancient Age Reserve with Coke, but I don’t drink liquor anymore, it just is too unpredictable, for better but mostly for worse. But on a night such as this one I think about breaking those rules more, because everything that got me here was unpredicted, and what do they say about the future, whether immediate or distant? It is unpredictable. My problem is that I try to predict it, and perhaps that is worse than any hangover on earth.
God it was late, almost sun up. It is really unbelievable how many times I’ve gotten ready to head to bed, dead tired with fatigue, only to linger around another five hours before actually making my bed and laying down for the night. Sleep usually doesn’t even come until later, all that adrenalin routed through the blood must go somewhere before the melatonin slaps your shit silly again, and there’s usually one final well-intentioned piss right after you lay down, knowing you’re gonna either wake up too early with a bladder full of watered down beer or soaking in your own piss. It’s a problem as old as the thoughtful alcoholic, and I feel like that’s what I am sometimes, an over-thinking chemical-dependent with too much time on his hands. We all do, that was brought us there together that night, that is our basis for organization, the secret reason why we all get along. Imagine an entire subculture devoted to the cultivation of free time, and that free time spent pursuing the sublimity of the perennial good time. That was why we all were considered friends, because we knew a good time when we saw it. All we cared about was having a blast. That was the answer to everything. Like Homer Simpson said in a toast to alcohol, “The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” If we didn’t exalt the intoxicated spirit then we’d never care about saving money, never working and living on handouts and quick wits, we’d never share the mutual problems of youthful indecency we were so good at – or at least some of us were. That was what brought us here, though I suppose it could happen to anyone, though we had a certain style about it, that is, us, that group, that night, and here we were, dealing with the consequences. Arrested for weed somewhere south of Ocala, after gas canning down there, we bailed Erica out and cracked beers all the way to St. Pete where the first safe house lay. There I faced the same dilemma I have known since the first night of my new life of freedom: Should I stay or should I sleep? The question goes well with the interpretive ‘Does she like me or am I just hoping so?’ It all would have been so much easier if I had just gotten some extra sleep in there. I hadn’t slept in days. Not a wink, just a few hours here and there, but not an ounce, just a handful, something to hold on to between the days. We drank beers by nightfall, cool sweaty sixteeners of Old Mil and Busch, on the farm in Waldo or at the above-ground pool in Gainesville, or the bar, the infoshop, or the block. We burned the candle at both ends, because we were in our 20s, most of us still, and we smoked ourselves to death, though not yours truly, and none of it mattered, because we all got up in the morning, no matter how little sleep there was to go around. I stopped paying attention when someone said they were tired, their condition never interested me, they could never feel as tired as me, the same exhaustion I knew my life long – it wasn’t possible for they to know what levels of burnt-out emptiness I had lived on for what seemed like an eternity. I could never sleep more than eight hours, I lived on a diet of waste, I hit the sack and got right back up again, the four and a half hour diet, I knew more about the game than they did, and there I was again, being the one complaining about tiredness when all around me they kept buzzing with whiskey energy I couldn’t imagine having myself.
She handed me the beer and I drank it to keep listening. I wanted to hear her words so that I could watch her speak; she had a way of running her hair through her hands and pulling it back that reminded me of someone else, who didn’t do that; they both were hot, but this girl was right here for me to admire and want, and though my brain wasn’t working right, I knew that I couldn’t believe that this was how the day had ended up. We hadn’t slept yet so it was still yesterday, Thursday, even though I said it was Friday morning. The following day is only a blink away once the sun comes up. Once the sun comes up then it was yesterday that you left town and yesterday that you bought those beers and yesterday that the beer store closed because beer stores always open at 7 or 8 a.m., which is long enough of a haul of darkness and rise of sun to call it tomorrow.
I watched the girl run her hand through her hair and I thought of another girl I knew and once liked so much; I liked this one more. She was sitting right there. She was sitting right there and the whole day still wasn’t ending, it couldn’t end, not until the sun came up and the mosquitoes went away and the temperature went sky high once more. The day was so long it never ended; that’s what it’s like to never get sleep.
