On medical advice, I need to stop smoking, quit drinking (or at least bring my daily consumption to levels less than "epic even for frat boys") and stop chasing skirts.
Since I am not allowed to chase skirts (or pants, for that matter), that last bit is useless advice.
So, last night, I managed to keep myself down to a mere 10 crap beers instead of my recently-adopted usual swill rate of a dozen or more. The reason I drink, in case anyone has forgotten, is because otherwise I will not sleep.
Long ago I learned to be a light sleeper, after having had to learn to be a deep sleeper.
Living right next to Meridian Hill Park in the early 1990s, I was deep within the free-fire zone of Northwest Washington. I worked in the District, I played in the District, I wrote my first novel in the District and boy does it suck. Well, the lead character sucked, pretty much a gallon at a time.
Hey, I was a Goth, I was living in a rat-infested dive crawling with cockroaches on one of the most dangerous blocks in Northwest even as the unfunded mandates from Congress were starting to drive the government of the City of Washington into an irreversible (until 1997) decline rapidly ramping up to be a death spiral.
Like a complete idiot I had changed jobs, and moved out of the house to live with a gal downtown. Clue for the clueless: make sure that you find out that your new housemate is a call girl before you move in.
After that sad debacle, which I need not mention was a genuine and hearfelt exercise in pointlessness -- there's nothing more sad than loyally pining for a gal whose favors other people easily buy -- as well as an opportunity for me to reaffirm that I have abominable taste in women, I wound up living in one of the cheapest flophouses where they actually allow locks on the doors. Further, the early-1990s Recession was just settling in deep and dark on top of the crack wars and the District's ongoing budget crisis, and aside from the fact that the landlord was letting me stay for free because I was both harmless and could be used as a tax dodge, my life really sucked. So of course I wrote what has been billed as "the quintessential cyberpunk SF Harlequin Romance of vampire stories".
Living where I did definitely made it easy to write about a city sliding into decay and taking the rest of Western civilization along with it. But I was trying to write fiction, not document the neighborhood. I wasn't making all that much headway on my sad little novel, which at the point in time was really a collection of character sketches, tentative outlines which just didn't work (as if the novel did; it doesn't), and assorted short stories which fit mostly within the same "ficton", a "ficton" being what Joss Whedon would later call a "'Verse".
I had this, already, one morning I just got up and wrote the draft and there it was:
Another evening. He walked the streets in search of the mystery woman from his night-school class. He looked in bars, in restaurants, everywhere around the campus, all of the little hole-in-the-wall places. He had no luck in his search, and the rain began to fall. He went home.
She was there in his living room when he turned from locking the deadbolt of his apartment door. She wore black Spandex, and nothing else, and her luxuriant raven hair, which he had before seen only bound, fell about her shoulders, framing her pretty young face. Her face, feet and hands were all that was visible, and scarcely so, as she stood in the half-shadow of the poorly-lit room. Nothing else showed, yet he was all too aware of a vague sensation of curves in the darkness.
His mind leapt back to the time when he had first seen her, sitting shyly in the back of the classroom at school. She had dressed in the androgynous style, lumpy sweaters and baggy pants. She said little in class, just the occasional question, and otherwise had given little indication of personality. He recalled the way that she had never raised her hands (in fact kept them hidden in her sleeves) but instead wedged her voice into gaps in the instructor's lessons. Her hands were still hidden now, but the shy huddled girl he recalled was gone. She stood proudly. At ease, as a superb, yet modest dancer might, in total control of a perfect body that she was well at home in.
She stood there, and let him take it all in. She was absolutely lovely. Firm. Healthy. She was no exaggerated Playboy Playmate, she was merely flawless in an almost unremarkable way. She was absolutely silent, and stood there, perfectly poised, a vision in black, waiting in silence with downcast eyes.
He found his tongue, and said, inanely, "Uh... Hi! How've you been? For that matter, where've you been?"
She brought her gaze up towards his, and their eyes locked.
Her eyes were an incredible shade of emerald. They seemed to glow with an inner light. Tiny flecks of luminous color seemed to float in them, and as he watched, entranced, they changed hue to a deep turquoise. He felt as if he could fall into those eyes, forever fall...
A tear brimmed over the edge, jerking him back to reality as she said, "I have to tell you, well, I ...I guess I have, like, a very serious crush on you...but... I... can't see you anymore."
"Look, don't you know how I feel about you?" he said. He was surprised at the sudden intensity of his feelings, and knew that this was no mere infatuation. He had dreamed of seeing her again, and his dreams were being realized.
He dared hope that she felt the same way, for she began to smile that shy, closed-lipped smile, to come towards him, then stopped herself. He wished she would come closer. He wanted another of those hugs, at least, but she had halted, and said, "Yes, I do know how you feel, (and she whispered) I know exactly how you feel, but it's because of how I feel about you that I can't ever see you again." She turned half-away from him. Conflicting, uninterpretable emotions warred on her face. She said, "I shouldn't even have come." It looked as if she wanted to run to him, yet she stayed where she was. It seemed to take an effort.
It occurred to him that he'd had to unlock the deadbolt to enter. "How'd you get in?"
She looked at the ground and shuffled her feet, and seemed to make up her mind about something, then began to walk toward him. "I climbed," she said.
"Four stories up brick?" She stopped a short pace away from him.
"I climb well." For the first time, really, she showed him her hands. They had been held behind her back, but she brought them around for him to inspect. They were relaxed, soft, delicate, flexible - pretty hands. He reached out his hands to take hers. A moment before contact, she tensed, flexed her hands, and they changed. Tendons stood out, muscles knotted, and her hands were no longer quite human. They were dexterous, agile, sharp, irresistible talons - killing claws.
Before he could react she was across the room. He hadn't seen her move; as he blinked, shocked, she just seemed to suddenly have put distance between them. He didn't mind. Halfway through the door to the balcony, she was one with the shadows, a part of the night. She was silently beautiful, was black panther death in the room with him, and was crying, soundlessly, tears as of lost love.
She was faced a quarter-turn away from him, and the hands which had so frightened him were relaxed again, just a pretty girl's hands, wiping away tears, and she seemed suddenly much less dangerous, and he took a halting step towards her.
She turned to him, met his gaze, and her eyes... they held him captive.
"You understand?" she whispered. He couldn't move. Those blue-green eyes were hypnotic, and there seemed to be something in them he must strive to see, his own soul perhaps. He felt a funny shivering tingle of goosebumps, then she noticed his hair standing on end. She spoke. "You should be afraid. Like I said, I really shouldn't have come." She smiled, really smiled for the first time. He had been totally wrong in his guess at the cause of her habitual tiny smile.
She had nice teeth. Lots of them. They were perfect - for a sentient predator which lived by mimicry of its sentient prey. "You do understand."
He understood he was in serious trouble. Then she began to back out of the door, and whatever had held him still and quiet released him. Strangely enough, he said, "Don't go! Talk to me!"
"I've got to go, Ron. I'm very... hungry. As I said before, you're special to me. I like you. You've helped me in ways I hope you can't understand. All of the logic you taught me, it has helped me solve more than math problems. You couldn't know, but you've helped me get my mind back. But Ron, I am very hungry right now, and I don't want to eat you. I knew how you felt, even when you thought I was just some poor white dope fiend, I could... feel it. I loved the selflessness I felt in you, despite your class loathing of what you thought I was. Despite all of the class differences, you were falling in love... You still feel the same about me, now that you know what I really am?"
He nodded, not entirely sure why.
"I don't think it would be good for us to see each other. Our ways of life are too different. Falling for someone like me wouldn't be good for you at all, and I don't know that it would be safe for me to fall in love. There, I said it! I've been falling in love with you, too, and it's dangerous for both of us. I've got to go! Just accept me as one of life's little mysteries, and as far as I'm concerned, don't be afraid of the dark..."
Suddenly, she was across the room, her arms around him, a kiss of red lips on his cheek. He felt two tiny sharpnesses edge into his skin, heard her gasp as she leapt away from him, saw the look of frustration on her face as she licked her lips. "Gotta go!" she moaned, blinked back fresh tears, and leapt out into the night.
Oy, gevalt. What schmaltz! And how, exactly, do these characters manage to find themselves in such a vignette?
Then along came the flu, or something like it, and I got sick as a dog. Deathbed sick.
I was in and out of delerium, wolfing down aspirin and high-powered antibiotics, for the better part of a month. And one morning, I woke up and wasn't sick, although I had lost considerable weight and felt as weak as a kitten.
And the missing pieces of my novel were right there with me.
Interlude I took me about 3 days to write and 50-some pages later I put a wrap on it and uploaded it to a local BBS so that I could download it onto another computer and print it. Then I trotted on down to the Library of Congress and applied for copyright. Five months later I had the whole novel done and copyrighted.
And in that five months, almost every day, I was up before the dawn, listening to the city come to life around me as the night crew faded into their haunts of daytime darkness, and the Morning People came stirring into the streets even as winter faded into a rare long springtime.
I slept well during that time, and didn't drink much. I didn't need to drink much.
During my long illness, I had learned to sleep right through the sound of automatic weapons fire that came practically hourly from the Clifton Terrace projects only two blocks away. No longer did I need to drink to get to sleep.
A few years later, I was living in a VW Beetle in Austin Texas, wintering over and effectively homeless.
Obviously, that is not a situation where you would actually want to be able to sleep deeply, and I didn't. Especially after I woke one morning with someone trying to steal the license plates off of the car, I slept with one eye open, so to speak, and if I wanted to be near the front of the line down at the day-labor place, and have a hope of getting work, I had to be up and caffeinated by 4:30.
And I discovered that even before the caffeine took effect, if you mixed cold water with freeze-dried instant coffee and gulped it down, the taste alone would pry your eyes wide open.
Work was not hard to come by in Austin in those years.
The Invasion hadn't yet really started, and it was possible for white folks to get day-labor jobs, and I learned the ropes of Hobo society, who were the Tramps and who were the Bums, and how to avoid the Bindlestiffs and the Whackers. Bums are bums, no definition needed. Tramps are migrant workers, more or less, not looking for a steady job no longing to stay long in any one place. Bindlestiffs were one of the lowest sort of petty criminals, mostly preying on Tramps. Whackers, of course, were the folks like Angel Resendez Ramirez, also known as "the Railroad Killer". They might seem like just another Tramp, but they usually gave off a "vibe" and most people instinctively knew to avoid them.
I met a fascinating cast of characters, shoveled a lot of dirt and cleaned up a lot of construction scrap, moved furniture, that sort of thing. And I was always up at 4:30 and always at the front of the line. As time went on, I managed to do some writing, even managed to swing a free membership in the Austin Writer's Guild.
I also got awarded a disability, got my thyroid deficiency diagnosed very early on and was able to get deep discounts on the medication, and developed a reputation as being totally crazy and into bizarre concepts straight out of science fiction. For example, there was the reputation I got at the homeless shelter, where I kept going on about "BBSes" (whatever delusional thing that those might be), computers and "modems" (whatever delusional things that those might be) and "downloading" (whatever imaginary thing that was) job listings from the main Texas Employment Commission office across town.
Clearly mad as a hatter, Austin's outreach community was happy to see me go as I invested my lump-sum first disability payment into my car, and headed off for the Puget Sound area, where they actually knew the meaning of downloading from BBSes via modem. I travelled widely, leaving copies of GremCIT (Citadel+ version) everywhere I went and could find anyone with a computer and a modem.
Eventually I landed back in Maryland, flat broke, dead tired, far underweight, and without a car.
I also couldn't sleep very well.
This contributed a lot to other problems, such as inability to gain weight or pay attention very well. My thyroid problem was still evolving, and that didn't help either.
So, I started drinking to get to sleep and to stay asleep. I was able to gain weight (too much, actually) and to mostly recover from some years of sleep deprivation. When you finally get enough dreaming when you are asleep, you stop living in a dream while wide awake.
And almost 15 years later, I'm a reasonably sane and overweight lush.
Alcohol can be a bitch. I'm fortunate in that I have quit drinking before, and know what I'm facing, and know also that I have done it and that it can be done.
However, cutting back means that my sleep patterns are going to be seriously altered. Doubtless, my schedule will also change a lot.
Well, sorry, it can't be helped. I'll be a lot more miserable -- at least for a while -- and my doctors will hopefully think of me as less of a hopeless case and waste of their time and my money.
Just don't be totally shocked if you see me fetching the paper in before sun-up.
And don't be shocked, either, if I both seem a bit more bitchy, and to be writing a lot more.
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