UP ALL NIGHT—DIARY OF AN INSOMNIAC

 I’ve never thought of myself as an insomniac. But I suppose that, clinically, I am. I mean, the definition of an insomniac is “a person who regularly has trouble sleeping.” If I looked into a mirror just about any time of the night and asked myself honestly if I fit into that pigeonhole, I’d have to say, “Yep, that’s me.”

Problem is, if someone were to ask me if I’m “a morning person”, I’d have to answer yes to that item too. I hate “sleeping in”, as they say, and missing the morning. I don’t think I’ve ever slept until noon even as a teenager. And ninety-eight percent of the time, I’m up before eight no matter how late I’ve gotten to sleep.

Now that I’m older and no longer have such a pressing and demanding schedule—except the one that I obsessively impose on myself—you would think that I could just say, “Phew, finally, I can get some decent rest.” But I guess that, just like everything else, sleeping peacefully through the night takes practice, and I apparently have no talent for it.

For one thing, for males my age, “getting eight hours straight” is usually problematic. For that sort of glorious, almost “hibernative” journey, most of us male septuagenarians have to make several pit-stops along the way. I never was one of those people who could make it all the way through the night without having to get up at least once. And the older I get, the oftener the technical layovers in my nightly flight to dreamland seem to get. So, for anyone watching me—seriously now, who would want to?—their first observation about a night spent with me would be that it involves a helluva lot of comings and goings.

I admit that I’d love to be able to sleep six hours straight—or even five. But after all these years, I am, at this late date, learning to take it all in stride. Lying awake after one of my various trots downstairs to the facilities and back up to bed, I’ll listen to the wind in the trees outside, or the rain on our galvanized metal roof, or the cackle and screech of a great horned owl that sometimes frequents the big branches of a centenarian live beech just outside my window on bright moonlit nights. I’ll lie there and think about things I need to do around the house, or blogs I want to write, or stories I’m working on. And if that doesn’t work, I eventually sit up, turn on the light and read from whichever author I happen to be courting at the moment, or write notes in a journal I keep next to my bed, beneath my Kindle.

Obviously, this sort of behavior would be disturbing to anyone trying to get a good night’s sleep in a bed next to me. Couple that with the fact that when I do finally go to sleep, I quite often snore, and it’s not hard to understand why I long ago transferred my sleeping quarters to the guest room, so that my wife, at least, can get a good night’s sleep, in the company of any or most of our half-dozen cat friends. Otherwise, I seriously doubt we’d ever have made it to our silver anniversary, let alone our golden one.

I suppose my having sleep disorders is only natural. When I reached puberty and no longer had a “bedtime” imposed on me, I found plenty to occupy my time until midnight or so. I shared a room with my brother, so I carried out these activities in the basement, half of which had been remodeled as a “family room”. That was a misnomer, as it turned out, because nobody used but me—well, and my mother, to store everything she couldn’t cram into the hall closets upstairs. I mean, we were never the type of family that liked to get together and talk about our day—asking my dad that question could open up a whole can of worms that could drag on endlessly—or less still, to engage in “family activities” of any sort.

Indeed, Reba Mae, my mother, could never coax Whitie, my father, into the basement that he’d spent considerable money having paneled in Philippines mahogany and the concrete floor tiled, the ceiling finished in acoustical panels and lighting put in, to say nothing of the furniture purchased specifically for that part of the house. She couldn’t even get him to go down there when there were imminent tornado warnings.

Why, I even recall once when her clothes dryer—located on the unfinished side of the basement—caught fire and she came barreling up the stairs screaming bloody-murder, trying to prompt Whitie to go down and help her put out the blaze. He was smoking a cigarette and watching Walter Cronkite on TV, and instead of responding to her alarmed coaxing, he just said, “Well, call the goddamn Fire Department.”

When the big red truck showed up, siren blaring, one of the firemen burst in and said, “Hey Whitie, where’s the fire?”

Always cordial, my dad said, “Hey Dave, how’s it goin’?” pointed to the floor and said, “In the basement. Reba’s down there. She’ll show you.”  

Anyway, since no one else claimed that space, I did, and it became my “studio”, where I had my writing desk and typewriter, my books, my records and stereo hi-fi, my drums, and even a separate electric coffee pot for myself. As of high school, I also used it as a place to give drum lessons, so it became my business location as well. There I would—as seldom as possible—do my homework, but mostly, I read and wrote stories and played my drums and generally lived in my own world. Often by the time I emerged at night to go to bed, if anyone was still up at all, it was Whitie watching late-night TV with an enormous bowl of ice-cream on his lap—a nightly ritual for much of his life.

By halfway through my sophomore year in high school, I had further expanded my nocturnal activities. I was, by then, not only working part-time in a music store and giving private percussion lessons there and at home, but I’d also started playing with a jazz trio. This meant not only were weekends almost always occupied with playing gigs from ten to two at night, but that at least one and sometimes two weeknights found me in one nightclub or another in neighboring Lima, Ohio, playing jazz and fusion music from nine to one.

So, starting in my high school days, I seldom got six hours of sleep at night, and far less on the weeknights when I played a gig, got home at two or so in the morning, and had to be up getting ready for school at seven.

The Army was probably where I got the most regular sleep of my life, though not always either. In basic combat training at Ft. Bragg there wasn’t much choice. Lights-out was at ten, and the DI had your feet hitting the floor at five. Most of the time you were so exhausted and over-trained that all you thought about was getting into bed and going to sleep. But during my seven-month first tour at the Army Element of the Naval School of Music, in Little Creek, Virginia, I went back to my nocturnal ways, and would be out long after lights-out carousing with my buddies in the bars of nearby Norfolk, or drinking at the enlisted men’s club until the Shore Police cleared us out at last call.

Uniformed for the evening in LA

My next assignment was a year in Los Angeles with the 72^nd Army Band at Ft. MacArthur. Army lifers considered Ft. Mac a country club. It was commanded at the time by a young colonel, who, upon accepting the post, had to have the aging chaplain reassigned because he was also a colonel and outranked the commander in time in grade. The chaplain went somewhere else and the new chaplain assigned was a young major. This was the post where veteran field grade officers drew their pay and got their untaxed booze and smokes through the PX. The LA area seemed to be a favorite retirement venue for high-ranking military officers, so Ft. Mac was where they touched base with their people. I even recall playing an event for General Omar Bradley, the last living World War II five-star, at the posh Beverley Hilton—where one of the other band members, who had more guts than brains and was perpetually half-drunk, used one of our percussion trap cases to spirit a silver coffee service out of the Hilton to take to his mom for Mother’s Day. He figured the Hilton insignia on it made it all the more classy.

Anyway, what being with the “country club” band meant was that while we might play a lot of parades and awards ceremonies in the daytime, at night we often turned into nightclub musicians, playing at the Officers’ Club, military balls or evening parties for field grade officers and their wives. So again, it wasn’t your normal “in the Army now” schedule. And the first three months I was there before I eloped with my rather reluctant bride, I lived in a barracks in the port of LA and spent most free nights with whichever group of fellow barracks rats happened to have a car, guzzling up my meager pay in local dives and eateries.

My wife Virginia and me on tour in Europe

My next assignment was in Germany, with the 30^th Army Band, and there we did a great deal of entertaining at night and playing for parades and beer tents during the day. We also toured parts of France and Luxembourg. And when we weren’t touring or rehearsing we had a great deal of comp time off, which allowed my new bride and me to live a singularly bohemian life, traveling, usually on night trains through several European countries and hungry to see everything we could see and do everything we could do. Who had time to sleep? 

So, it’s not like I formed healthy sleeping habits or anything like regularity in my youth or early years of adulthood. That said, I wasn’t always as successful in navigating my insomnia as I am now. And later on, my sleepless nights weren’t because I was out on the town, but because I had some serious preoccupations that were capable of keeping me up night after night.

First among these was how to make a living, when I first decided to make my home in Buenos Aires, my wife’s home town. Early on, while I searched desperately for a way into journalism, I had to take what I could get. And my first job in that sleepless metropolis was as a night bellhop in a traditional downtown hotel. So, again, I found myself going to work when everybody else was going to bed, working the graveyard shift from eleven at night until eight in the morning.

I would finish my shift, take the A-line subway to its terminal station and then take a bus the rest of the way home to my mother-in-law’s place on the west side of town, eighty blocks away. I would arrive after my wife had already left for her job as a secretary downtown, just a few blocks from the hotel where I’d spent the night.  I would have some coffee and a chat with my mother-in-law, and then catch a couple of hours of sleep at best before getting up to write or to get out for a walk around the neighborhood until lunchtime. Then I might work in a nap of a couple of hours before getting bathed and dressed for when my wife and her sister arrived home from work and my brother-in-law from the university.  We would have supper together as a family and that was the very best time of the day for me before I took leave of them at ten, when I wanted nothing as much as to stay right there talking until bedtime and then trundling off for a good night’s sleep.

Instead, I got a jolting, noisy ride on the bus to the midtown Primera Junta Station, where I was greeted by the hot stale breath of the subway tunnel and the creaking rolling stock of the A-Line’s vintage trains, which I shared with other members of the walking dead, headed downtown when everyone else was heading the opposite way, to take up our posts on our respective nightshifts.

Night "crowd" on the old A-line.

When I finally did break into journalism, it was at an English-language daily, a morning paper, which meant that most of our actual writing, translating and publishing work was done by night. I reported and researched during much of the day, arriving at the paper between four and six in the afternoon and working, more often than not, until well past midnight. So I often found myself having supper at midnight or one in the morning and going to bed at two or three, only to be up again at eight or so in the morning, working on my own creative writing, or making plans for research and interviews for the rest of the day.

It was only on my days off—one day one week and two the next—when I could even think about getting to bed early, but that usually didn’t happen, simply because I wasn’t used to “going to bed with the chickens,” as Reba Mae used to say. Sometimes I worked on my days off, since I was also a freelance correspondent for numerous US and British publications. And back then too, there were movies and shows to see and friends to dine with and cocktail events to attend, so hey, who needed to sleep?

Life catches up to you, though.  At different times in my life I’ve had what might be described as “night terrors”. During the era in which I was a news editor, reporter and editorialist, this was entirely understandable. They were dangerous times in Buenos Aires, which was “my city” for two decades. My early years in journalism were during the violent last presidential term of General Juan Domingo Perón and his wife and vice-president (later president) Isabel Martínez, and during the bloody military dictatorship that followed it for the next seven and a half years. I was working for the only newspaper in the city that was in frank and open opposition of the regime and aggressively pro-democracy. And I was also reporting on these eras for some high-profile newspapers and magazines abroad.

During the day, I usually—and stupidly—felt somehow invincible. Democratic ethics and the fight for human and civil rights were the armor I wore. And I entertained the romantic—and also stupid—notion that if I were killed for what I believed in, it all would have been worth it.

Me on the Night Desk with Robert Cox

In hindsight, I wonder how my convictions would have fared had I been targeted more than I was. What if, instead of being killed outright, I were abducted and bludgeoned with batons or pipes daily for weeks on end, or if I were strapped naked to some bedsprings in a Proceso safehouse somewhere and introduced to “la máquina”, with more high voltage than blood running through my veins. Clearly, it wasn’t an unlikely scenario. Over a hundred opposition journalists and writers disappeared or were murdered directly during those seven-plus years. And three of our own top journalists at the newspaper—including my mentor and editor-in-chief Robert Cox, who left after a twenty-year career there when his family was targeted—chose exile over continuing to ignore the threats that we all, at one time or another, received.

So I can’t help wondering, would my convictions have survived even if I didn’t? Or would torture have made them all seem miniscule and futile in comparison to the urge to survive, or simply for the torment to stop? Guess I’ll never know. Like I say, during the daytime, I seldom thought about these things. I just oiled my courage with whisky, wine and cognac—not usually all together—and concentrated on the work, and on being the best team member and friend I possibly could be to Cox, perhaps the most courageous and human newsman I’ve ever known.

But at night, or better said, in the wee hours of the morning, when I’d drift off and these lurking terrors could take me by surprise, the panic could be devastating. Violent dreams, cold sweats, tachycardia, and difficulty returning from the images dreamed.

A recurrent dream was of swallowing a block of wood with the edge of a razorblade protruding from it. I’d need a shrink to tell me the significance of that one. But in the dream, I would be in bed, as I was in real life, and awake to find the block and blade in my mouth. I would try to seize it between my thumb and middle finger and pull it out before it could do any damage, but it was always too late. It was on its way down my gullet, but would then stick at the back of my throat, in my craw, as it were. I would try to bring it back up, but it would go up and down to the rhythm of my adam’s apple, sawing back and forth, the gleaming blade slashing my throat—suicide by a thousand cuts.

I would awake from this nightmare and sit bolt upright in bed gasping, one hand on my throat, the fingers of the other shoved inside my mouth seeking to get hold of the block and jerk it out. Sometimes I’d realize what was happening, wait for my breathing and pulse to slow down, and then flop back down on my pillow, my t-shirt soaked with sweat, and simply relax and try to go back to sleep. But other times, I’d be stuck between waking and sleep, and my wife would have to wake up as well, talk to me and convince me that I was “just” having a nightmare. Sometimes I would even argue with her, only half-awake, and say, “No, this time I really did it. This time I swallowed it!”

This led to other recurrent nightmares, always finding myself in an unsafe place, enemy territory. They were dreams of persecution, of being chased by faceless thugs who meant to capture or murder me. My writer’s mind and earlier military training rendered my subconscious unwilling to simply accept being made a victim, and I began to invent devices to try and save myself. Among them, obviously, were handguns I’d forgotten I had, usually a .38 Police Special or a Colt .45 automatic, that I would immediately remember as being mine from a previous dream. And for a time I might fight valiantly, holding off my attackers, but I was always outgunned and my ammo running low. Death or capture were inevitable.

It was during these times of high stress, in my late twenties and early thirties that I first started having bouts of arrhythmia. At the time, I had no idea what they were, but I would awake from a nightmare in a sweat, breathing hard, dizzy and chest pounding crazily, out of rhythm, out of time, and sure that I was having a heart attack. An emergency room doctor who was also a close friend had me do an EKG and pronounced me healthy as a horse. When I had a waking panic attack at work, he prescribed a bottle of Russian vodka he happened to have as a remedy for my stress. We drank it together, him in his underwear, since I’d gotten him up in the middle of the night when I went knocking on his door.

Even once those dangerous times were over—once I began to realize I might actually live to be over forty—it was like some spring had snapped inside me and my clock kept on running way too fast. I worked obsessively, constantly bit off more than I could chew, but chewed it anyway, and swallowed it into the bargain. It seemed like I was always breathlessly busy, never saying, “No, sorry, I won’t have time for it,” when yet another assignment was offered on top of whatever else I was doing. So for years on end, I was on a fast-moving merry-go-round that demanded all-nighters and weeks on end without a day of rest. And when my head finally hit the pillow, I quite often found I was incapable of relaxing.

This went on for years while I was obsessively trying to “make a career for myself.” And the night terrors that had once been reasonable (because there were very real things to be terrified of in my life back then) were now illogical yet uncontrollable panic attacks, from which I continued to awaken in a state of agitation that felt like nothing as much as a heart attack. So, I got so I was actually afraid to go to bed and developed a habit of staying up until I was too exhausted not to sleep. And even then, just when I would think I finally had my problem licked, I would once again awake a couple of hours after going to sleep in the midst of an arrhythmia attack and feeling like I was going to die.

But I didn’t. And eventually, I reached a stage in my life in which I realized that any “career” I hadn’t “made for myself” up to then, I wasn’t going to achieve. That was an incredible load off my mind. I no longer was afraid of saying “no” to assignments I didn’t want to take on. I specialized in those I did, and set my own schedule. And I was finally relaxed enough that I could also tackle the chronic arrhythmia that I’d lived with for more than a decade. I found a doctor who knew how to solve it, and following his treatment has changed (and saved) my life.

These days, I always wish my aging self could go back and tell my younger self that he’s going about life all wrong. I would tell him that the number one goal in his life should be happiness. That his “career” is whatever he truly wants it to be, not all the intermediate steps he took to try and get to that goal. I would tell him that some people know that. A handful of people, who seem to be born knowing that. And they’re the ones you hear about. The rest of us just waste a great deal of time burying ourselves in our own crap, and then all of the sudden we realize that life was what was happening while we were waiting for life to happen.

That said, I am still an insomniac. I stay up too late watching cop shows and then reading in bed. And I get up too early for the time I go to sleep. But it no longer bothers me. I take it in stride, as I say. I get in a lot of reading and thinking and jotting down notes for the next day’s creations. And when I do sleep, it’s restful and undisturbed, and capped by glorious hour-long siestas that I have in the early afternoon just because I can. I can’t help thinking it’s how I should have lived my entire life, but all things considered, there’s no time like the present.

Anyway, I’m glad we had this talk. It’ll give me something to think about when most of the rest of the world is sleeping.

Good night. Sleep tight! Tomorrow’s going to be a whole new day.