Britical

NYC

I feel like bursting into tears but I can’t be bothered. And before you start, here are the things that don’t work: quitting caffeine, earplugs, “a nice hot bath”, herbal tea, herbs, a warm drink, regular bedtime, white noise machine, alcohol, massage, meditation, relaxation tapes, deep breathing, eyeshades, blackout curtain, sex, sleeping somewhere else, Vicodin, Clonazepam, Ambien, Ambien CR, Tamazepam, Exedrin P.M., Tylenol P.M., acupuncture, Propranolol, Lunesta, Lorazepam, Valium, Xanax, the sleep clinic (twice), cold medicine, and sleeping in the bathroom. Never all at once, mind you. Believe me, at this point I am nothing if not methodical.

Have you ever seen The Red Shoes? A Powell & Pressburger film, a woman is given a pair of magical red ballet shoes. She is delighted at first, only to find later that she cannot take them off. They dance her round and round and round the puzzled townsfolk while she grows steadily more exhausted, frightened, desperate. I shan’t ruin the ending here except to say that it ends, as it should, very, very badly.

If only insomnia were less Red Shoes, more Fight Club. I do recall the Ed Norton character telling us in bleary voiceover that when you can’t sleep, every day is like a worse photocopy of the one before which itself was a bad photcopy of the one before that. You got that right. However I don’t know anymore which is worse, the days or the nights. Days are pretty simple; what you’d expect, yes, but unchanging in their pattern of feeling perpetually underwater, endlessly smacked down in some slow motion sight gag by something you can’t even attempt to appreciate or understand because, well, it’s too exhausting, the joke beyond you. The day’s tasks seems unimaginable, enormous, the process an intolerable blind perp walk up K2. Everything is too loud, jarring. Caffeine is laughable. And here we go hoping we won’t fall down in the shower, here we go up the subway stairs, looking as they do like a grubby version of the staircase to heaven in another Powell and Pressburger film, A Matter of Life and Death (anaemically titled in the U.S. ‘Stairway to Heaven’ because Americans are pussies). If I actually have to interact with anyone in any sensible way, it’s all about keeping it together with smiling, nodding, a bit of studious frowning thrown in, much as you do with foreigners, the thread lost but secretly so. Real unreal, doesn’t seem to matter too much. And here on the way home, floating, staggering, past the odd, mildly disturbing hallucination on Park Avenue, and here we go into the deli to buy some soothing chocolate …I wonder if I look strange? I keep dropping things. And why is the the lighting doing that…that epileptic thing? Counting out change as the deli man ( a good sort, an affable Egyptian who’s named me simply “English”) waits patiently. I peer into my hand, at quarters, nickels - but for some reason cannot quite grasp the meaning of the coins and their tricksy arithmetic and I have to start again, give up, hand over a ten dollar bill. Easier. “Thanks, English. Have a good night.” That would be nice. I feel like a very old person, vision blurred, apparently senile. At home the chocolate, surprisingly, pleases not, its taste like a shrug: eh! I am not keen on dark chocolate so there’s some still in the fridge and I get it. It hits the palate like an assault. I chuck it in the trash, irritated.

Later, it’s bedtime. Again. My heart pounds, a recent development that. Lately, thinking about anything sleep related, the lumbering thing takes some mysterious cue and accelerates from about 62 bpm to around 90. Actually lie down and it tips 100. Fantastic. My mind sits by, now exasperated at this new turn of events, a harried parent, arms crossed grown-uppily, waiting out some two year old’s tantrum. I try and Relax and the thing jolts to 120. Whatthefuck? It’s like someone having a fucking techno party in there. The thing is going like the clappers, now a small sparrow trapped in a greenhouse flinging itself at the glass. I get up, I try and think about Other Things not sleep - but what? It’s like that mind control exercise, “Don’t think of an elephant”. They lounge knowingly, flung nonchantly over every surface of the room, waving, winking, wearing little pink skirts like the hippos in Fantasia, filing their nails, dancing across the bathroom like the cygnets in Swan Lake. A few hours later, wide awake, pondering the meaning of “panic attack” and my mind (such as it remains) starts up with a vengeance. This is new too, a debut if you will.

I am not someone who is kept awake Worrying about things. I simply cannot sleep. I know most people have trouble accepting this to be the case, but it is. Reading, doing the crossword, balancing the chequebook are also not options. I know you say are but they’re just not. You’ll have to take my word for it. However, tonight there’s an unfamiliar creeping, queasy feeling in my head, which is usually clear of anything except the sheep. Curiouser and curiouser. And suddenly, like some spastic neuronal cascade, my brain is assaulted by what feels like millions of tiny obsessive compulsive illustrators scribbling furiously with felt tip pens - no, Rotrings even! - on the bony inside of my skull. A clamouring SWAT team of nerdy, Frenchified babblers, decontructing everything in sight, every meaningless thought I’ve ever had. This is insupportable, unacceptable! Not only is it suffocating, but I feel like some sort of ridiculous acid head, rushing for the notebook, same would-be profound thoughts reduced come daylight to page after page of utter nonsense. There shall be no notebook rushing then. I want to think of something else but I can’t, there’s no room, no place for me to sit quietly. I want not to think, perchance to “take a geographic” as the Twelve Steppers like to say, but unfortunately “wherever you go there you are” (I believe they say this too, smug gits).

The new age therapy-oriented among you will wonder here why I don’t welcome this unwitting bungee jump into my own roiling unconscious and just “go with it”. Why not take my glittering free form swan dive of Acceptance into the sea of opportunity, the dark waters of exploration? Whatever, dude. I am thoroughly beyond the meditation thing now, and I am terrified, blood skittering icily through slippery veins (there is no better description than this veins/ice cliche), and I am grasping at…what exactly? I open my eyes. The room, its darkened shapes, skulk reassuringly. OK, a little better. But now something moves on my bed, maybe - no, but I know I felt something move on the duvet! I am certain, am I?… and I’m convinced instantly that there is now Something Under the Bed. The scribbling stops instantly. Silence. Fuck. I should get out of bed and check. Or not. Not wins out, too frightened. I have been tricked by these American Werewolf in London dreams before (yes! Maybe I am actually asleep!). I run my usual tests for lucid dreaming. Nope - I’m awake. Good and bad. Maybe sleep deprivation is sending me back to little childhood terrrors and habits. Just brain chemistry then. But everything is brain chemistry! There is no solution. I sit the night out, at a loss. I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Yeah, that’s the attitude. My eyes hurt. I think of that crazy guy who drilled a hole in his skull. To me, right now, it makes a certain sort of sense.

 

 

Copyright Britical 2005

NYC

 

Is it just me or are taxis, like a few other things in life, not only nowhere to be seen when you want one, but conversely, in plain and painful sight when you really, really don’t? I shall explain.

Every New Yorker knows what it’s like to be stuck on some Arctic corner at 8pm on a Saturday night, arm outstretched like some lunatic half Jesus. This is par for the course and why, unless I’m in heels, I prefer the subway. (The latter is also, oddly enough, more private: just you and your Metrocard whisked along in blessed anonimity with no need to talk to anyone.) No, what I’m concerned with here is the strangely unfailing instinct of a bright yellow car to assail you when you least want to see one.

A busy Thursday night on the corner of 4th Street and First Avenue. Being a school night it’s just that time when everyone grabs the cheque a cab home. I should be doing the same thing. But I am standing on the sidewalk not six inches away from the person I’m with and it should be clear to anyone, even a passerby, that I have no desire for a cab. But up one shows. And mortifyingly, not only does it carefully screech to a halt right next to us but the driver leans across the passenger seat and sort of glares over at me for all the world as if I’d flagged him down and then proceeded to ignore him. Caught in my slightly desperate little moment with my reluctant companion, I am now flustered, trying to ignore the thing as it idles insinuatingly beside me, but knowing I want to snatch a few more precious seconds as the moment is sent spinnning prematurely to a close.

This is all quite absurd, of course. I should just wave the cab away - but I know another would immmediately take its place, and worse, that my dismissing the wretched thing would tip my hand and make me look obvious in my wanting to linger, just a little. I smile as calmly as I can, say goodbye and get in the cab. Game over.

Perhaps there are things I had wanted to say, to ask even, and no doubt I was lucky, the cab depriving me of all this undoubtedly fruitless asking and saying, and playing for time. There was, of course, nothing to say.

Later I think about all the frantic semaphore of cab hailing in the city streets every day, the advantageous and sly placing of yourself at this or that strategic corner, the cabs sailing obliviously by, or cruising lazily and deliberately to an impertinent halt some fifty heel-snapping feet down the block. But then the puzzling little vignettes we’ve all seen played out in the city, usually at night, couples fraught, distraught, hopeful - one to be the unlucky recipient of an unusually obliging taxi, the other left on the corner feeling perhaps… relieved? Cheated? I guess that depends.

I must confess I once found myself on a similar corner in some unwelcome, awkward situation with someone I didn’t much care for. The words ran out, but not in that good way. Desperate for a hasty exit, I tried to nudge him slowly off the sidewalk and into, well, not incoming traffic exactly, but certainly towards the street, there to be mercifully swallowed into a yellow cab, packed off like an unwanted baggage. That was the plan anyway. Naturally there was nary a one to be seen.

 

 

Copyright Britical 2005

NYC

“Remember, remember the 5th of November / Gunpowder, treason and plot!” You might, but no one here remembers at all. They don’t even forget. New York neither knows nor cares about Bonfire Night and its mischief. I do realise it’s an English tradition, but it is most particularly not the sort of thing most Americans, even New Yorkers, would embrace, and that being said, this might be why I like it so much.

There are fireworks on the Fourth of July here - but it’s not the same, is it? Both days have connnections to patriotism - and yet, patriotism is a bit of a dirty word in England (not only does it display a very un-English earnestness, it’s a bit Fifth Column, my dear - whiffs of fascism, skinheads, Americans!). So Bonfire Night is also a bit ambiguous. After all, are we celebrating the foiling of the plot to blow up the government…or the attempt itself..? Ask around and you’ll get both opinions.

July 4th has no truck with such uncertainty. It’s easy-to-understand one dimensional Americana writ large and primary coloured in childrens’ crayon. It’s akin to some sickly artificial sweetener made entirely of pom-poms, sunshine and large globs of apple pie. November 5th is murder plots and sticking effigies of the pope on the fire, and having your Mum tell you you’ll get your arm blown off if you’re not careful (it’s all fun and games until someone has their eye out). Something English that doesn’t love that dark and slightly dangerousous night. And all these things, you might imagine, would not go down too well over here - and you’d be right. Any suggestion here of a dark undertow to even Hallowe’en has been cleaned away, PG spit-polished, and spun into shiny Hallmark silliness. It is now entirely and depressingly “family oriented”, and even at its most subversive, merely an excuse for men to dress up as women and women to dress up as sluts. Daring!

I was upstate at my friend Mo’s last weekend doing the obligatory fall foliage appreciation thing (and thank God that’s over) when I found a firework sitting all on its own on the kitchen counter. Dismayed that it wasn’t part of the the front line for an enormous Bonfire Night celebration, fretting already that said night would come and with nary an eye out, I decided to rescue the device and set it off. I made a bad actor’s attempt at looking “longingly” at the thing and - success! - was tersely informed I was welcome to take the thing with me but hurry up or it would be thrown out. Thrilled, I grabbed it and fled before anyone could change their capricious mind.

So last night, November 5th, when I went out to meet friends at a bar, I put it in my bag. If I was a certain sort of irritating writer I would start going on right about here about how the firework sat nestled in silver in my bag “like a secret”. But I’m not up to such poetic pretension, not today anyway. No, it sat in its foil in my bag and I whined to everyone about wanting to light it and where could we when can we and so forth. Eventually they gave in and back we came at 2am to my apartment where I perched the device on the balcony and, with some trepidation, lit the fuse.

It was shockingly bright and gorgeous. And loud! And so everyone fell about in some sort of uncontrolled hysteria of horror and glee, loving the display and wanting it to stop all at the same time, like tickling or some fairground ride. My neighbour knocked on the door. Soon mollified, she went back to her apartment and I went out to check that the firework really was thoroughly done and not about to resurrect itself. It was only then that I happened to notice the last two lines of the instructions printed on the back of it: “Light fuse. Get away.” Succinct! And universally good advice for instigators and troublemakers everywhere. Guy Fawkes might have taken better note.

 

 

Copyright Britical 2005