Santa Died a Hero

As I get nearer and nearer to my thirtieth birthday, I become more and more resigned to the blinking red light of a clock radio, or the dull fluorescent white of a cell phone lantern as I fumble around in dresser drawers, trying not to wake the woman in the bed next to me, or the room mate, or (as I jump up on my balance board and turn up Rise Against) my neighbors. Guests who stay in my home always seem amazed to find me making coffee and pancakes at eight in the morning after a carouse that leaves them, at four a.m., whimpering about how they need to sleep before they talk themselves into a hangover.

None of this is anything to the looks that Liz gives me when I stay up until one in the morning, only to wake again at five for work. It's like the entire world, once they discover that I don't particularly like to sleep, decides to shun and interrogate me into submission, hoping to slow down whatever hamster wheel is powering my brain and spine until they can understand its output. For me, this is not overdoing it. It's not stressful, and it's not anything that I feel ashamed about or want to change. For me, this is simply normal.

As a teenager, I used to regularly start reading a book at eight or nine in the evening, lose myself in it, and then find that I'd finished it around ten the next day. I would go about my day afterward, trying to ignore my father's diatribes about how my mother had insomnia before she ever went insane, and how its progression was always a warning sign to him of trouble ahead. And it didn't end there. In my freshman year of college, I had to work three jobs to pay off a rent debt, so I became accustomed to living two twelve hour days in every twenty-four hour cycle. I typically took a nap from ten or eleven until two or so, and then again the next day from noon until two or from three until five, depending on my work schedule.

This is the point where people usually tell me that the college lifestyle, with its incumbent binge-drinking, sex, and mind-expanding pharmaceutical experiments is responsible for this change.

They are either lying of full of crap.

I'll tell you when I remember it happening: Always.

My earliest memory of sleep problems is from when I was five or six. I got a tape player with an FM tuner in it for Christmas, along with several story books on tape, one of which was an adaptation of the movie Gremlins. I loved Gremlins. Those mischevious little buggers, constantly dripping snot, eating pizza, and electrocuting Rotarians for pleasure, were to me a symbol of everything I could be if I worked hard. So, that became my bedtime ritual. Pajamas, brush teeth, Dad says good night, Mom tells me a story about the rapture, lights out, Gremlins on tape. Every night. For months. It got downright Pavolvian, with my innocent snores just overpowering the sound of the tape just as the creatures are lured to the public pool to be electrocuted.

One night, I had a rather vivid dream. I was in a tower, a labyrinthine building with a honeycomb of alcoves, sub-tunnels, and bunkers. I know it was above ground, because at various levels it was open, exposed to the sky, and there were people attempting to shoot out at the Gremlin onslaught. The one time I tried to look out, they were scaling the wall of the tower, and I was shoved out of the way as the Hendersons (sans Harry) poured boiling oil onto them.

At some point, they got into the tunnels. I'd say it was like Alien 3, except that Alien 3 wasn't out yet. Same color scheme, though. Things got desperate, and I remember cowering in a little cave off the main tunnel when suddenly the Gremlins started running away. Shortly after, shotgun blasts rang out, and one of them was cut in half right in front of my hiding place. It's legs were just a red mist, but its torso crawled to another Gremlin, ripped one of its legs off, and tried to force it onto the ragged red ribbons that streamed down from the first slimy creature's chest.

That was when the machine gun rang out. All I remember after that is Marty McFly and the Doctor trying to carry a gut-shot Santa Claus into a medical bay, only to find that he had not only gone septic, but that significant and necessary sections of his bowel had been ingested by the gremlins before Santa's body was recovered.

That was about when I woke up screaming. I went flying into my parents' room, still screaming, and threw myself between them, still screaming.

My first impression was the disorienting feeling of being in two beds at once, as I felt my father's naked chest next to me on the one side, and my mother's smothering, too-thick flannel nightgown on the other. The oppressive heat of that thing in summer made blankets unbearable to my parents for six months out of the year, and the constant knowledge that a nightmare would require me to drown in the trapped sweat smell my mother always exuded when she put it on is, I think, the reason I can't bear anything heavier than a pair of running shorts while I sleep today.

Father wanted to explain to me the difference between fact and fiction. I knew the difference, and I knew that the Gremlins weren't real, but I was still feeling terrorized by the sight of Santa's intestines trailing behind him as his body is dragged through the door by Christopher Lloyd. Mother wanted to prove that the Gremlins couldn't hurt me by burning the book and demolishing the tape then and there. Thanks to my not having the vocabulary to express myself, and to the excessive snot and tears, she got her way.

After that, she put on either oldies or classical music for me to fall asleep to. And, after that, I would wait until she stopped sticking her neck in my room and telling me to sleep, and I would turn it to pop hits or (when I was feeling adventurous) the rock station. Eventually, she got wise. It must have been because all she listened to was Christian music and pop disguised as country (think John Denver), and somehow I still had managed (without leaving her sight during my waking hours) to learn all of George Thorogood's epic "Bad to the Bone."

While this might have been seen as cute in most households, to my mother it indicated a serious desire to embark on a criminal career before my balls dropped. She started taking the batteries out of my radio before I went to bed, and I was stuck listening to her complain to my father about how much his parents drank until I managed to fall asleep.

Not that it made me sleep any more. Instead of trying to stay awake long enough to catch the beginning of Metal at Midnight, I just woke up at four in the morning and watched reruns of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis until the local stations played the national anthem and got serious about making with the cartoons.