I don't sleep anymore/again. I wake at three-thirty or four. I roll about and close my eyes, but my mind is too active, my brain to anxious. I think of all the things I need to do that I don't want to do but which have been put off as long as they can be. I think of all the things I want to do that I can't do or maybe will not be able to do or maybe just will not do at all. So this morning, at four, I got up and took a Xanax. "I'll sleep until ten or so," I thought. Nope. Up at five-thirty after rolling around in bed waiting for the drug to kick in. I can't tell that it ever did.
So I sit with cat and coffee and the growing gray dawn. The holidays are here. I am ready to skip out on the factory and play. Serious play. Not the watching of football on television kind. Just walking and feeling and thinking, recharging the creative batteries, looking for inspiration and information. I will, I think, play hooky.
Thanksgiving is this week, of course, and my mother and I are thinking of going out for dinner. We've never done this before, and I'm not sure yet how I feel about it yet. As I recall, I have only gone out for Thanksgiving dinner twice in my life. The first time was thrilling. I was in Key West with my girlfriend, a crazy, romantic girl who had no ties to traditions of any kind. She was eighteen and I was not, and it was mad that I had taken her away from her parents' home in the first place. But that is how life was then before we lost Paris and Berlin and Rome as models for living, before the universities allowed the Baptists and Puritans to purge life of anything interesting in the least. Life then was still good when it was strange and slightly dangerous, and Key West was that then, too, before all the magazines and newspapers labelled it The Last Resort, before the condos and the cruise ships had Disneyfied the island, when gay gentrification and drug money fueled the town.
At the last minute, we bought tickets on Florida Air and took a room on the east side of the island by the water in the old part of town. We ate breakfasts in Cuban cafes with strong Cuban coffees and big slices of Cuban bread slathered in butter and lunches on the water at The Sands or the Pier House when you could still take off your clothes and lie about without notice. But for Thanksgiving dinner, we ate at the old Pan Am World Airways office on Whitehead Street, the first international airline with the first international flight leaving from Key West. It had been converted into a restaurant and bar and was the most romantic place I could think to eat. The night was quiet and the restaurant dim, and I felt as alive as I had ever been there with the most beautiful woman you could ever imagine drinking wine and eating the traditional turkey and cranberries and dressing like a character in a movie. I will never know what she felt that night, but I knew that everything had changed for me then, for good or ill.
The other time I remember eating out on Thanksgiving was in L.A. I was alone, both on the trip and in my life, and had decided to go to Joshua Tree to hike and climb and just to get out of town. But some strange fronts moved through the desert while I was there bringing freezing temperatures and hurricane force winds that flattened trees and damaged buildings. I was cold and alone and sleeping in a tent in a campground that had been abandoned that day as people packed up their cars and headed for funner environs. All night long, I lay in the dark and cold and listened to my tent flap and pop, but my mountain skills had been good and the little tent stayed up through it all. The next night, though, I decided to check into a motel and chose The Joshua Tree Inn famed (though I didn't know it at the time) as the place where Gram Parsons died. It, too, was empty but for a couple who I met at breakfast briefly the next day. After a couple of desolate days of driving my rental car at top speeds around the very empty National Park (and oh was that fun) and doing some dangerous solo rock climbing that scared me silly, I decided to head back to L.A. I guess I'd gotten lonely.
L.A. on Thanksgiving is like a movie set itself as the roads are abandoned and businesses closed, so it is possible to drive anywhere as quickly as you want, to pull over and have a look, and then head on to the next place. And that is what I did. I saw L.A. as few do, I believe, flying on normally congested roads in minutes, going from Venus to Malibu like lightening, then flying through the Hollywood Hills and through the canyons. . . I can't remember it all. But that night, I could find no place to eat. I wandered around near the UCLA campus thinking something must be open there. I wish I had a picture. I ended up eating at a fast food Chinese restaurant at a shaky table with a plastic table cloth under fluorescent lights. Two young men sat at one of the other tables. It was weird, but not romantic. It was the worst Thanksgiving you can imagine.
Perhaps I'll cook something easier than a turkey. Maybe I'll make something on the grill. The thought of eating out just doesn't appeal to me. Yes, I think I'll have my mother over for a mid-afternoon repast, a feast, even, with champagne and mousse truffles and pork loin. Or perhaps I'll make a roast with onions and potatoes and carrots in the Romertopf. Perfect. We can drink champagne and smoke pot and take Xanax and chill the live long day.
All the sudden, I'm looking forward to it.
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