I could prove it to you if not for the separation of the screens and time. If you are reading this and I am not dead** then I could do it. Concrete floors? The after party of your friend's 30th birthday? In the bathroom of a Long John Slivers? No problem! SLEEP!
That all said, I do try to sleep on things meant for it. Not looking to challenge myself. Just content in my ability.
Most notable was my childhood water bed. I had it from say the 5th grade all through senior year of high school. It was a hand me down*** from our next door neighbors. It came in pieces slipped over the concrete fence that separate our homes and then through the metal bars over my windows. Imagine smuggling furniture through the DMZ piece by piece. The mattress (I think the appropriate term is bladder) came empty and then took hours to fill from the garden hose slung around the hose from the outside slop sink. I don't recall ever filling it back up from the initial go but we had to at some point. I do recall every few months draining a bottle of neon green water conditioner that we got from the slim "water bed section" (Really a shelf) of the local Kmart. From there we got a bed sheet and duvet cover spread that had neon tropical fish in a water color motif. I kept that for years until my mother deemed it good enough for the dog and changed it to a simpler red sheet set to contrast with the aquamarine accent wall she painted.
I loved that bed. It surprised people like some untamed stallion. My room was relatively small and had no place to sit save for the bed and people who didn't know would tumble into the center. My dogs growing up adapted but always looked like moon landers settling in. My mother made sure to keep their nails filed for fear they would pop the bladder albeit the bed was rarely ever naked. Even when stripped it had a pill covered white girdle looking thing that snapped into each corner.
Even through sheets it cooled in heat and warmed at night even when I ran my window AC. As I got older I found it rebellious to not sleep with the AC at night, even in the tropical heat, and I would stare at the ceiling fan and blinking idle settings of my CD-Stereo**** and drift on the water bed and imagine I am in some noir scenario.
In college I brought home a girlfriend to show her around the island and meet the family. I was thrilled to be able to sleep with her on the water bed.
"We are going to fuck on the water bed like something out of 70s crime thriller. My neo noir moment!"
However, my mother had gotten rid of it in the brief time between high graduation and this visit and my girlfriend, ever polite, was in no mood for anything in my childhood bedroom.*****
In college, I slept on the school issued extra long dorm mattress. That was fine except I fell for the rumor I heard that it was "impossible" to find sheets that fit it unless you ordered them through the college book store. So, I did, paying probably double what you did at any other store for hunter green sheets the bled color even when dry. They painted the beige painted brick a mossy green glow.
The first ever mattress I had I did not buy. I stole it. In college, I worked for the Physical Plant and had access to the coveted MR37 key which could open ANY door on campus. ANY DOOR. People were lucky that I had honor and also crippling anxiety because this was any lab, classroom, or dorm room. I used it to break into the storage room basement of Clark Hall, where the college kept all things decrepit. If you ever had the gym teacher ask you to go get something from their supply closet in elementary school, that is what the room looked like. It was a space where moving anything had to come with "Oh fuck! WATCH OUT" as 40 year old campus phone books and stacked chairs tumbled over you. It also had dozens of full size mattresses from before the reign of the extra long dorm room mattresses. I took one with a friend of mine helping loading it into the U-Haul outside and to my first apartment. The thing had to be thirty years old and most of its weight had to be in dead skin cells and sweat. No bed bugs. They would have surely starved in the basement for that long.
I once slept outside. In Dewitt Park, Ithaca, NY. We saw the film Invisible Children which was tearing through well meaning liberal college towns and the film makers encouraged to spread awareness by sleeping outside. About 100 of us did albeit no one in my group actually slept, except for me, tucked next to the granite of the city's WW2 memorial.
The first ever mattress I owned I bought with my wife from the Macy's in University Heights, OH. This was next to a Target spread across two floors and which had a shopping cart trolley. I forced us to go after we paid for the mattress confused why it would take a week for it to ship to our place. They had a bunch right there on the department store floor!
Now, I sleep on a couch isolated by age and snoring. Fox Mulder, from The X-Files, slept on his couch to the point it became a joke on the show that he did not have a bed. I sleep like a goblin. My head is on the armrest and instead I clutch pillows against my chest. I will slip my feet into the well worn spaces between the cushions and try to curl as deep as the cushions will allow. I am often surrounded by cats that will nest between my legs and leave stinging bruises when the bolt from any noise or movement.
I have a dream where the couch drifts into the maw of space and it is just me and anything still on it. It is like that book Life of Pi except it is a couch and the tiger is an overweight all black void cat. Ill have to live on the petrified snacks found in the cushions and idle away the time stretching in and out hair bands. There is a highlighter and a click pen buried in the couch and I will work trying to make them dance across my knuckles while I float in the couch bubble. For sure, I could sleep the time away.
*This was a skill that someone at a bar once told me indicated that I must have been in the service. I can imagine it being quite practical in the military where "hurry up and wait" rules the day. But, no, I developed it in the civilian world.
**Death being the ultimate sleep I would think
***Used water bed sounds quite "un-right" However, rather have that then a second hand mattress, which, no surprise is something I have slept on. I mention it in the main body of this essay. Do you read these as they come up? Or all at once at the end? Mary Roach does that with her books and I tend to read at the end. It hurts my eyes to bounce around so much.
****The big silver Aiwa one with the detachable side speakers that I swear was standard issue in the 90s even for families all the way down in Puerto Rico
*****This was also the catalyst of a very quick to start yet slow to end breakup. My girlfriend, earily prescient, told me bawling as we walked over the pedestrian bridge over Rio Piedras to go drink at a bar (Drinking age is 18 in PR) that she could never imagine ever seeing my family again, much less being part of it. I do not blame her.
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