NONE SHALL SLEEP TONIGHT

    Sunday, November 23, 1997
    9:49 p.m.
    New York City

In all the years of living in New York I've always had to beg people to come over and see me. Whether these prospective visitors are from the city or from another state.

I make a pathetic beggar.

If they find the time to stop by it is battle to make them stay. And if they stay for the evening it becomes a war to make them like me. And if you like me tonight I am frenzied to make you keep liking me in the morning. And if anyone stays with me that long then my plans crap out. Coffee? Eggs? Just stay with me, whoever you are.

Yesterday afternoon, at 3:00 or so at the Sanford Restaurant on Broadway I started early. David is a friend from college; he and I crapped all over ourselves with redneck jokes and college-boy asininity, set upright here and there by comments on obscure bassoonists and mutually disrespected clarinetists.

At the Sanford Restaurant we started talking about Turandot, about my Glenn Gould videos, about all the things we could do tonight in my seemingly palatial new apartment.

By as early as 8:00 p.m., though, I was listening to Egon Petri CDs and drinking beer by myself.

I don't know anyone in this town who would let me cry the way David does. He lets my floodgates open, and he will let them open again tomorrow, next week, next year. It will be years and years and years before I tell him everything, or even hint at anything.

Most of my guests do not have this affect on me. Most have come and gone so quickly that at best they surface in my conversations as anecdotes to beer-headed reverie and RHEINGOLD! RHEINGOLD! RHEINGOLD!

Others (friends of friends) stand up by their selves and leave. Others have sunk into glassy-eyed emptiness and disappeared before my eyes. Most refused to show up in the first place. The dozen and more women stopped talking and taken their clothes off in front of me, taken my shirt off while I played Rachmaninoff for them, held my back tight to their breasts and made it impossible for me to just play the music as it was intended to be heard, kissed at me and sent me into the oral tornado.

We watched Turandot tonight. I rattled and raved that the 1st Act is the highest triumph of all western opera, that it rivals the greatest symphonies, that no child learning an instrument today could ever imagine what glories await them at the opera house.

We talked about the shows we saw together last season at the Met. The agony of Wozzeck and all those fucking clarinets. The amazingly lame ending of Tosca. The bad, bad, bad conductor at Carmen. We talked about the night before I left New York and we saw Das Rheingold (which is playing on my CD thinger at this moment) and how that night I thought out loud "How could anyone ever leave this city? Why? Nowhere else will there be an orchestra that understands the water, the la la la laaaa the weia woga woge, du welle!"

And the next morning I was in New Jersey on the airplane thinking the same glorious thought over and over and over and scribbling frantic nonsense into my journal and waiting for that moment of release when the plane was in the air and there was no way back and everything was the best it could be.

Tonight carried on and on and on. I moved the TV from this bedroom into the living room, so we could sit on the couch and be more comfortable. I went out and bought more beer. More chips. I fast-forwarded through all that early 2nd-Act nonsense.

The 3rd act arrived with all its dramaturgical nonsense... then he asked "What does 'Nessun Dorma' mean, anyway?" I waved my left wrist all around the planet and answered "You shall not sleep, we, I, no one shall sleep tonight... Some shit like that."

My mother and Dwayne and I saw Luciano Pavarotti sing "Nessun Dorma" (and a zillion other pieces) in Central Park a few years ago. Pavarotti himself in an interview on the radio that morning puffed "it will be a concert for the people, and I shall sing the people's music."

We were people. That much is certain.

I remember the event for a few things; for the fat guy a million miles away from our asses and lawn chairs waving his arms and singing for us the people. It was hot and summertime.

But most of all I remember it for the woman, my age, sitting near us, sitting by herself right on the grass for most of the afternoon and evening, then at 8:45 p.m. her turning to the right and saying to someone else "He was a blind date. He left 3 hours ago. Have you seen him?" And she laughed and laughed and laughed, and for some reason so did we all.

She seemed beautiful to me at that moment. This woman I did not know, whose face and eyes and legs and arms and fingers and hair wilted the way mine do tonight.

Then I remembered all those flimsy South American short stories I read in high school in which the man in abject confusion and stupidity falls for whatever woman is nearest at hand. Where there is no answer to anything except falling in love and draining your soul over whichever beautiful woman happens through.

Tonight I stood up and hurled my arms to the sky at the end of Act 1. I threw the remote control across the room at Act 2. I shut up for Act 3 and "Nessun Dorma."

You just can not do these things by yourself.

I asked him if he wanted to hear that aria again. He said yes, of course.

Then, at the same very moment my beeper went off and his cel-phone rang (he was pissing, I was leafing through Victoria's Secret catalogues) he announced "I gotta go. Jo-Anne is locked out of her apartment."

He hardly knows this Jo-Anne person; I know her as a marvelously-boobed imbecile who. . . . . . . .

The night was uncommonly silent. I chose to try to sleep in the living room, on the couch, and watch videos of The Tonight Show and Late Night with David Letterman from 1991 and 1992. And I watched On the Riviera, with Danny Kaye. Then I shuffled through a dozen unmarked videos from a box I've still not totally unpacked.

There are boxes here which I never unpacked after moving to my last apartment in 1994.

An e-mail message from a friend arrived at about 1:00 a.m., and I responded to it as the sun came up.

The first food of the day was at 5:00 p.m. It was a baloney and salami sandwich on wheat bread.