Sleepy Time

(This is known as "pulling a Miggie")

In early May I got an evite to Ray Lynch’s bachelor party. Ray is an old college buddy, and at 47, was getting married for the first time. The party was at Connelly’s, an Irish pub, a stone’s throw from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in midtown. My first call was to Billy Murphy to secure lodging. Murph lives on the Upper West Side, he’s also an old college buddy and he has a spare bedroom. I invite Murph to join me, as he and Ray are also buddies and then I confirm that I can crash in his spare bedroom. Visions of a night of uninterrupted sleep dance in my head…

The party was the Saturday night of the Preakness. Early that May afternoon, I kissed my wife and kids good-bye; and with my duffel bag on the back seat and Elvis Costello on the audio, I drove to West 76th Street. Pumped could not begin to describe how I felt. I was flying solo, there were no whiny voices from the back seat, I was secure in the knowledge that my next two meals I would not have to cut anyone else’s meat. Depending on how drunk Murph gets. I was looking forward to seeing old friends, having some decent food and maybe a frosty mug of beer or two. I mean, it was a bachelor party. But near the top of the list, I was looking forward to sleeping, for 8, 10, 12 straight hours.

I exit the West Side Highway, and quickly find a spot. Murph buzzes me in and I climb the stairs to his fifth floor walk-up. I had to stop on the fourth floor to set up base camp in preparation for my summit attempt. Murph opens the door, a quick hand shake, a peck on the cheek for his girlfriend Carolyn, a few verbal pleasantries and I go to drop my duffel bag in the guest room. I stop. There’s women’s stuff on the bed: blow dryer, make-up and something with spaghetti straps. Like a kid who just had his birthday candles blown out for him, I turn to Murph for clearance. “Oh yeh Spin-man, I forgot to tell you, Sara is still crashing here. You can crash on the couch.” I smile, the politician’s smile. Inside I am throwing a temper tantrum my six year old would be proud of, “But you SAID! That’s MY room! You PROMISED!” As I walk towards the sectional couch, I look longingly at the queen-sized bed, my fingers gripping the door knob, Murph and Carolyn are pulling me by the legs….NOOOOOOOOO!

My days of sleeping on the couch ended when Paula Abdul had her last number one hit. I drop my duffel bag at the foot of the sectional sofa. It’s not the first time I crashed on Murph’s couch so I know what it entails. My thoughts are reeling…How do I get out of this? I was SO looking forward to a night of uninterrupted sleep, the kind of sleep I have not gotten since we started having kids. Should I get a hotel room? Will Murph be insulted? How could he do this to me? The Bastard. Doesn’t he know how important this is? He doesn’t have kids, he can sleep all he wants. Should I crash at my mother’s house in Brooklyn? Do I want to drive after a Lynch party? Probably not. . And, his couch is free.

When did I become such a wuss? Don’t answer that. There was a day when a crumb-encrusted couch in Belmar, NJ would work for an entire summer weekend. Like most of you, not so long ago my mantra could have been Warren Zevon’s “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.” Over the years, things changed. What the hell happened to the Jimmy Spinner I used to know? Murph and I go for a bike ride along the Hudson River and I am shooting hate daggers into his back as we ride….and I think about sleep, and how my opinion of it has changed over the years. I think of my first visit back to college…

After graduating from SUNY Buffalo, my buddy Dave Gordon and I use the Bills-Jet game as an excuse to visit the campus. Big Al Duarte picks us up at the airport in his sky blue Granada. Al drives us to an off campus house, a house similar to one we had shared less than a year before. We walk in, get a raucous hello from the housemates, most of whom I know, and grab a can of Bud as it flies through the air. Dave and I drop our bags and begin to party. As the night moves, Gordo and I, independent of each other, are doing reconnaissance on the lodging. I am peering in bedrooms and looking at the living room furniture, which looks like it might be the couch I slept on in that shore house in Belmar. Grabbing another beer out of the fridge I see pats of butter on the door, some take-out tins and a single onion in the produce drawer that might have been there when these guys moved in. Was our house this bad? How did we live like this? This is disgusting. After using the facilities I bump into Gordo in the foyer on his way to the latrine. We exchange a look. He glances both ways and says, “What do you think?” Whispering, so as not to insult our college student hosts, “There’s no way I’m staying here.” Gordo emits a massive sigh. “Oh thank God. I was worried there for a minute. What should we do?” “Don’t worry Gordo, I’ll think of something.” We party for a little while longer and eventually I throw Gordo under the bus. I pull Murph and Big Al aside and I say, “You know guys, I’d love to stay with you. Dave, he’s a little soft. You know, he’s been married for a few years, he’s got a nice house, he’s used to his creature comforts. Thanks for the offer but Gordo wants to get a room at the Marriot. I can’t in good conscience, let him stay there alone.”

So it looks like it started once I got my BA. Over the years I have become more enamored with sleep. For the first couple of decades of life I didn’t need much sleep. Adrenaline seemed to work just fine. Even today, if I get six solid hours, I’m good. The problem is the solid part. I haven’t had r.e.m. sleep since the Clinton administration. You have to understand, not only do I have three boys, age 11, 9 and 6. My wife is also auditioning for Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Right now we have two dogs and one cat. And that’s only because I have steadfastly held to THAT line in the sand. Over the past 10 years I have said NO to countless: dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, gerbils, chickens, goats, (I swear) ferrets, salamanders…If it were up to my wife, we’d have our own freaking petting zoo. You can figure out what these pets do for our sleep.

On any given night now: the cat will walk ON me, or he’ll snuggle up in some crevice next to me. There’s a word that I have added to my vocabulary, snuggle. If the cat doesn’t purr or claw me awake, the pooches will become ninja-like watch-dogs. Or worse, they will “talk” in their sleep, chasing an imaginary squirrel, woof woof woof, while there legs are scraping on the hard wood floors.

If by chance I am sleeping soundly, maybe our fire alarm will go off. It’s one of those systems like you have in schools or town building. Every unit is connected to the system and it talks to you while it’s blaring some ear piercing horn in your ear. I would imagine someone might die of a heart attack before the fire, if there ever is one, actually gets to them.

If miraculously, none of those things happen, the phone will ring…a friend who is three sheets to the wind will call me from a bar in some ski town. I pick up the phone, bleary-eyed at 2 in the morning, praying it’s not bad news only to hear, “SPINNER! WE’RE IN VAIL, COLORADO! WE WERE JUST TELLING THE STOry…” Click. Finally, I probably don’t have to mention all of the interruptions to sleep 3 boys bring: bad dreams, wet bed, upset tummy, can’t sleep. To make matters worse, my wife is hanging on to Charlie, "the baby" so he's in our bed twice a night. And guess who has to move him back to his bed? The boys are into Greek mythology now and I heard Charlie saying something about a guy who killed his father....So those are just the interruptions in our house.

Outside the house…At five in the morning the garbage man comes. At 7, on most Saturdays some pea-brain in the neighborhood who has no kids, has to get a jump on the yard work. We have a wealthy neighbor, an heiress, the kind that has streets named after her family in our town. This woman has more money than Bill Gates and she uses it to hire all manner of men. I imagine that she peruses the section of the Yellow Pages for “guys with really freaking loud equipment.” Over the past 4 years she has had landscapers with backhoes, masons with jack-hammers, chimney fixer-uppers with…you find it in the yellow pages, she’ll put the poor bastard and his sleep deprivation machine to work.

My love of sleep has evolved slowly, I guess you might say it has sleepily progressed. Coinciding with marriage, I have become more tame. And that’s not a bad thing, well not too bad. I have started to take naps. Yeh, there’s the après dinner, dozing off during Jeopardy nap, which I LOVE. We call that “pulling a Miggie” after my friend Mark Migliaccio (in the photo at the beginning) who gets a lot of zzz’s on his couch. But I’m talking about REAL naps. The kind my wife takes…I am talking, middle of the day, kids are out of the house, close the blinds, forget about riding the bike or doing the yard work…napping. And it’s great! It’s energizing. I am a little groggy when I first wake up from one of these naps. And initially, I wouldn’t admit that I take them. Someone would call at 3:15 in the afternoon, “Spinner, did I wake you?” “Oh, no, I just rode 15 miles on my bike, and I was just about to go chop down this big tree or do something really manly….”

If you are going to become a sleep maven, you have to know the terminology. Starting with snuggling, spooning….Now I know about stuff like thread count on sheets. Whenever I see advertisements for new mattresses (The Dux bed, the Sleep Number bed) my ears perk up. Christ, I spent more time researching our mattress purchase than I spent on our tv/stereo purchase. Well, all of this writing has made me sleepy, I think I need a nap.

Token Memories

Lying in bed here in Middlebury, CT my mind begins wandering. It’s early summer, bedroom windows are open. I smile at the concert of crickets outside. I think of the contrast, the sounds my boys hear while falling asleep, and the sounds I heard. Open windows on Brooklyn’s East 4th Street meant we dozed off to: the occasional car lolling down the street, far off sirens and the most distinguishing sound, the subway. The F train, which traveled down McDonald Avenue, some four blocks away, changed from an elevated train to a subway on its way into Manhattan. My boyhood friends would tell you that the rhythmic, slowly decreasing, clankity-clank of the subway was the defining sound of our summer evenings.


For New Yorkers, the subway is always just underneath, literally and figuratively. Growing up in the 70’s it was part of the fabric of our lives. After falling asleep to our urban lullaby we could keep time on a summer morning by the predictable faces, the waves of professionals, Wall Street traders and secretaries for Ad agencies flowing toward Manhattan.

At school and on the street, we heard stories of the subway; urban legends of rats the size of cats, or tales of the power of the 660 volts of electricity flowing through the lethal 3rd rail. Scariest were the rumors of roving, knife-wielding gangs wreaking havoc on unsuspecting innocents like my friends and I. This was New York in the 70’s, the New York of graffiti, and squeegee men, the New York of Abe Beame, well before Rudy Guiliani cleaned it up. New York and the subway in particular was a scary place.
Thanksgiving 1972, and Mr. Tracey is taking his son John and I to the Macy’s Parade. Two nine year olds, jumping out of our skin, going to see Snoopy floats and Santa Claus. The fly in the ointment is, we have to take the subway to get there. Wide-eyed, we stay close to John’s dad as we buy our tokens and head down the stairs of the Church Ave station. On the platform, giggling nervously, John and I scan the tracks for the legendary rats; all we see are scraps of newspaper and some stray soda cans. “Which one is the third rail dad?” “You see the rail against the wall? With the plank of wood over it? That’s the third rail.” Disappointing, not exactly what I pictured.

The train arrives and we take our seats. The two of us read the advertisements for Broadway plays and dermatologists, we swing on the poles, do chin ups on the hand holds. John’s dad takes us to the front window so we can watch the tunnel as the train’s headlights light the way. We spend most of our time looking out the window. At each new station, we watch passengers getting on and off, keeping a wary eye open for the much feared gangs. Nothing. Warming to the trip, we hit Carroll Street, Jay Street, Delancey Street…arriving eventually at 34th Street. I can only speak for myself but if John was anything like me he had a sense of relief. We had made it! We had run the gauntlet of NYC’s big bad subway. For now.

After the parade, we make our way back downstairs to the Herald Square platform. Once again our minds begin to wander. Maybe on the way home we’ll get mugged? Maybe some bum, in the 70’s we called them bums, will push us onto the tracks as the train is arriving? Maybe we’ll slip and hit the third rail? Or maybe one of those gangs will catch up to us? After standing in the cold, drinking hot chocolate, we both have to visit the bathroom. Panic! If the subway is scary, the subway bathroom has got to be even scarier. Tweety says, “Dad, I have to use the bathroom.” Scanning the area, Mr. Tracey takes us back towards the token booth. The three of us walk right up to the door and John’s dad stops. Is he crazy? He’s going to let us use the bathroom ourselves? Hesitating, we look at each other and back at Mr. Tracey. We’re too little! I want to scream. He’s oblivious to our plight. Slowly, glancing from side to side, looking for random psychopaths, we make our way into the bathroom. Should we use a stall with a door? Should we go together? Should we use the urinal? I suggest, “Why don’t I use the stall and you stand guard, then I’ll stand guard while you use the stall?” That’s our plan. We finish our business quickly and head for the exit. We wash our hands and both scan the bathroom, one of us notices a flesh colored mass, something that used to be round but is now squished in the fetid ooze around the urinal. Tweety points, “Do you think?” “I don’t know. Looks like one!” Ahhhhhhhhh! We run out of the bathroom screaming in Mr. Tracy’s face, “Daaaad, there’s a ball, someone got his ball cut off and it’s squished on the floor in there. Let’s get out of here!” I am sure Mr. Tracy got a lot of mileage out of that story at Hurley’s bar…My son and his friend think they found a removed testicle...

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Around the middle of 8th grade, a group of boys from our grammar school, Immaculate Heart of Mary, were chosen to take the entrance exam for Regis High School. Regis is a scholarship only, boys only, catholic school, on the upper East Side of Manhattan. Regis boasts an impressive reputation and an equally impressive list of alumni. To be “chosen” to go to Regis, and then to attend for free, would be a big deal for any catholic school boy. The exam was on a Saturday morning, in late fall. Following the city axiom of safety in numbers, Sister Elizabeth organized us to meet on the Church Avenue platform at 7:30. We would be escorted by Bobby Snow, a freshman at Regis, and a graduate of our school. Poor Bob had to spend his Saturday going back to school!

We begin to trickle in from all corners of our neighborhood with our bag lunches. There’s Jimmy Quinlan, Mark Bowen, Timmy Boyle, Matty Milbauer & company. It’s funny how we all look different without our school uniforms. “Anybody see the Ranger game last night?”
“What I saw was Lorraine Baldwin’s skirt yesterday. Man! I can’t believe she didn’t get in trouble for wearing it that short.”
“You know Sister Florence would yell at her if she noticed, probably jealous she doesn’t have legs like that.” “And she doesn’t have boobs like Laura DelSorbo, man I think those things are getting bigger daily. She needs a new school uniform.”

Eventually the conversation turns to our trip on the subway. Timmy Boyle is an old pro as his dad works for the Transit Authority. He regales us with tales of something called the dead man’s lever. “You see, there’s a safety device on the train so that anyone controlling the train has to keep squeezing this lever. Then, if the “driver” of the train dies, the train will come to a stop because he can’t maintain the pressure. You see, dead man’s lever.” Jimmy Quinlan tells us a story of his older brother, Johnny, fending off a gang of kids around Brooklyn Tech with a fire extinguisher. “Broke one guys arm in four places.” Jimmy claims as he makes the swinging motion with his arm. Waiting for just the right moment to reveal my secret, I pipe in, “Nobody’s going to mess with me, cause I brought THIS!” I pull out my garden-variety pocket knife. You know the one, with the faux wooden handle, stamped with Pocono Mountains. “Ooooh.” Impressed, the boys circle closer; then I hear Bobby Snow, our escort, with derision in his voice, “Put that thing away Spinner, as a matter of fact give it to me. The only one’s going to get stabbed with that thing is YOU when someone takes it off you and stabs you with it.”

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I didn't get in to Regis but I am admitted to John Dewey High School, out towards Coney Island which means a 50 minute train ride on the subway. By senior year I am an experienced straphanger. I know how to position myself to get a seat on a crowded train. My friends and I from our neighborhood, still travel together but now we cause our own mischief. Over the four years of high school, the only roving gangs I witnessed were fellow high schoolers, usually from FDR or one of the other schools our train passed during our commute. Senior year, I got a job at Barnes & Noble right around Union Square in Manhattan. As a senior I could leave school when my classes were done. I rigged my schedule so that I could be in B&N around 1 p.m.. This required that I travel the B train from the next to last stop, through many Brooklyn neighborhoods, across the Manhattan Bridge, through Chinatown and the lower East Side to Union Square. The issue here was the time I was traveling. At that time of day, almost nobody takes the train, nobody.

If I ran out of my English class and ran, I could just catch the B as it pulled in to the station. Winded, I would walk through the cars to get to the front car. Not because I wanted to look out the front window, I was a jaded New Yorker by then. No, I would walk to the front car because when we got to Union Square, the front of the train would be closest to the exit I needed to get to 18th Street and 5th Ave. One day, early spring, I catch the B, and out of breath I begin to weave my way from car to car towards the front. But…. as soon as I enter the second car, I get slammed in the face with the smell of pot. It awakens me, I look up and I am surrounded by three guys, about my age, clearly cutting school and looking for trouble. I try to act cool, nod to one of them and keep walking to the front of the car. I prepare to enter the first car and put some distance between myself and the thugs but the door is stuck, or locked, but either way, I’m screwed. I walk back a few steps, pull out my copy of Stephen King’s Christine, put my foot up on the metal pole in front of me and slouch down. I act like I am reading but I am listening to the potheads talk at the other end of the train. It’s not 20 seconds until I hear one of them say, “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go get me a quarter off a white boy.” Gulp. I thought it odd that he only wanted a quarter but, whatever. So the leader saunters over and stands over me. His compadres quickly join him and sit on either side of me. They are toying with me, having fun. “What’s that your reading?” “Nothing, Stephen King, you know the horror writer?” “No I don’t know.” The guy standing over me takes his hand and slaps my feet off the pole. I sit up. They are about my age, I'm thinking I could fend them off and make a break for it at the next stop. The dude on my left tries to go through the pockets on my denim jacket. I try and keep his hands away. He persists. I look up to my left and standing in the first car, taking in the whole scene, is a cop. A big meaty, cop with his hands on his hips snickering at the whole situation. I can’t believe my luck. I point and say, “Don’t look now but there’s a cop in the next car.” At first they snicker and then the leader does a double-take puts his hands in the air and says, ‘Don’t worry, we’s cool, we’s cool.” At the next stop, the cop moves into our car. Doesn’t say a word to me, slaps the cuffs on one of them and takes all three of them off the train. Whenever someone says, “There’s never a cop around when you need one.” I tell them that story.

After college, I worked on Wall Street and became a regular commuter, one of the guys walking down the street that my friends and I used to notice I suppose. The subway became part of my New York lifeline. As with a lot of things we fear, once I got to know it, the subway was not something I was afraid of but something I needed and appreciated. In my decades of commuting on the subway, I was only accosted twice, the story you just heard and one night I took the train home late at night when I should have taken a cab. But that’s a story for another time…