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.