Night Like This J E F F S UWAK
I wake up and know, right away, that it’s going to be one of those nights where I can’t get back to sleep again. One of those nights where I toss and turn in my sheets for hours listening to the broken refrigerator motor drone on incessantly in the kitchen which, in my one-room efficiency apartment, is next to my bed. Yeah, one of those awful nights where I lie staring at the streetlight beaming between the slats of my Venetian blinds as I try to logically deduce the meaning of life. As I try and rationalize my way out of loneliness, knowing the whole time that those efforts will only drive me crazy. So, rather than bear the torment of that masochistic introspection, I slip out of bed and into my pants, boots, coat, and step outside. Nothing stirs on the darkened street, nothing in the windows of the apartment buildings or houses. A cold wind rattles the last dead leaves in the trees lining the sidewalk and fills the night with a sound like rattlesnakes and maracas. Sitcom laughter drifts out from some open window somewhere. Hell probably sounds something like that. No, Hell probably sounds exactly like that. I bury my hands in my coat pockets and start walking. At the end of the block is the Cannonball Tavern. Three girls stand outside the front door smoking cigarettes. I see their type everywhere these days: blonde hair, leather jackets, they like to talk about being bad girls and shopping. They laugh like a pack of hyenas about someone named Mitch’s crooked teeth. I don’t have to ask to know that Mitch is a friend of theirs, and probably a good friend. I could use a drink, but holy shit I don’t want to drink with people like this - these robbers of their own graves. I keep walking. I cross the bridge over the river into air stinking of dead fish and sludge. The reflection of the city lights waver over the black, oily surface of the water like torches of the damned signaling from the shore of some distant netherworld. I stop to look over the rail at the lights, wondering at the world they beckon towards, until a taxi enters the bridge and I turn and keep walking. Just over the bridge is an upscale art gallery. I stop to look at the paintings in the window. An impressionist Paris nightscape, moored yachts at dawn, a golf course shrouded in mist. The pictures are like postcards to countries I can’t afford to go to – and don’t want to. Art like that does nothing for me. All technique and no fire. Not an ounce of guts in any of it. Art for me has always been the broken knuckled hand with dirt caked beneath the fingernails; a battered violin with one string left; wildflowers sprouting out of an abandoned boxcar door. I keep walking. Fantasies of a girl roaming through insomniatic streets drift through my mind. Some sleepless, vagabond angel wandering the city like me looking for that beauty that 2