Sleep Talkin' Man (5 page)

Hey! You killed my velociraptor, dickhead.
That’s so unfair. You do realize how hard it is to find one of those ‘round here, don’t you?

You’re a complete waste of space.
Just go home and apologize to your mother’s vagina.

I need a big room, with strobe lights.
And people riding bicycles … naked.
To classical music, of course.

Two hats for my bunny, please.
Make ’em smart ones.

He’s got to look the business.
And no more fucking spats, OK?

Loving you is an important life lesson.
You learn about all the fucking stupid mistakes you make.

Leave the broccoli alone.
It can sort out its own problems.
Confusion is part and parcel of its life.

… Then out of nowhere, the puffin ninja kicked my ass! Little fucking runt bastard.

Where are we going?
I want to know where you’re taking me.
It’s all fun not knowing, but now I’m bored, so FUCKING TELL ME WHERE ARE WE GOING! … Ooh, I’ve never been there before! I hope it’s good.

I’d say welcome to the School of Life, but you wouldn’t pass the entrance exam.
Dickhead.

All I want out of life is ice cream and cuddles.
Is it too much to ask? Is it?

Half the time listening to you, I’m imagining the carnage of pulling out your tongue and wrapping it around your throat.

Your singing can wake the dead.
So shut the fuck up. I don’t want any zombies dropping their jazz hands all over the fucking place.
Alright? Just shut it.

Stupid-fucking-cunty-bollocks-expialidocious

“Yeah, falling in love is WONDERFUL.
Especially when it’s with me.”

By now you might be wondering how Adam and I met—especially with an ocean between us. I think it’s actually a pretty juicy story. And, of course, it involves sleeping.

It was 1991. The Western world was in the early stages of recovery from the cultural atrocities of the 80s. Synthesized pop ditties, rock power ballads, and neon nylon had given way to grunge, flannel, and apathy. But in the Jerusalem nightclubs, it was Duran Duran and “Land Down Under” every night of the week.

I was spending a year between high school and university in Israel on a program with a Zionist youth group. Our year was split between studying in Jerusalem, teaching in a small-town school, and working the fields on a kibbutz. In those first months in Jerusalem, I spent the days soaking up the history, architecture, culture, and
language, and the nights dancing until the sun came up. Sleep was not on the syllabus.

Adam was on a similar program with a sister youth group from the United Kingdom. Occasionally, the leaders of our two organizations threw us all together for social weekends. You can imagine the bedlam: a bunch of teenagers out from under their parents for the first time, in a country with no legal drinking age, crammed into a dorm with another bunch of teenagers with exotic, and therefore inherently sexy, accents. It was hormonal pandemonium.

Aside from treating each other like foreign cuts of meat, I made some good friends among the British guys at those international gatherings, and it wasn’t long before I was spending lots of my evenings in their dorm rather than mine, watching them play Risk for hours on end. (Wait, did I say hormonal pandemonium? Maybe I overestimated British teenage guys’ idea of a good time.) That’s when I first noticed Adam.

Adam has a distinct memory of overhearing me whisper into a friend’s ear, “My God, check out his lips,” and knowing that I was talking
about him. Yup, he was right. Even then, Adam had these gorgeous, full lips that just cried out to be gnawed on … But I digress.

It was a cool evening when we all set out from the Brits’ dorm to walk to the dance club in Talpiot. Until then, Adam and I had only admired each other from afar. But he had decided that, on this walk, he was going to speak to me. And so he strode up alongside me, and we started talking. To this day, although neither of us can recall a word that was said, we both remember with crystal clarity how immediate the connection was, and the breathtaking excitement we felt. We talked and talked, until we hit the club and the music drowned out all conversation. So then we danced and danced, rapturously, illuminated in the blues and reds and stark white of the ever-shifting club lights, unaware of anyone or anything else. It was electrifying.

We walked home together at six in the morning and stopped at the beautiful Talpiot overlook to watch Jerusalem turn gold with the sunrise. We both knew that something extraordinary was brewing.

From that night on, we saw each other when we could, and got to know each other in bits and pieces. Meanwhile, I had parted from my program and found myself an independent kibbutz to finish out my year. So when Adam’s group was coincidentally sent to my kibbutz for the weeklong wrap up of their program, it seemed that fate had intervened on our behalf. I was nearly paralyzed by anticipation and nervousness waiting for him to arrive. Had everything we’d experienced in the whirl and excitement of our brief episodes together been real? Could it be sustained beyond those moments on the dance floor or watching the sunrise?

The day arrived. I didn’t know exactly when Adam would be arriving on my kibbutz that evening, so I went for a late-night swim (read: scaled the fence around the pool for a skinny-dip) with my friends. When I returned, I opened the door to my room to the surprising sight of Adam sound asleep in my bed. I had never seen anything so entrancing. I couldn’t explain what I was feeling, but it was colossal. I watched him sleep for a long time.

As Adam tells it, he arrived on my kibbutz a bundle of nerves, and realized that he had no idea how to find me. He asked around until he was directed to my room, and let himself in. There wasn’t much else in the room besides the bed, and so he settled himself down for a bit of a rest while he waited. I find paraphrasing him way too embarrassing, so I’ll let Adam speak for himself here: “I got into your bed, and suddenly, my whole body seemed to be crackling with electricity. I could smell you in the sheets and the pillow. I closed my eyes to breathe you in and soon, exhaustion overcame me. The next thing I knew, you were waking me up, all cool skin and wet hair and sparkling eyes. I had never seen a more beautiful sight in my life.”

It was in that moment that we fell in love.

Adam blew off all of his group activities to spend every possible moment with me. I’d get up at four-thirty in the morning to go out to the fields, make it back by eleven a.m., and the rest of the day and evening was ours. We lost all track of time when we were together.

I remember so clearly the day that Adam’s
group was leaving to go back to England. We had already kissed goodbye a thousand times, the bus had been boarded and was lumbering away down the dirt road while I wept and waved. When the bus stopped at the kibbutz gate to wait for someone to come out to open it, Adam threw open the emergency window at the back of the bus, climbed out, and ran back up the road to steal another kiss.

(Sometimes I amuse myself imagining how STM would have done it. I envision him leaping out of the back of the bus, sauntering over, looking me dead in the eyes and declaring (as he has in the dead of night), “Kissing’s good for your health. So pucker up, baby, I’m gonna make you live past a hundred!” Not quite the stuff of a great romance.)

Adam and I soon found ourselves back in our respective countries, trying to navigate a relationship from opposite sides of the ocean. Remember, this was before the Internet; there was no e-mailing, IM’ing, text messaging, video conferencing. Transatlantic phone calls cost a fortune, especially for a couple of nineteen-year-olds. But it was also before the death of the written letter, and, even better, audio cassettes.

Yeah, remember those? Adam and I raised the art of the mixtape to new heights: our foremost form of communication, we mailed back and forth recordings of us talking, intermixed with music. I so clearly remember those desperate trips to the mailbox numerous times a day, hoping to hear from him, and then the exultation of opening a package and sliding the cassette into the stereo. Accustomed as most of us are now to anytime, anywhere communication, it’s not often that we have the opportunity to experience that bittersweet, agonizing anticipation. Even back then, Adam was so emotionally expressive, so clearheaded in his feelings. I would listen to his tapes hundreds of times, until I had every word, every breath memorized.

I was prepared to do anything to be with Adam, even wait. But for him, it was too hard. As he explains, “I was crazy about you, the feelings were overwhelming, unlike anything I had ever experienced. But at nineteen, I couldn’t bear the pain of being separated from you, of having those yearnings continually unfulfilled. I dealt with my emotions by burying them, until I could
leave you behind. I buried a huge part of myself in the process.” After a few months, we parted very painfully.

My heart was broken. A part of me harboured the hope that Adam would find his way back to me. Meanwhile, I dated my guts out, looking for someone to fill the void he’d left behind. But no one that I met could measure up to my memory of him. After two full years of anguished pining, I finally moved on and committed to a life without him.

Of course, being the master of timing that he is, it is precisely around that time that Adam came to his senses, pulled himself together, and decided that he had made a terrible mistake—that we belonged together. He began calling and writing, trying to woo me back. But for me, having worked so hard to get over him, it was too late. My heart was closed to him.

And thus, it was Adam’s turn to hope and pine. For months, he waited every day for the phone to ring. And then, finally, he went on with his life as well.

TOP TEN

STM Pick-up Lines

10
“Kiss me. Tastes good, doesn’t it. Why don’t you go back and have a second helping? Be greedy.”

9
“Keep close to me. My love is infectious, and there’s no cure.”

8
“Of course I know where your eyes are. I just like staring at your tits.”

7
“Let’s swap saliva. I know, love is messy.”

6
“You’re in the crosshairs of my love. And my aim is true. Bitch.”

5
“Well, don’t YOU look like the icing on a fuck cake.”

4
“Nothing’s invisible to my love radar. I’m picking you up loud and clear.”

3
“Your three steps to happiness: Sex, Food, Me.”

2
“Sure you can have my phone number. It’s like having a direct line to God. But better. Because I answer.”

1
“Rub my tummy, bitch.”

2007, New York City. Twelve years had passed since we had last spoken, fifteen since we had seen each other. I had long ago moved on with my life, and had a number of serious relationships, none of which were quite right. I had thought of Adam occasionally, but only as a distant element of my past. And then, one day—on a momentary whim—I did what millions of ex-girlfriends have done the world over: plugged his name into Facebook. And there he was! Swiftly, without too much thought or analysis, I dropped him a friendly e-mail.

Adam’s response was immediate and enthusiastic, and we charged into catch-up mode. He had gotten married (Oh.); he had gotten divorced (Oh?); he had two children (Ohhh. Well …). We graduated swiftly from e-mail to IM, to phone, to Skype. We spent hours each night talking on video, without any acknowledgment that anything romantic was going on. The official unspoken line: “Oh, this is normal, we are just old friends who happen to spend FOUR HOURS every night Skyping. Nope, nothing to see here.” What a feat of mutual denial it took to pull THAT off.

One day, I suggested that we needed to get together for cup of coffee. Just so we could, y’know, settle the past and put it behind us. He agreed. So he did what any sane, totally-just-friends person would do under the circumstances: purchased a plane ticket, London to New York. The most expensive damn cup of coffee in the history of the beverage.

It was midnight, December first when I arrived at the airport to pick up Adam. Yeah, let’s review that. He’s coming for a CUP OF COFFEE, we’ve never acknowledged that there’s this little matter of WHERE HE’S GOING TO SLEEP and his flight gets in at MIDNIGHT. So there I was, waiting for my totally platonic friend from London to drop in for a nice cup of coffee. The nerves were killing me.

Of course, Adam got held up in customs. It seems his insane-hyena-on-ecstasy grin caught the eye of the officers who probably thought he was high or crazy or both. They pulled him aside and started grilling him as to the nature of his trip, in response to which he told them our entire love story thus far. Adam must have successfully
appealed to their romantic sensibilities, since those customs officials did eventually send him out to the airport lounge where I was waiting for him.