Charlie Huston - Sleepless

7/9/10

ALMOST MIDNIGHT.

I was thinking about how Beenie told me about the Craigslist personals. The new category that appeared in late ’08. Sleepless-related. Mostly about treatment.

Has anyone tried? Someone told me. Is it true that? Twelve hour yoga to replace sleep. SLP acupuncture. SLP is mental not physical! SLP is an environmental allergy, stop using chemical, go organic!

Sales classifieds that I printed:

Selling one king size bed-Hardly used. $100.00 or swap for a tank of gas.

4sale, thousands of comic books-These were my husbands. I’m not sure what they are worth, but we don’t have room for them and I’m afraid they are a fire hazard and our area keeps losing services from the DWP and the fire department can’t get pump trucks up our access road. I just want to get rid of them. Bring a truck and as much bottled water as you can carry and you can have them all.

All my worldly possessions-The things I have spent a lifetime acquiring. Everything from my baby blanket to the house I paid off just last year. Fifty-two years worth of material objects. My letters and business papers. My 2007 BMW 6 series. My 56 inch plasma screen. My sectional. A collection of 12 numbered Hockney prints, framed. My Talor Made graphite clubs. My three Armani suits, 44 long jacket, 42/34 pants. My All-Clad pots and pans. My grandmother’s wedding shoes. A really nice mountain bike that I never use. My letterman jacket, lettered in both football and track. My first tooth and a lock of my baby hair. A glass jar with a fistful of sand from a beach in France from my honeymoon. My divorce papers. A penny squashed flat after I put it on a train track. I have no family. I’m giving it all away. But only to someone willing to move into my house and live here with these things and use them. These are my things. These are what I’m leaving. I want them to stay together. Call me and tell me why you should have my things.

Personals:

SLPM 4 SLPF-up late. LOL! Keep me company?

SLPM 4 ANYONE-I’m a virgin, you’re experienced and gentle. Hold me.

SLP 4???-Alone in my apartment, the front door unlocked. I give you the address and tell you that I’ll be in bed with my eyes closed and headphones on. I can’t see you or hear you. How will you send me someplace better? Serious responders only, please. I don’t have time to waste on anyone without the nerve. And, no, this is not a call for help.

SLP 4 DR33M3R-I’ll do anything u want.

Thousands of listings.

I looked around. I tried to find out something that Rose and I hadn’t already learned about SLP. I looked at a forum for family members of sleepless, but I could never post. Mostly I looked at the Dreamer listings. All the people looking to buy or trade for it. I placed a couple ads. The only responses I got that went further than one email were from obvious scammers:

I HAVE RECEIVED YOUR EMAIL AND WILL BE HAPPY TO ACCEPT YOUR OFFER!!! I AM TRAVELING ABROAD AND CANNOT MEET WITH YOU IN PERSON!!! SEND ME YOUR BANK ROUTING AND ACCOUNT NUMBERS AND I WILL ARRANGE A TRANSFER IN THE OFFERED AMOUNT!!! A COURIER WILL DELIVER THE ITEMS!!!

People were often directed to Dreamer and SLP forums where they could get more information. Mostly identity theft scams. A few were legitimate but primarily concerned with counseling, online group therapy. Religious sites, preaching acceptance, conversion, hope, and, most of all, resistance to the temptation of suicide.

Rumors permeated almost all those sites. An insistence that Dreamer was out there, a large supply of it that other sleepless were tapping into. Captain Bartolome said it was “to be expected bullshit.” Of course the sleepless were sharing rumors about a secret supply of Dreamer; what else would you expect? It would have been far stranger if there were no rumors. He said, “Look for the money.” The money, he didn’t need to say, would lead to busts of scale.

But there should be something. Sleepless spend so much time online, there should be something about black market Dreamer. CL is a natural place for dealers to look for customers. But I couldn’t find anything.

At the party Hydo had said something about Dreamer that stuck in my head. Passing a bottle of Jack Daniels around a table, he’d said Dreamer was “on a special wavelength.” He said part of that was literal. He was stoned, but it caught my attention, and I asked Beenie for an introduction. Hydo got more stoned, explained what he meant. Talking about how the RFID tags on the cases and bottles mean there are actual traceable radio signals that tell you where the Dreamer is. “The whole history of each bottle is in the air,” is what he said. Which I already knew, but hadn’t thought of that way. Not that it really helped.

Why isn’t there an audible signal? A visible signal?

There’s always a slang at work in drug deals. On CL people talk about 420 and going skiing and taking a vacation, when what they want is pot, cocaine, or LSD, but that was the kind of stuff you could get from an LAPD training pamphlet. I’d been able to pick up most of the cues I needed for my assignment by listening carefully and parsing what I heard. It was like philosophy. You don’t glean anything useful with a surface reading of Nietzsche; you have to spend some time thinking about an idea like “God is dead” for it to be anything but a knee-jerk catchphrase.

But no trace of Dreamer slang or lingo can be picked up. Nothing that could hit the cops’ radar and start them asking around the way they would if a new tag started showing up on top of old graffiti.

Dreamer has to be out there. Bartolome said the demand was too great and “the money’s too high” for there not to be black market Dreamer. Real DR33M3R.

But if it is there, it is also somehow invisible. Not just down low, but without a trace. And that requires organization: a consciously designed distribution system for the only drug that law enforcement has any real interest in controlling.

Real Dreamer. Actual DR33M3R, in large and reliable quantities. Pills straight from the factories, stolen in the supply chain. Their absence should be known. The individual pills are traceable through the batch and production sequence codes stamped into them. Bottles and boxes, crates and pallets, all have their own RFID tags. Wherever a large amount of Dreamer may have slipped out of the system, someone must be aware of the shortage. Several people must be aware.

Afronzo-New Day DR33M3R being sold on a large scale. Several people within the production and distribution chain have to be involved in this trade in DR33M3R. Someone, somewhere, inside or outside of A-ND designed the system, recruited those involved and is reaping the bulk of the reward.

Hydo said, “On a special wavelength.” Beenie said he thought Hydo knew “the guy.”

I get that far, and it slips apart. Because Hydo is dead. Anything he knew about the “special wavelength” is gone.

Why am I writing this? It looks like paranoia.

Sleep deprivation.

I fell asleep on my way downtown. At least I think I must have. I don’t remember driving here. I remember driving from Bel Air to a bungalow in West Hollywood (754 King). The girl who answered the door was in perfect “Like a Virgin” Madonna drag. Not dressed for a party or anything, just that’s what she wears. That’s what her mom told me. She said her daughter and her daughter’s friends are all into the same stuff she thought sucked when she was their age. She said she was a punk in the eighties, hated Madonna. She said it doesn’t really matter, because her daughter thinks Madonna is just this crazy “old lady that believes in magic and adopts African babies and needs to start acting more her age cuz it’s kind of gross when she dresses up in underwear.” She said her daughter just likes the old music and loves the clothes. She asked if I had kids, and I told her yes. She said, “Wait and see, whatever you thought sucked when you were a teenager, that’ll be what’s cool.” Then she asked how old my kid is and I told her that I have a baby, and she stopped talking about it.