Introduction

ㅤㅤㅤㅤI still get nightmares. In fact I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I’m not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤFor a while there I tried every pill imaginable. Anything to curb the fear. Excedrin PMs, Melatonin, L-tryptophan, Valium, Vicodin, quite a few members of the barbital family. A pretty extensive list, frequently mixed, often matched, with shots of bourbon, a few lung rasping bong hits, sometimes even the vaporous confidence-trip of cocaine. None of it helped. I think it’s pretty safe to assume there’s no lab sophisticated enough yet to synthesize the kind of chemicals I need. A Nobel Prize to the one who invents that puppy.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤI’m so tired. Sleep’s been stalking me for too long to remember. Inevitable I suppose. Sadly though, I’m not looking forward to the prospect. I say “sadly” because there was a time when I actually enjoyed sleeping. In fact I slept all the time. That was before my friend Lude woke me up at three in the morning and asked me to come over to his place. Who knows, if I hadn’t heard the phone ring, would everything be different now? I think about that alot.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤActually, Lude had told me about the old man a month or so before that fateful evening. (Is that right? fate? It sure as hell wasn’t -ful. Or was it exactly that?) I’d been in the throes of looking for an apartment after a little difficulty with a landlord who woke up one morning convinced he was Charles de Gaulle. I was so stunned by this announcement that before I could think twice I’d already told him how in my humble estimation he did not at all resemble an airport though the thought of a 757 landing on him was not at all disagreeable. I was promptly evicted. I could have put up a fight but the place was a nuthouse anyway and I was glad to leave. As it turned out Chuckie de Gaulle burnt the place to the ground a week later. Told the police a 757 had crashed into it.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤDuring the following weeks, while I was couching it from Santa Monica to Silverlake looking for an apartment, Lude told me about this old guy who lived in his building. He had a first
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