November 9 - It's what I do at 2.30 in the morning when I can't sleep

“Okay, Pete in the East Village, you’re on the radio.”

“Yeah hi, Frankie, it’s me again.”

“Pete!” Frankie exclaimed. Pete cringed internally. It was one thing to enjoy talking with Frankie the Football Fan, but another to be greeted by him as an old friend. Frankie was on the radio after hours – midnight to five in the morning, to be exact – and finding his show had been a relief to Pete after years of insomnia spent watching late night infomercials or endlessly clicking through computer solitaire until his doctor informed him he had a mild case of tendonitis.

“Are you doing a lot of typing for work?” Dr. Wilson had asked with concern, then, and Pete had flushed as red as the cartoon drawing of a heart up on the wall, the aorta and ventricles marked with cheerful, bubbly letters. “No, no… not for work,” he stammered.

He never told Dr. Wilson that he was an insomniac, though he wasn’t sure why he was ashamed of the fact. His parents had always been early risers who turned in just past the setting sun and woke before its rays touched the horizon, and as a child, he could hear their snores drifting to his bedroom in a steady stream all night long, an endless ribbon of dreams lasting from when head touched pillow to when alarm rang at dawn. He wasn’t sure, then, where his own propensity for insomnia came from, but Pete had been an insomniac as long as he could remember. He had tried sleeping pills, once, but found they only caused him to sleep-walk, his body drugged into oblivion while his brain continued to tick, so he would wake in the morning to find he had reorganized the furniture in his living room or – once, and the episode that made him shudder and give up sleeping pills for good – cut out a collage from magazines using a butchers knife instead of a normal pair of scissors. He still looked down thankfully to see that all the tips of his fingers were intact.

Without sleeping pills, he had turned to red wine, hearing that the chemical compounds tended to make people drowsy. This tactic required about six glasses before his lids started to grow heavy, though, and Pete was too big a fan of his liver to stick with it for long. A friend offered pot as a solution, but that only made him cough and his tongue feel thick and gave him a splitting headache that kept him up until dawn anyway, so so much for that cure.

Eventually he had just grown resigned to it, so it became not a matter of trying to sleep before five in the morning, but a matter of filling those hours. Late night movies which were inevitably of the cheesy, unwatchable variety, internet porn which had a tendency to grow stale after staring at for three hours and only half-heartedly holding his dick with one hand while thinking, which woman’s tits will turn my brain off enough to sleep tonight?

It made dating, hard, too, since his hours were so different from the woman he wanted to take out. And if a date – thankfully, hopefully – ended up in his bedroom, he had to explain why he was walking around the kitchen at four in the morning instead of holding whoever it was in his bed. Embarrassment more often than not led Pete to avoid dates altogether.

A year ago, he had discovered the late night football talk show on the sports radio network, and Frankie the Football Fan’s reassuring, jocular voice that boomed into his apartment and kept him company while the city (some of It, anyway, this was New York) slept outside his windows.

He didn’t call in for the first time until the third month, but since then he had been a regular.

“Pete from the East Village!” Frankie would greet him like a long-lost high school friend at a reunion, as though From-the-east-village were his last name. “How’s it going tonight, my brother?”

“Well, Frankie, well.” Better for you, he never said out loud.

“And what’s it to be tonight, Pete?”

“Well, Frankie, I just don’t agree with what you were saying about trading the quarterback for our team. Look, the kid’s young, but you gotta give him enough playing time on the field to gain some experience, you know?”

“Give him some time!” Frankie had a tendency to end everything with an exclamation point.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Pete agreed.

“Ok, hold on Pete. We’ve got another caller; let’s see if she agrees. Gabby in the East Village, you’re on the air.”

“Frankie,” said a woman’s voice, deep for a woman. Pete thought it sounded strange for a minute, like there was an echo to it, but then shook his head at his own three a.m. delusions and cocked an ear to listen. “Frankie, first time caller here but I listen to you every night. You’re a life saver for insomnia!”

Frankie chuckled.

“I disagree with your last caller, Frankie. Get the kid out of their now. We’re what, two-and-seven this season so far? Unacceptable. Maybe if it was earlier in the season and there was more room to play around, but the kid has just gotta go. Put our old quarterback back in there. He might be older, but he’s got experience, you hear me?”

“I hear you!” Frankie enthused.

Pete heard her too, and he realized now why it had sounded so strange. He wasn’t hearing through the radio speakers. He was hearing through the plaster-board to the apartment next door. It couldn’t be! He turned down his radio, and crept over to press an ear against his green-painted walls. It took his ear drum a moment to sift through the sounds - the hiss of the radiator heating, the brief, fading siren of an ambulance somewhere six stories below, but then – yes! – there was Frankie’s voice, coming through the wall. Cautiously, Pete rapped his knuckle against the wall. Silence. He rapped again. Still nothing.

Perhaps he was mistaken. Looking around his small living room, Pete sighed and decided his own imagination was trying to provide companions. Best to go back to Frankie’s voice. Only what if…? This time, when he turned on the radio he carried it over to the wall, aimed the speaker next door, and turned up the volume. He played Frankie’s voice for a moment, then when it switched to commercial break, he knocked again. A moment of silence, then an answering, questioning knock. Pete couldn’t help it. He laughed! He heard an echoing laugh on the other side, a woman’s rich timbre.

Rushing to the door, he peered out into the hallway just as 6C next door creaked n its hinges. A woman with curly red ringlets peeked around at him. He remembered passing her once or twice on the stairwell, but had never realized she lived next door.

“Pete from the East Village?” she asked.

“Gabby from the East Village,” he confirmed. She laughed again and came out into the hallway. She wore a pink bathrobe and big fluffy slippers, he noted with amusement.

“You too?” she asked, gesturing a thumb back in her apartment, incorporating in that one gesture everything from Frankie’s voice to insomnia to sleepless hours spent staving off the loneliness.

“I’m telling you, this radio station is a lifesaver,” Pete acknowledged with a guilty shrug. “It’s what I do at 2.30 in the morning when I can’t sleep.” He worried for an instant that this made him sound like a complete loser, but Gabby gave no sign of thinking so, nodding enthusiastically. She was the one wearing bunny slippers, he reminded himself.

“You always up this late?” she asked.

“Always,” he replied.

“It’s a curse.”

“A curse,” he agreed. Gabby looked him up and down, taking in the college co-ed sweat pants on a man obviously into his thirties, the eyes red from lack of sleep, the little edge of pot-belly starting to stick out over the elastic band of his sweats. Pete felt naked for an instant, but whatever Gabby saw, she must have liked because she smiled.

“Well, tell you what, neighbor. Tomorrow night, since we’ll both be up, why don’t we listen together?”

“Sounds like a date,” Pete said.

His apartment felt different when he walked back inside. Frankie’s voice had been silenced; one curtain puffed importantly into the room from a breeze outside for a moment, then fluttered back and was still. Pete thought about making some eggs, but turned without really thinking and lay down on his bed with his two hands cupped under one cheek like he had as a kid. He closed his eyes, just for a moment. He was surprised to find that, when he opened them again, it was morning.