Joel Lovell
Appearances
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
I've been told that the insomnia I've struggled with on and off for most of my life comes from drinking too much caffeine, or eating too much sugar, or sleeping on a bed that's too soft, or too hard, or too flat. That I don't exercise enough, or that I exercise too much, or that I exercise the right amount but at the wrong time of day.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
Or that it's the result of watching TV or using a computer right before I go to bed. That wasn't that when everyone pokes around on the computer or watches TV. I've also been told that I should have more sex, which was good to hear, but then I was told I should have less. What my insomnia is really about is being afraid.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
I don't mean being afraid of something happening to my daughters or to my wife or to my job or whatever other adult fears. I mean it's about being afraid when I was a kid, specifically when I was 11 years old, the year I trained myself not to sleep. It wasn't that hard. I had all the normal childhood fears to draw on. Pops Ferrara, for instance.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
He was on my peewee football team, a fifth grader just like me, though he was the kind of fifth grader who could get the nickname Pops. He was squat and bow-legged and crazily muscular, and he had a raspy voice that was indistinguishable from the voice of his father, who was also called Pops.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
Once in practice, I reached out to slap hands with Pops the Younger, and he took hold of my wrist and turned my hand palm up and hawked a huge loogie into the center of it. He scared the crap out of me. It wasn't just pops, though. I was afraid of the Ponick twins, with their fantastic breasts, and the way they sat on the jungle gym smoking their parents' cigarettes.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
I was afraid of not doing perfectly in school, and then afraid of being the kid who did perfectly in school. I was afraid of hobos. This isn't a joke. We lived on a dead-end street next to a railroad track, and one night my father woke up and chased two of them out of our house.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
I was afraid of my father having a heart attack because his father had died of a heart attack when he was a kid and had been buried in a cemetery across the street from his house. And I was afraid that when my father died of his heart attack, it would be on a night when my older brother didn't come home until very late, which was happening more and more.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
He was 17 years old, a senior in high school, and something bad had come undone in him. He'd started going out each night and coming home at midnight and then sometimes at 2 or 3 in the morning, wild-eyed and belligerent, saying weird stuff that we attributed to his being drunk or high, but that much later we realized were the first signs of his schizophrenia.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
My father would sit in the fake leather recliner in our living room, in his boxer shorts and t-shirt, waiting for my brother to come home. And the moment my brother opened the door, the questions and shouting and occasional furniture-toppling fistfight would erupt. I stayed up those nights and watched out my window, waiting for my brother to suddenly appear beneath a street lamp on our block.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
One night he stopped there and did an impromptu martial arts kata, punching and kicking the air in front of him for nearly half an hour in the middle of the circle of white light. As soon as I saw him, I'd get out of bed and go into the living room, hoping that my presence there would keep things from escalating, which occasionally it did. And so I taught myself not to go to sleep.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
It was mostly just a matter of queuing up the highlight reel of anxiety and letting the images flicker away inside my head. Pops Ferrara pinning me to the ground and spitting in my face. Or the hobos who at that very moment were no doubt sitting on the tracks above our house waiting for the lights to go out.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
Or my dad's weak heart and what his face would look like when it started to clench inside his chest. I dialed up all the imaginary drama inside my head, which kept me awake, which then allowed me to dial down the very real drama that existed each night inside our house. And it worked. It worked so well, in fact, that almost immediately, there were consequences.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
By training myself to fear sleep, it became my default mode. I set myself up for a lifetime of late-night distress, unproductive self-probing, and troubling discoveries I'd never have made if I hadn't been awake in the middle of the night. The first and maybe the biggest came at the end of our peewee football season in the fall of 1977.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
We'd played all the local teams and won all our games, and so we were selected to play in a peewee-sanctioned turkey bowl in Seaford, Long Island, seven hours away. When our coach gave us the news, all the kids on my team raised their helmets in the air and hooted like they'd seen real players do on TV. What I thought was, oh, Jesus, another two weeks of dodging Pops Ferrara, great.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
It was worse than that, though. We weren't going to bunk together in motel rooms, which would have been bad enough. We were going to stay with the families of players on the opposing team.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
As you might imagine, I was a kid who dreaded sleeping over at anyone's house, much less a stranger's, in part because of garden variety anxiety, and in part because I worried about what might happen in my own house if I wasn't there. I tried every excuse to get out of it, but nothing worked.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
And so when the time arrived, I ate breakfast in silence as my mother packed my lunch, then rode with my father to the parking lot outside Perkins Pancake House, where I boarded our bus and sat as far away from Pops as possible. 300 or so miles later, we arrived at another parking lot, and car after car pulled up and took my teammates away. Eventually, the family I'd be staying with arrived.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
A big, square-headed man with his two sons, smaller versions of him, one a few years older than I was and the other my age. They sat silently on either side of me in the back seat of their station wagon as their father talked about football all the way back to their home. Their mother greeted us on their front lawn.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
Her face was sweet and chubby, and she wore a fighting Irish baseball cap over her brillowy hair. She put her arm around my shoulders as she led me into their house. It was dark in there, all heavy furniture and curtains, and there was Notre Dame paraphernalia all over the place. A Notre Dame blanket and throw pillow on the sofa. A Notre Dame latch hook rug on the dark-paneled family room wall.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
Notre Dame posters all over the bedroom that the brother shared. The kid my age, the one I'd be playing the next day, he barely talked to me, and his older brother spoke only when he wanted to mock the two of us.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
We sat in their TV room and watched a college football game while the father, who was also an assistant coach of his son's team, unleashed an endless commentary about blocking and short pass routes and the wishbone offense. Before dinner, I stared into my plate as they said grace. We had pot roast and potatoes, which my mother cooked all the time, but this didn't taste like hers.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
Even their ice cubes had a weird smell to them. and after dessert and more endless football talk, we played Atari, which the mother told the two brothers to include me in. She must have sensed my discomfort, because before bed she looked into my eyes and said that if there was anything I wanted, they were just down the hall, that it was no bother to wake them if I needed to.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag between the two brothers' beds. They had NFL bedspreads and a Pittsburgh Steelers poster on the ceiling overhead. We talked for a few minutes about the game the next day, and the older brother went on about how my team was going to slaughter his brothers, which was kind of him. And then before long, we stopped talking and they both drifted off to sleep.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
I don't know how much time passed. In my memory, it's hours, though that can't really be the case. I started thinking of home, wondering if my parents were awake and if my brother was still out. And then I started wondering if the mother here in this house would check on us. When it was clear she wasn't going to, I got up and went to the bathroom and hoped that she'd hear me in there.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
I turned on the bathroom light and looked in the mirror, flushed the toilet and let the water run for a while. I didn't know what I'd say to her, but I just wanted her to come out and comfort me in some way, maybe give me something to drink or some more pie, or just talk to me for a while about my parents or school or the wishbone offense for all I cared.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
I stepped back into the hallway and stood there in my pajamas, listening to the house. The parents were still awake in their room. A light was on. And so I walked to their door and knocked on it, thinking I'd apologize and then ask for a glass of water. I nudged the door open, and there was the mother on her bed, and behind her the father, red-faced and naked.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
I had no idea what I was seeing, just that I shouldn't be. Her head was bent toward the sheets, and she never lifted it. He looked right at me. He was pale and fat, and there was a scar that ran vertically from his navel. Neither of us said a thing. I closed the door and hurried back to the boys' bedroom and waited for something to happen, but nothing did.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
The next morning, the mother would make pancakes and bacon, and the father would come in from outdoors and tussle my hair and say it was a cold day for a football game. Neither of them would hint it would happen in the bedroom. That was all hours away, though.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
I lay there for a while, listening to the sound of the brothers breathing on either side of me, simultaneously trying to block out and then bring into sharper focus what I had just seen, to make sense of what it all meant. I was 11 years old. My brother, who I was closer to than anyone in the world, was turning into someone I no longer knew.
This American Life
361: Fear of Sleep
I was lying on a floor in the house of complete strangers, and I'd just opened the door on a large pale man having sex with his sweet matronly wife, the closest thing to my mother for 300 miles. You just have no idea what's going on at any moment, in any family, in any house. Pretty much everything in life is an absolute friggin' mystery. There was still a lot of night ahead of me