New York City gave me a cure for insomnia, but perhaps only because it also made me an insomniac.  The first months that I lived here, I did not sleep.  I had just moved from a small town in Montana, and I was ready for anything.  The rugged life I knew was sufficient preparation for what was ahead, this I felt in my gut.  To be honest, it was excellent preparation for many of the mean surprises the city has in store, but in no way could have prepared me for the war with my own head.  Not a war in a dramatic sense, because no hard reason could have helped me come to terms with the fact that deep down, I am totally neurotic.  This means, of course, that I belong here, much as this may hurt my credibility in the cowboy poetry circuit.

I had not slept in two months.  Aside from occasional moments of dropping off for a few minutes in the subway, or waiting for a friend in a park, or sometimes while I was giving readings.  It helps to be someone who lives at variance, because you can get away with peculiar behaviors.  The only time I did sleep through a night was when I was visiting an out of town friend at a Manhattan business hotel, where the sounds of the city were far away, and I dreamed of crickets.  And I smelled sage and mesquite.  I had a friend who also worked the poetry circuit, and she had a side business in homeopathy, and she would prescribe my placing small white beads under the tongue.  She also recommended hot baths where I could be away from it all.

The one time I decided to try taking her advice, I found myself lying in a bathtub at 11pm, my head half-submerged so my ears were under water.  I tried to think of an open field, but instead came to realize that I was in a very crowded city, in a very crowded neighborhood, in a very small apartment, in a small room in a small apartment, and at that point I lost my last thread of sanity.  It was at that moment that I realized that homeopathic cures wouldn’t help my condition, because I had just become a New Yorker, and I didn’t want a cure for that.