The One ... the Only ... Circus Redickuless

"Fuck you."
"You're so easy David."
In the car, David -- who had grown up in Pittsburgh, where his mom still lived -- had only a few words: "This cannot happen," and, "I haven't seen her in 2 1/2 years. I haven't talked to her in two years."

He leaned his face into his hand and, for 20 miles, sobbed. "Is it funny yet?" Chick-en asked.

"No."
That was, for all purposes, his last word that night.

It was about 2 a.m. Chicken was still driving -- he'd done all the driving. I was tired, but I figured he must have been dead. As we pulled into a gas station to get coffee, I asked him what his sleep patterns were like. He took a lot of naps, he said. The conversation continued up to the coffee maker. "Let's just say I'm blessed with sound sleep," he said.

"You're narcoleptic," I said.
"Yeah," he said.
Back in the car, we talked more about the condition. He didn't want me to use it in this story. He said people had too many prejudices; that they wouldn't understand. "It's all because of that fucking movie," he said.

He was talking about My Own Private Idaho, where the protagonist nods off throughout the movie. "River Phoenix was a good actor," I said.

"Yeah, he's a good actor, except that he wasn't playing a narcoleptic! He was playing someone with cataplexy," Chicken said. He explained that people with cataplexy -- a symptom of narcolepsy -- fall into a paralyzing sleep at any time. Because there are several degrees of the condition, some narcoleptics have more control. Chicken, for instance, would never fall asleep as long as he was doing something: talking, eating, driving, singing along to a tape, working on a car, pulling balloons through his nasal cavity. When he did fall asleep, though, he could hit the REM stage within seconds. His naps could get him through both days and nights.

Chicken uses the extra hours. He performs, he creates, he finds junk to incorporate into whatever he's got going at that particular minute. He has more nervous energy, more time to talk on the phone, more events to go to and people to see than the rest of us. Every few days he crashes for hours.

"You take what's given to you, and you turn it around," he said. "That ties it up into a nice, neat little bow, doesn't it?