Only a guilty man can lay his head down and sleep... (Jason Gideon)

I relished those moments when no one was knocking on my door. When it was quiet, just John Lennon in the background and the white noise of traffic, that was the best. Whether I was lost in a book or watching the watching the world whiz by from my balcony, there was nothing better. I loved lazing around with Nicky on a Sunday afternoon or having dinner with Rider but those people who need to be with people all the time were strange to me. My father once said that was how I differed most from him. He didn't understand my ability to be alone. He could never be alone but I guess he never had. Maybe he was just unfamiliar with it. He had a big family and my mother. People were his life.

I think there was more to our differences than that though. I loved to sleep while it was a foreign concept to him. I liked to ease out of each day with a Zen finish, get a good night of REM sleep, start the next day fresh with an equally Zen start. My father just went hard all the time and slept only when he couldn't maintain consciousness any longer. He lived his life on cat naps. I could never live like that. I was sleeping more and more as time went on. I was so busy and involved with so many exhausting people that by the time I had my dinner digested I started to get sleepy.

Maybe it is strange how easily I slept with a highly combustible meth lab around me because I actually slept better at the apartment than any of the houses. I liked the calm and quiet of the houses but the apartment building was just like my father's house: drugs, rowdy people, parties, more drugs. The apartment still seemed to be my home. The houses just made for a lovely little getaway. They provided me with the mini-vacation I needed to get through the craziness of the week. I didn't have what it took to clear out the houses whenever a search warrant came to one of them so they were clean houses. Aside from an unregistered gun stowed here or there, the houses were drug-free. I had a small scale detox a couple times a week, which helped convince me that I wasn't addicted to anything but power.