Bed

I slept like crap last night. Couldn’t get comfortable. Couldn’t breathe right. Back hurt all night long.

It’s hard to believe that the follow-up statement to a list of complaints like that is “I’m so happy!”, but it is.

The Iron Bedframe

It started out with the Iron Bedframe. This thing had heavy iron bedrails, and rounded metal head and foot boards with vertical dividers. (The dividers turned the tops of the rails into ideal attachment points for police-style handcuffs, a feature that I would make occasional use of during my association with CJ.) I’m told that the Iron Bedframe was made in the 40s or 50s. Old and well-built.

Of course, by time I came into possession of it, one of the bedrails was slightly bent. No idea how the thing got bent (drunk circus strongman?), but once it did have that slight malformation of shape to it, it became susceptible to further bending.

Enter the fat man. 450 now, up over 600 at my heaviest about five years ago. I’m apparently the kind of thing that can further bend an already structurally compromised heavy iron bedrail.

Mattress Transplant

When I started sleeping on this thing, it had what my friends and I termed the oldest mattress in the world. Because, well, we thought it just might have been. Old, worn, half-dead. And, the more I slept on it, the more sharp metal broken tips of springs poked out of it. By the end, it was covered in duct tape (the pieces of duct tape being used to hold down small thick pads – also made of duct tape – to provide a barrier between the sharp poky metal and my tender, tender flesh.

Oh, and under the mattress, nothing as fancy as a box-spring. No, this sucker had an old-style coil-spring. All metal, no enclosing ‘box’ structure whatsoever.

It served it’s purpose while I had it. I slept on it. I masturbated on it. There were several occasions where I fooled around with CJ on it. (I’m sure that if we’d have been able to actually have sex, I’d have fucked CJ on it.)

But as soon as an opportunity to grab a fairly decent secondhand mattress was presented to me, I grabbed it. Mattress and box-spring, in great shape. Replacing the world’s oldest mattress and the ancient fucking coil-spring.

A Crack in the Night

I had a few years worth of good night’s sleep on the ‘new’ mattress. But then, one night, as I’m laying there half asleep, I hear this weird creaking noise. “Huh,” I think sleepily. “Weird creaking noise. Oh well.”

And then there’s this loud CRACK! and half the mattress and box-spring drop through the bedframe to the floor. “Huh,” I think sleepily. “That’s not good at all.” I try to crawl out of bed, but that’s the point at which the medication I’m on that lets me sleep at night kicks in. I can’t really lift my arms or legs (which makes getting out of bed difficult) and the next thing I know I’m waking up the next morning in my partially collapsed bed.

Turns out that over time, the iron bedrail had continued to bend, until it was holding the bed in place, but not supporting it. Kind of like the braces that hold the board for the karate-chopping fist. Substitute my bed for the board, and my big fat ass for the karate hand, and you’ve got the idea.

The frame of the box-spring had broken in three places along one side.

My brother and I jury-rigged a system that would keep the bed in the frame for the time being, but I realized that the bed’s days were numbered. I just didn’t realize how large the ‘number’ in question was. That loud crack in the night took place years ago.

The Ditch

The surface of my bed developed a ditch. And no matter where I went to sleep, I woke up in that ditch. Apparently a big fat man will roll downhill just like any other round object.

There’s this mattress commercial where a set of ten bowling pins is set up on one half of a bed. Then to illustrate how movement on one side won’t disturb whoever’s sleeping on the other, they drop a bowling ball down onto the empty half of the bed without disturbing the pins.

Yeah, if you were to gently set a bowling ball on one half of my bed, it would immediately roll to the other side. Coming to a rest in the ditch.

People would occasionally tell me to stop bitching about my bed, assuming that I was exaggerating One day my sister was over, and I told her that I wanted her to lay on my bed for five minutes.

She couldn’t do it.

She laid down on the ‘good’ side. I told her, “Uh-uh. The other side, up against the wall. In the ditch.” So, she rolled over into the ditch. Her back started hurting in under a minute at which point she crawled out of the ditch and off my bed.

“How do you sleep on that?!” was her question.

After that, it became the trendy thing for people to do, like looking at my hernia. “Dude, you’ve got to go lay on Zeitgeist’s bed . . .”

Sleeping in the Chair

Building up to Christmas last year, there was something I needed, but could not find. I suspected that it was in a box at the bottom of my closet. (It was.) Putting my hands on it meant emptying my closet out onto my bed. The problem came at bedtime, when the contents of my closet were STILL on my bed. I hadn’t had the energy to put everything back.

So, I said, ‘Fuck it,’ and slept in my chair. It’s (sadly) not a recliner, so I used a small bench (the wrong height) for a footstool, covered up with a couple of throws, and drifted off to sleep.

The next morning I realized that I wasn’t nearly as sore as I typically was after a night sleeping in the bed. When bedtime rolled around again, it occurred to me that I still hadn’t actually fed the contents of the bed back into the closet again. Huh. Oh well, another night in the chair, I guess.

I started sleeping in the chair in mid-to-late November. I never went back to the bed. I’ve been sleeping in a chair for four months to avoid sleeping in that damn bed.

Trickle Down Mattress-omics

So about a month ago, my sister-in-law’s parents bought a new bed. Box-spring, mattress, frame, head- and foot-boards – the works. Once they had made this purchase, they called up their daughter and asked if she and my brother wanted their old bed. And since the bed being offered them was better than the bed they’d currently been sleeping on, they said yes.

The next day my brother calls me, tells me this story, and then asks if I want the bed that he and his wife were currently using once they got their ‘new’ bed moved into the house and set up. I can’t remember exactly how I worded my answer, but I think I may have actually crawled through the phone line and kissed him all over his face. It’s possible.

I didn’t call anyone and offer them my old bed. Honestly, there’s nobody I hate that much. I suppose that if I were more involved in the BDSM community than I am, I’d know some heavy pain players that would have been happy to take it. Sleep on it for a night, and be in serious back pain for a week.

Anyway . . .

Yesterday my ‘new’ bed arrived. My brother and Zorch took my old piece of junk sleeping apparatus out of my bedroom – bent frame and all – and replaced it with an actual honest-to-God flat-surfaced box-spring and mattress on an intact and functional frame. (No fancy extras like a headboard or footboard, but really, what the fuck do I care?)

And so last night, instead of sitting in the chair under a pile of throws come bedtime, I crawled into bed. Into bed. You can’t imagine how good it feels to say ‘into bed’ and not have it tied to the image of the bent iron frame, the broken box-spring, and the legendary ditch.

Of course, after having spent four months sleeping in the chair, that became the default position. How my body registered ‘comfort’ and ‘sleep’. Which means that I slept like crap last night. Couldn’t get comfortable. Couldn’t breathe right. Back hurt all night long.

None of this was unexpected. Which is why I was eager to get the bed set up a couple of weeks prior to KinkFest – better to work through the pain and adjustment of going from sleeping-in-chair to sleeping-in-bed now than actually doing it at the event. I had this image of trying to attend workshops and play parties with a messed up back due to not being used to sleeping in a real bed.

But now the nice flat bed in the hotel room with be just like my nice flat bed at home. (Problem solved.)

I figure a couple more days, and my body will adjust to the new bed, and I’ll start getting good sleep that doesn’t fuck up my body. I can’t wait – I’m so excited!

(Now if I could just lure a woman into my life to serve as a kinky bed partner, I’d have it made.)