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This writing was accepted for publication in the 108 page perfect-bound ISSN# / ISBN# issue/book... “the Breaking” Down in the Dirt (v134) (the January/February 2016 Issue) You can also order this 6"x9" issue as a paperback book:

Order this writing in the book A Stormy Beginning the Down in the Dirt Jan. - June 2016 collection book		get the 318 page Jan. - June 2016 Down in the Dirt issue anthology 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

The Time I Took to Bed

Christopher Godwin

    I heard Brian Wilson didn’t get out of bed for close to three years after the drugs and lack of hits wrecked him. Three years was long too long for me, but last year I didn’t get out of bed for 19 days. It was June 11^th when I pulled the covers up over my chin, and unlike Brian, I really didn’t get out of bed much at all. That’s the thing about that Brian Wilson story nobody knows. There really wasn’t anybody else there so he had to feed himself and probably wash his bathrobe once in a while. I had my wife to do all of that stuff for me, so I really only had to get up to use the bathroom and shower.
    The truth is that I’m still not sure what made me decide to stay in bed that long. I didn’t really have any clients to cook for, but I could have made some phone calls and probably wrangled some parties. Instead I turned my ringer off and told clients I had a full schedule once my wife left for work, and that I would call them in July. I should have been scheduling 4^th of July events but I didn’t care about the money. I just wanted to be in bed under the blankets watching whatever program was on TV.
    That TV stayed on around the clock. Once in a while my wife would turn it off and I would let her fall asleep before I turned it back on. Mostly it stayed on one of the big seven networks that showed a lot of sitcoms and a few late night shows. I picked that channel because they never had dead air or infomercials. Late night TV transitioned into morning shows where I could learn about new techniques for chopping vegetables from middle-aged private chefs who broke through with a book of salad recipes or something. That or why more women are having affairs than men these days. Probably because men were becoming lazier and more apathetic is what I guessed before falling asleep a few minutes later.
    My wife tried to cook healthy food and food that I like to eat while I was in bed for the first few days. The third full day I was in bed she made me NY strip steak from the fancy butcher shop and used the recipe for her grandmother’s delicious bacon-filled potato salad. I think she even made the mayonnaise herself. She brought up a whole bottle of pinot noir and a cold mineral water. I ate the food and talked to her a little bit about what I’d seen on TV that afternoon. Except for the glass she had I drank most of the bottle of wine by myself. I could tell she thought I might get out of bed or suggest we go out or something, but I just asked her if she would get in bed with me. She did, and eventually she fell asleep, but I could tell that she didn’t get the response she wanted because she didn’t wake me up before leaving for work the next morning.
    The first few days felt pretty novel. I read a lot that I’d been meaning to read; literary magazines, world newspapers that were stacked up in the office, short stories I hadn’t gotten around to rereading in a few months and plenty of novels and history books. Before I got in bed that first day I moved them and stacked them on top of, beneath and all around the night table. I put some of the newspapers and magazines under the bed so I could just reach down and pull one out. It didn’t matter which one I grabbed and I knew it wouldn’t matter when I got around to reading them, if I ever got around to reading them.
    Most of the time I didn’t eat during the day, or at least not the middle part of the day. My wife brought me some of whatever she was having for breakfast, usually oatmeal or cold cereal with chunks of fruit in it and coffee. On the days she felt bad for me she would try a little harder to make me happy by preparing pancakes or French toast and loose leaf green tea, which she knows I prefer over coffee, even though that’s what she makes most days and I drink it anyway.
    I never ate lunch because that would have meant getting out of bed and going downstairs. Obviously I did get out of bed to use the bathroom, but walking down the stairs would have been a serious violation of the rules that I set up. So I didn’t eat lunch until I asked my wife to pick up a case of a candy bar that was being advertised on TV. She left it on a stack of magazines piling up on the floor and I would grab one whenever I was hungry during the day. I tried to be considerate by throwing away the wrappers when I got up to go to the bathroom to use the toilet or refill my glass of water.
    My wife always brought dinner, but since she wasn’t a big eater I found myself having a couple of candy bars after. Most of the time my wife only had soup or salad, and while it can be done, eating a bowl of hot clam chowder or minestrone soup when you’ve been lounging in bed all day, curled up in the fetal position reading back issues of the New Yorker, just doesn’t sound appealing. At least it didn’t to me, even if I don’t really know why not.
    I started to feel like I had an extra roll of fat around my belly around the 15^th day. It was probably from all of the candy bars. Until that roll of fat appeared beneath one of my books I hadn’t bothered to check the nutrition information. 420 calories in one-half candy bar! I’d been eating two of them for lunch each day. I had to do the math in my head to realize I’d been eating 1,680 calories only for lunch. No wonder I was gaining weight, not to mention the pancakes and clam chowder.
    I’ll admit that being in bed all the time did start to get a bit uncomfortable by June 25^th, but at that point I was committed until the end of the month. The worst part wasn’t being in a prone position all the time or not being able to take a walk down the street to the market. It wasn’t even the lack of basic human contact that you get when you actually go to the gas station to buy a candy bar instead of having your wife buy them by the dozen. The worst part was not being able to feel the sun on my face or the wind pass through my hair.
    Five days before the end of the month I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to devise some sort of plan to get out of the house or do something. As I turned from my stomach onto my back I caught a sliver of golden sunlight coming in through the curtains. The balcony! Our bedroom had a small balcony big enough for two chairs, a small table and a couple of potted plants. There were no chairs on ours because we never went out there, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t get some sun that way, and since it was actually connected to the bedroom it wouldn’t really be breaking the rules.
    I started slow and pulled the screen covering the glass door up letting the sun shine on my face. It was a glorious feeling. I sat there on the carpet just enjoying the sun through the glass like a cat bathing in the heat. After 10 minutes or so I couldn’t wait any longer. I couldn’t be sure, but it felt like maybe 85-degrees outside – much warmer than the house, which we kept around 70-degrees all the time. I sat there on the balcony, right on the cool, dirty tile watching the trees blow in the breeze. There was an orange tree shedding fruit onto the green grass and a lemon tree next to it with branches also starting to get heavy and bowed. It was my job to pick the fruit and bring it inside. In the summer I would take the fruit to the neighbors who don’t have trees because there was so much. Sometimes we would get small jars of preserves or pickled fruit rind back in return.
    As I looked at the rotting fruit beneath the trees a bird flew through my line of sight and sat on a telephone wire. A black, uninteresting crow, the bird just sat there preening his feathers and rolling his head from side to side. The bird didn’t make a sound until he flew off, flapping his wings hard, turning left and banking right around Dr. Lowry’s house and then out of sight. I looked for more birds but there were none.
    When I got back in bed the TV was playing a story about a local high school football team with a quarterback that had been accused of raping two different cheerleaders. It wasn’t my high school, but I knew a lot of people that went there, and most of them went to good colleges and turned out to be doctors, lawyers, architects, civil servants or something to be proud of. The story was going to shock a lot of people and I’m sure it wasn’t the last I’d be hearing of it over the next four days in bed. At least I had that to look forward to.

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