mattress

(Originally posted in the Stratford Star and Fairfield Sun newspapers on May 3, 2012, in my  “Walsh’s Wonderings” column.)

One doesn’t often think of mattresses until lying sleepless in them for hours at a clip. In the well-lit showroom, all of them seem comfortable. That the “memory foam” will suffocate my wife and I in summer, or that the “dual zone” option will leave one of us sleeping in a crater, never enters our minds.

A night in a hotel changes that. We’re thrown into a no-win situation: if we love the bed, we end up hating our own.  When we get back, we’ll run down the laundry list of ways our bed doesn’t stack up, staying up all night adding foam layers or switching pillows. If we don’t like the hotel bed, we’ll be up all night playing with the AC or switching pillows. Only one thing is for certain: regardless of the mattress, we’ll hate those pillows.

Mattress comfort was not a priority in my father’s house. Like heat in the winter or “free time,” comfort took a back seat to utility. A navy man, he spent forty years sleeping on a bed sewn from two twins rather than paying for a king. (His queen did the sewing.) It must have been a nostalgic nod to his years on naval destroyers that led him to purchase the used trampoline bunk beds for his sons. To be fair, they didn’t start out as trampolines. Instead, they started out as threadbare webs of thin wire held together by hundreds of small springs. The only thing that kept them from tattooing their chicken wire design into our backs were the stained mattresses that appeared to have been taken too soon from their mother—they were as thick as a seventh grade mustache.

While completely unacceptable for actual sleep, they turned out to be fantastic trampolines. My parents hated trampolines almost as much as they hated buying king size mattresses. They refused to let us on them after a friend had been paralyzed in their youth. These army surplus bunk beds were perfect replacements, and I took to wearing an old football helmet to soften the blow as I hit the ceiling. Eventually, we stretched the wire netting until the beds became little more than wire hammocks inside the metal frame.

There was an element of danger that went far beyond the obvious risk of the rusted springs finally snapping. My family followed proper prison protocol: as the youngest boy, I was forced to sleep in the top bunk. At the slightest offense, my oldest brother would lie in the bunk below me as I lay sleeping. He would place both feet lightly on the springs of my bed, which sagged down toward him like an old water balloon. The mattress above squeezed through the wire springs like sausage casings, allowing for a solid footing. He would then kick his legs up into the mattress of my bunk, catapulting me a full five feet into the air. Sometimes I slammed into the ceiling, my face crushed against the white stucco and bearing its imprint for hours afterward. Other times I was flung past the bed altogether and landed in a heap on the floor, my Spiderman pajamas doing little to cushion the fall.

“What in the Sam Hill is going on up there?” my dad would roar upon feeling the thud.

“Nothing,” my brother would reply, glaring at me as if it were my fault that I couldn’t find a way to stick the landing. Random attacks such as these triggered insomnia, of course, but there was no “telling on” my bothers or sisters in my house. In my dad’s eyes, we were all guilty of complicity anyway.

And so, many years later, this is where the hotel pillow’s “memory foam” brings me. The so-called mattress upon which I was meant to sleep is a felt-covered slab of granite beneath me. My wife, who refuses to acknowledge its borders, has made the “dual zone” of the bed irrelevant. It’s three o’clock in the morning, and I’m typing this column because I know sleep will not find me here.

Instead, I need to remind myself to ask for a bouncier bed next time I check in. Insomnia is much more fun on a trampoline.