The Grateful Bed

I was friends with a guy in college named Christian, who slept on a woven mat he'd purchased in Thailand while on vacation with his father. I liked him right away for his oddball traits, like drinking dirty martinis at fraternity parties, occasionally sleeping with dirty girls in his diesel van and smoking copious amounts of weed before our political science game theory class. He wound up with a better grade, so maybe he was onto something.

His study habits notwithstanding, I never understood the mat. It's not that he didn't have the cash to spring for a proper mattress. Even the most impoverished among us had found couches by the curb, flipped the cushions and made damn sure to never pass-out face down. Christian wasn't tall, maybe 5'8" in heels, but his little straw mat was barely big enough for him. What really baffled me was his arrangement with his girlfriend, who visited often from California. What, I wondered, did she do for a bed? Did he own a guest mat?

I was never that spartan, although I had a puny twin-bed until four years ago, when my sister mercifully gave her full mattress to me when I moved into my St. Paul apartment. Actually, I took the mattress without asking, and she reminds me of it nearly every time we're together. She'll be old, toothless and senile and still be talking about it. That, and prunes.

Sarah has a surprisingly comfortable Futon mattress, and it's nearly as wide as my full. I can't imagine why anything bigger would ever be necessary. They always show old, married couples who've upgraded from a bed to a pontoon, with miles of pillows between them. I suppose the greater distance deadens the lonely, loveless sobbing.

I see about as many ads for mattresses as I do for cars: Coils, box springs, memory foam, NASA technology, Amish-built frames, cartoon springs wearing hard-hats, sleep numbers. It's a safe bet that Christian's no longer sleeping on a mat. Age, and a new fiance, has a way of making that austerity less tolerable. I just wonder if he's put it out on the curb yet.