Talk of the Town - Sleeping vs. beeping June 27 2001

Snoozing late on Saturday is a religious experience. Everything True Believers feel — inner peace, a sense of well-being, the sense you're moving toward a bright white light (No, that's death. Sorry.) — are mine when I roll over for an extra hour or three of deep REM sleep.

Rapid Eye Movement is the body's passport to Dreamland, and my travel documents were in order.

Anne Marie DeStefano, whose excuse for not dating me in high school was that she'd be washing her hair every night for the rest of her life, approaches me at a class reunion.

"You were the best thing that ever happened to me," she whispers, her eyes shining. "Even if I did refuse to make eye contact with you for four years."

The scene shifts.

My boss calls me into his office. "Slattery, you're just about the best doggone writer since Mark Twain," he says, lighting me a 20-buck Havana. "Even a 50 percent raise isn't good enough for a literary genius of your caliber. We're doubling your salary, paid in cash so you don't have to declare it. And take the rest of the year off — in Hawaii — at my personal expense."

Next, I'm on the road.

Behind the wheel of a brand-new, bright red Jaguar, tooling down a road devoid of traffic, billboards and kudzu, I stop to watch a county work crew tear up a useless, ugly, nail & mail strip mall. They truck in a layer of topsoil and begin replanting a grove of trees, restoring the land to its original state.

But behind me, there's this constant beeping. There are no other cars in my dream, so I can't figure it out. I try switching back to my generous boss, or Anne Marie (not necessarily in that order), but all I can hear is the beeping.

Then I realize the noise is coming from outside the dream, from outside my house, from something big, loud and almost in

my yard.

A bulldozer, clearing land for a

subdivision.

And every time it backs up, there's that beep-beep-beep.

Saturday, 8 a.m.

At times such as this, I'm glad I don't have a gun in the house. Because there's no question that, in the grand French crime de passion tradition, I would have run out and shot the bulldozer operator dead. With more holes than a slice of Jarlsberg, just to make sure. And left him there, as a warning to the others.

Would I be acquitted?

Americans shoot each other every day for all sorts of trivial reasons. What jury would convict a guy trying to get a little shuteye on the weekend?

But in the rational, full light of day, it's clear that taking a life would be wrong. Besides, I'm in a state that enforces the death penalty with gusto. Also, I failed metal shop back when and would surely flunk license plate-making class on my way to the Death House, which in Georgia has the quaint name of Diagnostic and Classification Prison, seemingly a place where the inmates evaluate your butterfly collection.

So I did what all law-abiding Americans do when flummoxed by disorder. I called the cops.

When I was a kid, the surest sign of a cranky, humorless adult was if they summoned the police.

As middle-age descends on me like a pack of potbellied hyenas, I find myself ringing the gendarmerie more and more: the night idiots across the road held an all-night rave; the time my neighbors' house alarm went off and my spouse thought she saw a burglar, who turned out to be me trying to figure out why the neighbor's alarm went off. Boy, did I have to talk fast that day.

Now I was calling again, an outraged, prematurely awake householder. I asked the police dispatcher if she knew when construction work is allowed to begin on a Saturday morning.

"10 a.m.," came the reply.

"Well they beat the clock by two hours," I snarled.

She promised to send an officer. While waiting for the long arm of the law to make its move, I contemplated the incessant beep-beep-beep backup noise that is the sound track to life in development-wracked America.

What does this sound say about society? Evidently we're so attention-deficit distracted that it's not enough to have a three-ton, bright yellow tractor packing an engine louder than the bleacher section at a Liverpool soccer match. Oh no, we might not notice that sucker. We also have to put a beeper on it.

As time went on, the beeping showed no sign of abating. Even allowing for two Krispy Kreme pit stops along the way, any constable should have been on site by now. So I called back.

My wrath boiled over.

"My rights as a citizen are being infringed!" I bellowed, imagining that this is how V.I. Lenin got started. "I demand to be heard."

"I can't hear you," she replied. "We have a bad connection."

"What do you mean?"

"There's this loud beeping noise."

Glen Slattery is beepin' mad

in Alpharetta.??