We were waiting in the room forever, locked into one room all three of us sitting around and waiting. Not one of us could bear to part from the others. Silently, separately, the three of us would fight off the first and all further nudgings of sleep. To sleep, oh to sleep!

J. declared the situation, "My, but aren't we all so very sleepy! And to sleep would be the final mistake, however delicious as it happened."

Headcheese ran through a paroxysm of yawns.

"The thing to do," he continued, "is to drink tremendous amounts of coffee."

We were all sitting on the floor waiting. The room was serviced by the scantiest of furnishings, dominated by an ancient heavy dresser, giving off its monolithic breath of Stonehenge; a plain shaky wooden slat chair decades old and from looks undoubtedly uncomfortable since manufacture; the far corner was graced by a small metal frame cot bare of linens. The furniture were foreign objects we had yet to explore. We remained huddled, planning, lounging around on the floor. From our perspective, the closet door looked particularly menacing.

Bent on waiting, bent from waiting, forced into waiting. We tried to scheme, but found it impossible to decide about what.

"Ladies and gentlemen," J. intoned, "there is one thing that I believe we can concur is a statement of fact: this wait will be the longest wait we have yet encountered, collectively, and I'm certain it will surpass any waiting any of us have ever endured individually.

"It is the type of waiting you begin full dreading the foresight that it will be a waiting unending, forever, for all time; time will invariable become distorted, hallucinogenic, trapped within the walls of the waiting room. The past and future fall pitifully away like dead flies around the windows."

"It's a universal equation: imagine the worst, then add four hours."

"And by then you will have fallen asleep, and everything will be ruined."

After such unanimous agreement, our camaraderie dissipated in the silence of waiting. Headcheese took out a fresh pack of cigarettes, swatted the top with her paw a few times to tamp the tobacco, then viciously, professionally bit it open, ripping and tearing through the cellophane and foil, jerking her head up and free with her canines delicately impaling three cigarettes at the end of the filters. She offered the smokes around to her friends in waiting, teasing them, making them scratch her behind the ears. J. graciously lit hers.

"I think," Fotog offered, "that with a crisis of waiting such as this, the single most important thing for us to do is pool all our cigarettes together. Rationing is the rationale, perhaps by majority vote."

"And I think," Headcheese countered, "that the fullness of your plan is full of shit. I'd venture that you're damn near to being out yourself, and baby, once you're out, you're out. So don't be putting your naked paws on mine until I offer them around. Just because I had the feline intuition to buy a carton on the way over--no way, sad face. This species proves its superiority by having enough cigarettes to last until my maker calls me home or the sun rises again, whichever comes first. And if you think . . . "

"Now, now," J. counseled, "becoming cranky from lack of coffee is unbecoming, won't solve a damn thing and is a poor way to pass the time. We, who are so incredibly sleepy; we must consume coffee, we must drink cup after cup after cup as quickly as possible."

"This isn't so comic."

"Don't you think it's terribly stuffy in here? Muggy, musty, damp and delirious?"

"Possibly."

We all sat panting, rasping hoarse breaths sending smoke in billowing clouds ghosting around our heads on up to the ceiling.

"And a tad warm, too," J. said standing, working his greatcoat from his shoulders, freeing his arms from the cavernous sleeves. His hands disappeared among the folds of material, reappearing as a magician's holding, astonishingly, two white paper sacks the size of suitcases. "Anyone care for some coffee?" he grinned.

Disbelief was the word conquering the room. The presence of divine intervention held sway.

"I have always found," Fotog ventured, "that if you're not too busy sleeping, the next best thing to do is drink coffee continuously. At least for enough stretch of time to lay a solid foundation for the remainders of your carousings. Ohhh, shit. It is essential. If you drink enough coffee, nothing else matters. If you drink enough coffee, you become closer to God."

Headcheese applauded him, rewarding him with another cigarette.

"That is to say, after thank you oh so much so very kindly," Fotog went on, "that with practice you can easily end up at two in the morning, despite all else, you can be sitting there all alone wide awake with your cigarettes in a favored chair. Staring around with nothing much to do, except everything you want to do. Everything you want to do involves much fussing around, noises necessarily loud, but everything you do is silent, the unrequited respect for all these other people spread supine on slabs fast asleep. On the other hand, if you don't have coffee, you are dead."

J. said, "I will answer all questions with the anecdote. While you were off buying your cigarettes, and with you preoccupied by all the compositions-in-passing, focusing, I noticed, on the big-boobéd variety, I dodged into a deli for some coffee-to-go. I hold in my hands twenty-one grecian-adorned wax paper cups, with lids, and enough plastic nibs of whitener, packets of sugar and bundle of little stirrers to go wholesale."

One of us remarked, "If God is not among us, then we know not who is, but unto them we do command our spirits!"

"I'm sorry, I know it's not much, but it should fortify us for the next half hour. I should last us until we foment momentarily against apathy and send out for more ouncefully brown reinforcements."

We drank our way through the coffee like madmen. The cigarette smoke was furious, thick harsh and heavy. With our palms piling up with ashes we chuckled that the ashtray would best be the bottom drawer of the nearby dresser. We pulled it out and in briefly feigned astonishment discovered it to be completely empty. We soon set to filling it up. We waited for our cigarettes to grow elaborately long ashes, which we would carefully set down and deposit extant in the drawer. We held our cigarettes until the tobacco was burned away, an ember was a lie; we'd then put the ashes to bed and swallow the filters like horse pills.

At one point everyone was drinking from at least two cups of coffee while simultaneously tending three or more cigarettes, or vice versa. The smoke hung so opaque in the room it twisted into holograms. The President appeared in the far corner, seated naked on the cot surrounded by all his Cabinet members. He spouted off some shit that was mostly green; you could tilt it for rainbows. You could turn around and get you some different perspectives.

"The President will speak always and only in haiku," Headcheese noted.

"The dreaming state proves its vast superiority over the waking by its innate flexibility--you retain the ability to say, 'This is ridiculous, I refuse to participate in a dream this stupid.'"

"Ah, blesséd mother sleep!"

We were all weeping mightily when the coffee ran out. Cries of "Cruel!" "Unjust!" and "Inhuman! so to speak!" rang ricocheted scattershot through the room. By then we all had enormous quantities of nicotine-propelled caffeine coursing through our veins, encouraging a brave curiosity to explore the entire room. We would pry up every last floorboard in our search for more coffee. We bitterly recognized the futility of attempting to alchemize coffee from the mattress stuffing.

"Well look what we have here," J. announced mutedly from within the closet. We had an electric steam iron, ironing board, and five gallon jugs of distilled water. "The very building blocks of coffee!" Promptly inventing, J. filled the iron from one jug, carried it over and plugged it into an outlet by the cot. He instructed the others to scrape the waxen grounds from the twenty-one cups. "Now we need to set aside the cleanest three for us. Separate those remaining in half, according to how soiled and stained they are. The dirty cups you two shall shred, mixing in with the dregs." J. took the other nine cups, and through the deepest secrets of the origamic arts constructed a most unique triple-drip coffee machine.

With the first of many more cups in our hands, we all sighed and signaled the sign of the coffee bean upon our foreheads. Headcheese resumed her generosity; once the air was suitably murky, J. proposed a toast for grace, "I believe as an irrefutable truth that although this may not be the most delicious cup of coffee, it will prove to be one of the most deeply appreciated."

"Hear! hear!"

"Cheers! Cheers!"

As our moods ascended soaringly, the coffee was flowing continuously down our throats, we wouldn't even stop to bother with gulps. Headcheese took up Fotog's dare and smoked an entire pack of cigarettes at once. Her mouth couldn't accommodate all twenty, so she put a few in each ear, the final one in her anus. Inevitably, the coffee supply soon dwindled. The iron experienced a meltdown, so we poured in the last half-gallon at room temperature. Unless our reckoning was way off, we lost almost an entire gallon to paper-product fatigue. Since we were all developing a second pressing need as well, we did attempt the proverbial two birds/one stone, but that only created a brew too foul to describe. The smoke from the iron seemed to react with the indigenous smoke in such a way that the entire room was plunged into a cloud. We could no longer see one another, even voices bounced away and got lost. We stumbled around blindly in search of each other in a tiny room that had swollen to the size of an exposition hall. After an hour the fog settled to the floor as dry ice, revealing Headcheese curled up on the chair, Fotog slumped on the cot; J. had apparently found the ironing board and opened it up--he was sprawled atop it like a shipwrecked surfer.

J. suddenly exclaimed, "I repeat, God it's stuffy in here. And good Lord, from the looks of it, we're all in grave and mortal danger of falling asleep!"

We all jumped to our feet simultaneously and broke out in song:

"We must throw . . .

"All of the furniture . . .

"Out the window . . . except the dresser, which is too damn heavy to budge and simply won't fit."

The window was centuries painted shut. The cot shattered it frame, glass and all, quickly followed by the iron, ironing board and chair. And paper cup assemblage--of no use to us now, remaining only to mock our great needs and grand desires. We turned to the dresser with one last glance. Headcheese began arguing in earnest for the sacrifice of one drawer. "Obviously it must stay, and well so, since it serves as such a fabulous ashtray. Granted, possibly I could fall asleep on top of it, but one of you would have to pick me up and put me there. I've never been much of a jumper. And to anticipate your nasty Fotog-interruption, I don't sleep in drawers without 100% wool sweaters. But one drawer, trust me, I do have some expertise in these matters, one drawer, we could use for some much needed urination and defecation, and then we could throw it out the window. I don't know about you guys, but when I need to pee--say on a long car trip--I just go straight to sleep. It's a reflex action."

"So that's why the back seat gets so soggy. J., do they make nighttime kitty Pampers?"

"Well, I wouldn't know. But her idea is more appealing to me that flapping it out the window."

"We could always go in the closet."

"Sorry, us allegedly inferior animals refuse to soil our nests."

"I think if we are without coffee for much longer, we shall turn into shrieking two-year-olds, and then we are bound to start taking naps!"

"Except for this two-year-old adult cat."

"Ahem, catnaps."

With that Fotog pulled out the top drawer, set it on the floor, grabbed Headcheese and holding her above the drawer tickled her until she exploded from her hind orifices. J. and Fotog performed their respective duties, then carried the drawer to the window and tossed it out turning cartwheels through the air. J. stayed at the window, huffing in the fresh air while puffing on five cigarettes.

"Why, look what's out here on the ledge! How fortuitous!" he gasped; wheezing and groaning and grunting he returned from his lean out the window turning inside carrying a 25-gallon banquet urn, "Full to the brim, all our prayers answered, with rich steaming coffee!"