“American Bedrooms” by Ryan Ridge

Photography by Mick Davidson

The gods said never start a piece of writing with a character waking up in

bed.

But here I am, half-asleep, narrating from my mattress in NonFiction City.

A bedroom requires a bed, she said.

She, being actress Audrey Meadows, whose American Home featured six

bedrooms, nine baths, and an elevator. They say her American Home was

positively European.

In the bedroom at Monticello, at the foot of Thomas Jefferson’s bed, a

machine he’d invented with forty-eight projecting hands on which he hung his

suits and wigs.

For fourteen years, I lit a fire there.

Said Sally Hemmings re Jefferson’s bedroom fireplace.

In an American Home in Amherst, Mass: Emily Dickinson’s bedroom

window, overlooking the town graveyard.

The ghost of Betsy Ross seen crying at the foot of her bed in her former

American bedroom in Philadelphia.

Lincoln’s ghost, at the window of the White House guest bedroom, gazing

sagely at the Potomac.

Lincoln’s bedroom! And you see that great bed, it looks like a cathedral.

Said Jacqueline Onassis, her first night in the White House.

Jacqueline Onassis, who died thirty-three years later, in the bedroom of a

New York City apartment.

A bedroom is the perfect place to fall apart.

Said Margot Kidder and she wasn’t kidding.

Overheard: slow eaters are fast in the bedroom.

I’m so fast that last night I turned the light switch off in my bedroom and I

was in bed before the room was dark.

Said Muhammad Ali, who owns three American Homes––all with multiple

bedrooms.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: famous bed-wetter.

J Edgar Hoover knew what was happening in many American Bedrooms.

JFK. MLK. RFK.

The likelihood that Michael Jackson slept in a hyperbaric chamber.

The likelihood he also slept with children.

No one has stepped foot in Elvis’s bedroom at Graceland since 1977, the

year he died.

Books in the bedroom: bad Feng Shui.

Televisions in bedrooms: worse.

Bedrooms in basements: bad idea.

Fireplaces in the bedroom: hot!

Above Jefferson’s bed, a skylight.

Beneath James Madison’s: a junk food wrapper.

In Herman Melville’s: his wife and children sleeping.

Moby Dick begins in a bedroom.

So much ends continually, especially in the wild bedrooms of the sea.

Fact: Bedrooms are where virginity goes when it’s lost. (Source: NACSA)

Lyrics on a teenager’s bedroom wall:

The sun shines in the bedroom

When you play

And the raining always starts

When you go away

Rooms require room.

Bedrooms require beds.

What do you call a bedroom without a bed?

The gods also said to never end a story with a character waking up in bed,

even if he’s holding a weapon, wondering WTF.

What about epiphanies in bedrooms?

Okay. Sure.

My epiphany?

I may have just had an epiphany.

Here on my bed in my apartment in NonFiction City.

In the Land of American Homes.

A maybe epiphany.

It was about death.

Aren’t they all?

Jefferson died in his bedroom, broke, his creditors removing the remaining

family within days.

What is the likelihood of dying in your own bed?

What is the likelihood of dying in someone else’s?

American Hospitals. American Homes. American Graveyards.

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Ryan Ridge is the author of the story collection Hunters & Gamblers (Dark Sky Books) and the poetry collection Ox (BatCat Press). He is an associate editor at Juked and teaches writing at the University of California, Irvine. You can find him online @ ryanridge.com