That Was The Worst Sleepover Ever!

Keith left the room to grab a spare pillow from the hall closet and I took the opportunity to push aside piles of CDs haphazardly strewn about the carpet and piles of hand-drawn recreations of dungeons from assorted RPGs to clear a spot for myself on the floor. He came back and threw a pillow and blanket toward me and out of instinct I ducked to one side, allowing them to slump against the wall behind me. It wasn't so much that I was scared of being hit by light, loose fabric as it was my inherent fear of coming into contact with substances which may bore holes through my skin upon impact. I reasoned that since the paint had yet to bubble and melt, that at the very least, I wouldn't have to worry about any long-term scarring. I'd almost settled myself in for the night when I caught a closer glimpse of the pillow.

The first thing I'd noticed was that there was no outer pillowcase and hadn't been one for quite some time. The inner lining was yellowed over and just riddled with indiscernible stains which ranged from beige to dark brown. The pillow itself was paper-thin in places, as the stuffing had been matted and torn apart. No amount of fluffing provided a consistent surface upon which to rest my head, assuming I'd even dare to in the first place. The blanket, while not quite so outwardly revolting, wasn't much better. Like, if a band of crafty Europeans had presented a bundle of these to whichever group of people indigenous to the region they'd been looking to conquer, they'd have been met with a blank stare and an "are you fucking serious?" I knew I had a choice to make and none of the options seemed particularly desirable.

1: I could use the pillow and blanket, therein subjecting my skin to direct contact with whichever horrors had managed to accrue onto their surfaces over the years.
2: I could use the sweatshirt I'd been wearing as a pillow, therein subjecting my body to his room's desert-like climate shift from dry, arid heat to a bitingly cold midnight chill.
3: I could keep the sweatshirt on as a preemptive measure against the cold and awkwardly position my arm between the carpet and my head, ensuring that I'd wake up in the morning with my forearm spot welded to the side of my face by a night's worth of drool.

I determined that risking nerve damage and thousands of dollars worth of physical therapy later in life outweighed the dangers of subjecting my body to any number of diseases yet to be cured by modern medicine and in some cases, had yet to be documented. Though in itself, sleeping on a carpet with a bone and skin pillow proved itself to be no easy task, I was forced to contend with the din of the television, which was apparently some sort of top-secret experimental flash grenade.

Keith wasn't tired so he stayed up to play Sega while I settled in to go to sleep. It was his house so I really couldn't object, and besides, he was polite enough to turn down the volume. And while I did appreciate the sentiment, I'd almost wished he wouldn't have because while could have easily fallen asleep to synthetic noises designed for auditory pleasure, without that buffer of sound I was greeted by a collective of noises which when taken individually wouldn't have been so bad, but as a collective forged an orchestra of the most annoying sounds known to man.

I'd just like to note that if this were communist China and his TV were a second-born handicapped baby, it would've been taken out to a rice paddy and drowned years ago. It was an old enough model so that it still had a UHF dial and every so often the horizontal tracking would throw itself out of alignment. I guess the tracking knob had broken, because whenever this would happen I'd be jerked out of the most uneasy sleep known to man by the pounding of his fist against the unit's frame combined with muffled swearing directed toward the TV itself as if it'd made a conscious decision to not work after years of neglect and misuse.

The fact that my sense of hearing had taken on almost superhuman levels of awareness wasn't helping matters either. Not only could I hear the grease of his thumb as it slid across the buttons and the strained cracking with each forceful depression, but I swear to God I could hear six weeks into the past as he'd attempted to awkwardly shift a can of soda from one hand to the other while refusing to pause whichever game he'd been playing, serving as a caramel-colored catalyst for this current bout of sticky resistance. I could hear the air cut through his nose hairs with each inhalation and could also hear the atomic restructuring of oxygen into carbon dioxide. I could hear Keith as he cursed and muttered at the game under his breath, which was puzzling to me since on the scale of complexity, RPGs fall somewhere in between those toys you find in a doctor's waiting room where you slide a column of colored wooden beads along a twisting plastic track and the game babies play in which they stack plastic rings of a descending size onto a center column.

Annoying though all of this may have been, I could've tolerated it if it weren't for the fact that I could also hear the television. Not noises coming from the game mind you, but the television itself. Now, I understand HOW TVs work and that they're primarily a visual medium, The swelling of the buzz corresponded with the intensity of the blinding white light he'd been staring directly into for the better part of an hour. It sounded almost like a couple of teenaged pubescent bees whining about how unfair it was that their parents wouldn't let them attend that weekend's GWAR show. I could hear the cathode ray tube pleading to be put out of its misery as Keith continued to progress in the blizzard simulation, ascension to Heaven or whatever it was he'd been playing.

By the grace of God, Keith decided to call it a night at around 12:30 and as I fell asleep to his mattress straining with every toss and turn I consoled myself with the knowledge that this whole terrible ordeal would be over soon. Oh how wrong I was.

To be continued.