Wanna Stay the Night?

One of the coolest things, I think, about being married (besides that AT&T wireless Family Plan and conjugal visits in prison) is that every night is a sleepover with your best friend.

If you happen to be married to yours, that is.

I try not to forget how lucky I am to be married to my best friend, and to know that. I call her "Buddy" and "Partner" as often as I call her "Wifey-doo" because, to me, she is just as much a partner and a buddy as she is a wife. And I get to have sleepovers with her all the fricking time.

When we're particularly wired at night and we complain that we can't fall asleep, we announce, "Slumbie Partie!" and we stay up until we're completely batty, joking around with each other in bed, saying stupid shit that wouldn't be funny if the sun were out, and generally being gay. Good old sleepovers.

I miss sleepovers.

Remember your sleepovers? They were probably awesome. Mine were. Well, the ones I went to were. I only had one (count 'em, ONE) genuine sleepover "party" at my house where there was more than just me and one other person. We slept in the basement, which, looking back on it, I cannot believe my mother permitted, as the basement in my parents' house is basically unfinished, with shuffle-board embedded in the floor tile. Sleepovers with just one friend were more frequent, but still sporadic and marginally successful.

Sleepovers at friends' houses were better. Finished basements, relaxed rules and regs, lots of food of dubious nutritional value, attractive mothers, enormous televisions, and CINEMAX.

Can you say, "First Porn Ever"? I can.

I remember one sleepover where my friend's older brother recounted the story of how he got arrested for attempting to steal condoms at a local Rite-Aid because he was too chickenshit to bring them up to the counter to pay for them. That fucking moron is a doctor now.

At another sleepover, another friend of ours confessed that he got an erection while his elderly male physician was giving him the old turn-your-head-and-cough hernia test.

"Ooops," my friend said the doctor remarked, "it happens!"

Sidebar: "Ooops, it happens!" is exactly what a urologist told me, many years later after removing his gloved hand from my anus during a check of my pancreas when some poodie came out. If there was a gun anywhere in that zipcode, I would have found it and shot myself.

I can remember another sleepover where I went upstairs to the kitchen to get a glass of water and found my friend's younger sister, who must have been around seven years old at the time, seated at the kitchen counter on a stool consuming sour cream, right out of the container, with a gigantic wooden spoon. I almost threw up on her head. I mean, sour cream at two o'clock in the morning?

Ooops, it happens!

Sometimes, I want to have sleepovers again-- not just with my wife, with other people. And I'm not talking about orgies or cheating. I just mean staying up all night with people-- getting giddy and weird and very inappropriate and baring your soul and knowing things about others they'd never tell you with the lights on, talking about who was hot in high school, sharing memories and never-known facts or stories. I love stories-- especially at night. Not campfire stories, or war stories-- just stories. That's probably why I love folk ballads so much-- because they're just stories, with a couple innocuous chords.

I think, when foreign leaders visit the White House, they should be offered a sleepover with the President. Can you imagine Hu Jintao, on the floor of the Lincoln Bedroom, in a polyester sleeping bag, swapping stories with Obama at 3:30 in the morning in the whispering darkness?

God. How awesome would that be?

I wish I'd had more sleepovers as a kid. It's something you never know you're going to miss until it's gone. But thank God I have my buddy to get silly with beneath flannel, made safe and sound by the warmth of the dogs.