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.

Come on In

When you're a kid, having weird obsessions is usually charming. When you're an adult, it sometimes lands you in a psych hospital.

My childhood obsessions were as follows:

* Airplane crashes
* News anchors
* Classical music
* Cars from the 1970s
* Multi-line rotary office telephones
* Hypochondria
* Three-piece suits
* CB radios
* Doorknobs

(If you ever get bored and want to write to my parents to ask them why I was not engaged in intensive psychotherapy beginning at age 7, PM me for their mailing address. I think they'd like to hear from you.)

If you're not quite sure how a young boy gets obsessed with doorknobs, well, ladies (and gents?), you've once again come to the right blog. Go, you.

When I was a child, I grew up watching "Fawlty Towers," a brilliant BBC comedy series written by John Cleese and his then-soon-to-be-ex-wife Connie Booth. The show was written and produced in the mid-1970s, and only twelve episodes exist-- almost each and every one is comedic gold. The show takes place in a hotel in Torquay in a hotel that bears the same name as the show. As a child of maybe ten, I knew each line of episode by heart, and my eldest sister used to take great joy in lying in bed while I would recite entire sections of dialogue from "The Germans" or "Basil the Rat" episodes from memory, altering my voice to seamlessly change from one character to the next, and back again.

If you think kids don't notice details, you're crazy. The set of Fawlty Towers was very meticulously designed, and, even though it's supposed to be a not-so-hot hotel, (the front sign with movable letters frequently changed from anything to "Watery Farts" to "Fawlty Twats"), it was still formal, and uptight, and decidedly English. And what's more English than an S-shaped, serpentine door handle.


One day, I announced to my father that we needed to go to the hardware store. Back then, it was called "Channel."

"Why?"

"Because my door needs a new handle," I said confidently. Funny, they say teenagers think they're invincible-- but I was always afraid of approaching my father with some bizarre request as a teenager. However, when I was ten, I thought nothing of it whatsoever.

"What the fuck are you talking about?" he asked, his brow furrowed.

"Just take me to Channel," I said, "and I'll show you."

So my father and I went to Channel, and I pointed to a gold-colored s-shaped door handle, elegant and sweeping to a small curlie-q at the end. It was $27.00.

"Mummy, I love you, but you've got to be fuckin' kidding me. $27.00 for a fucking door handle? No. Don't you want to go to college some day?"

"No," I answered. Little did I realize then that I would be able to publish a book, produce my own plays, and get laid in this magical place. I pouted as my eyes searched hungrily for an acceptable compromise.

"What about this one?" I asked, prepping the puppy eyes. "It's only $13.00."

"Jesus Christ," my father muttered, grabbing the plastic casing encapsulating my new door handle, "let's get the fuck out of here already."

Not too long ago, my wife and my eldest sister and I were sitting together upstairs in my parents' house. This house has been home to generations of my family, beginning with my grandparents, my great-aunt, my mother and her brothers when they were little children, my father, me and my sisters, and now, most of the time, my nephew. The day-to-day residents of the house are my parents and my eldest sister, though she says she's moving out again. Some day. Affectionately disordered folks with my blood have played musical rooms in that house since 1957.

"Did you ever live in this room?" my wife asked me that night when we were all talking in the room now inhabited by my eldest sister.

"Of course he did," my sister said, "look at that fucking door handle."

And there, barely still attached to a chewed-up, run-down, beat up, bare-assed, hollow-core wooden door is a gold-colored swirly, elegant, shining door handle, the clear enigmatic emblem of a house that has had its details ignored, its moldings carelessly painted over, its chimney practically collapsing onto itself, and the same floor in the dining room and kitchen since 1957.

"That handle looks really funny on that door," my wife commented, gazing at it in a haze of humor and disbelief.

"Looks good to me," I said.