I just found this on my hard drive. Don’t remember when I wrote it. Someone was complaining that not enough threads have been started lately. So here’s one.
When I was thirteen I went to a slumber party at my friend Jenna’s house, around the corner from my house. Lisa, another attendee, and I shared a room. In the middle of the night, I woke up and saw a man, next to the bed, undressing, so as to get in bed. I knew that all the men in my family undress completely to sleep, so that did not seem strange to me. Also, I thought it was a dream. “Hmm, interesting dream,” I thought. I am from a big family, where holidays and other special occasions sometimes resulted in close sleeping arrangements. (Admittedly, men did not sleep with girls on these occasions.) Sleepily, I moved over in the big queen- or king-size bed so he could get in too. I smelled alcohol. The Dream started talking to me.
“How old are you? Are you a virgin?”
“Thirteen. Yes,” I said. I turned my back to him.
He started touching my back. “Don’t,” I told the Dream. “OK,” he said.
The Dream kept talking to me, though. Some of what he said was funny. I’d never talked to a drunk guy before. And a few times, he touched my back again.
“Please,” he said.
“No,” I said.
Slowly, beginning to emerge from my nocturnal fog, I started to consider the possibility that he wasn’t a Dream.
“Lisa,” I said. I shook her shoulders. “Lisa!” Lisa opened her eyes and looked at me sleepily. “I think there’s a drunk guy in the bed.” She looked over me to the possible Dream. “Oh, my God. What do you mean, you think there is a drunk guy in the bed? Yeah, there is,” she said.
Confirmed and restated by Lisa, the possibility, the actualness, of a drunk guy in the bed suddenly seemed more serious, more grave. I pushed her out of bed. She landed on the floor. We went to Jenna’s room. My main thoughts were, “This guy is going to be in big trouble,” and “How can we get him out of here? Poor guy.” A charitable sort, I was.
“Jenna! Jenna! Wake up, there’s a drunk guy in our room.”
“Go back to sleep!”
“No, really, there is a drunk guy in our room.”
“I don’t CARE about a drunk guy!” she grumbled, annoyed, and to our surprise, she got up, herded us back into the room, and shut the door. This was confusing. We found out later she thought we meant there was a drunk guy outside, in the street, and we had awakened her so she, too, could watch his antics from the window.
We looked back at the bed.The Dream – now a Reality – was sleeping soundly. We went back to Jenna’s room for another try. But the commotion had awakened Jenna’s mom, by now. She opened her bedroom door just as we were dragging Jenna back to our room to see the guy, the real drunk guy.
“What are you girls doing?!” she demanded. “You are NOT going out to toilet-paper houses. Absolutely NOT! Go back to bed. Now! I’m tired.”
“Linda, there’s a drunk guy in our room.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He came in our room – he’s naked, too. He’s asleep now. I think he just wanted to go to sleep.”
Calmly, she said, “All three of you girls go outside, right now. Sit on the porch. I’m calling the police. Go.”
We watched while three police cars drove up, and at least six grim-faced officers entered the house. It was amazing to me how soon a scene could change from interesting, funny, sleepy, and confusing to IMPORTANT TO ADULTS and DANGEROUS. The Reality came out, handcuffed. I felt really sorry for him, almost like I had betrayed him. I had scooted over to let him in, hadn’t I? We had sort of become friends when he was a Dream.
We gave statements to the police. We reassured them that we hadn’t been abused or touched or traumatized. (Well, I did tell them about the back.) In piecing the events together, the investigators realized that the door had been left unlocked by one of our other girlfriends, Lori, who had had to leave early and couldn’t spend the night. The Reality, drunk out of his mind, had been dropped off by his friends, mistakenly, at the wrong house. In that neighborhood, many of the houses had the exact same floor plan. Jenna’s house was the same as his. He came in – and, in an act that seems to indicate that indeed, he thought he was where he was supposed to be – he locked the front door behind him. He went to what he thought was his room, and there his troubles began. Our story made the newspaper, though we were unnamed because we were minors, and for awhile we were famous at school. I never knew exactly what happened to him. I heard he was a visiting professor from South America and was in danger of deportation. I remember hoping they weren’t too hard on him.
