The Sadness of Insomnia

I suffer from frequent bouts of insomnia (another trait I share with Groucho, for those of you keeping score) that can be quite debilitating. I rarely, if ever, get the recommended eight hours of sleep. I was raised to be a night owl, which in many ways is depressing considering how I am at my most creative during the morning. My folks were anything but firm when it came to an established bedtime … and I am paying the price for it now in my thirties.

Sometimes the insomnia is brought about by an over-active mind … sure, you’ve been there. Your mind is running a million miles per hour when all you really want to do (or should do) is go to sleep. Sometimes I spend hours replaying the day’s events, sometimes its worry about various and sundry things, sometimes I find myself lost in memories … replaying random moments from my history.

Frequently (at least, over the course of the last several weeks) I have been in bed running through a nearly-forgotten memory. It’s a memory of a time long ago and I can’t help but wonder why these thoughts consume my mind late, late at night. If you had asked me two months ago about this particular set of memories, I don’t know that I could have recalled them.

But for some reason they have weighed heavily on my mind the last few weeks. So, what the heck … I’ll share them with my two or three moderately loyal readers. They are memories of when I became accustomed to being disappointed in others …

It was the summer of 1987 (dear God, was it really that long ago) and I was a rebellious and cocky teenager. I will be using made-up names for all of the other characters in this story … not to protect the innocent, but because I honestly can’t quite remember any of their names. That summer I met Dave (I’m 99% certain that his name did start with a “D”) and Joe … Dave was a few months younger than me, Joe was about to turn 16. The three of us struck up a quick and instant friendship based on nothing other than being fairly intelligent, rebellious kids trying to grow up too damn fast.

For weeks the three of us practically lived together. We spent our days cruising the streets and smoking cigarettes. We spent our nights drinking beer and, if and when it was available, smoking a little pot. We played pool and stole car stereos. We tossed a baseball back and forth and listened to the “album-oriented” rock station. In retrospect, the three of us really hadn’t much of any substance in common … but at the time, we were inseparable.

One night we threw a small party at Dave’s house (if memory serves, his parents were out of town practically the entire summer!) with about a dozen people invited. An attractive young girl (who we’ll call Claire) arrived and took everybody by surprise. You see, none of us really knew her. I knew of her … we had attended the same school since the 7th grade, but had never had a class together. Our relationship was no closer than some friends of my friends were friends with her friends … we were the same age, but knew next-to-nothing about each other.

As the evening progressed, I grew quite fond of her. She was smart, sassy and had a quick and biting tongue. She dropped hilarious insults and was outgoing and a little loud. I found out she had only come because a girlfriend of hers (who we had invited) couldn’t make it. We played cards, drank bourbon and traded jokes and barbs. She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous or anything, but had a cute little body to go with her flashing eyes. For a few hours I was really enjoying this girl … she was perfect … everything I was attracted to (which, I admit, was most everything at the time) and still am attracted to: funny, smart as a whip, confident, hilarious, brash … ah, she was something else.

The night continued and the good-natured insults we traded back and forth became dirtier and dirtier (as will happen between a man and a woman, particularly when bourbon is involved) and by one o’clock in the morning I was smitten … I was going to fall for this girl … there was no doubt. I would have to see Claire again.

Then she dropped the bombshell …

“I’m horny and I wanna f**k. Any and all of you. Except for him.” She was pointing at me! In an instant I became the group leper … a pariah among a group of people who, in a loose sense at least, looked to me as some kind of leader. To the guys, I was a laughing stock. To the girls … well, I was the guy least likely to get laid. In that instant, the dynamic of my friendship with Dave and Joe shifted. I was the “least cool” guy in the room.

It made me sad. Profoundly sad.

Not for myself … not at all … and not really for Claire … but for the loss that I (and the world) had just experienced. I felt misled by this bright, shining light of a person who I had just met. It wasn’t jealousy … the emotion didn’t even necessarily involve any feelings about myself. It just felt like a waste. I actually fought back tears, I was so taken aback.

As the night went on she did exactly as she had promised … she screwed every guy there but me (there were probably five or six of us) … while I sat at the table sipping a Jack & Coke trying to make small talk with … well, with whoever wasn’t busy either losing their virginity to or getting some much needed experience from Claire.

Now, let’s set the record straight (although I don’t feel I have to) … I am certainly not a prude and I certainly wasn’t one back in ’87. I’ve had my fair share of one-night-stands, flings and casual encounters. But maybe I look at it differently than others do … because they all meant (and still mean!) something to me. Whatever the situation and whatever label we put on it, that event (as “casual” as it might have been) was special … because we chose to have it with one another.

But the story doesn’t quite end there.

As the sun rose the following morning, the only people left in the house were Dave, Joe and myself … and Claire, who had commandeered Dave’s bed for the evening. The four of us decided that morning that we would do battle with the hang-over-to-come by heading to the apartment complex that Claire lived in with her mother (who also was out of town … why is that my parents were the only ones who never went out of town?) and hang out by the pool.

So the next hour or two was spent lounging in a chair poolside with the Texas sun beating down on me while I sipped on a large glass of iced tea. The clouds rolled in around noon and it began to rain. We all felt like hell, so we went in and decided that we should all take a little nap. Dave and Joe grabbed some throw pillows from the couch and settled down on the floor while I stretched out on the couch itself. I had assumed that Claire had gone to her own bedroom to sleep it off and was surprised to find her settling in next to me.

She wrapped her arms around my neck and settled her face onto my chest and after a few moments fell off to sleep. Had it happened twelve hours earlier I would have been overjoyed. Now I was simply confused and disappointed. This girl, so comfortable and gently breathing on my shoulder, so resembled the one I had been enamored with the night before …

It made me sad. Profoundly sad.