Matt and I have been dating about a month, and the poor guy has been subjected to more shenanigans than anyone should have to endure in a year. I’ve taken to sleeping on his bathroom floor, because I drink too much of the naughty water on occasion. The most recent bathroom nap session, I locked the door. Matt had to break into his own bathroom with a paperclip (he showed me the mangled remains of the paper accessory as proof), to rescue me from the disgusting tiled floor, shared by two boys in their early twenties. He informed me that he had to coax me off of the floor with soft, kind words and I returned this tenderness with various drunken grunts and grumbles, clearly content with my nest of moldy bathmat and nose-hair clippings. After two minutes or so, the noises subsided and I released a final, throaty grunt of frustration—plowed past him with the force of Babe the Ox and “belly flopped on the bed like you were in the WWE.” I quietly listened to Matt recount the story, and cringed with each charming detail. He stupidly continued to see me though, the fool.
We decided to have a relaxed night in, and Matt told me to bring over a bottle of wine. I was having quite a bit of trouble falling asleep in his bed, continuously tossing and turning, fanaticizing about the comforter I left lonesome at my apartment—so I decided to bring my little blue friend, the Walsom. A Walsom is a knock off Unisom sleeping pill from Walgreens, and I slipped it in the sneaky side pocket of my pocketbook, usually reserved for super tampons.
After some intense perusing on the wine isle of Winn-Dixie, I settled on a saucy-looking bottle of Merlot with a picture of a woman on the label, she looked like June Cleaver, if June had boozy breath—the bottle was called “Mad Housewife.” It was only seven bucks with my Winn-Dixie card, so I headed for the checkout line with the cashier that looked like T. Pain. He told me that he could turn the popular song “fireflies” by Owl City into an R&B song. I agreed and told him to go for it, then left the store with drunken June and Walsom plotting against me in my purse.
I ended up drinking about three glasses of wine, and started thinking about what “fireflies” would sound like if T. Pain’s clone managed to convert it into an R&B song, when Matt suggested we go to bed. A normal person would consume three glasses of “Mad Housewife” and think, “hey, this is enough to get to sleep, no Walsom needed here.” I, however, chose to ignore my inner Jiminy Cricket, so I took the pill and signed myself up for dating catastrophe. “YOU IMBECILE,” that same normal person would yell, had they been there to chaperone my self-made date-rape concoction. But no one was there to address my imbecility, and the repercussions were disgusting and infinitely embarrassing.
I faintly recall the dialogue to “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,” and rather, seem to remember the brightly-colored woodland creatures I kept seeing dancing around my head, offering me lollipops and kisses, much more. Reality came knocking with a wetness on my right cheek, unless one of neon pink squirrels urinated on my face, I was drooling. This would be a bad situation in and of itself, one can imagine trying to cover up the wet stain with a strategically placed hand for the rest of the night, but I managed to make this mortifying spittle emission much worse. My doped-up, leaking head wasn’t resting on a pillow, oh no, it was nestled on Matthew’s unsuspecting shoulder. I bat the woodland creatures away once this registered and gargled, “Oh Shit. I drooled a bits on you.” I then took it upon myself to clean up said drool, (I may be disgusting, but I still have manners). I pulled my hand up from under the covers and proceeded to slap around my saliva, and then pat the evenly coated spittle shoulder, as if to say, “there we are, all clean.” Soon after this, I flopped around a bit, and fell back asleep.
The next morning, my eyes slowly opened to the sound of the alarm clock and then widened with utter horror. Matt was getting up for work, and I was nervously trying to piece together the night before. I gasped when the mouth seepage registered, and he asked if I was okay.
“Yea, great,” I stammered.
“Alright, my key is on my desk, so just lock up when you leave.”
“Mhm…” I couldn’t make eye-contact.
On the drive back to my house, Matt text me saying that he slept really well, and asked if I did too. I decided the best way to remedy this awful situation was to make a joke out of it. “Obviously,” I typed out, biting my lower lip, “considering the drool. Ha ha.”
“What drool?” I received a few minutes later.
“Don’t be coy with me! You know what I’m talking about,” I returned, assuming he was trying to get me to put “I drooled on your shoulder” in a text message.
“I didn’t see any drool,” he wrote back, and I had had enough. I called him,
“You’re telling me you have no idea what I’m talking about?”
“Not a clue, seriously.”
“So I just confessed to drooling on you last night?”
“Ew. What the fuck? You drooled on me?”
In my nervousness, I had forgotten that Matthew had also consumed a large quantity of “Mad Housewife.” It didn’t even cross my mind that he might have been asleep through the entire drool/drool cleanup episode. As it turns out, he was.
When I went back to England after not having been back for ten years, my family and I went to this classy joint called "The Tartar Frigate" on the sun-shiney coast of Broadstairs, Kent. My Aunt was in the middle of a story--which ended with, "And then I found myself hiding in the bushes from Judy, (her sister) and I had to come out because I wet my knickers..." Reading this, you might think, "well that's a pretty normal childhood tale," but Auntie Ann was recalling an event that happened the week before this dinner. For me, and everyone that knows her, this type of story is pretty ordinary.
By the middle of dinner, the waiter has adopted avoiding Auntie Ann like a sorority girl avoids carbohydrates, so she naturally reverts to perversion, a classic strategy of hers when things are going too normally,
