Monday, February 14, 2011

Pigs in a Blanket

Blood and vomit never really come out of a sleeping bag. You can wash it and dry it many times over but still….. even if the actual blood and chunky bits have been washed away, you still know that they were there. So maybe I should have said “blood and vomit never really come out of your memory”.

The first time the sleeping bag got soiled was at Kenny’s birthday party. A bunch of us guys were going to party at my place and then crash out. Kenny had dropped off his sleeping bag and gone on a beer errand. Matt, Gene, Larry and others had stayed behind to do "quality control testing" on the beer we had on hand. Apparently it required multiple tests to ensure it was up to standards.

By the time Kenny returned, the testers were pretty trashed. In particular, Larry was lying on his side passed out on the couch. Kenny had only been back for a few minutes when Larry began to gag as if to puke. Matt seeing Kenny’s sleeping bag lying right next to Larry’s head, leapt over and with a sweeping gesture saved the bag from its apparent impending doom. Unfortunately, we had yet to learn that Larry was a stealth puker. He’d been puking on that sleeping bag for quite a while. So when Matt swept the bag away, it slung puke across the room and right onto Kenny’s chest. You know how when you see one person puke it makes you want to too? The cascading effect on all those guys from that slung vomit was an image that is still burned into my psyche.

From then on, Kenny refused to own the sleeping bag any more. It was now me and my roommates’ property. I washed it and put it away but no one could ever bring themselves to use it.

The next time was at my 21st birthday party. I had planned on having a small party with several of my friends at my place. As it turned out, that night was also prom night at Deadsville High and someone had told people that my party was the post-prom party. So at about 10 PM hordes of kids started showing up with booze in hand (the drinking age was still 18 but I know there were some underage drinkers there). One of these drinkers was Kenny’s friend Kyle. When he was 18, Kyle wasn’t anyone’s idea of brawny. He was moderate height, thin, with glasses and a quirky sense of humor. And he was a serious lightweight when it came to drinking.

As we were soon to discover, after about 2 beers he would become an immobile (but fully conscious) puking machine. Worse yet, vomiting would break blood vessels in his nose causing apparent nasal hemorrhaging. It was quite a horror show. And yet, he was conscious and didn’t want to miss a thing. And so at some point, somebody got the idea to use THE sleeping bag as a stretcher, carrying the prone, puking, bleeding body of Kyle around our lawn and house. I found it the next day in this little shed we had in the backyard where I had partied as a teen. I couldn't convince myself to bring it in and wash it. The only furniture in the shed was a ratty old couch so I threw the sleeping bag behind it and left it to molder.

Over the years, that sleeping bag became a regular fixture at our parties. It became some sort of physically manifested retribution. A punishment meted out on those who got too drunk at my house. My roommates and I made a rule that the first person to pass out (as opposed to consciously going to bed) at one of our parties would wake up neatly tucked into the sleeping bag. It usually only happened once per person for them to learn the error of their ways.

After a couple years, the sleeping bag was unnecessary. Plus I’d moved onto another phase of life – wife, child, house, job. You know…. the grown-up stuff some people try so hard to escape through drugs, alcohol, affairs, television, video games, the internet, sports, and high horsepower toys.

There is a thin line between “free” and “lost” and sometimes we walked on both sides of that line. And sometimes you wake up to find that what you thought was the comfort of friends and “good times” was really just the embrace of that sleeping bag tucked tightly around your body.

I burned that sleeping bag. The smoke was black and the smell horrific but it felt so right.

2 comments:

  1. Wow, that was.... horrifically awesome.

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  2. you ruined a family heirloom, you could have passed that one on to your godson so he, too, could have prevented people from becoming too drunk at his parties...parties i am sure at some point he will have, or better yet you could have given it to your daughter for the same reason.

    a priceless item lost to pyromania.

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