Fiction: A Collision of Amphetamines and Insomnia

Screenshot 2019-07-10 at 14.59.19Jan hadn’t slept much. Like, for the past three days she hadn’t slept, but she was about to crash. Like hitting a wall or something. She was coming down because the speed was just about done, and she was sort of looking forward to the crash. How could you blame her? This is how she planned her weeks, you know. Speed on test days. Pot on weekends. Beer for dancing, mostly. Or just because boys like it.

The problem was that Bobby was sort of revved up, because that’s just how he is. He just gets all this nervous energy and then just talks and talks and talks. Philosophy, politics, music, love and loss. Bobby wasn’t into drugs and really had no clue about drug etiquette or even just the parameters around what drug users might be going through. Some people found him rather inconsiderate.

And Jan kept telling him she was really tired, but he really didn’t feel like being alone at that particular moment, and he didn’t want to stop talking. She thought sex might have done the trick, because guys notoriously fall asleep right after, but Bobby was a hard-core insomniac, even if sex was calming, it wasn’t enough to settle his nerves.

So this went on awhile—until she passed out, and Bobby was left staring through the screen on the window and counting the moths on the outside. He was thinking of Carson McCullers and Frankie in “Member of the Wedding.”

Somehow Bobby related to Frankie, though it would seem unlikely that he would. He just liked the way this little butch girl looked out the window and pondered the “irony of fate” for the insects out there. And he thought a lot about the irony of fate, and sometimes he felt like a little butch girl stuck out in the country just wanting to fit in at a wedding or something.

Jan was dead to the world, but Bobby checked to be sure she was alive in her drug-enforced slumber before he stepped out into the steaming evening air. After a moment of regret for forgetting mosquito spray, he set off toward Old Main, hoping Mary might be up there again, because she never slept well either.

Randall Horton

If you’re looking for info on insomnia, Mattress Battle put together some stats.

Awkward Beginnings and Assorted Insecurities (#fiction)

man sitting near fence
Photo by renan rez on Pexels.com

II

He wasn’t a virgin. He had definitely had sex more than once before and with more than one person, which was just another way of saying she was the third person on his sexual resume. He had enough experience to know where to put what and so forth, but things had never moved quite so quickly before. She was almost a stranger, even if they had talked in class from time to time.

To be fair, it wasn’t like she just threw him in bed and jumped on him. She invited him for pizza first, then she drove him to the park for a walk in nature. At the park, they sat in the grass on the slope of a kind of ditch, and he was lost in his thoughts, because that was where he spent most of his time. He was sort of staring into the distance, but he wasn’t looking at anything, really, when he felt a light kiss on the back of his neck.

She apologized for being so forward and said she didn’t generally do that. If she’d been more honest, she would have told him that anytime she’d sat in the grass with a man before, he had immediately put her hand on his crotch, so she wasn’t accustomed to having to get things started herself. A lot of women don’t meet the quiet boys, the non-sex-crazed boys, the shy boys, or the timid boys because those boys don’t meet a lot of women. If you think about it, it seems obvious.

But back at his room, she just expected to move straight to the bed, and that took him by surprise. Of course, he didn’t know that she’d taken some amount of speed earlier and was sort of buzzing around, not really in a relaxed mood, if you get my drift. She got the speed above board, more or less, because doctors are always willing to prescribe it for weight loss. They feel sorry for the chubby girls and want to do their part to help them be more desirable.

So that’s how you end up with a pretty well withdrawn young man going at it with a even-less-inhibited-than-usual somewhat chubby woman pretty much screaming and laughing as if she forgot they were in a fourplex with old and uninsulated walls. He felt embarrassed and awkward, but she didn’t seem to notice, so never mind. She was just in a routine, and he was out of his comfort zone. We don’t always end up where we expect to be, do we?