My Boyfriend, His Ambien and Me

"If you close your eyes, it feels like you're in a room of small little porcelain tigers."

"It's like a candy story in here. Right now you're like chocolate pie."

"Let me cuddle with you...are those your balls?"

It's statements like these, proclaimed with the assurance of Dubya with a "Mission Accomplished" sign behind him, that let me know when my boyfriend has popped an Ambien. Vinay warned me early on that sometimes, when he has sampled his favorite sleep-aid, he does things like write an e-mail which tailed off into nonsense, or decide to reorganize his ramekin collection (yes, he has enough ramekins to qualify as a "collection"). However, I wasn't prepared for the speechifying at 1 AM.

I would like to take this opportunity to make it perfectly clear that I'm not complaining. In fact, I find it so amusing that if I'm feeling blue, I might take to crushing up a pill and sprinkling it over Vinay's ice cream before we go to bed just to give myself a good chuckle. I hate going to bed depressed.

In any case, not only do I find it amusing, Vinay only makes it worse when he acts insulted in the face of my glee. As I frantically type direct quotes into my phone, he calls me out for being mean, or tries to tackle me back into the bed. He's usually coherent enough to realize that I'm laughing at him, but not enough to stop the deliciously hazy bon mots from tumbling out of his mouth.

"They're trying to keep me off the team!" he once spouted.

"Who is?" I asked innocently.

"Those BITCHES!" he snarled.

Cue the boneless collapse, face-down into one pillow, while I attempt to smother my hysterics with the other. Please insert the "pillow-biting" joke of your choice here.

My relationship with other people on substances that I'm haven't partaken of is something I first encountered in college. I can remember when people would walk into acting class clutching their morning coffee to them like a frightened mother, and thinking "Man I wish I didn't hate coffee so much. They look so happy together!" I would periodically try coffee, and could never wrap my head around people's love of it. In fact, I've never really understood the idea of an "acquired taste" on a basic level. How does one acquire a taste? I personally think that salmon tastes like unwashed gym socks with a piscine twist...I don't foresee a time in the future where I will magically become enamored of the vile stuff.

As jealous as I was of coffee-lovers, I've still not really developed a relationship with it. Sure, when Starbucks started putting out those delicious blended frappuccinos I acted like a tween at a Justin Bieber concert, but we all know that those things are way more milk shake than coffee. And who doesn't love a milk shake? Particularly when they come with the extra on the side, and just send the calorie count beyond anything even remotely justifiable, becoming a delicious way to completely destroy the benefits of any gym visits you may or may not have made in the preceding days. With a dollop of whip cream on top. But I digress.

Coffee isn't the only substance I see people enjoying that I've never grown to love. In fact, I've never even tried a cigarette. I've never smoked up, or out, or whatever the hell the proper terminology is. In fact, looking back, I've missed a lot of opportunities to make bad decisions with mind-altering substances. I blame the movie Straight Up, which is completely unrelated to the Paula Abdul hit, I was forced to watch in middle-school health class. Starring future homo Chad Allen, the movie depicted a young lad who travels to magical land via something called The Fate Elevator, where he encounters anthropomorphized versions of different drugs like marijuana and cocaine. The Fate Elevator is manned by Louis Gossett Jr., who sings a song whose lyrics I remember to this day ("Take the elevator up...and close the gate! This is the ride that will decide your fate!") while wearing what appears to be a a cast-off costume from a high school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. He gives Chad a magical headband to protect him from all the different drugs, and it's usually at this point when I tell people about this that they start to really think I'm making it up. While I'm flattered that my imagination is given such respect, I promise you that I'm not. If right-wingers ever got a hold of this film, they could mount a credible case that you can actually identify the moment that turns Chad Allen gay: I, personally, think it's when Booze and Miss Pot perform a screeching duet entitled "Give Me That Headband," though I suppose the a case could be made for it being right as Louis Gossett Jr. starts to get him dancing in the elevator. This classic VHS is available for buy at Amazon.com. I just checked.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that after all these years of clean living, I'm truly tempted to take an Ambien and see what hallucinating is like. After all the amusement I've gotten from him, Vinay probably deserves getting to listen to me ramble on for a few minutes about things that make no sense.

"I see a village of houses. They have green roofs, and the normal ones are moving like they're on a train."

"What do you mean 'the normal ones'?"

"We're in a bird apiary!"

"Isn't an apiary for bees?"

"That's why I said it was for BIRDS."

"Ah. Of course."

"PARROTS."

I mean, you can't write this shit.