That One Wild Night

This story is a little different than what I usually write. For one thing, it's true. For another thing, it's about me. So there's that.

I should give a few details about me before I tell this story. I'm usually a pretty chill person, I get told all the time about how calm I am and how nothing ever phases me. I'm happy go lucky and get along with pretty much everyone. Violence is definitely not my MO and I'd rather tell a joke than start a fight.

All this being said, here's some details about this particular time of my life. I had started working out a few months previously and went WAY overkill on it. At this point I was running an average of seven miles a day, 6 days a week, 400+ pushups, 1000+ crunches, various other workouts to break up the monotony. The increased drain on my body meant I was sleeping A LOT. I'd sleep 9-10 hours every night and still take a nap in the middle of the day. Even when I was asleep I was woken up by the slightest noise and I spent most of my time with every nerve on edge. It was a weird time of life.

Ok, there's the background. Nice guy, on edge, needs his sleep. (That's the summary for people who don't like reading intros and skipped it.) So here I am, 16 years old, going on a trip with some buddies.

Cue the character list. Me, 6'2, skinny, likes my snacks and doesn't like people touching my food. James, my best friend, almost my height, little bit bigger, nice guy who likes his video games. Carlos, Shorter heavyset football player, best friends with Jerry. Jerry, tiny kid, barely 110 pounds, he was the oldest and technically in charge of our group. Louden, firefighter, the second in command since he was the only one besides Jerry over 18.

So we're staying in a hotel, and it's got a lot rooms in it, pretty sure it's called a suite, but I honestly don't know. So James and I are in a room next to Jerry and Carlos. Louden is sleeping on the pullout bed in the living room. Well James likes to talk a lot so we did for awhile, but eventually I just needed my sleep, and he didn't feel like sleeping yet, so I moved out to the couch to try to sleep.

Where I was laying, Louden was across the living room from me, with his noise cancelling headphones on. I slept lengthwise with my feet towards the two bedrooms. Or tried to sleep.

It was probably 10 before I moved to the living room, and I was already really exhausted, but Jerry and Carlos were both night owls and VERY loud. I laid there for at least an hour before I fell into a fitful sleep, trying to block out the noise with a pile of pillows over my head.

The next thing I know, I'm standing in the doorway to James' room with Jerry shaking me. My brain woke up before my body fully was relating messages to my brain. I just knew something was up, and I had this furious rage and something in my head telling me that Jerry wasn't the person it was directed at.

The first thing I become aware of is Jerry shaking me and yelling "Ezra!! Wake up! Don't kill Carlos!" I still wasn't sure what was going on, but I knew I didn't want him touching me so I slapped his arms off of me. Carlos was laying on the floor inside the room staring at me with wide eyes. James was inside the room yelling "What's the screaming, what's going on?"

Here's where the story gets odd, because I don't actually remember what happened, this part is a collection of what other people told me about it.

James told me that around two in the morning, Carlos and Jerry quieted down and Carlos came into the other room to talk to James. It was there that Carlos saw my snacks sitting on the floor of the room. He looked at James and asked "How mad would Ezra be if I ate his snacks?"

Apparently the answer was 'pretty mad' because at that second I woke up. Louden still couldn't hear anything due to his earphones, but he said the only thing he saw was "A pillow flew across the room, followed closely by Ezra. He was really flying, I think he cleared the whole room in one jump."

At that point I went for Carlos standing in the doorway. This happened to be the exact moment Jerry stepped out of his room to use the restroom. I guess he was pretty worried for Carlos because he stepped in between us to wake me up. Later he told me he was worried for his own safety stepping between us like that. Which makes sense, I was nearly 70 pounds heavier than him.

Carlos was incoherent for a couple minutes after I woke up. He just sat on the floor of the room going "I just..... I mean.... And then he was.... And then a pillow!" It took a little while of us all sitting and talking to sort out what happened.

After Carlos mentioned taking my food, he and James both heard a roar from the living room. When Carlos turned to look he got a pillow to the face. (These pillows were no joke either, they were heavy and amazing to sleep on.) The pillow knocked him back into the room flat on his butt. I tried to follow him there, but Jerry got in the way. He said that my eyes were glowing a bright green, but I feel like that's an exaggeration. I DO know that after that night no one in my friend group would wake me up. It was actually kind of funny, in one church camp Carlos and I went to a couple months later, I fell asleep on the couch right before chapel. Someone told Carlos to wake me up and he looked at them and went "Heck NO" and then left the room before someone else could wake me up.

To summarize, if you're a scrawny nerd and want people to tell stories about the night you almost killed one of your buddies at every social gathering the rest of your life, that's how it goes. Every time I hear the story it gets more exaggerated. I think last time it ended with me down on the floor draining the soul out of half the people there before tearing the place apart with my teeth.

It's the only thing people in my friend group say about me when they introduce me, which gets really repetitive, but I'll never complain about all the nights sleep I've gotten because no one wakes me up anymore.