The Last Slumber Party

staying up late with a friend and a claptrap

Let me ask you, dear reader: do you remember your last slumber party?

Not the adult simulacrum where you drive in for the weekend, drag a duffel into the guest room, and spend the next forty-eight hours pretending your physical presence isn’t an intrusion on the routines of a recently-married couple that has long since made peace with different bedtimes and mismatched morning alarms. I mean the genuine slumber party—the exposed, wired, too-sugared, too-late-night delirium of the thing itself. The slumber party that was less about sleeping than about carving open time, hollowing out a bubble of hours so fragile and so perfect that morning, when it came, felt like the betrayal of a parent flicking on the hallway light.

I thought I’d lost that forever. We all do, right? We grow up, we marry. We learn to ration our evenings, to weigh the consequences of staying up too late against the responsible and brutal calculus of the day ahead.

But then, last week, I had a slumber party. With my friend Peter.

We didn’t sprawl across sleeping bags in some paneled basement and we didn’t leave behind a nest of soda cans and peanut M&M wrappers, though God knows I thought of them. Instead, we logged into Borderlands 4. By midnight the game had taken us by the hand—no, by the throat—and pulled us back into the bouncy house of boyhood: two friends who should have known better, wide-eyed in the glow of our respective screens, trading stories while plundering bandits. The game offered up its endless carousel of guns, its shimmering chests of loot, and one hemisphere of the brain could idly weigh the virtues of fire rate against corrosion damage while the other hemisphere—unguarded, unafraid—talked about life, about the state of things, about The Horrors, about women we had loved or tried to love, and about our feelings.

And feelings are, though you’re not supposed to admit this, the key ingredient to a slumber party.

Borderlands 4 would have you believe it’s nothing more than a hyper-masculine hallucination: rippling muscles, grotesque violence, characters whose abrasiveness are their entire personalities. A frat house with rocket launchers. But somewhere beneath the nonstop screaming, something else is happening. The women are powerful. The queer and non-binary characters claim center stage. Every NPC seems compelled to declare their horniness in a way that feels equally opportune and democratically mandated. The sheer gratuitousness of the violence has cleared out enough room—it has created a layer of protection—for tenderness to bloom, an irony so sharp you can only accept it on faith. You enter for the guns, but you stay for the closeness.

That night, I wouldn’t have been closer to Peter if we’d been outside carving our names into cherry trees or burying our beer bottles in my dad’s yard.

When was the last time I did any of those things? When was the last peanut M&M? The last catch-up coffee with that particular old friend? The last conversation with a parent? Lasts don’t announce themselves with trumpets. They end with the smallest of closures and, if you’re not careful, one day you’ll realize you can’t remember what slumber parties were even about.

But I can.

At some insane hour, we found Claptrap in a dumpster, just his eyeball piece because he’d been knocked around and taken apart by bullies. I reassembled his body, piece by piece, until he looked almost whole again, and when he begged for his final part he told me, “Please rookie, without my wheel I’m just a yellow toaster…with depression.” And in that moment, absurd and tender, I thought: this is a slumber party. To be ridiculous and sad, together, in the smallest hours of the night. To laugh until you almost cry, to share something you didn’t know you were going to share, to let yourself be stupid and vulnerable.

The next morning, I got up a little later than I normally would and I told my wife: I had a slumber party last night.

Thanks for reading all that.