Things About My Friends

Random Stories About My Friends: Part Three
(Part One and Part Two)

Tony drunk-made-out with his ex the last time he saw her and was supposed to call her afterwards but uh... he lost her number. A month ago she passed by us in the street and Tony busted out an overly casual pose and tried to stare at some uninteresting thing behind him, while a member of our party stopped to chat. Naturally, I noticed the look on his face and started prodding to get the story out of him. When I want information I'm more persistent than the Gestapo.

Janelle and Net got drunk and went to one of those Weird NJ places last month. It was an intersection where you're supposed to drive backwards in a circle 6 times and the ghost of a little boy who died in a car accident is supposed to appear, then you get chased by some KKK guys in a big black SUV. They didn't see any boy but they did get chased by the big black SUV. I suppose the urban legend is so well known that some people go there to drive in the circle and some go there to scare people.

Abel gets hit on by girls in very forward ways. Some friend (not me) who he hadn't seen in a while wrapped her arms around him and when he hugged her back, she started giving him a hickey on his neck. Right in the middle of the bowling alley. Abel also likes to say "that's fucked up" when you talk smack but he laughs anyway.

Mike went out on a blind date once with some Italian girl who kept talking really loud and throwing out racist slurs during dinner. By the end of the meal, the entire restaurant was staring at them. I don't think he stayed for dessert. I'm not even certain he gave her a ride home. He also lost his virginity in a tree house, thus desecrating some poor little kid's precious play area.

Kwame is a responsible and sensitive guy who sometimes says funny yet foul things. When he says those things, we blame it on his alter ego "Kwamby." The name came into existence when we worked at the NBA, and a um, mentally-challenged guy used to call up every day for like a year to get NBA facts. I'm not certain Kwame ever tried to get him to say his name correctly, just accepted that for that one guy he wasn't Kwame he was Kwamby.

My friend Eric almost got us "arrested." In college once, we were supposed to go study at the library. But when he came to our door, my roommates were getting lifted. We took a rotation then continued on our way. UC Santa Cruz is located on a mountain, in a forest, overlooking the beach. It's like walking through the Ewok Village to go to class, and you have to take a shuttle bus everywhere because there's limited parking. So we're flying by the time we get to the shuttle stop. I'm standing there staring intently at a tree (which seemed to be winking at me), when all of a sudden blue lights start flashing all around us and an alarm starts blaring really loud. Eric's like "It's the police!!! They're coming for us!!!" We start running, but instead of darting into the woods or running back towards my dorm we start running up the hill, towards the next shuttle stop. Cars are going by us, beeping and yelling for us to get out of the road, but we're just running in the street like it's nobody's business.

We hide in a bush behind the tennis courts, and make some plan to infiltrate the crowd at the next shuttle stop and "blend in." So we do that and the whole time we're standing there, the crowd around us keeps speculating on the flashing blue lights in the distance. Finally, Eric turns to me and says "I accidentally set the emergency alarm off." "How?" "I was pushing some buttons." We were seriously convinced the police knew who we were and were coming after us, or that the crowd knew what we had done and were going to stone us. But we were also convinced that we were "on a mission" of some sort because that's what we kept saying out loud to each other. Someone called out our names and we FREAKED and started running again, but it was our friend Luyen offering us a ride to the library. Where we sat for an hour, staring at our closed backpacks, until we decided to take a trip to the grocery and buy Doritos, cupcakes, Sour Patch Kids, Flaming Hot Cheetos, string cheese, jalapeno poppers and soda.

Whenever I think of all my close friends I think of that saying:

"A good friend will come bail you out of jail. A true friend will be sitting next to you in the cell, going 'Damn we fucked up.'" Funny as hell. I have such good friends that there would be no one left to bail us out.