15 moments of funny/scary chills for your reading pleasure
Now that I am feeling better after my unique and rather frightening weekend, for y'alls Halloween reading pleasure, I have written out 15 moments from my life that were either my scariest in a funny way, just outright scariest, or somewhere in between. If you know any of these tales already, just skip over them if you'd like, or if you are on my livejournal or myspace, you may read them there...and if you got the list of the ten, sorry, after I sent them, I realized there were more that should be on here...
15.) When I went to San Diego, CA with my folks, I went out by myself on the Friday night that we were there. At this large open air mall in downtown, I met these two girls and I hung out with them. I asked them where they lived, and they said "the street", but I thought they were just joking. They told me about this coffeehouse where there was a big poetry slam, and that was back in my big poet days, so I went and read a couple of my poems in this rundown, falling apart coffee house place. I could tell it was a little rougher than what I was used to because the cops came in and busted a guy for drugs while I was on stage. So, after I read my poems, I sat with the two girls and this guy that looked like a young version of Ron Wood, the dude from the Rolling Stones, and had a great conversation. At 1 a.m., the coffeehouse closed, and they kicked everyone out. That was when the two girls started looking for a place to sleep...and I realized that they hadn't been joking earlier...and also that I was now quite a ways from the hotel, and in amongst a very grungy, sketchy group of people that I didn't know. I was thinking to myself that this could not be good. So I wound up having to make over an hour's walk across downtown San Diego at 1 a.m., and I expected that I was about to be mugged or worse at any moment. What made it even worse was that our hotel was so tall that I could see it for what felt like forever, but I didn't seem to be getting any closer as I walked. Nothing happened, but it was pretty intimidating in that moment when I realized that I was pretty much on my own in a huge city after midnight.
14.) When I was the ball boy for the MSU women's v-ball team, I got invited to their Halloween party in '96. I get there, and one of the girls on the team was dressed up as...ME!!! She wore clothes like what I was wearing back in those days, put a mini-basketball under her shirt, drew a mustache and goatee on, and gelled her hair straight back like I wore mine then. What made the effect all the more jarring was that Liz is 6 ft. tall, while I'm only 5'9"...so I had a 6 ft. tall woman dressed up as me. Those visuals stick with one for a long, long, long time, let me tell ya...
13.) On one of our winter vacations to Ft. Lauderdale, we were down there on New Year's Eve, and so I had gone out bar hopping to celebrate. I was sitting in this bar when this guy walked up to my table. He was about 6'1" or 6'2", and even his muscles seemed to have muscles...he looked at me and said "Hey! It looks like you and me are the two biggest dudes in this bar." I was thinking "and your point would be...???" but since I didn't know this dude, I looked around the bar, and said "I guess so." Then this guy says "Well, it looks like we're going to have see who the biggest toughest sumbich in this bar is." Then I realized that this guy wanted to fight; and I was by myself, in this guy's hometown. So I just started walking out, looked over my shoulder, and said "That'd be you, cowboy." and I was outta there.
12.) When we were at summer camp one year in North Carolina, we had decided to go whitewater rafting. Sandra, our youth director, drove past the entrance to the rafting place, so she had to turn the van around on this mountain road that had a big cliff just off of the shoulder of the road on the other side. So Sandra is backing towards that to get turned around, and she asks Dave and Steve, the two guys in the back seat, to tell her when she got close to the edge of the cliff. Small problem: Our youth group was filled top to bottom with mischevious smart alecs, and none more so than Dave and Steve. So, as Sandra backs up, Steve screams out "Holy Crap!" and Sandra laughs and says "Oh, you guys." and she goes back a little bit more, and Dave is like "OMG, we're all going to die!" to which Sandra is like "Very funny". And it keeps going like that, and Sandra is finally to the point she says "Will you clowns knock it off and get serious here? I really do need you guys help." and Steve explodes at that point, and he's like "Sandra. Turn the van off, get out, walk back here, and look at this. So Sandra gets out, and several more of us that were in front follow her, and about 3 quarters of the area of the van between the back bumper and the rear wheels are hanging out over the cliff. Another two foot and we'd have ran off the cliff.
11.) Back before everything went south between us, I was hanging out in the old apt. with Dave and Jill. Dave, for some bizarre reason, decided to put on Jill's black pleather pants and walk out of their bedroom shirtless...and this is a guy who has the natural skin tone of a sheet of paper! (Shudder) As our other roommate Shag said later of another matter, "They need to, but they do not make brain bleach that can wash crap like that out." I just wish that I could un-see that sight...
10.) When I lived in Nashville, Mike, my roommate, was 7 foot tall and around 300 lbs or so. (he couldn't play basketball to save his life, either.) We each had day beds in the cramped room that had to serve as our bedroom/kitchen/dining room/living room, and one night, I was having trouble sleeping, so to try something different, I threw my mattress off of my bed in the floor, and actually did get to sleep down there. I wake up to a really odd sight. Mike had woken up first, not realizing that I was now on the floor, and put his big size 17 feet down and almost stood up...until he realized that his feet were on something that was warmer and less flat than our floor...namely my chest.
9.) I was trying to drive back to Owensboro after taking my last final at HCC in December of 2002, and as I started around the Henderson bypass towards the Audobon Parkway, an ice storm hit. Several people had voiced their concern at my leaving for O'boro, but I was ready to be home, so I went. At first, it wasn't that bad, I thought...then on the last curve coming down the hill to where you get on the Audobon, the back end of my car came around, and I spun. I tried to steer my way out of the skidding, and it didn't work, and my car kept spinning. I saw the guardrail coming up, and the ditch, and I thought "Oh great-I'll either hit the guardrail and slide up it, or I'll miss it and wind up upside down in the ditch." I actually had time to realize how much the next few seconds would distinctly suck was the worst part of the wreck. Then I managed to do neither possibility that I anticipated. The passenger side of my car hit the end of the guardrail, and drove it all the way into my passenger seat, in essence harpooning my Altima onto the guardrail. I didn't have a scratch on me, fortunately.
8.) When I was a little kid, I lived very close to Niagara School in Henderson Co. One summer, my friends Greg White, Luke Crafton, and I went down to this area under the bridge on the creek behind the school to catch minnows so that we could go fishing at Luke's grandparents. The creek ponds up just beyond the bridge in a pool that is about 3 ft deep. We had an old wire screen, and so Greg and I were going to wade into the creek and use the screen to catch minnows on, while Luke stood on the bridge to watch for snakes, because that part of the creek was known as Snake Lake. Greg and I made a lot of noise going down into the water to scare away any snakes, so we were safe...we thought. After about 20 minutes, Luke said "Hey! Look at that fish". As we watched, a blue gill suddenly floated to the surface, looking very limp about 5 feet away from us. Then this snake's head came out of the water, and we actually could see it's fangs extend as it chomped back into the bluegill. Then, with the bluegill in it's mouth, the cottonmouth swam over the screen between Greg and I and went off into the weeds on the bank opposite the bridge as Greg and I went into hysterics and scampered up on the bridge.
7.) One night in Murray, I went to this party at my friend Gary's house. I got there, and I open up the door, and the first thing I see is John, this guy that we knew. John was wearing a replica Star Trek Capt. Kirk shirt, a leather mini-skirt, had a 40 oz. beer in each hand, and a lampshade on his head. I closed the door and walked away, trying to get that memory out of my head...
6.) When I was at Murray the first time, I knew this dude Joey and his girlfriend, who went by the nickname Tater. One night when a bunch of us were sitting around drinking, Joey started telling me that him and Tater were really into the whole watersports thing...and we ain't talking anything with speed boats or jet skis here, folks. Frankly, I didn't believe them, and I called b.s. on them. So they told me to meet them at the port-a-pots at the football stadium and they'd prove it. So I show up, and Joey is wearing one of those big yellow rain slickers from Wal-Mart with duct tape around the sleeves and legs, rubber boots, swim goggles, and a snorkel mask. Tater holds the door to the port a potty open, and Joey actually climbs down into the tank beneath the seat. Joey had some trouble scrunching down in there, so Tater helpfully put her big combat boot on his head and stomped to help him get all the way down in there. By this point, I was standing there slack jawed, thinking OMG, they are really going to do this. Then Tater turns to me, says "So, should I leave the door opened so you can watch, or closed?" Without any hesitation, I said "Closed. Definitely closed." So she went into the port-a-potty, and the door slammed shut. I stood there for the longest time, because I didn't know what I should say or do. That was really a...um...moment in my life, one I kinda hope that will very soon fade entirely from my memory. Every time that I hear a port-a-potty door slam, though...it always make think back to that moment...and I shudder.
5.) The night before I graduated high school, I was riding with my good friend Wayne the Brain, and Tarek, this exchange student from Germany that I had befriended that year. Wayne the Brain was in from college since he's a couple of years older than I am, and he was driving. We were way off in the boondocks along the Kentucky/Tennessee border when Wayne almost took a corner too fast and skidded straight down the middle of an S-curve, changing lanes inadvertently about 6 times. We stopped, tires smoking, and caught our breath at which point Tarek observed "Wow-that was nuts. We could have been a little bit dead there." At that point, I put my seat belt on in dramatic fashion to needle Wayne. So we get going again, and top a hill with Wayne's parents Plymouth Reliant K pushed to the upper limits of it's speed potential. I saw a curve that was right after the crest of the hill, and paused from my drink of Nehi Grape to tell Wayne that it looked too sharp for how fast we were going. Wayne, who had came back to Russellville fresh off of a bad break-up at college, didn't respond. (because, he told me later, the radio station was playing he and his ex's song and he kinda lost track of where he was and what he was doing. I almost hit him when he told me that.) The next thing I knew, I heard the tires screeching again, and I realized that the car was going sideways now, and Wayne didn't seem to be the one controlling where the car went. Then I saw the stump that we were sliding sideways towards. It was a massive stump, and it looked like we were about to hit it, so I screamed. Then we actually did hit it. I didn't scream then, I guess because it seemed pointless to. I remember the car began to flip after the bone jarring collision with the stump (The state police later estimated our speed at the time we crashed to be 85 mph approximately) and at one point as I looked out the windshield, I saw sky...then the ground...then the sky again. I thought when I saw that "It's over. I am going to die." We actually did not, thank God, but the car was utterly annihilated, and I never found the can of Grape Nehi that I had in my hand when we hit the stump. After the car stopped flipping, a farmhand who had seen the wreck ran over, and said the greatest thing amid his shock at seeing all 3 of us still alive-he said "Boys, I thought I was going to have throw y'alls brains back off of the road." He said that the very first thing, before he said anything else to us.
4.) Back when Erin and I were together, we got a really bizarre offer from another couple-they offered to do a foursome with us. That wouldn't have been quite so bad, except that the other couple were freakishly large folks-the guy is 6'8" and around 350 lbs, and his girlfriend is 6'3" or maybe 6'4" and outweighs even my current hefty girth by at least 45 -50 lbs. That was a really frightening offer to even consider, especially for Erin, who was only 5'7" and 135 lbs. Needless to say, our answer was "no."...
3.) After Erin and I had broken up, I spent a long while in a deep funk over our break-up. Some of my friends became kind of concerned about me, and staged an intervention of sorts. That would've been really cool of them, but what made it so scary/funny was that the group of friends who got together to stage this intervention were all members of the Murray Vampyr Clan, and they got pretty creative with their intervention that night...it began around 2 a.m. when Marika, an ex of mine, showed up at my apt. in this black leather outfit. Like most guys, I figured 'Ok, my ex showed up at my door at 2 a.m. wearing all leather...awww yeah, baby!". But unlike most guys, because of the trauma that Erin caused me, I was having panic attacks and even at points having vivid flashbacks/hallucinations when I was intimate with women at that point in time, but I was too embarrassed to get help for them. So I had one, and Marika left, and I went to bed. About 10 minutes later, Jaden, James, Syn, Nay-Nay, and about 8 other friends of mine from the Vampyr Clan show up. They start doing this séance mumbo jumbo to try and contact the "spirit" that I saw, while I watched the proceedings in my underwear, somewhat bemused by the whole thing. Things went awry, and suddenly Jaden is jumping all around my apartment, screaming in apparent satanic agony. Had this been any other group of my friends, I would've been like "Very funny, you guys. Chill." But considering that Jaden has just testified in court against Rod Ferrell, the vampire killer, and the group had been on several different true shows and so forth, I thought, "Well, maybe this is real-ya never know." So they ushered me outside, and all of them followed except Jaden and Jaden's little brother Gabriel, who had led the séance. We heard a lot of screaming and glass breaking, and at that point, I almost went next door to MSU public safety to get help. Thankfully everyone talked me out of it. Then the door opened, and Gabe pushed Jaden, whom he had duct taped to one of my chairs, out the door. Jaden writhed on the ground, and Gabe, who had cut himself, bled onto this sheet of paper that he had drawn a pentagram on. He then gave it to me to protect myself from "the evil spirits that had been accidentally unleashed". So they all leave, and I go back to bed again, and about 20 minutes later, there's another knock at my door. This time, it's Missy and Vanessa, James and Jaden's wives. Missy, the sole practicing Christian among the group, brought her Bible over, and after I had apologized to Vanessa for Jaden getting possessed, Missy started reading various parts of the Bible to me, and talking to me about Jesus. Around that time, I noticed that in Jaden's fit, he had knocked down my seascape poster, but left the poster of Michangelo's Angels right next to it undisturbed. I was pointing out to Missy how odd I found that when Vanessa ran out my door. A couple of minutes later, the whole crew came back, and they let me in on the fact that they had played pretty much a ginourmous joke on me so that I would see how ridiculous it was that I wasn't getting help, and to tell me that they really wanted me to get professional help, so that I could get back to being the Al that they loved hanging with. All in all, that was the strangest night in my entire life.
2.) I was driving back from work in Henderson late one night around 4 a.m., and since hwy 60 was deserted, I was flying along at around 75-80 mph as I approached the small community of Stanley. As I came around the large curve there on the west side of Stanley, I saw a headlight that came across the road at a really odd angle, and seemed to be really bouncing around a whole lot. As I came out of the curve and got my speed back, I wondered what was going on with that weird headlight. When I was about a quarter mile from the train crossing, suddenly the red lights came on-the weird headlight was a train! The train was also flying along, I have no idea how fast, but it was a pretty good clip also. I quickly looked the situation over and I realized that I could not get my car stopped before I got to the tracks with how fast I was going. I also realized that if I kept my speed the same, I couldn't beat the train. If I sped up to even 90 or 95, I still couldn't beat the train. I only saw one viable plan. I stomped my accelerator to the floor as hard as I could, then brought my left foot over and pressed it down on top of my right foot. As I was getting to the crossing, I saw the front of the train coming on, and I thought "Man-I am not entirely sure this is going to work." That was not a pleasant realization, so I looked down at the gauges to see what my car had left for me to use. My rpm's were in the red slightly at around 7200 rpm, and I was going a little over 120 mph. So, either this plan had to work, or...well, at least I knew at those speeds that it wasn't going to hurt because I would die too quickly. I remember as I crossed the tracks, I could actually see the train engineers wide eyes up in the locomotive. I made it barely, and then I had to get my car slowed back down, on the off chance that someone might be in the road for some odd reason in Stanley. I shifted into neutral, actually killed the motor, and coasted into the Fast Fuel station where I had to turn sharply to take out the rest of my momentum. I had to sit there a few minutes to let all that adrenaline calm back down also.
1.) The last story is about the girl I knew at Murray named Bridgette. Bridgette and I had a fairly interesting history, to say the least. Bridgette, on many occasions, had talked with me about her plans to shoot me. I thought that she was joking, so I didn't freak out. But after she kept talking about it repeatedly for months, I got annoyed, because you can only hear the same joke so many times, ya know? So in the summer of 1996, because of that and some other behaviors by her that were less than normal...or nice, shall we say, I had decided to deal with Bridgette by freaking her out so bad that she'd leave me alone. So I offered to buy the bullets for her to shoot me with, and told her "look-either do it, or quit wasting my time telling me how you're going to do it." I thought that if I offered to buy her the bullets, then she'd think that I must be up to something, that I had something up my sleeve, she'd freak, and leave me alone. The thing was, I wasn't up to anything aside from bluffing her, and all I had up my sleeve was my arm. Now, the downside to my plan was that I had essentially wagered everything that I had on my plan freaking her out. If she wasn't bluffing and was serious about shooting me...then I was screwed on an epic scale. So, she, our mutual friend Little John, and I met at the Sirloin Stockade (Wait...is it Western Sizzler? It's the steak place on the south side of Murray; I can't remember which it is now...) After we ordered our food, I handed her three .357 Magnum bullets. She picked one up, took a long draw off of her cigarette, and calmly said "What? You didn't get me hollow points?" I replied that since she was such a good shot(she is pretty awesome accuracy wise with that .357), I didn't think that she needed them. Then she said the thing that scared me the most. She said "Hollow points are more aesthetically pleasing." At that point, Little John harrumped and said something like "What? Are you going to shoot him in front of a white wall and go for the Jackson Pollack look or something?" All I could do was sit there and stare at my drink, and realize that my plan, which I did not have a back-up plan for at all, had failed spectacularly. At best, I had failed to freak out Bridgette out, or even preterb her in the least, and if she was trying to do likewise to me, well, it was working. At worst, I had just handed a mentally deranged woman who was intent on making me her homicide 3 bullets to do me in with. Stupendous planning on my part there. (There is a LOT more to this story, but I don't really wish to go into all that here...)
15.) When I went to San Diego, CA with my folks, I went out by myself on the Friday night that we were there. At this large open air mall in downtown, I met these two girls and I hung out with them. I asked them where they lived, and they said "the street", but I thought they were just joking. They told me about this coffeehouse where there was a big poetry slam, and that was back in my big poet days, so I went and read a couple of my poems in this rundown, falling apart coffee house place. I could tell it was a little rougher than what I was used to because the cops came in and busted a guy for drugs while I was on stage. So, after I read my poems, I sat with the two girls and this guy that looked like a young version of Ron Wood, the dude from the Rolling Stones, and had a great conversation. At 1 a.m., the coffeehouse closed, and they kicked everyone out. That was when the two girls started looking for a place to sleep...and I realized that they hadn't been joking earlier...and also that I was now quite a ways from the hotel, and in amongst a very grungy, sketchy group of people that I didn't know. I was thinking to myself that this could not be good. So I wound up having to make over an hour's walk across downtown San Diego at 1 a.m., and I expected that I was about to be mugged or worse at any moment. What made it even worse was that our hotel was so tall that I could see it for what felt like forever, but I didn't seem to be getting any closer as I walked. Nothing happened, but it was pretty intimidating in that moment when I realized that I was pretty much on my own in a huge city after midnight.
14.) When I was the ball boy for the MSU women's v-ball team, I got invited to their Halloween party in '96. I get there, and one of the girls on the team was dressed up as...ME!!! She wore clothes like what I was wearing back in those days, put a mini-basketball under her shirt, drew a mustache and goatee on, and gelled her hair straight back like I wore mine then. What made the effect all the more jarring was that Liz is 6 ft. tall, while I'm only 5'9"...so I had a 6 ft. tall woman dressed up as me. Those visuals stick with one for a long, long, long time, let me tell ya...
13.) On one of our winter vacations to Ft. Lauderdale, we were down there on New Year's Eve, and so I had gone out bar hopping to celebrate. I was sitting in this bar when this guy walked up to my table. He was about 6'1" or 6'2", and even his muscles seemed to have muscles...he looked at me and said "Hey! It looks like you and me are the two biggest dudes in this bar." I was thinking "and your point would be...???" but since I didn't know this dude, I looked around the bar, and said "I guess so." Then this guy says "Well, it looks like we're going to have see who the biggest toughest sumbich in this bar is." Then I realized that this guy wanted to fight; and I was by myself, in this guy's hometown. So I just started walking out, looked over my shoulder, and said "That'd be you, cowboy." and I was outta there.
12.) When we were at summer camp one year in North Carolina, we had decided to go whitewater rafting. Sandra, our youth director, drove past the entrance to the rafting place, so she had to turn the van around on this mountain road that had a big cliff just off of the shoulder of the road on the other side. So Sandra is backing towards that to get turned around, and she asks Dave and Steve, the two guys in the back seat, to tell her when she got close to the edge of the cliff. Small problem: Our youth group was filled top to bottom with mischevious smart alecs, and none more so than Dave and Steve. So, as Sandra backs up, Steve screams out "Holy Crap!" and Sandra laughs and says "Oh, you guys." and she goes back a little bit more, and Dave is like "OMG, we're all going to die!" to which Sandra is like "Very funny". And it keeps going like that, and Sandra is finally to the point she says "Will you clowns knock it off and get serious here? I really do need you guys help." and Steve explodes at that point, and he's like "Sandra. Turn the van off, get out, walk back here, and look at this. So Sandra gets out, and several more of us that were in front follow her, and about 3 quarters of the area of the van between the back bumper and the rear wheels are hanging out over the cliff. Another two foot and we'd have ran off the cliff.
11.) Back before everything went south between us, I was hanging out in the old apt. with Dave and Jill. Dave, for some bizarre reason, decided to put on Jill's black pleather pants and walk out of their bedroom shirtless...and this is a guy who has the natural skin tone of a sheet of paper! (Shudder) As our other roommate Shag said later of another matter, "They need to, but they do not make brain bleach that can wash crap like that out." I just wish that I could un-see that sight...
10.) When I lived in Nashville, Mike, my roommate, was 7 foot tall and around 300 lbs or so. (he couldn't play basketball to save his life, either.) We each had day beds in the cramped room that had to serve as our bedroom/kitchen/dining room/living room, and one night, I was having trouble sleeping, so to try something different, I threw my mattress off of my bed in the floor, and actually did get to sleep down there. I wake up to a really odd sight. Mike had woken up first, not realizing that I was now on the floor, and put his big size 17 feet down and almost stood up...until he realized that his feet were on something that was warmer and less flat than our floor...namely my chest.
9.) I was trying to drive back to Owensboro after taking my last final at HCC in December of 2002, and as I started around the Henderson bypass towards the Audobon Parkway, an ice storm hit. Several people had voiced their concern at my leaving for O'boro, but I was ready to be home, so I went. At first, it wasn't that bad, I thought...then on the last curve coming down the hill to where you get on the Audobon, the back end of my car came around, and I spun. I tried to steer my way out of the skidding, and it didn't work, and my car kept spinning. I saw the guardrail coming up, and the ditch, and I thought "Oh great-I'll either hit the guardrail and slide up it, or I'll miss it and wind up upside down in the ditch." I actually had time to realize how much the next few seconds would distinctly suck was the worst part of the wreck. Then I managed to do neither possibility that I anticipated. The passenger side of my car hit the end of the guardrail, and drove it all the way into my passenger seat, in essence harpooning my Altima onto the guardrail. I didn't have a scratch on me, fortunately.
8.) When I was a little kid, I lived very close to Niagara School in Henderson Co. One summer, my friends Greg White, Luke Crafton, and I went down to this area under the bridge on the creek behind the school to catch minnows so that we could go fishing at Luke's grandparents. The creek ponds up just beyond the bridge in a pool that is about 3 ft deep. We had an old wire screen, and so Greg and I were going to wade into the creek and use the screen to catch minnows on, while Luke stood on the bridge to watch for snakes, because that part of the creek was known as Snake Lake. Greg and I made a lot of noise going down into the water to scare away any snakes, so we were safe...we thought. After about 20 minutes, Luke said "Hey! Look at that fish". As we watched, a blue gill suddenly floated to the surface, looking very limp about 5 feet away from us. Then this snake's head came out of the water, and we actually could see it's fangs extend as it chomped back into the bluegill. Then, with the bluegill in it's mouth, the cottonmouth swam over the screen between Greg and I and went off into the weeds on the bank opposite the bridge as Greg and I went into hysterics and scampered up on the bridge.
7.) One night in Murray, I went to this party at my friend Gary's house. I got there, and I open up the door, and the first thing I see is John, this guy that we knew. John was wearing a replica Star Trek Capt. Kirk shirt, a leather mini-skirt, had a 40 oz. beer in each hand, and a lampshade on his head. I closed the door and walked away, trying to get that memory out of my head...
6.) When I was at Murray the first time, I knew this dude Joey and his girlfriend, who went by the nickname Tater. One night when a bunch of us were sitting around drinking, Joey started telling me that him and Tater were really into the whole watersports thing...and we ain't talking anything with speed boats or jet skis here, folks. Frankly, I didn't believe them, and I called b.s. on them. So they told me to meet them at the port-a-pots at the football stadium and they'd prove it. So I show up, and Joey is wearing one of those big yellow rain slickers from Wal-Mart with duct tape around the sleeves and legs, rubber boots, swim goggles, and a snorkel mask. Tater holds the door to the port a potty open, and Joey actually climbs down into the tank beneath the seat. Joey had some trouble scrunching down in there, so Tater helpfully put her big combat boot on his head and stomped to help him get all the way down in there. By this point, I was standing there slack jawed, thinking OMG, they are really going to do this. Then Tater turns to me, says "So, should I leave the door opened so you can watch, or closed?" Without any hesitation, I said "Closed. Definitely closed." So she went into the port-a-potty, and the door slammed shut. I stood there for the longest time, because I didn't know what I should say or do. That was really a...um...moment in my life, one I kinda hope that will very soon fade entirely from my memory. Every time that I hear a port-a-potty door slam, though...it always make think back to that moment...and I shudder.
5.) The night before I graduated high school, I was riding with my good friend Wayne the Brain, and Tarek, this exchange student from Germany that I had befriended that year. Wayne the Brain was in from college since he's a couple of years older than I am, and he was driving. We were way off in the boondocks along the Kentucky/Tennessee border when Wayne almost took a corner too fast and skidded straight down the middle of an S-curve, changing lanes inadvertently about 6 times. We stopped, tires smoking, and caught our breath at which point Tarek observed "Wow-that was nuts. We could have been a little bit dead there." At that point, I put my seat belt on in dramatic fashion to needle Wayne. So we get going again, and top a hill with Wayne's parents Plymouth Reliant K pushed to the upper limits of it's speed potential. I saw a curve that was right after the crest of the hill, and paused from my drink of Nehi Grape to tell Wayne that it looked too sharp for how fast we were going. Wayne, who had came back to Russellville fresh off of a bad break-up at college, didn't respond. (because, he told me later, the radio station was playing he and his ex's song and he kinda lost track of where he was and what he was doing. I almost hit him when he told me that.) The next thing I knew, I heard the tires screeching again, and I realized that the car was going sideways now, and Wayne didn't seem to be the one controlling where the car went. Then I saw the stump that we were sliding sideways towards. It was a massive stump, and it looked like we were about to hit it, so I screamed. Then we actually did hit it. I didn't scream then, I guess because it seemed pointless to. I remember the car began to flip after the bone jarring collision with the stump (The state police later estimated our speed at the time we crashed to be 85 mph approximately) and at one point as I looked out the windshield, I saw sky...then the ground...then the sky again. I thought when I saw that "It's over. I am going to die." We actually did not, thank God, but the car was utterly annihilated, and I never found the can of Grape Nehi that I had in my hand when we hit the stump. After the car stopped flipping, a farmhand who had seen the wreck ran over, and said the greatest thing amid his shock at seeing all 3 of us still alive-he said "Boys, I thought I was going to have throw y'alls brains back off of the road." He said that the very first thing, before he said anything else to us.
4.) Back when Erin and I were together, we got a really bizarre offer from another couple-they offered to do a foursome with us. That wouldn't have been quite so bad, except that the other couple were freakishly large folks-the guy is 6'8" and around 350 lbs, and his girlfriend is 6'3" or maybe 6'4" and outweighs even my current hefty girth by at least 45 -50 lbs. That was a really frightening offer to even consider, especially for Erin, who was only 5'7" and 135 lbs. Needless to say, our answer was "no."...
3.) After Erin and I had broken up, I spent a long while in a deep funk over our break-up. Some of my friends became kind of concerned about me, and staged an intervention of sorts. That would've been really cool of them, but what made it so scary/funny was that the group of friends who got together to stage this intervention were all members of the Murray Vampyr Clan, and they got pretty creative with their intervention that night...it began around 2 a.m. when Marika, an ex of mine, showed up at my apt. in this black leather outfit. Like most guys, I figured 'Ok, my ex showed up at my door at 2 a.m. wearing all leather...awww yeah, baby!". But unlike most guys, because of the trauma that Erin caused me, I was having panic attacks and even at points having vivid flashbacks/hallucinations when I was intimate with women at that point in time, but I was too embarrassed to get help for them. So I had one, and Marika left, and I went to bed. About 10 minutes later, Jaden, James, Syn, Nay-Nay, and about 8 other friends of mine from the Vampyr Clan show up. They start doing this séance mumbo jumbo to try and contact the "spirit" that I saw, while I watched the proceedings in my underwear, somewhat bemused by the whole thing. Things went awry, and suddenly Jaden is jumping all around my apartment, screaming in apparent satanic agony. Had this been any other group of my friends, I would've been like "Very funny, you guys. Chill." But considering that Jaden has just testified in court against Rod Ferrell, the vampire killer, and the group had been on several different true shows and so forth, I thought, "Well, maybe this is real-ya never know." So they ushered me outside, and all of them followed except Jaden and Jaden's little brother Gabriel, who had led the séance. We heard a lot of screaming and glass breaking, and at that point, I almost went next door to MSU public safety to get help. Thankfully everyone talked me out of it. Then the door opened, and Gabe pushed Jaden, whom he had duct taped to one of my chairs, out the door. Jaden writhed on the ground, and Gabe, who had cut himself, bled onto this sheet of paper that he had drawn a pentagram on. He then gave it to me to protect myself from "the evil spirits that had been accidentally unleashed". So they all leave, and I go back to bed again, and about 20 minutes later, there's another knock at my door. This time, it's Missy and Vanessa, James and Jaden's wives. Missy, the sole practicing Christian among the group, brought her Bible over, and after I had apologized to Vanessa for Jaden getting possessed, Missy started reading various parts of the Bible to me, and talking to me about Jesus. Around that time, I noticed that in Jaden's fit, he had knocked down my seascape poster, but left the poster of Michangelo's Angels right next to it undisturbed. I was pointing out to Missy how odd I found that when Vanessa ran out my door. A couple of minutes later, the whole crew came back, and they let me in on the fact that they had played pretty much a ginourmous joke on me so that I would see how ridiculous it was that I wasn't getting help, and to tell me that they really wanted me to get professional help, so that I could get back to being the Al that they loved hanging with. All in all, that was the strangest night in my entire life.
2.) I was driving back from work in Henderson late one night around 4 a.m., and since hwy 60 was deserted, I was flying along at around 75-80 mph as I approached the small community of Stanley. As I came around the large curve there on the west side of Stanley, I saw a headlight that came across the road at a really odd angle, and seemed to be really bouncing around a whole lot. As I came out of the curve and got my speed back, I wondered what was going on with that weird headlight. When I was about a quarter mile from the train crossing, suddenly the red lights came on-the weird headlight was a train! The train was also flying along, I have no idea how fast, but it was a pretty good clip also. I quickly looked the situation over and I realized that I could not get my car stopped before I got to the tracks with how fast I was going. I also realized that if I kept my speed the same, I couldn't beat the train. If I sped up to even 90 or 95, I still couldn't beat the train. I only saw one viable plan. I stomped my accelerator to the floor as hard as I could, then brought my left foot over and pressed it down on top of my right foot. As I was getting to the crossing, I saw the front of the train coming on, and I thought "Man-I am not entirely sure this is going to work." That was not a pleasant realization, so I looked down at the gauges to see what my car had left for me to use. My rpm's were in the red slightly at around 7200 rpm, and I was going a little over 120 mph. So, either this plan had to work, or...well, at least I knew at those speeds that it wasn't going to hurt because I would die too quickly. I remember as I crossed the tracks, I could actually see the train engineers wide eyes up in the locomotive. I made it barely, and then I had to get my car slowed back down, on the off chance that someone might be in the road for some odd reason in Stanley. I shifted into neutral, actually killed the motor, and coasted into the Fast Fuel station where I had to turn sharply to take out the rest of my momentum. I had to sit there a few minutes to let all that adrenaline calm back down also.
1.) The last story is about the girl I knew at Murray named Bridgette. Bridgette and I had a fairly interesting history, to say the least. Bridgette, on many occasions, had talked with me about her plans to shoot me. I thought that she was joking, so I didn't freak out. But after she kept talking about it repeatedly for months, I got annoyed, because you can only hear the same joke so many times, ya know? So in the summer of 1996, because of that and some other behaviors by her that were less than normal...or nice, shall we say, I had decided to deal with Bridgette by freaking her out so bad that she'd leave me alone. So I offered to buy the bullets for her to shoot me with, and told her "look-either do it, or quit wasting my time telling me how you're going to do it." I thought that if I offered to buy her the bullets, then she'd think that I must be up to something, that I had something up my sleeve, she'd freak, and leave me alone. The thing was, I wasn't up to anything aside from bluffing her, and all I had up my sleeve was my arm. Now, the downside to my plan was that I had essentially wagered everything that I had on my plan freaking her out. If she wasn't bluffing and was serious about shooting me...then I was screwed on an epic scale. So, she, our mutual friend Little John, and I met at the Sirloin Stockade (Wait...is it Western Sizzler? It's the steak place on the south side of Murray; I can't remember which it is now...) After we ordered our food, I handed her three .357 Magnum bullets. She picked one up, took a long draw off of her cigarette, and calmly said "What? You didn't get me hollow points?" I replied that since she was such a good shot(she is pretty awesome accuracy wise with that .357), I didn't think that she needed them. Then she said the thing that scared me the most. She said "Hollow points are more aesthetically pleasing." At that point, Little John harrumped and said something like "What? Are you going to shoot him in front of a white wall and go for the Jackson Pollack look or something?" All I could do was sit there and stare at my drink, and realize that my plan, which I did not have a back-up plan for at all, had failed spectacularly. At best, I had failed to freak out Bridgette out, or even preterb her in the least, and if she was trying to do likewise to me, well, it was working. At worst, I had just handed a mentally deranged woman who was intent on making me her homicide 3 bullets to do me in with. Stupendous planning on my part there. (There is a LOT more to this story, but I don't really wish to go into all that here...)