A Rude Awakening

Okay, so yesterday’s post was – as T-Cam so quickly pointed out to everyone – nothing more than a completely silly, extremely absurd April Fools post. The Grecian name used translates to “April Fool” although I doubt anybody bothered to translate it and, by no means whatsoever, was I offered ten grand and a stretch limo for the Pussy Wagon. It would have been nice, but it never actually happened…

So please, people, stop sending me emails questioning the validity of that story … oh wait, nobody ever sends me correspondence to my blog postings no matter how unbelievable. I guess my desire to write these things up as nothing more than self-entertainment is proving to be fulfilled. That’s coo… A few people seem to read them and I suppose it’s not the worst method I could use to waste time. Might as well fill up a small portion of the Internet with my nonsense…

Today’s nonsense will be a long overdue story from back in the day. The reason that it is long overdue is because I alluded to the possibility of writing up some stories from my college years a while back in my The College Years posting. Since that was posted well over a year and a half ago, I guess it’s about time I followed through. It was the spring of 1989. My fellow pledges and I had been busy with a plethora of assigned tasks at the house, without any sleep, since arriving there the day before. It was now the Saturday evening of our Hell Weekend…

Most of the active brothers were at the house this evening – they had all been through the same experience when they pledged and the opportunity to take part in passing the torch onto the latest batch of brothers-to-be was considered a duty as well as a privilege. This night was to be our (the pledges) final test of character, one more method for building camaraderie amongst our pledge class and an experience that every brother could point to as a shared rite of passage. That being said, we were a college fraternity; when fun was to be had, we’d have it…

There was a party-like atmosphere at the house throughout this weekend and it was basically the pledges that were entertaining the brothers. Our “little sisters” – a group of sorority girls who, for one reason or another, decided that the Theta Tau guys were cool enough to hang with and accepted the completely informal designation as “little sisters” – were there as well but no outsiders were allowed in. Not that there wasn’t fun to be had if you were a pledge; whether or not a pledge had fun was a decision that each pledge needed to make for himself. I can’t really get into too many details; but, for the pledge class, the real fun began when we received a piece of paper with a clue on it – a riddle. We were told that the solution to this riddle would lead us to the next clue and so on, and so on. How many clues there were was an unknown and where, exactly, they would lead us was also an unknown. It was then that we left the house and began our journey…

There were three in the pledge class that semester – Logic, Sponge Pile and myself, Coriolis. There used to be four however the fourth pledge didn’t make it through Pledge Court – an earlier event. Our task now was to solve this first riddle and find the next clue. It was rather impressive to see the intricacy that was put into the clues and the amount of ground that one needed to cover in order to complete the game. I remember that the initial riddles led us to various places on or near the Wayne State University campus and, without fail, we would discover the next clue waiting. As the game went on, we needed to head further and further out until the final clue was retrieved. It was taped to the butt of the “Spirit of Detroit” statue in Detroit’s Hart Plaza. To our surprise, this final clue was not a riddle. What it ended up being was a rather long list of “things” with instructions for us to return back to the house…

Upon returning we noticed that much of the crowd had already left. Pretty much the only people at the house were those that lived there and our pledge master and it was he who gave us our instructions. We were told to return to the house the next morning with no less than half of the items represented on the list we had obtained. We were given a time (I think it was 9 or 10 in the morning) and told that we could obtain said items by any means other than purchasing them. If we decided to do something stupid like steal an item and were then unfortunate enough to get caught by an authority figure, the fraternity would disavow all knowledge of our actions and we would have to face the charges on our own. This scavenger hunt would become our final riddle…

Now bear in mind that we had been awake for quite a while at this point. Depending on what time we got up the morning before this and seeing as it was now approaching midnight, all of us had been without sleep for a minimum of at least 36 hours. That being the case, we had quite a few items to retrieve before reporting back to the house the next morning. We headed out in search of some interesting items…

We started with the easy things … things that we could just get from our houses. We stopped by Logic’s place and picked up a box of Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries, a pair of panties (“borrowed” from his sister) and a few other items; headed to my parent’s house to get a couple more items – what, exactly, I do not remember – although I don’t remember stopping by Sponge Pile’s – either he had nothing on the list or his house was too far out of the way … I don’t remember. I doubt it was the latter as we covered a lot of ground that night. After stopping by my parent’s, we headed west on I-94 toward Detroit Metro Airport. One of the items was an international airline ticket…

Luckily for us, the international terminal was still open. All of the domestic terminals were shut down for the night but the international terminal was still operational. We ran into a couple young ladies that were waiting for a ride and asked if they, in the name of higher education, would be willing to let us have their tickets. After explaining that we were pledging a fraternity and currently involved in a scavenger hunt they were more than happy to help us out. Bingo – international airline tickets! They were already used, but nothing on the list said they needed to be unused… We were also able to obtain a urinal cake from one of the terminal’s bathrooms. Why? Because it was on the list…

I remember obtaining a railroad crossing sign – not round – from a somewhat desolate road in Ypsilanti where poor Logic needed to get down on all fours and let me climb on his back to be able to reach the bolts which I then removed. We stopped off at this XXX theater on Michigan Avenue to get a dildo (listed as a “huya” on the item list), a pocket pussy and an adult theater ticket stub – nice guy working there … gave us the ticket for free. I believe his words were, “Anything to help higher education.” I’ll have to admit that we cheated a bit and actually purchased the dildo and pocket pussy but what good are rules if you can’t bend them a bit? We even stopped off at a police station at one point. I don’t know what we obtained there, if anything, but I definitely remember stopping by.

I think it was around 6 or 7 in the morning when, for reasons that elude me now, we made our way over to Belle Isle. I was driving. Logic was in the passenger seat … sleeping. Sponge Pile was in the back seat and, as I noticed through my rear-view mirror, also sleeping. A short while later I was awakened by a loud thud and some rather violent motion. Strange thing was I was still driving. Granted half of my car was now on the sidewalk and headed directly toward one of those wire-framed garbage cans, the fact of the matter was that I, in the strictest definition of the term, was driving.

Now granted, I’m not what most people would refer to as a “morning person” – far from it. Most of the time the first thing I want to do after waking up is get a few more winks. When you wake up behind the wheel of a vehicle – one that’s currently being utilized for exactly what it was designed – you need to quickly come to terms with your situation. Me? I floored it.

As I was returning to the road and watching the newly deformed garbage can land behind us I must admit that the sudden rush of adrenaline brought on by recent events woke me up rather quickly. I then needed to explain the situation to a very confused Logic and Sponge Pile. After all, they had just woken up as well…

All kidding aside, things could have been much worse. It was early Sunday morning on Belle Isle and there were quite a few people – apparently much better at dealing with mornings than I – jogging or riding bikes around the island. I’m lucky I didn’t kill anybody. This would then have been a tragically different story. Luckily though, the only casualties of this story were one badly dented rim and one newly mangled garbage can.

So I guess the lesson to be learned from this story is to be careful where you decide to sleep. Try to keep it some place where no life or death decisions need to be made mere nanoseconds after waking up. Whilst driving an automobile is just about the worst place I can think of…

bis später,

Coriolis