"My Saturday with Roger"
(Disclaimer: I'll just forewarn you all that the punctuation used in the following story (or lack of punctuation, rather.) May astound or alarm some of you. Yes, I did graduate high school. It's a friggen 2,500 word story. So sue me if I missed a few commas. That is all. Enjoy!)
It all started out on a mid September Saturday afternoon, and Steph and I had tickets to a football game at the Carrier dome. We decided that it would be too expensive and stressful to try and park up on the hill, and so decided to take advantage of the public transportation services Aka: the Centro bus. And so our adventure begins. It was my brilliant idea to park at the mall, and ride the bus straight to SU, and not have to wait for transfers. We parked in front of JCPenney (the popular 'spot' in which you wait for your bus to arrive) and by the time we got there, the SU bus was just arriving. Nearly getting hit by this bus, we finally made it onto it when the driver told us "Just sit down, if you go to SU you don't need to pay your fare". I was astounded at this and didn't think it seemed right that just because we happened to be taking a trip to Syracuse University, we should get a free ride. Then my brain decided to kick in and I realized that man was under the impression that I was, in fact, a student at the University. I continued to tell him I did not attend that school, or any school and that I didn't feel right about just sitting there and taking advantage, so I told him I would pay as soon as the bus had stopped. By now we had been on the bus for about five minutes, and Stephanie and I somehow got onto the topic of farms (Something about how there aren't enough farms in Syracuse, and there are more farm animals back home.) I began to tell her about all of the farm animals that I saw at the state Fair the previous week. Just as she began ridiculing me for my love for cows, the bus driver (We'll call him 'Bob') decided that he wanted in on this intense debate of which farm animal is greater. Immediately he sided with me and told us he likes cows too. The only problem with this, however, is that he continued to talk on and on....and on about them; telling me about how many cows he sees on his various out-of-city bus routes. "That's interesting" and "oh, wow you don't see that everyday" were the standard responses I would give him out of common curtsey, then continue to talk to Steph. After he shut up for a while, my friend and I got into a different conversation. She had asked me to spend the night at her house that evening after the game. I told her I didn't think I would be able to make it, cause I had to get up fairly early for church the next morning, and just as I said this, bus boy was at it again - butting right into our conversation. "Church? I used to go to church" he said. "Well....uh..maybe you should try it out again. It feels pretty good to, you know." I replied as he murmured something under his breath to the effect of "Yea, so does staying out on Saturday night...". by this time we were approaching our bus stop (not a minute too soon) and when I went up to put my Dollar in the machine 'Bob' just put his hand up and said "Well..nice talking to you!". I said something like thanks, have a nice day, or whatever you say and got off the bus. After five or ten minutes of Steph telling me 'Bob' was gonna stalk me, and he wanted to 'get my numba' I had realized something. I had forgot to pay my fare! After all of that time, waiting until we had arrived to pay it, I left the bus without doing so. I, being Emily Clos, immediately started flipping out and making it a much bigger deal than it needed to be. I continued to say "But -but but he put his hand up...I thought that meant it was on the house". I then realized something else, I had told him I got to church and believe in God. So now the man thinks that I'm a criminal with a Bible! Stephanie was able to calm me down, and that with the combination of my A.D.D. caused me to forget about the whole incident in a matter of minutes.
When we entered the dome shaped building, immediately bright orange and blue colors began to bombard my corneas, and I was blinded by the mob of giant orange blobs. After a minute of two of gaining my composure I then was able to distinguish what the orange blobs were. They were, in fact, people! Hundreds of people, with their shirts, faces, stomachs, etc. painted with orange. It wasn't that I was surprised to see this display of what some might call "team spirit", however it took me back at first. It was not uncommon to see a few guys walking by, all decked out in orange and blue Syracuse gear, painted up, foam finger on hand, bandana on their head, and their girlfriends walking with them not wearing an inch of the two hideous colors. They would be wearing something like a black sweater, jeans (not too blue though) and maybe some UGG boots. For a moment I began to wonder why they would even bother showing up to a football game for a team for which they have no team spirit. They puzzled me, but only until I saw a group of kids walking by in various New York Yankee T shirts. Not only were they not in Syracuse paraphernalia like all the others, they were wearing the shirt of a completely different SPORT. How do you justify that? "Well...it has some blue in it" would maybe be the only excuse on earth available for them. After weaving in and out of the crowd we arrived at our seats. We were sitting there for a few minutes into the game when we noticed something running about all over the corner of the field. After a few moments I realized it was the team mascot. I'd seen the mascot dozens of times on TV while watching the game at home, but it occurred to me that I had never actually seen it in real life. There's something unsettling about a giant, orange shaped, blob dancing in front of you while you’re trying to eat nachos. A question arose in my mind while seeing this: "Why does our team have to have the lamest mascot known to mankind?" I mean there are plenty of silly mascots, there's a blue devil, a masked raider, an angry leprechaun etc. Yet our team decides to pick a "loveable orange". A piece of fruit! (Maybe it's some sort of a symbol.) Anyhow we were at the game settled in for about two hours and decided we would be smarter than everyone else in leaving before the fourth quarter was over. I just figured that they weren't going to win anyways at the rate that they were going, so we might as well 'beat the traffic'.
We ended up getting on the first bus we saw, a 'Camillus Commons' bus, figuring 'Hey..as long as we get downtown, we can figure it out from there'. Well, we made it downtown shortly afterwards and started to wait for a bus that would talk us back to the mall. Stephanie (never having experienced waiting downtown for a bus, late at night) was growing very impatient. I continued to tell her that our bus would arrive shortly (my dad used to drive a bus and gave me the advice of ‘Whenever some crazy comes up to you and asks when there bus will come, just say to them: ‘it’s scheduled to come in six more minutes.’) I tried this little trick on Steph, and about ten or fifteen minutes later, this little trick turned right into an unsure, freezing cold nightmare. It wasn’t two seconds after Steph asking me “how much longer?” That a man with a dirty grey sweatshirt (I’m guessing something near a size XXXL) came up to us and offered to buy a cigarette from us for a dollar. (For those of you not savvy to street prices, this was double the suggested retail value of the standard single $0.50 cigarette.) I told the man I didn’t smoke and after he asked me a few more times, (as if I were hiding them in my back pocket) he crossed the street to ask another man for one. I was nearly unaware that the whole incident had even taken place, considering around three or four people in a given day waiting for the bus will generally go around performing the very same "cigarette interrogation". Stephanie, however, was a bit taken back by the man. I could tell she was becoming more and more nervous. The fact that Steph was nervous, then began to make ME nervous, and I quickly became more cautious of our surroundings. A few more minutes went by, and no bus. Other buses, going to other malls, had passed by and each time Steph would say “Why can’t we just get on that one?” assuming it would automatically take us to wherever we pleased. I tried to explain to her that the destination of the bus, would be written on the top (for example: 52 Court/Park st, or 388 Central Square…and so on). She began to understand and told me that she thought there should be a bus with the word ‘Ghetto’ on the destination bar, and it should just drive around the city all day long. I laughed, but right after this remark a man walked up near our stop we were sitting at. As he approached us I noticed he had a plastic bag over his hands. I told Steph that we should move to a different corner of the road. I told Steph the cold hard truth according to Emily Clos, that the man had a knife under his plastic bag. (not maybe, not possibly, but for certain). I only did this to show Steph that it was possibly dangerous and move her away quickly. She kept telling me that I was ‘judging people’ and was convinced that the man was simply warming his hands. How a plastic bag can warm yours hands, I may never know. Right as we made our way to the other side of the building, away from the knife-bag guy, a kid riding an old, beat up, girl’s bike approached us. He and the giant pick in his hair wanted to know if “Ya’ll got MySpace pages?” I told him “no” (only it was more like NO! and made a face like ‘mind your business, move along’) but Steph politely stood there and replied: “No, I don’t actually”. This was her first mistake because then the questioning began. “Where you go to school!?” “You got a cell phone?” “Where you live at?” “what bus are you waiting for?” “What’s your favorite color?” And so on and so forth. I began to slowly walk in the other direction, hoping she would follow and she did. After doing so the boy rode his rickety little bike away. Just as he was leaving, the knife-bag guy was coming closer to us. I began to panic as I saw a car driving up. ‘Good, they can call the police if we get stabbed, they’ll see it all! We’ll be on the news!’ The car however was not driving by to witness a murder, but to pick up the knife-bag guy. As he got into the car, the plastic bag began to come off of his hand, revealing what was underneath. It was not a knife, or a gun, but a chicken leg. Stephanie burst into a fit of slightly irritating and seemingly uncontrollable laughter and ridiculed that I was afraid of poultry. I began to tell her “You can’t be too careful! You’re too trusting! Chicken legs can have very jagged edges, I could have been impaled!” It was getting very late by this time and I was contemplation calling home for a ride. The cold wind whipping against my arms felt like tiny little needles, pinching me every time the wind would blow. A few moments later two men and a woman walked out of a bar from down the street. When they saw all of the orange and blue and Syracuse clothing I was wearing, they began to shout things like “WE DID IT!” and “WHAT A GAME!” Syracuse had apparently won the game. Not only did we not save any time or trouble by leaving early, but we missed the one game (probably out of the whole season) that they actually win! Needless to say, I felt like a moron! “I’m not waiting any longer, you need to call for a ride or I’m going to!” Steph said in a panic. It was 11:30 by now and we had been waiting for a bus for nearly an hour. I kept reasoning with her (and myself) that it was a weekend schedule, and the bus would come any minute. But I began to know it wasn’t true. I called my brother and he was in the middle of a gigantic project, of course, (something like building a computer, or fixing a space shuttle, I’m not sure -something outrageous) and he told me he would come “in a little while” (which we all know means 45 minutes.) But about 25 minutes later (still longer than necessary) he finally arrived to pick us up. We got to the mall, and each got into our cars, exhausted from the whole ordeal. And as we pulled away, what did we see? A bus!!! ‘Syracuse University/Carousel mall’! arriving at precisely the same time as our ride.
I would just like to say, that this is my luck in a nutshell. I try to do the right thing and pay a bus fare -and forget to! I try to be ‘smart’ and leave early -and I get home an hour and a half late’ I try to protect my friend from murderers -and she laughs in my face!
If you have gotten nothing else out of this story, please remember to pay you fare when you get ON the bus and don’t talk to strangers with bags on their hands.
That’s the tale of my unforgettable Saturday.
~The end~
