I was so ready for my entertainment that it took me a second to realize that something was different. The inebriated clown with the punch bowl stumbled forward unsteadily, only to almost choke on the feather boa being waved around by the energetic show girl. I moved through the crowd behind him, trying to identify what was missing. A tall girl wearing what I could only guess was the 15th “slutty cat” costume of the night danced backward and crunched down on the punch-bearer’s big toe with her stiletto heel. As he bellowed with a strange mix of pain and laughter, it suddenly hit me: the football player who got drenched last time was in another corner of the room, making time with some chick in a Princess Leia slave girl costume.
Turning back to the chaos, I tried to figure out who was in the line of fire now. Through the crowd, I caught a glimpse of a girl in a bumblebee costume chatting with a friend in the center of the splash zone. I didn’t want her to suffer an embarrassment that was meant for a douche jock, and besides, no girl should be at a co-ed costume party and end up participating in an involuntary wet T-shirt contest at the same time. That’s just too much. Darting through the crowd, I snagged one of her costume’s wings and yanked her backwards just as Dummy tripped and his goblet of spiked fruit juice spilled all over where she had been standing a second earlier. Everyone burst out laughing at his antics, and I relished in my chivalrous moment. Bumblebee turned and smiled up at me, her blue eyes shining through her mask.
“Thanks. The last thing I wanted was to get wet in this get-up.”
I knew that voice. I stumbled backward, the blood draining from my face.
She was concerned. As she reached out to stabilize me, she stepped under one of the lights and her blonde hair caught the glow, creating a halo around her.
“Are you alright?”
I tried stammering a response, but I slipped in the punch on the floor. Just as I was about to hit the ground, I jumped, forward this time, to get me anywhere but there. I hit the grass with a dull thud. Looking around, I found myself in the chilly October night, my back soaked with punch and my heart galloping like a wild stallion. My best guess was that after landing in the punch, I had sprinted out of there like the building was on fire and ended up here, yards away from the party. I screamed my frustration to the moon and pounded the hill that I was lying on. Why?? Of all the things that had to change, of all the cruel circumstances, why did she have to be the one I rescued from the punch disaster??
My mind raced against my will, tracing the flow of events. Since I hadn’t brought Tara to the party this time, she hadn’t worn a costume to match mine; because I hadn’t danced off to the side with her, she’d ended up chatting with a girl friend; because she occupied the football player’s spot in the center of the room, he gotten bored and found a throat to shove his tongue down. My head ached. She was unavoidable. Everywhere I went, Tara haunted my steps, never even knowing that she was breaking and re-breaking me each time I saw her. I couldn’t take it anymore.
I leapt to my feet and sprinted toward my dorm on the opposite side of campus. One jump forward, and I was there in three seconds. I threw my luggage bag on my bed and rifled through my dresser drawers. Another jump, and the bag was packed with all the essentials I needed. A final jump found me walking along the road where Tara had walked away, as I flashed the hitchhiker’s sign at passing trucks. Two hours later, I was on my way to New York. I thought I was free.
I just didn’t know yet that there was no such thing as freedom for me anymore.
Chapter 7
Travelling is fun, right? You’re going an adventure. At least that’s what you tell yourself to ease the monotonous task of getting where you need to go. It’s simpler as a child, when going anywhere is just as exciting as arriving. A road trip becomes the journey to hidden treasure or a voyage to quests unknown. As you get older and more impatient, travelling morphs into the mandatory distance you need to cover to get where you’re supposed to be. Nobody rejoices in commuting to work every morning, but there is a satisfaction to arriving someplace. The important thing about travelling is that there must be a journey from A to B, a starting point and a finish line. If you have nowhere to go, you’re not travelling. You’re just moving.
****
The trip to New York was split up into three eighteen-wheelers, two taxis, and one van stuffed with an overly friendly family of homeschoolers. After the Brady Bunch let me out in Albany, I grabbed my bag of unwashed clothes and set out in search of a laundromat. As I walked, the first difference that I noticed between the East Coast and the Midwest was how pretty the foliage was. That, and the fact that there was more of it. I mean, Ohio is a beautiful state, but it’s more linear, which is a nice way of saying that it’s flat. The rolling hills and abrupt changes in elevation of upstate New York created layers of flaming trees that doubled the visual impact of fall. I strolled down the winding streets of residential neighborhoods and wandered into a few cul-de-sacs before I figured out how to navigate the labyrinth of suburbia.
The farther I walked, the more I saw the transition from Richie Rich houses to Oliver Twist back alleys. That was a bit more familiar. There’s always this ugly, cheap zone that creates a buffer between the open country and the booming metropolis. It was in that no man’s land that I found a place to wash my clothes. As I swung open the filthy glass door, a tired electric buzzer announced my entrance, as if anyone working that place still cared about customer service. Sure enough, the balding man behind the counter didn’t even glance up, and that was just fine with me. I wasn’t in the mood to chat or make new friends. Frustratingly, there were no open machines, which was shocking since there wasn’t another soul in the place. Still, I needed clean clothes. The locker room odor that followed me around like a noxious shadow was getting ridiculous. With a furtive look around the empty room, I tossed my whites in with someone else’s laundry, picked up a five-year-old People magazine from a corner table and sat down to wait.
Just as the cycle was just about to wrap up, the strangest man on earth entered the room. I’ve seen weird things. Forget the three-breasted woman from Total Recall, I have witnessed crap that made me wonder if I had accidently jumped to another dimension instead of back in time. But this guy….he just had this aura of bizarre about him, the kind of weird that you just feel in your gut as you experience it. He had shock-blond hair that stood up on end in some places and lay perfectly flat in others, accentuated by a wave of blue running down the middle. A tight V-neck shirt crisscrossed with neon stripes caught the light and actually created a refraction blur under the harsh fluorescent beams of the laundromat. Covering his legs were fishnets that travelled up underneath scissor-cut jean shorts. I wondered how in God’s name he was walking around in the New York pre-winter chill without frostbite. To complete the ensemble, a Vietnam-era leather handgun holster lay loosely draped across his scrawny frame, almost falling off as he…um…sashayed through the rows of appliances.
I scolded myself for staring, but it was like watching a planned train wreck; the whole situation practically begged for a “what-the-hell?” expression and some awkward extended staring. I know, you think I’m judgmental, but you weren’t there. Like I said, this was the kind of weird that just hits you as a feeling, not as a result of anything physical. His outfit didn’t exactly help, though.
If he noticed or objected to my raised eyebrows, he didn’t show it. Walking down the row of machines, he traced his fingers along the smooth metal surfaces with a lingering touch, like he was caressing them. Stopping in front of the machine that I had tossed my clothes into, he opened it up and started pulling stuff out. I cringed. I had no desire to interact with this strange individual, so I slid down behind my magazine like a shield. A low chuckle from the opposite side of the room reluctantly drew my attention away from ancient gossip about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. He held a pair of my boxers as he looked in my direction with a raised eyebrow and a smirk that made me very uncomfortable. Silent laughter creased his face, and he tossed them ove
r to me. Relieved that he didn’t seem interested in talking, I accepted them with a quick nod and promptly hid behind my magazine again. My curiosity lured me back out again though, and I stealthily watched him, trying to determine why he struck me as so out of the ordinary.
He didn’t give me anything to work with. He simply continued to pull laundry out of the dryer and stack things into piles. After a few minutes of careful observation, I grew bored and returned to my reading. The room was silent for a while, so I just sort of assumed that he had left. I tossed my magazine to the side and started to stand up, but instantly collapsed back into my seat in shock. He was leaning on the machine directly in front of me, staring me down with a half-grin on his face. I was freaked. I hadn’t heard him move at all, let alone get that close to me. He could’ve been watching me for a full ten minutes and I had no clue. He didn’t react at all to my shock. Wide-eyed and trying to catch my breath, I lay awkwardly in the chair the way I had landed. We played chicken with our stares, me freaking out and hiding it badly, he amused and playful. He broke the extended silence first.
“You know, it’s rude to use someone else’s machine without splitting the cost.” His voice was shockingly deep for such a girly individual. “It’s just bad manners.”
I cleared my throat in an attempt to make my voice work again.
“Sorry,” I said as I dug around for some quarters in my pocket. “Here…um…,” I managed to pull out about sixty cents in loose change. “That’s all the coins I have on me.”
He accepted them graciously enough. His hand lingered on mine far too long for my liking and his eyes twinkled with mischief. He was clearly enjoying making me uncomfortable.
“Much appreciated. And here—“, he reached behind him and passed me a stack of my folded clothes, “—are your clothes. Pleasure doing business with you.”
The thought of this man handling my clothes intimately enough to fold them turned my stomach. I managed an insincere grin in response. Noticing a corner of paper sticking out from between my shirts, I pulled on it, revealing an advertisement for a club. Confused, I looked up at him. He grinned.
“In case you get bored. We’ve got a killer buffet, and your first time is my treat.” He grabbed a few of his shirts and turned to walk out. “We’d love to have you,” he said placing a heavy emphasis on love. Thankfully, he spun around like a dancer and glided towards the door, leaving the rest of his laundry behind. I didn’t want to say anything more to him, but my Midwest upbringing didn’t let me ignore his error.
“Hey, you left your laundry behind!”
He ducked his head back through the exit and gave me what I was starting to recognize as his trademark, unreadable smirk.
“That’s not my laundry.”
With that, he winked and left.
Chapter 8
Now, before you go making assumptions about what I’m about to say next, just place yourself in my shoes for a second: You’re a college student (which is code for “bank loan slave”) with no source of income. Imagine that you run away from the place where you use those loans to supply yourself with food and lodging in order to, say, escape from a horrible life-decision caused by an addiction to a quantum physics impossibility. You’re left with no money, no food, and no place to stay. OK, now you’re ready to hear this story.
After that bizarre encounter, I packed up my clean clothes and started walking through the darks alleys of the city. I realized something: I hadn’t made any kind of plan when I fled Ohio State. I hadn’t considered where I’d live after I arrived in New York. More importantly, I was starving. I could and would have eaten a live pig if there had happened to be one wandering the streets. OK, that’s a bit of hyperbole. Sue me.
Regardless, I was hungry, and this is when desperation decided to scrub out a line that I had drawn in the sand at the laundromat. I gazed down at the flyer I had for the club with the “killer buffet”. I was torn. I was hungry, but…the creepy guy would be there. I was dying to get out of the October chill, but…the creepy guy would be there. I was really having a hard time with that part, in case you couldn’t tell. Eventually, my survival instincts won out. I began my quest to find this place, searching for 155th Avenue while preparing to stifle my nausea during the encounter.
It was taking a long time to reach my destination. Too long.
I decided to jump.
The next thing I knew, I was caught in the middle of a neon-clad crowd of creatures that bordered on the fine line between human and alien. They were chattering away in what sounded like a hipster form of English, so I decided that they were from the earth-bound side of the atmosphere. I had no memory of meeting them, of course, so I had to pretend like I knew what was going on, laughing at what I hoped were jokes and trying to avoid getting stepped on as they hustled me along towards a poorly-lit red door at the end of an alley. I was grateful that I was with these people, even if past me was the one who met them, because there was absolutely no way that I would have found this place alone.
If you’ve never been to the Red Door Lounge (yes, that’s actually what it’s called), you need to know two things:
No actual lounging is done there.
The whole club is a mosh pit on steroids.
I’d never heard music loud enough to make me wish I was deaf before, but even if I’d been blessed with that handicap when I walked onto the floor of the Red Door Lounge, I still would have felt every note resonate in my chest. My guides grinned madly and nodded at me, expecting some sort of reaction. I managed a plastic smile and a thumbs-up, which seemed to satisfy them. Promptly evaporating into the jumping, chaotic sea of humanity, they abandoned me on the fringes. I knew I needed to find my potential benefactor, the laundry creep. Turns out, I didn’t have to go far.
An effeminate grasp on my shoulder almost caused what little food I had in my stomach to be recycled, and I instantly identified the hand’s owner. Swallowing hard so as not to be sick, I turned and faced that already familiar smirk.
“Couldn’t stay away, huh?”
At least that’s what I think he said. I wasn’t too good at lip reading back then, so I’m still not completely sure this is how the conversation went, but I’ll do my best.
“Had to try this ‘killer buffet’ you were talking about,” I yelled back, hoping he could hear me over the noise.
He laughed, which I thought was a bit of an odd reaction, but then he wasn’t exactly the picture of a normal guy.
“Come on, we’ve got a little best for you.”
That was a strange turn of phrase, but hey, maybe it meant he was gonna let me try the special of the night or something. He led me toward the buffet line, but suddenly, he swerved to the right and motioned me to follow him through the crowd. I kept my hands up by my head and walked sideways to make as little contact with the dancers as possible, but it seemed like everyone’s body was most attracted towards the guy who wanted nothing to do with them. It was like cats and their unnatural ability to find the one person in a crowd who’s allergic; once they know you don’t like them, they try to be your best friend.
Much to my dismay, the crowd surged in between me and Laundry-guy and I had to battle my way through what felt like miles of grinding, sweating bodies. Eventually, I found some much needed breathing space. A little too much space, actually.
I was standing in the middle of a ring formed by the only clubbers who weren’t dancing. As I scanned their faces, I saw eagerness, excitement, and something else I couldn’t quite place. I came full circle and stared across the floor at Laundry-guy and the four King Kong lookalikes standing in a row behind him. The thumping of my heart rose to match the bass of the dubstep song breaking my eardrums. A smirk creased my eccentric acquaintance’s face. He raised his arms and performed a rapid 360 degree turn, pumping his arms to draw a roar from the crowd, and they obliged, adding another rumble to the already vibrating floor.
“Let’s have ourselves a light!” he yelled.
Looking back, I r
ealize that’s probably not quite what he said because the next thing I knew, I was getting charged by four huge guys, intent on mayhem.
Chapter 9
A word of advice: A club, especially one like the Red Door Lounge, is an awful place to have a fight. That’s probably not that helpful, since you usually don’t get to pick where you have to defend yourself, unless you’re having a duel (which I don’t recommend either), but that’s beside the point. The problem with duking it out in a club is that most raves have strobe lights. Have you ever watched your hand under a strobe light? Kinda looks like you’re watching an old-time movie where you see each individual frame. Well, if the lights are flashing slower than that, the comparison is more like someone places a picture in front of you, then flips off the lights, replaces the picture with a different one, and turns the lights back on. Your brain just doesn’t move that fast.
So, naturally, when I’m getting charged by four gorilla-like thugs and they seem to be teleporting towards me, I get a little disoriented. Therefore, it makes sense that I didn’t see that first punch coming.
This wasn’t the first time I’d been punched, but this wasn’t on the same level as my Ohio State experience. This wasn’t even in the same building. I was almost knocked out by that hit alone, but luckily I was far from the jumping rookie that I had been a year ago. A split second after impact, I reversed time for the first of many times that night. This time, I conditioned myself to the flashing lights and strained to watch for any approaching fists. Sure enough, I saw it and dodged perfectly. Then somebody else broke some of my teeth. Reset. Blocked one, dodged the other, counter-strike. Got hit. Rinse and repeat.
The Jump Journal Page 4