Since this is my first entry into Fuzzy Memories, I thought I would write about one of my favorites. This one took place during my senior year in college.
I went to a small school, and a somewhat nerdy one at that, so entertainment options were at a minimum. One particularly entertaining late night past time, however, was the driving around of the golfcarts that the college employees used. Most of the time these carts were locked up or unable to be jimmied to start, but on those few classic occassions, you would find a free cart that started right up with a bent fork key.
One particular night, my roommates and I stumbled upon one of these golden horses in a drunken stupor and decided to take it for a cruise. We hit the motherload with this particular cart because it was equipped with doors and a flatbed...classy. Well, we're cruising around, checking out the sites, and decide to take it back onto the cross country trails which were at one edge of the campus. The cross country trails were in the middle of the woods and were relatively narrow, so it made it pretty exciting to cruise around on them in the middle of the night. Of course there are no lights out there...but the cart has lights, so we're all good.
Anyway, here we are, the three of us, squeezed into the front of the cart, me sitting bitch (trust me, that's not a bad thing...just wait) and my two roommates on either side. My roommate, the K man, is driving and of course he's got the pedal to the floor. This makes it much more exciting because at this speed, and with the obvious clarity that comes with a plexiglass windshield and tiny headlights in the darkness of the woods, he can follow the path like Bobby Labonte. Did I mention we're drunk? Well, within a minute or so we hit a sharp left, he sees it a bit too late and overcompensates by pulling the wheel hard to the left.
Woosh...there goes my other roommate, the B man, out the door. Apparently, the doors can't handle about 570 lbs of weight being put on them by three guys turning a corner at 15 mph. Go figure. This is unbelievably hilarious to me and the K man, but B is a bit perturbed to say the least. He stumbles out of the tall grass and gives us the "I'm OK, assholes" salute. No injuries, but now I've been relagated to sitting in the flatbed...mostly because I represent 170 of those 570 lbs and I would lose in a fight for the seat. Oh well, no biggie.
K man gets a little better at driving but then we get a bit bored with simply driving around and all agree that driving the cart over some bumps or into a tree would be more fun. (I said the "school" was a nerdy school, apparently we are at the lower end of the brain spectrum.)
Four crashes later and the cart's not looking so good...we've lost the lights and at this point we're all standing outside the cart trying to figure out why it won't move. Perhaps it is the tree stump sticking into the bottom of the front axle. Luckily, carts don't weigh too much and we lift it up and off the stump. But now we've got a problem.
Now the cart can only do two things...drive at full speed or be shut off. Don't ask me why, I'm not a mechanic, but that's the hand we were dealt so we went with it. Seeing this as a sign that our is coming to an end, we head back in the direction of where we got the cart, behind the main gym of the school. Well, this sits at the top of a hill and as we're heading up the hill, we start to see some lights. Bright lights. But we can't slow down. And then we see what it is. The field lights are on and a bunch of people are doing a charity late night walk or some shit like that. There's no way we can turn the cart around at full speed and we surely can't drive out onto the field all of a sudden and we're approaching this area pretty quickly, so we have to make a decision.
Turn off the engine. Bail out. And run like hell to the other exits from the paths.
But we're on a hill, the top of the hill. And gravity is working against us. We're running like mad down the hill and here comes the cart behind us. I swear I've never run faster, and the loud bang of the cart making its final tree collision let me know I'm safe from getting run over.
All in a good night's work.
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