At sixteen I moved out of my house to live with a female “friend” who was some years older than I. To the normal teenage boy this would be a dream come true! Especially during the rite of passage we call spring break… enter the hands of fate with creepy horror movie music as a backdrop. My plan was simple, get my friend to invite one of her girlfriends to the park with us and, clear throat for effect, spend the week with them. I should however point out that I was at the time working at a fast food joint.
Being the” man”, I took it upon myself to get us a room. However, it wasn’t near the park. In fact it was several blocks away from the park. I am still to this day not sure why I was blamed for that mistake, it was only a few millimeters away on the map! Given that money was tight it wasn’t the best establishment around. I may have been tipped off when the desk clerk asked me how many hours I needed the room when I made reservations.
Upon arriving I was very impressed with my animal magnetism… I quickly came to the realization that the girls were in fact fleeing a spider of grotesque size. Being arachnophobic myself I handled the situation remarkably well, not at all screaming like a horrified woman, as others have claimed.
What was thought to be a quick five minute walk turned out to be a twenty minute hike down busy streets, rushing to jump onto moving buses, and dodging roving gangs of angry teens, I might have had to slay a dragon at one point, but we finally made it to the park, our end goal, our bastion of hope, the top of the mountain! We rode three rides that day, spending a majority of the time waiting in lines. That was before the power in the park went down because of the extreme heat.
The girls were of course in need of cool drinks, food, places to seat, an ear to listen to their burdensome woes… just make it to bed time… just hold on to bed time… Little did I know that both women were experiencing monthly “hormonal imbalances”, the effects of nature’s cruel joke on a poor, or at least quickly becoming poor, young teenage boy whose hormones were raging! Sadly the park was not prepared for the mass number of patrons, nor the heat of the day, and we were forced to return to our room.
More upsetting than all that is I was forced to sit in the room for the rest of the week because upon returning we were greeted by our friendly neighborhood spider man, okay it was just a spider the size of a man, my extreme fear of spiders got the better of me causing a shriek of horror and a suddenly change in direction that had me spraining my ankle and knocking one of my two companions into a young gentleman.
I am happy to say the two of them hit it off splendidly, even over my insistence that he was most likely an ax murder that was going to kill us, or rape us, or both, and I look horrible in pieces and I had no pain threshold for the other option!