Beyond Belief (Take One)

So this is the first edition of Beyond Belief. The following are three stories. One actually happened to me over the past week and two are completely made up. You decide!

STORY ONE

On Monday I wore my bright orange shirt and jeans. After class, I went to the Quiznos right off of campus. I grabbed my roast beef hoagie and ate it on the curb in front of the store. Mid-bite, a scruffy fourty-something year-old yelled at me to put my helmet back on and get back to work. I laughed and told him that I was just a college student and that I had no idea what he was talking about. Word for word, he then said, "Get up and quit fuckin' around kid. We got work to do." The man then got a phone call. His ringtone was "Run This Town" by Jay-Z. He answered it hastily and walked away.

I got up and finished my hoagie while I was walking. When I turned around the corner, I saw an open manhole and about 12 people wearing bright orange shirts and helmets. As I approached campus, I turned around to see the man running after me desperately. "Where are you going?" he asked with a fierceness that nearly made me regurtitate my roast beef. "Back to campus. I told you I'm a student. I don't work for you!" Just then, "Run This Town" began to play. I was saved by the bell (or, in this case, the crappy Jay-Z song). The man answered his phone but this time, he did not walk away.

"Yeah, Gary, I'm glad you called. I got a code 44 at construction zone two-one-two." There was a pause. The man listened intently. At this point I was very nervous and took the pause as a queue to escape. I turned around and sprinted towards campus, which was now about 100 feet away. The man ran after me, but I was faster. "This is completely ridiculous," I thought. I used my student ID to get into a building and ran to the bathroom, as if it was the safest place to go. I haven't seen that guy since.

STORY TWO

Over the weekend, my friends and I went to the city to see "Where The Wild Things Are." After the movie, we headed back to campus via the subway. When we got off to change trains, a middle-aged man (call him Joe) began to strike up a conversation with us. Over the course of this exchange, he tried to sell us drugs, gave my friend the nickname "Shoes" (because he was wearing shoes, and my other friend and I were wearing sandals), and tried to hook "Shoes" up with a couple girls by sweet-talking them.

Another man (call him John) at the station overheard our conversation and tried to comfort Shoes by assuring us that the guy the girls were with was gay. Our train came, and my friends and I, John, Joe, and the girls and their male friend (call him Bill) got on. John began to antagonize Bill about being gay. "If you're a homo, you can't hide it. You gotta be open with it." Bill was wearing a shirt that said "Legalize Gay."

It began to transform into a display of homophobia. Then, a teenage girl stood up and started to yell at John. "Don't be messin' with him! He gotta right to be gay!" She got louder and closer to Bill, until Bill pulled out a knife. "I don't got a problem with cuttin' a nigga up. I cut up a goat once and hung it by its neck." Luckily, Joe stood up and brought the girl to her senses before John lost his cool.

A minute later, a self-described "educated female" began to lecture Bill about the senselessness of violence. She worked at a hospital and had to (literally) stitch together the problems that people like Bill caused daily. The situation switched to an almost 7th Heaven-like moral. As a denoument, Joe asked me out of all the girls on the train, who I was most interested in. I jokingly said I'd have to take them each out to dinner and turn on some Luther Vandross to figure out who I was really into.

STORY THREE

Yesterday we began to decorate our dorms for Halloween. There were a bunch of different tasks that needed to be done, so naturally I volunteered to cut out the vampire bats. I soon realized that cutting out each bat individually was a waste of time; piling all of the vampire bats together and then just cutting once would be much faster. The first few edges were a bit difficult to cut because of the pressure required to slice through 50 pages. However, it began to get easier.

The TV in the lounge was on and it was playing "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." I soon got lost into the plot of the show. After all, that green man can get pretty mesmerizing. By commercial break, I realized I had managed to cut directly through the neck of the vampire bats accidentally. The RA yelled at me, as I had wasted all 50 vampire bats. She assigned me to blow up balloons.

Surely I could not screw this up. I began to inflate each balloon with pure Ari breath. Meanwhile, my friends were back at the table cutting out pumpkins. Eventually, I got bored and tried to inhale the air that I had jut exhaled into one of the balloons. It felt like I had been kicked by Spiderman in the lungs. I doubled over and started gasping in pain. The RA asked me if I could breathe. In a frenzy, I screamed back, "No!"

The paramedics were called and I was hurried to the medical center. The doctor in the urgent care section took off my shirt and began giving me chest compressions. After a few minutes and a near-blackout, I awoke feeling clearer than ever. I went back to the dorm and finished my homework.