Episode LXXV – Raise the Jolly Roger.

I flew down the hill. I swiped my card through the access point. The door didn’t open. I swiped and swiped until the blasted green light of acceptance appeared. I wrenched at the open door and flew up the one flight of stairs and down the stained hall to my door which I kicked down. I knew whose voice it was.

The door flew open, and left me standing there, looking into a dark room that would appear totally innocuous to the naked outside eye, but behind the flag that covered our open window, SC was sitting up, a large orange construction cone propped to his face.

“Shut the damn door!” He said hissing at me, “You’re going to ruin everything!”

As I was completely floored by the comment, I calmly turned and shut the door as if nothing unusual was occurring. Taking my silence for acceptance, SC kept yelling out the window through the cone, with more ludicrous vigor and innovation than any cheer squad. Finally, when I supposed no one was outside the dorm, he fell silent.

“You’re the Beaumont crier?” I said incredulously. “And you yell out of a – is that a bathroom cleaning cone?”

“Sure.” He said nonchalantly. “But don’t worry, I cleaned it. Well, at least this end.” He pointed at the end near his mouth. Then, it was back to yelling. “You sir, BOW to the power of the cone – muah ha ha!”

There were so many things I wanted to say. I should have been angry. Somewhere, there was some part of me that wanted to launch into a lecture about how it was unacceptable to yell from our window, hidden behind my pirate flag at total strangers. I wanted to state that we were going to get in trouble, and that I didn’t want any more trouble. But I didn’t. I couldn’t stop listening to what he was saying. It was hypnotically funny, because it was totally random and decidedly ridiculous.

“Alright, let me have a go.” I whispered instead. For the next half hour, we passed the cone and issued proclamations about passers by in the most offensive language we could think of. Eventually, some hot-head, incensed by our utterly scurrilous language began running around in front of the dorm like a provoked dog, demanding that we come out and fight him. Eventually, he attracted sympathetic parties to his cause. The sympathetic parties drew an even larger crowd to see the spectacle was about. The group of fifty odd people milling about enticed the blue and red lights of the campus police to our location.

Once we saw the Campus Police, we stated loudly through the cone that “the ham eating forces of campus conformity would never take us alive”. Humorlessly, they listened to our diatribe, and immediately began trying to enter the dorm, nightsticks, D-cell flashlights, and handcuffs at the ready. Eventually, a student helped them out and opened the door for them. As they dashed inside, we fled our room. It didn’t help our situation that the mob below was beginning to speculate loudly about our actual whereabouts. Every door we ran to on our floor was locked. No one answered our frantic knocks. Just when we thought we would be caught like rats in a maze of dorm corridors, the last door we tried was open. We stumbled in and found a small semi-circle of the most devout people on our floor studying. The good news was that they zealously allowed us to enter and participate in their meeting. The bad news was that their meeting about the good book was much worse than being captured by the bumbling police.

Hours later, we finally extricated ourselves out of the “People who are going to hell in a hand basket” conversation and set sail back to our room. As a result of the earlier duel-challenging mess, we never were able to ever let fly with our uncensored remarks as much afterwards. But like true buccaneers, occasionally we would pass the rum and let loose a quick broadside of troublesome words at strangers with booty before running off to meet with our regular friends.