This night being one of the highlights of my college career, when I go back I'm crashing one of their minivans!

It was late and the bars were dying out, but I still wanted to party. Heavy drinking and substance abuse will do that to you. Mikey and I still had plenty of party left in us when we decided to take a cab back to the townhouses on campus.

There’s almost always something going on late night in the townhouses, but this particular Thursday was pretty dead. I had a girlfriend for the time being, so I decided it was time for a little booty call. Mikey decided to come along for some reason, and it’s a damn good thing he did.

Our route across campus to the dorms (she was a freshman) took us past the security building. Normally campus security is something you want to steer clear of. Not so much because you’ll get in trouble, but nobody wants to spend hours of their time getting wasted only to end the night being interrogated by a bunch of guys who couldn’t pass the local PD’s fitness test. But in the dim light in front of the building, I noticed something that I just couldn’t pass up. There, lit by a dull yellow streetlight was a row of security golf carts, and one of them had the keys in it.

I told Mikey that we were taking my new car and to hang on a second while I went to get it. He was very confused, earlier that evening he had been in my car, and it was the same Wrangler I had had on campus all year. His confusion quickly subsided when he saw me hop in the first golf cart. I turned the key, put it in reverse and:

BEEEEEEEEP, I forgot those things squeal when you do that. It scared me, so I gunned the gas and slammed into the van parked behind me. It shut off and I couldn’t get it going again. Mikey was hiding between two cars now, but I was unfazed by the racket I had just caused. I took the keys, put them in another cart, popped it in neutral and quietly pushed this one back. Mikey came running over, jumped in shotgun and with a jolt, we were off laughing and spilling beer all over ourselves.

At my girlfriend’s dorm I felt the need to drive right up to the door (up a flight of ten stairs), but the golf cart wasn’t having it. We got about two stairs up and the bastard got stuck. A few late night smokers fell down laughing at the debacle they had just seen, but promised to keep quiet. The girlfriend, by the way, probably smelled us coming. If not, she definitely heard us tearing everything off every wall in the building on the way to her room. For some reason, she wasn’t too happy with the idea of having two human wrecking balls spend the night in her room. So we left, pushed security’s shitbox off the stairs and took off.

Next it was off to the football field, where Mikey and I both tried our hands at skidding our names. Apparently you can’t get much of a power slide out of a golf cart, but you sure can toss your buddy out of shotgun. At this point we were covered in booze and dirt, but still nowhere near ready to go to bed. I decided that the best place to get more beer on that side of campus was my sister’s dorm room. Deep down, I knew that security must have figured something was amiss by this point, so instead of parking in front of that dorm, I opted for the handicapped spot around back. I decided the handicapped sign would stop us much faster than the brakes could, so I just continued to accelerate until we hit it. Mikey apparently hadn’t figured out my plan, and was rocketed out the front of the cart when we hit.

Apparently no one on campus wanted us around for very long that night, as evidenced by my sister and her roommate throwing a sixer of Beast at us and promptly locking the door. Well now I was just bored, and there’s only one thing to do when you’re bored at 4am and have a golf cart…wake up your friends. We raced back to the townhouses, and as we did we could see the security vans all over the middle of campus. They were on to us and we had to move quickly. We raced to my friend Peter’s house. I knew the door was unlocked, but I still nearly blew it off the hinges crashing full speed into it. Peter was passed out in a chair, but the sound of his front door blasting a hole in the wall woke him right up. He looked over with a drunk stare, let everything seep in for a minute and calmly said: “Shotgun.”

Before we left, we had to stop and laugh at his roommate Matt, who had once again peed his pants while passed out on the couch. That was one of the few rooms in the house that didn’t yet have “Matt, there’s no peeing in here” scrawled on the wall in Sharpie.

I had no plan at this point 'cause I was just ass-wasted, so with Peter on the back and Mikey sitting shotty, I took off for the most remote building on campus. This was when we realized that we were screwed. A security van was bearing down on us from the road on our right, and we were going a blistering 5 MPH, so it wouldn’t be long before they caught us. When we got to the building, I turned into the shadows on the right, skidded around to the back of the building, and crashed headlong into the second van that was looking for us. Being a brilliant scholar, I put the cart in reverse: BEEEEEP; it took no more than three seconds for us to figure out we were pinched, so Mikey shouted the only thing he could think of: “RUN!” And we did, right into the thickest woods we could find.

I don’t know what it was that saved us that night. When we finally met up again nearly an hour later, we shared our stories of what happened. Peter was the drunkest, and therefore the most irrational. He was convinced that they were right behind him, and ran as fast as he could. When we saw him he was cut up and bruised because he kept running into trees or falling into bushes. He wound up nearly a mile from campus on some random road and walked back cursing me the whole way. Mikey and I had run off in two different directions, and neither of us got very far into the woods. Mikey ran through some bushes and had the presence of mind to hide behind the next bush he found in the woods. I ran between some vines, around a couple trees and directly into an evergreen. As I fell to the ground, I remember breaking off a few branches and covering myself with them and some leaves. For nearly an hour we both hid, and it seemed that every time one of us moved, we would hear leaves rustling nearby. It kept us in our hiding places for what felt like an eternity. Finally I just gave up and ran out. If they were willing to wait that long, they could have me. Off to my right someone else was running out of the woods, and I started to bolt. And that’s when I discovered that all the noise I had been hearing was Mikey about fifteen feet away from me. There were no signs of security, the golf cart, or Peter anywhere.

The next afternoon, when we went for breakfast, security and two local PD officers were out front examining the wreckage of what used to be my golf cart. Apparently crashing head on with a moving minivan will do some serious damage. The best part of it all was that they were fingerprinting everything. In the end, there was no in-depth investigation, and although I hid my face from every security officer I saw for a few weeks, there were no questions. It’s been a couple years since I graduated and successfully got away with that, but I’ve always wanted to do it again. When I go back for my reunion, I’m taking their fu**ing minivan.