3: "Tales of the Designated Driver"

As most anyone who reads this knows, I'm not much of a drinker, and for most of sophomore year and part of my junior year, I was often the guy driving people around after they'd been drinking.

My number 3 college memory is my time as a designated driver.

Now, I can understand why this might seem high.  Here's my rationale in putting it at number 3:
a) It's a collection of so many smaller memories.
b) It was the way in which I made a lot of my friends.
c) It defined who I was, for better or worse, for a year of my life.
d) It is the inspiration for my most recent screenplay.

Each of those points is very key, I think.  I'll start from the very beginning, and hit on each of them as we go along.

First up is The Designated Driver origin story.  In other words, how I met Monica.

In my post about Loui earlier, I mentioned the first party we threw at my house sophomore year, and how I was so nervous and didn't know anyone.  I mentioned that my friend Mava was the one who got me to come downstairs, and that's when I met Loui.

But, that's not all that happened that night.

I was, as I said, very nervous and way out of my comfort zone.  What I wanted, to combat that, was to just go to bed early.  But I wasn't tired.  So I asked a guy named Ben Trout, who I had met already, for advice.  He said he'd race me in the street to wear me down.  That led to another girl racing HERSELF...and losing.

Either after that "race" or during another trip outside to cool off, I found Mava on the porch looking very stressed out.  I asked her what was wrong and she told me her roommate, Courtney, had way too much to drink and her other roommate, Bri, also needed to go home.  So, I told her that I had not been drinking at all, had a car, and could drive them.

I pulled up the car and Mava brought Courtney and Bri out, as well as their fourth roommate, Monica.  Courtney fell getting into the car, and I had to talk to her friend on the phone to get instructions on how to take care of her (it was Courtney's birthday the next day, and she celebrated a little too much).  Bri never said a word the whole time, which would become the source of much humor later on.

As I started driving, I heard the girls in the back seat mumbling about something.  I turned around to see that both Courtney and Monica had vomited in the back seat of my car.

Oh - side note - I had just bought a Mustang a few weeks earlier.

Now, I have a belief.  My belief is that if you can like someone at their worst, they're worth having in your life.  This was about the worst that I had ever seen Monica (there are a couple instances that may be worse) and yet, I was blown away by how she and Courtney reacted.  Kindness, in the face of embarrassment and struggle, speaks volumes to me.

Monica ended up becoming one of my closest friends.  She met my family - they loved her - and I went to her house.  She would cook for me, helped throw a birthday party for me (and a welcome back party) and was a source of great entertainment for me in my life as the Designated Driver.

Monica loves to tell the story of how when I picked her up from a party one time, she had this strong urge to sing "Push" by Avril Lavigne, and had someone else in the car look up the lyrics so she could sing it.  It was a *coughcoughterrriblecoughcogh* wonderful serenade.

I like telling the story of Halloween sophomore year, when I followed Mava, Monica, and Bri to a party at Mava's brother's house.  I took Monica and Bri home and on the way, Monica INSISTED on stopping at Jimmy John's for their day old bread, saying it was a tradition.  Meanwhile, I was outside keeping Bri, who like before never said a word, awake.  Monica came out, and I got to watch her find a way to eat the loaf of bread - even giving samples to strangers passing by.  Later that night, Monica and I walked quite a ways across campus and it was one of the first times I'd ever really spoken to her.

For reasons that are far too complicated for this blog, Monica and I weren't really able to be friends until long after our many trips together in the Mustang.  But it was well, well worth the wait.

During the summer after junior year, when I was in South Carolina with my family enjoying life in paradise - but without Facebook and little to no contact with most of my friends - Monica was one of the few people who checked in with me, and she did so often.  As I wrote in my essay about the summer experience, that meant so much to me.  And, later in senior year, Monica and I started hanging out often, and had some of the deepest and most meaningful conversations I had had with anyone.

And, Monica was extremely helpful in the writing of the aforementioned script based on my driving.

I told her recently, in regards to how I developed a crush on her the night she threw up in my car, why I did.  And I told her it was because I've always been a pretty good judge of character, and I knew then - as I still do now - that Monica was one of the best people I'd meet.


Now, back to the road.  For this next section, I'll just list off memories.  And in certain situations, I've omitted people's names.

-A group of friends sending ridiculous, seductive "sext" messages to Ben Trout, then hunting him down in his impossible-to-find dorm room.

-Me, in my first encounter with Jennifer Woods, I told her, jokingly, "I fart a lot."  Because she was sitting in the car with me.  I know, it doesn't make sense.

-Me, at that first party, getting blankets for people to sleep with and trash bins for them to vomit into.

-A group of girls walking into the library because they wanted to dance there.  Then, grabbing books on sexual topics and placing them in front of a guy they knew, without saying a word.

-A friend being hit on by some creepy guy and telling him repeatedly, "you're so cheesy," and once quipping, "why would I give you my number?  You gonna call me?  I don't wanna talk to you!"

-Me being hit on by a gay guy at a party,

-Watching some friends run repeatedly into the bathroom at a party to throw up, then hiding their beers from them so they stopped drinking.

-My roommate Peter jumping out of cars, climbing trees and fences, leaving a house from the second-floor balcony, yelling "PARKOUR" the whole time.

-Finding a mug with the lid closed, opening the lid, and finding old vomit inside of it that smelled so bad we had to air the entire house out.

-Me, after helping a female friend out with some errands, being invited to sleep over in her bed.  It was the first time I'd shared a bed with a woman and I was so scared.

-Pulling off a "Chinese fire drill" with a bunch of drunk people.

-The many, many absurd conversations I eavesdropped on.

Now, two of my personal favorites.

On this first one, the details have been disputed for a long time, so we won't say what day of the week it was. But it was near St. Patrick's Day sophomore year.  I got a text message from my friend, Ginger, asking me to pick her up.  When I asked where, she gave me an intersection.

So I went to the location, kept texting her for specifics, but her texts became harder and harder to decipher.  I walked around town for about an hour.  Finally, I was told to go to Stucchi's, an ice cream shop on campus.

But, when I got to Stucchi's, it was closed.  All I saw was a guy cleaning up.  The chairs were up on the tables, everything was put away, and the lights were off.  I knocked on the door and the guy came and opened it for me.

"Is there a red-haired girl throwing up in your bathroom?" I asked.

He said yes, and let me in.  Ginger was there, with her friend Rebecca, and I got her home ok.


My last story is also pretty short.  It involves a guy named Tom MacDonald, a friend of a friend who was at a party.  I was outside and as I was coming in, he was talking to a girl.  He kept telling her "you're so special.  You deserve someone who is going to tell you that you are beautiful," and he proceeded to brush her hair back with his hand.

That girl was Emily Cedar, and this is the short version of our friendship.

I had known Emily for awhile before we started to really become friends, but when we did, she became one of my favorite people.  The thing about Emily that I love is just how plain cool she is.  She sings, plays guitar, is artistic, has great taste in just about everything, and is someone you just love being around. She's one of the few people I know who can always put a smile on my face.

Emily also let me into her family, which meant a lot to me.  I've gotten to know her parents, who still text me from time to time just to talk or see how I'm doing.  And how can I forget "the sexy librarian" that only Emily every really got to see from me?

I have two favorite Emily stories.  One is when I went to pick her up from a party one night, and we ended up staying up late watching The Golden Girls on TV (she had never seen it - Emily, when you read this: we need to do that again!).

My all-time favorite Emily story is how she let me sleep on her couch every Wednesday night fall semester of junior year.  It was a plan I came up with to: a) get away from the drama in my house, and b) to see Emily a little bit before she left for Australia.  It meant so much to me that we got to do that - Wednesday nights were the highlight of my week - and I doubt she'll ever really know how much I needed those nights.  Plus, in the process of me sleeping there, she helped me come up with ideas for what became my first-ever feature screenplay.


So, again, why was being a designated driver so important for me?  On top of meeting some great people in the process and having some fun stories to tell, it taught me a lot of valuable lessons.  Mostly, it taught me to not let people take advantage of me, and to get my priorities straight.  This role had a lot of negative effects for me, but I needed to go through that to get to where I am today.