Stone Cold: Unflappable

"I am well aware of your concern sir but can assure you that I have not had a drink in the past thirty-seven minutes and am therefore both exceptionally capable and shockingly overqualified to be driving a vehicle as such." - T.O. Hob

It's never good when you're the scariest thing in a haunted house.

Last night I met Crago in Bayonne and shot out to Philadelphia. No, not for cheesesteaks (damn vegetarians) but to go to the famous haunted house at the old Eastern State Penitentary. We were meeting a few of Crago's friends but since I tend to drive really fast we left Bayonne a little before they left New Brunswick and we beat them to Philadelphia by an hour.

Turns out Crago's sister was there, so he calls her and she says it's a bit crowded. We get down there and begin to understand how crowded is an understatement. This place is several city blocks long in every direction, and the line goes all the way around the building. We pay for our $25 tickets ($25 x {Thousands of people waiting on line in the cold}=someone made a shitload of money) Then end up waiting outside the prison for three hours. But we're not alone, there are a thousand miserable people to commiserate with.

Finally our section of the line makes it into the prison...only to find another line. This is where they tell us that we can either pay $5 more to skip to the front of the line or wait for another hour. We wait on line in protest of the general unfairness of the situation. We wait for a very long time.

Finally (again) we actually make it to the main entrance of the place. Now we all expected it to be a ghost tour like thing because this is an old abandoned haunted prison. Instead it's a cheesy Halloween haunted house that you can go to anywhere and pay $8 to get into...except it's bigger.

Originally everyone decides I should walk behind the girls so no one sneaks up on them, but before we even get into the entrance the guys have moved around so I'm in front. Big man goes first. There are a lot of blind corners, pitch black hallways, and seizure inducing strobe lights. But I just wander through the whole thing completely unfazed. Never understood how people could be scared at things like that. But it's absolutely hysterical when someone jumps out at you...and you end up scaring the hell out of them.

We get through what seems like an endless array of minimum wage tour guides with faux bloody wounds popping out of blatantly obvious mock walls with minimal screaming from the others and zero reaction from me when we come to what we know is the home stretch. I haven't even flinched but as I round a corner a particularly well disguised wall drops and this gore covered girl jumps out at me.

She's half hanging out the door and less than an inch from my face. Every ghoul and goblin in that place blinked when they ran up against me, not a single one got me...but this girl wasn't backing off. She just hung there, so close I could feel her hot breath on my face. I was holding mine, not just because she surprised me, but because she was easily the prettiest girl I've seen in a month. Not in the classic movie star sort of way, but I could tell under all that gore and grime she was flawless. And she had balls because she just hung there...so damn uncomfortably close it was painful. She just hung there and didn't flinch. It couldn't have been for more than a few seconds but we locked eyes and did battle...and neither one of us blinked. Crago laughed behind me because seeing a 6'3" 300 lb. shit ugly monster staring down a girl dressed as a zombie must be pretty damn hysterical. I could feel everyone behind me moving so I moved on, and she didn't retreat until I walked away. Good for her.

Last night was just one of those funny nights. I went from having nothing to do, to hanging out at an abandoned prison and not getting home till 5:30 in the morning. Only me, only me.

But I had one of those strange feelings last night. That something was going on, something I should know about. Something I could have changed. But something I didn't...

Odd.

I was standing in an old prison and felt at home. I was wandering the streets of Philadelphia and felt at peace. I was driving at 95 mph up the Turnpike and thought that maybe I should slow down a bit...because maybe crashing and burning would be a bad idea.

Funny how things can change so many times on one night. Even funnier how it can happen over and over again.

"I don't know. Sometimes I just know things." - Palomba