Time flies too fast when you get older.  I had no idea it’d been nearly two weeks since I last updated.  Let’s see…

I got to feel really good last night; a small group of friends of mine who are also regular customers, college girls from the dorms, went to a big party in frat village.  One of them was way drunk, and one of the others tried to borrow a phone to call me and get her a ride home.  Someone insisted to her that there was no such person as “John Henry,” and things went downhill badly from there – just a lot of little things that came together all at once in a bad and ugly fashion.  Worse, the third girl’s phone wasn’t working – she tried to call me like 15 times and they could hear me, but I couldn’t hear them. 

Suspecting this might be the case, and knowing that I was expecting a call from them, at a number I didn’t have in my phone, I actually told them where I was and so forth, and made my way there.  With THAT many calls, I thought something was up, so I boogied.  Had another call from the dispatcher at the place right next door as well, so yeah.  That one, nobody was there, and as I’m sitting waiting, my other girl finally gets through just FREAKING out, crying, panicked, begging me to come get them RIGHT NOW, trying to give me some sense of what was going on.  From the way she was talking I had this mental image of some Lord-of-the-Flies/Carrie scene with like 30 douchebags standing around and all but beating down one scapegoat target.

Fortunately, I was literally 3 seconds away.  Dropped the van in gear and hammered in to the parking lot of the house where they were partying, got out and opened the passenger doors to give myself something to do instead of walking in to the frat and bodily throwing people out of the way to get this poor kid out, since that would end badly for everyone.  She makes her way out and once I hear her voice I go toward the front door of the frat, and she finally sees me and runs and jumps into my arms, sobbing and trembling and saying my name like I’m Superman and just saved her and a school bus full of children from a nuke, with her roommate following close behind.   Their friend had gotten a ride from another source, which will become important in a minute.

So I manage to calm my upset friend down and managed to make sure that my existence would not be questioned in the future, get her in the car while her roommate climbs in, and get them back to their dorm, doing the best I can to continue comforting and settling down my friend.  As we’re pulling in to their dorm, we pass the dorm at the other end of their building and see the third girl being dropped off by her ride, so we stop to make sure she’s okay.  The two girls walk over to “smoker’s island” where there’s like fifteen guys sitting, and one of them turns wrong and flashes a fair bit of posterior skin at the guys.

This of course sets THESE guys off, and pretty soon we’ve got a dozen or so drunk freshmen harassing these girls – who are still crying and upset and shaking – in a ghostly and macabre second act of “College Douchebags With Alcohol.”

This is the point at which I’d had enough.  My first friend was giving shit back to the new band of knuckledraggers and I got out, walked over to her and guided her away from them with a hand on their shoulder, with a quiet and terse:  “You guys don’t know what the hell’s going on and these girls are having a bad night.  Shut the fuck up.”  In retrospect, probably a bit rash, immature, and douchetastic of me, but I’d had enough.  I was pissed to the point of great bodily harm at the way these girls had been treated by douchebag after douchebag tonight.

After this had a second to sink in, of course, they were back to whooping and hollering, but I’d at least redirected their attention to me…and frankly the mood I was in, I was half looking forward to seeing how many of them I could take down with me.  Not that I’m all Billy Bad-ass or anything, but if I was worried about my ability to handle myself if necessary I wouldn’t have got out of the car.

So yeah.  I got everyone back into the cab and continued on to the other dorm, where we all chilled and smoked (cigarettes!) and calmed down, and I gave the girls a Dad lecture, just generally trying to impress on them that they’re beautiful and worthwhile and don’t have to put up with the kind of shit they have been at this frat house to have friends or find guys or whatever.  Eventually they all went inside and I drove off, still very angry and enjoying the evil thoughts going through my head.  Evil thoughts like “I wonder how long it would take a youtube vid to ensure that no member of this frat anywhere in the country gets laid again before the end of the school year?”

Of course that’s the end of it; it was just one of those confluences of events that could have ended up going a lot worse than it did for everyone, and I’m glad it didn’t.  It was so validating to actually be useful and needed in an immediate, tangible way; equally validating to have the opportunity to walk my own walk rather than just talking about what “I’d do to guys like that” and so forth.  The buzz is worn off now, but I felt ten f’n feet tall last night.  And I turned three beautiful, intelligent, and good-hearted women into friends while hopefully adding something good and powerful and strong and meaningful to their personal definitions of what a good man is and does.  And of course anyone who knows me knows I have a hero/messiah/dad complex, and anyone who knows me well knows that I have an enormous, huge soft spot in my heart (and no smart-ass remarks about the hard spot) for a female in trouble…so it was a pretty redeeming night for me.

And no, in spite of the crap I’ve taken from co-workers and family about it already, I didn’t sleep with any of them nor do I plan to   Not only do I have no reason to believe any of them would have the slightest interest in sleeping with some fat old ugly run-down hippie-lookin loser…but it wasn’t and isn’t about that.

The world gave me a rare chance to do a good thing with immediate powerful impact for some good people who I respect and have a care about.  It’s hard to ask for a much better night than that.