Chapter 11: Part Two. Eleven-one-zero-three Cheat on Him.

I always kind of knew I wouldn't be at Western for four years. I was leaving Kalamazoo knowing full well that I wasn't coming back. It was hard. This was before emotional goodbyes became second nature to me. To really drive home the fact that I didn't belong at WMU anymore, my roommates threw a party on my last night in town. Here's the thing...it was a birthday party for our neighbor. It wasn't until much later that the "/Steve's going away" was hastily tagged onto the end of "Jason's Birthday." That's right, I got second billing in my own house. But that's neither here nor there. My farewell to the 'Zoo was already covered in Chapter 10.

I don’t know if it was a subconscious fear of leaving or just plain laziness, but I really took my time on the packing front. We were supposed to leave for the airport at 4am, and I didn’t even make an attempt to get my stuff together until 2. It’s one thing to wait until the last minute to pack before a trip, but I wasn’t going on some week-long getaway. I was moving. For reals. Here’s the thing about moving, though. You can’t fit your life in two suitcases. Hell, you can barely fit your GameCube. Luckily, these apartments we were living in were fully furnished and came with all of that stuff. That’s right, Disney College Program students got to have

“the opportunity to meet and live with people from all over the country, as well as the world, within the housing complexes. These complexes are diverse in their amenities and floor plans. Each offers the opportunity to meet fellow participants and create a sense of home in a comfortable living community.”

You hear that? Just like home!

And it’s true. You definitely feel at home, especially if your home life consists of:
1. No overnight visitors.
2. Getting written up by security for leaving your patio door open.
3. Scabies.

When I was assigned an apartment, the kind lady asked me if I minded living with people who had arrived shortly before I did, and would move out shortly before me. Thinking this meant they got there a week earlier, I happily agreed and signed my contract for 11103 Chatham Manor Blvd. What a terrible address. All of those 1's. So I show up and move into the new place. Turns out that when the kind lady said the people had arrived "shortly" before me, she meant six months. I can see how six months can be considered a short period of time if you're engaged to be married or are dying of a terminal illness, but when your entire College Program experience is eight months, that's quite a different perspective. Turns out that Phil, Robby, Jeremy, Joe, and Rob had already completed their programs and extended until May. Whereas every other new CP was out exploring Walt Disney World with their new roomies, I sat alone on the couch while mine were at work. That simple act is probably what garnered me the nickname "Guy on Couch" for the first month.

I didn't have a lot of good friends in Florida. I just didn't fit in. I wasn't a big enough badass to run with the renegades, but I was too cool for the Disney freaks. One night, on the bus ride home from Magic Kingdom (yes, I went to Magic Kingdom alone. Ridiculous), I overheard a girl sitting on the bus behind me. She was one of our new Rescue Rangers. I turned around and introduced myself. Her name was Kara. The first thing she said to me was "I haven't started yet, but I hear our boss is a bitch." With those few words, I immediately knew I needed someone like Kara in my life to make it through the second half of the program. Kara and I wasted no time in talking smack about everyone and everything. I taught her a lot of important lessons, like how if you re supposed to be bussing tables at Electric Umbrella, you can just go upstairs and hide and no one will know you're gone. We also had fun playing with astronaut blankets at the Mission:Space gift shop, where our two favorite managers, Lehlee and Joey, worked. Lehlee was a sultry Asian fox who, much like a speeding locomotive, you did now want to get in the way of. This is an actual conversation I had with her:

Steve: I can't wear these sunglasses anymore. They're hurting my eyes.
Lehlee: How many you sell?
Steve: None. I can't see anything and I'm feeling nauseous.
Lehlee: You sell three more.

Joey, on the other hand, was certainly a nice guy. But bless his heart, he had a short-term memory disorder. That's really the only explanation I could give for why every time I worked with Joey, which was frequently, he felt the need to introduce himself and comment on how we had never met. The only time Joey actually did remember me was when he felt inclined to scold me for leaving Test Track one day without asking. Sure, the ride was down. Sure, it was twenty minutes after the time I was scheduled to leave. I'm not exactly sure what purpose I would have served by staying. Maybe Joey was just upset he didn't get to introduce himself for the 14th time that day.

Kara and I had a lot in common, so she called me her Twinkie. I found this nickname to be really gay, so I called her Twigger in return. One of the most memorable moments of the entire program was probably one of my last weekends there. Hurricane Charley. It was me, Kara, and Robby (whom Kara nicknamed "Divalicious"). We watched the news, witnessed trees getting uprooted from the ground right outside our window, and answered phone calls from our worried mothers every fifteen minutes. We were safe, warm, and cozy, until we saw people actually running outside in the middle of it all and thought "That looks fun!" And off we went. Twigger got hit by a falling gutter, which was pretty funny. The rain was coming down so hard it hurt, and the second you stepped out into it you were drenched. We ran around, had our fun, then decided to go back inside. After drying off, we settled back down, all warm and cozy. Until we got bored and decided to go run around outside again. By the end of the night, we had changed our clothes about 5 times (because who wants to put on wet drawers

I lived in Chatham Square Apartments. The other complex was Vista Way. Chatham was nicknamed "Cheat-on-him," while Vista was affectionately dubbed "Vista Lay." Yes, those Disney College Program kids are known to get a little wild. Especially on Thursday nights, when they get into Pleasure Island for free. Legend has it that the hot tub at Vista was even listed in Playboy as one of the best places for a college student to get laid. In general, I think the CP's (that's what we called ourselves) were divided into two groups of people. Hardcore-party-animal-sexaholics...and Mormons. There were a LOT of Mormons in Florida. Nice people. Smiley. And they love to watch "Friends." I wasn't a crazy partier (which is odd, considering the lifestyle I left in Kalamazoo), and I wasn't much of a Mormon either. This made my social life very difficult. I could either go out to dinner at Steak and Shake and be back home and in bed by 8:30pm, or I could go out to Jungle Jim's and watch other people drink, since I was 20.

Every Rescue Ranger had one quality or trait that they became notorious for. Emily always left early. Mary Beth showed up drunk in the morning. Greg couldn't work Sundays because of his Mormon beliefs/laziness. Everyone knew that I was the one who was constantly being put on "light duty" due to my ability to find new and innovative ways to mutilate my face to a point where it was so unsightly that I was asked not to interact with guests. The first time this occurred was when I was assigned to be the greeter at Mission:Space. Basically this job meant making sure kids were tall enough to ride, reciting the words "It's uses centrifugal forces to simulate an actual rocket launch," ad nauseam, and getting second degree burns on my face from standing in the Florida sun for eight hours. I got two days off from work for this one, and when I returned I was sent to a small desk in the corner of the administration offices with a stack of file folders and a label maker, which they had affectionately named Larry. That day consisted of labeling a file folders for eight hours straight and getting told by countless people that I should have worn sunscreen. Like I didn't know what sunscreen was. Surely, had I any knowledge of this miracle lotion I would have applied copious amounts all day! Alas, hindsight is always 20/20. Sunscreen, eh? That's new. Another women kept telling me to put aloe on my increasingly scabby cheeks. Wait...ALOE? ALOE FOR SUNBURN?! I was being overwhelmed with BRAND NEW INFORMATION!

The second head injury occurred on the 4th of July. After watching the fireworks at Epcot and consuming absolutely NO alcohol (the fact that I was stone cold sober makes me come off as an even bigger dumbass), we decided to have a piggyback race backstage. Rachel, a fellow Rescue Ranger, hopped on my back and we took off. Piggyback rides aren't usually dangerous, but when you're racing someone and it's dark out, the stakes are raised exponentially. I stepped down off of a curb and twisted my ankle. Rachel and I both flew forward onto the pavement, and she landed on my head. My first thought was "Oh God what if I just killed Rachel!?" My second thought was "Oh God I hit my head, what if I go retarded!?" After reading a book in fifth grade about a girl who fell off a horse and hit her head, I've always had a fear of sustaining a head injury and "going" retarded. Luckily, Rachel was alive and my mental health was just as good as it ever was, which doesn't say much, considering the fact that competed and fell in a piggyback race. Rachel had quite a gash across her arm, and my head was bleeding profusely. Everyone around us found the entire scene to be hilarious. Luckily we were behind the World Showcase, so all of the things being shouted at Rachel and me were in other languages. It was safe to assume that the fellow castmembers were laughing and shouting things like "Goodness! Are you okay?!" as opposed to something like "What a fucking dumbass!"

With a gash across my forehead, I was once again deemed unsuitable for the eyes of visitors. This time, I was introduced to Larry the labelmaker's close friend, Shelly the shredder. After a few hours of shredding files (I could pretend that they were top secret documents containing classified Disney information, but it was mostly just payroll), I was transferred to a different office, where I met Twigger. Twigger had thrown up in the garbage (or so she said), and requested to spend the rest of the day doing something other than custodial. Or maybe she purposely inhaled chemicals. Either way, she hated custodial and would rather hear her first born child's death rattle than clean up a "protein spill." The two of us were assigned to the most important duty on all of Disney property. Sharpening pencils. This wasn't really a two person job, considering the fact that despite the thousands of pencils, there was only one sharpener. Not to mention the fact that after sharpening three pencils, the piece of garbage would overheat. You'd have to wait about fifteen minutes for it to work again. Two hours and fifteen pencils later, we went back to deployment and begged them to let us go home. Mind-numbing busy work, although quite Zen, is not worth six bucks an hour.

I showed up in January with about 40 other new Rescue Rangers. About a dozen of us made it to the end and graduated.

How's that for a hook?