Members Only

A Story by Topaz

Spontaneity turns into awesome

I have been to two ECU games. One planned and one spontaneous. The planned one was a military appreciation game where we got free tickets, didn't drink any beer and got to watch the game with our Commanding Officer...so all in all, not too cool or crazy.

The spontaneous one started at 1130 am when a buddy and I overheard that ECU was playing NC State. I looked at him and said "let's go". Maybe in a normal culture, most people would decide not to drive 2 hours to a football game with no tickets in hand, no plans and definitely not make the first half of the game that started at 1230, but cmon, we live in Jacksonville. Jacksonville is a place where dreams and happiness goes to die. I am not being morbid here, just stating a fact (it's on wikipedia).

So my buddy and I recruited another friend and off we went. The two hour drive was rather uneventful, but we were excited just for a different change of pace. When we arrive to ECU the streets are overflowing with parked cars, with not a spot in sight. All of this is overwhelming and frustrating because we can hear the announcer from the stadium, complimented with the roaring cheer of 'THE RECORD SOLD OUT CROWD'. We don't know it's sold out. Ahh, ignorance is bliss. Finally I remembered the place I parked last time for ECU and we head on over there expecting to pay the five bucks for the privilege of getting to park within a mile of the stadium. Dumb. We show up and....no one is there. We decide to leave the door unlocked with a five dollar bill showing in the window (acknowledging to the owner of the fine grassy establishment that we are willing to pay). Once parked, we are ready to go score some scalpers tickets....We must have asked fifty people if they were selling tickets, but not a single person had any tickets for us to buy. As previously mentioned, this was a sold out crowd. I am not too into football, but I guess this ECU vs. NC State was quite the unexpected rivalry. Unexpected because I am ignorant when it comes to college sports. So instead of watching the game, we decide to walk around like bums, asking people for their beer. Along the way we met a sketchy 17 year old kid who let us have a few beers; beers he had acquired by walking by peoples coolers and either stealing a single beer, or their whole cooler. So yeah, I guess we drank stolen beer, but we didn't steal it, so that is the important part. After a few beers, we started to get loose and started to walk around asking people if they wanted to give us their beer. We succeeded in this mission of ours. When I am not drinking, I pee as much as an eighty year old man, so when I drink beer, I pee like a 160 year old man and it is for this reason that I found my way into the game. Among my ten trips to the porta potty, some drunk old dude came out of the stall and handed me his ticket stub....'thanks a lot' I thought, recognizing that a ticket stub was about as useful (for gettting into the game) as a pet rat. But when I looked closer at the ticket, I saw at the top was an golden embroidered "Members Club". This members club was irrelevant at the time and I didn't pay it much attention, for I was not a member of the members club and wanted nothing to do with this preppy, scotch drinking, cigar smoking, racist of an institution...until....I saw the entrance to the Members Club. It was elite. It was selective. It was kind of what facebook was like when you had to be a member of a university in order to be a member. I wanted in and like Charlie and those four other doofuses, I had the golden ticket. One problem. The damn ticket was a stub. It was like a bicycle with no tires. An airplane with no windows. A car with no steering wheel....you get the point. And then, a grand idea permeated through my misty brain and it was on. When I saw an old man walk into the Members Only Club , or whatever its stupid fascist name was, I waited 'til he was out of earshot and just as he was about to turn the corner into the forbidden land of COLLEGE FOOTBALL RIVALRY SELLS OUT RECORD CROWD AND HAS AN AMAZING OVERTIME OUTCOME THAT WILL MAKE INTO THE ESPN RECORDBOOKS, I yelled "DAD! DAD! NO...WAIT?!?" And like that, he was gone, out of my life never to be seen again. But of course those silly little gatekeepers guarding the entrance were under the impression that this man of course was my father, and of course I can go in and get him and of course I had a ticket, and of course it was already ripped, but that is fine because it said "Members Only" on it. Haha. What a bunch of pushovers....they let me in.