If you've ever been down to Church Street Station in Orlando, you'll know what I'm talking about.
Church Street Station is the little entertainment district of downtown Orlando. Every Friday and Saturday night, the OPD cordons off two square blocks and open the streets to drunken tourists and college students. People mosey in and out of Rosie O'Gradys, the Cheyenne Saloon and the Orchid Garden.
But my favorite part?
At about 12:15AM, there's a CSX freight train that pulls directly through the party.
The first time I ever saw it, I was amazed. One minute there's hundreds of people carousing around the track, the next minute the RR crossing signs start flashing and barriers drop signalling the coming train. For several minutes the partying is put on hold while the freight train inches through. Once it's gone again, party on.
I was there with some friends of some friends of some friends. How I got from here to there is another post altogether. But anyways, on Friday night my group had met up with another group. I can't recall exactly if they were TA's from Rollins College or RA's from UCF, but I'm pretty sure it was one of the two.
Out of the new group, I had my eye on two or three women. Back then, my theory was to cast a wide net just in case one or two wiggled their way through the net. But there was one that I hadn't paid much attention to. Our only interaction had been when she finished one of my jokes. So we shared a laugh and little else.
We'd all decided to meet back up there the next night with the intention of getting stupid drunk then go driving go-karts at one of those places off International Drive (if you slip the guy at the gate an extra ten bucks, he'll turn a blind eye to any extracurricular bumping and slamming).
But by the time the next night rolled around, several people from both groups had found something (someone) else to do, so only about a half dozen of us were there on Church Street. Given that we now lacked our designated drivers as well, we thought it best to just hang out there for the evening. Drinking, flirting and general stupidity ensued.
A couple hours passed before we heard the tale-tell DING DING DING and saw the flashing lights. So we stood there drinks in hand as the train crawled through the intersection. But after about 10 or 12 cars, I noticed that many of them were empty and the sliding doors wide open. Now, maybe I'm just weird but when I see a slow-moving train with a bunch of open box cars, only one thought was crossing my mind;
I gotta jump on that bastard.
So I look to my left to see my friends standing there completely oblivious to the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity staring them in the face. Then I turned to my right and locked eyes with my joke-sharing compatriot. She had this evil little mischievous smile on her face and, without a word, I could tell that we we thinking the exact same thought.
I raised my eyebrows and tilted my head toward the train. She nodded and we both ducked under the barrier and paced the train until we could hop in through an open door. Howls of laughter and raucous applause could be heard as hurried inside and out of view of any police.
The inside of the car is pretty much what you'd expect - plank wood floors, girded metal walls, some scrap iron littering the deck. I guess it was around then that we first gave thought to a couple of fairly obvious questions - what do we do know, where the hell is this train going and how are we going to get home?
After laughing our asses off for a few minutes in pure idiotic glee, we answered the first question.
As the train finished it's trek through downtown Orlando, it began to gradually build up speed. The resulting rocking motion forced us to sit down against the forward wall. She turned to me and said," So are you going to kiss me or what?"
I guess when you're young and stupidly irresponsible, you haven't learned of many ways to communicate feelings of joy, passion, excitement, etc. If this had happened now that I'm older, I would have told her how amazingly brave and wonderfully crazy (in a good way) she was for jumping on the train with me. We would have spent that time telling jokes and exchanging antecdotes, finding out about who we were, building a foundation for later on.
But I was in fact young and stupidly irresponsible, so I just kissed her.
And she kissed me back.
The trained cruised through Winter Park, Maitland, Altamonte Springs and over the inland waterway before finally slowing down 100 miles later in Palatka. We jumped off a few hundred yards short of the railyard and sprinted behind an old metal shed to make sure we weren't caught. We hadn't planned on riding for so long, but.......
She held my hand as we walked a couple miles or so to a 7-11 for coffees and directions to somewhere we could rent a car. Then we huddled together down in the Enterprise parking lot while we waited a few hours for them to open. She sat to my left with her head on my shoulder and both arms wrapped around my one. I tried to think calming thoughts so she wouldn't feel my heart slamming against my chest.
