The Joust Part Two

…and now for the thrilling conclusion of The Joust!

Off in the distance, nearing downtown, I could see a pair of headlights heading my direction and where this was normally the part of the street people picked up speed because the speed limit allowed for them to do so, this car was actually slowing down. I prayed it wasn’t the police. I just kept peddling and tried to act as normal as one could while biking with a pole vault in hand.

As I progressed in the cars direction the driver had slowed to an absolute crawl. Rather than going the posted 40 miles per hour, he was probably hovering just above 10. This was making me very nervous, so I just kept my eyes on the road and peddled on ahead fearful of making eye contact.

“CHRIS!” screamed the driver, his head now sticking out his car window.

I turned my head towards the car, but did not first recognize the voice.

“Chris! What the fuck you doin’ man!?!”

“Oh, man! Liam! Hey! I’m just riding my bike with the pole vault,” I called out in his direction.

“I can see that! Dude, what the fuck!?!”

Liam had completely stopped his car in the middle of the road and I had reached the point where I was about to pass him. As I looked over in his direction I immediately started to smile because he was now holding his arm out his car window, phone in hand, inevitably filming my every move. The thought of how awesome that video was going to look made me start to laugh.

Liam worked with me at the school library and was pretty popular guy on campus. He was in a rival fraternity, but he and I always got along really well and would often hang out after work, so I was totally cool with him filming me. His immense popularity could only mean one thing for me in the end: a whole lot of people were going to know I had stolen the pole vault.

There was a split second where I had this pit in my stomach and thought about the trouble I might potentially get in, but ultimately, I decided seeing Liam didn’t change a thing. If anything, his video would only help our fraternity out against his during rush week, so I just kept peddling on down the street past the darkened storefronts of the typically vibrant downtown.

I guess finals week was even taking its toll on the local bars that would normally be bustling with activity because there was seriously no one down here. Thank goodness though; I didn’t need to be on anyone else’s Snapchat story.

I was really starting to love looking in the darkened windows of the storefronts and seeing the reflection of me riding my bike with the pole vault in hand. I couldn’t get over how cool I thought I looked and how excited I was to see Liam’s video. I started thinking how I hoped he had not just posted it to his Snapchat story, but saved it to his phone, so I could get a permanent copy.

Just a few blocks later I was rounding the corner to Aaron’s driveway. I knew he would still be awake and the lights on all over the house proved just that. My bike roared up the drive and I hopped right off before it even came to a complete stop. The bike rolled out from under me, eventually slamming into the side of the porch making far more noise than I was expecting. That crash accompanied by my howl of pain definitely let Aaron know someone was outside.

I was howling with pain because when I hopped off my bike I didn’t take into consideration I had the pole vault in hand and the tip of it slammed against the giant tree in Aaron’s front yard and the back half of into my lower ribs. The shock and pain hurt like Hell and I couldn’t help but howl out in agony. I really needed to start being more careful with this thing.

Before I could even quit howling the porch lights flickered on and I heard the front door open. Without giving Aaron the opportunity to speak, I called out,

“Aaron!”

“Chris? Man, what the Hell you doin’ out here!?!”

“Dude, you are not gonna believe what I got right now!”

A barefoot, highly irritated looking Aaron walked down the wooden porch steps, “No. Way.” Seeing the pole vault had apparently instantly erased his initial irritation.

“Yeah man!” I exclaimed. “I totally took the pole vault from the field house!” I couldn’t stop smiling about it.

Aaron was first laughing right along with me and even moved to grab the pole vault from me, but suddenly his excitement switched to concern. “Dude, your leg is bleeding,” He said while pointing at the blood oozing down my right leg.

“Oh, yeah, I hit it on the curb. Got a Bandaid?” The excitement of Liam filming me and watching myself in the store windows made me forget all about how I had hurt my leg.

“Yeah man, come on inside.”

I started to follow him up the steps, but it turns out the pole vault was too tall for the porch, so I had to turn around and go lay it in the yard.

“Here you go,” Aaron said handing me a Mickey Mouse Bandaid once inside.

“Mickey! Oh man, awesome!” I said as I tore apart the packaging and placed the Bandaid across my wound.

“Dude, we should totally take the pole vault out in my Mustang and like joust or some shit, man.”

“Oh man, yeah, definitely! That’ll be so much better than on my bike!” I exclaimed excitedly.

Aaron always had the best ideas and I knew this one was no exception. As soon as he finished putting his shoes on and grabbed his jacket hanging just by the door he was ready to go.

“Amanda home?” I asked.

“Yeah, but she’s been asleep for hours. I was just up gaming.”

“I’m surprised my bike crashing into the porch didn’t wake her,” I laughed.

“Or your howling,” Aaron shot back at me with a smirk. “Dude, I can’t find my keys,” he said as he reached in and out of all his pockets.

“Hey man,” I said motioning to the wooden pegs jutting out from the wall right next to the front door where there were several sets of keys hanging just below a cursive insignia that read keys.

“In my defense that’s new,” Aaron said raising both hands in the air. “Amanda knows I how I always lose everything and she put that up to help me keep track of shit.”

“I’m not so sure it’s working,” I laughed and Aaron punched me in the chest. I was first surprised how badly it hurt, but then remembering all the times I fell tonight and it made a little more sense, but damn his light punch really hurt like Hell.

Aaron and I walked back out the front door and I picked up the pole vault off the grass and followed him back down his driveway to the detached garage.

He went inside the garage and started up his Mustang while I patiently waited outside with the pole vault. This thing had done enough damage for one evening. I didn’t need it to tear up Aaron and Amanda’s garage too.

He reversed out the garage and stopped just as he had completely cleared it. With the touch of a button the roof began to descend into the back of the car. This was going to be so awesome. I set the pole vault across the backseat momentarily while I climbed in the front. Once I had gotten myself situated I grabbed the pole vault from the back and sat it up right in the front seat with me. It was so long that it had to look crazy sticking up out of Aaron’s car like this.

“Dude, let’s go out down Old Mill Road,” Aaron said as he drove off in the direction opposite from where I initially came from.

“Yeah, for sure man. We don’t wanna head back downtown, someone else might see us.”

“Someone else?” Aaron asked.

“Yeah yeah, you know Liam who works with me at the library? He saw me riding my bike with the pole vault and I think I’m probably on his Snapchat story now.”

“You check?”

“No man, I left my phone at home,” I sighed. “Dude, with all the shit that I’ve done tonight I really wish I’d brought it.”

Aaron reached down and grabbed his phone and sure enough, Liam had posted a couple ten second videos of me riding down Main Street. Liam could be heard in the first video talking about me jousting down Main.

“Dude, you’re gonna be so famous tomorrow. Everyone’s gonna wanna know what the Hell you were doing!” Aaron said through a fit of laughter. He was loving this maybe even more than I was.

We had gotten out of town, so I decided to hold the pole vault out the side of the Mustang. This proved to be much more difficult than it was on my bike because the road twist and turned so much and Aaron was going far faster than he should have been, so I couldn’t quite manage getting the pole vault to balance like I had while biking. I decided to undo my seatbelt, so I could lean more forward than it was allowing me to do with it on. This definitely helped me manage the stability of the pole vault better.

“Here, let me see it,” Aaron said as he took both his hands off the steering wheel using his right to grab the pole vault from me and undoing his seatbelt with his left. “This is fucking sick, man,” he said as he hoisted it up over the both of us and out his side.

He accelerated the car as he held the pole vault with his left hand and grabbed the wheel with his right. We rounded a corner faster than I would have maybe of liked and off in the distance, illuminated by his brights, we could see a mailbox on the opposite side of the road. Aaron eased into the other lane and before I could say a thing, he slammed the mailbox right off the wooden post it was propped up on, laughing maniacally all along.

“Dude, that was fucking awesome! You gotta give it a try!”

I was really not interested in destroying anyone’s personal property and I definitely didn’t want him to do it again either, so I grabbed the pole vault back from him thinking that if he didn’t have it any longer this would put an end to his little game.

I noticed when Aaron had the pole vault he rested it atop the side mirror, so this time I did the same, this made holding on to it much easier. As we continued down the two-lane forest road I could see us coming up to another mailbox in the distance.

“Dude, this is your chance!” Aaron yelled. “Fuckin’ do it, man,” he coaxed me as he put both his hands around my shoulders. “Just fuckin’ do it!” he said looking at me and the pole vault and unfortunately not the road.

All the while his hands were jiving my shoulders I was giving him a nervous smile ignoring the road as well. I just remember thinking how badly I didn’t want to hit this person’s mailbox, but in the end, it didn’t matter because I never even got the chance to do so.

My eyes broke away from Aaron and as I scrolled them past the road to the pole vault they immediately darted back to the road, “STOP!” I shouted, but it was too late.

Aaron looked away from me and saw what I had seen. A deer was standing firmly in the middle of our lane. Aaron slammed on his breaks and I guess in the surprise I busted off the side car mirror with the force of the pole vault, this allowed for the point to strike the ground, and for the third time tonight, I found myself being tossed through the night sky.

This time though, I let go of the pole vault, but it was too late, I went sailing straight through Aaron’s windshield and right onto the road. My body slammed down on the asphalt amidst a sea of shattered glass and rolled several times forward before coming to an abrupt stop. I never had a chance to lose anymore of my senses because almost as soon as it happened, I blacked out.

I woke up several hours later in the hospital with some stitches and a few little tubes hooked up to my arm, I was in a pretty fair amount of pain, but was told I was lucky to be alive. As for Aaron, well, he was lying in the bed right next to me with his nose all bandaged up and some extensive bruising, but otherwise in fair condition.

After looking over my body and seeing that I was in much better shape than I probably deserved, I looked across the room at the clock up on the wall and saw the time, 8:25. Looks like I was not going to make that 8:00 a.m. speech final after all.

After realizing this I just started to laugh, only this time harder than I had at any moment prior in this wild saga. My speech topic was the perils of social media and I became quite certain that with Liam’s video circulating out there I had just become a living example of what I should have probably right now of been speaking about.

Despite this realization I was still left with one looming thought, what happened to the pole vault?

THE END!

It is important to note that this story is merely based upon my brother’s real life actions. I have interviewed Chris a multitude of times to get firsthand accounts of his various moments and at the conclusion of each interview I am left with an excellent skeleton from which I am then able to build the body of my story from. All my stories about Chris and his life are based on a true story, none of them are 100% cemented in facts as I have taken many artistic liberties to showcase a complete body of work. I hope this does not dissuade any of you from your enjoyment, but I feel that it is important to be honest in my storytelling. Leading you all to believe that every event that happened in parts one and two of The Joust was historically accurate would be a great disservice to my brother and his legacy, but more importantly to all of you, my audience.

In observance of July 4^th being next Wednesday and the festivities surrounding that holiday, I will not be posting on Monday, July 2, but will return the following Monday on July 9. I hope that you all have a phenomenal holiday week and as always remember you are simply the best!