Alien vs. Predator

(Reprinted from Eating Chicken Vindaloo)

While attending the local community college one year, I worked at the Bear Mountain Inn in the Overlook Lodge. It had about 30 rooms on three floors and a reception room in the basement for banquets and whatnot. I "worked" there because a few of my friends did also and because I only had to do about 45 minutes of "work" for each 8 hours I got paid. On the weekends of the home Army football games, the "Inn" filled up on Friday night and became a ghost town on Saturday when every guest went to the football game.

On one such Saturday, my friend Max and I were working and the meager list of "jobs" we had to do included cleaning the bathrooms in the basement - not such a big deal since they were rarely used and were usually pretty clean anyways. We hit the men's room first. Max had the toilet brush, and I had the blue cleaner in the squirt bottle. At one point, I may have "accidentally" sprayed him with the cleaner and then a second, third, and fourth time, accidentally you see. He got pissed, pulled his toilet brush out of the toilet, and flung some toilet water my way. I retaliated by spraying him a couple more times and ran out of the bathroom - it was on!

We had the run of the place, so I took cover under the vanity table in the women's room (position A on the diagram). While I was waiting for Max to come into the ladies room and around the corner so I could blast him, a scene from "Police Academy" (hey, it was the 80's) flashed in my mind where the mean sergeant is training the misfit recruits and he wants them to pretend they're confronting a burglar stealing a TV. The girl with the squeaky voice botches it, and the psycho marine reject puts his finger (gun) to the sergeant's head and says,"Drop that TV before I blow your goddamn nuts off you asshole!" Anyways, Max kicks the door open to the bathroom, comes down the little hallway, and when he is in my view (position B), I yell, yes yell,"Drop that toilet brush before I blow your goddamn nuts off you asshole!" He looks in to where the stalls are and pretends that there was someone in there, giving me the "shh" sign. I whisper to him, "Bullshit! There's nobody in there!" He starts waving his arms over his head and pointing in there, and I whisper, "It's the Army game. You are so full of it!" He gives me the throat slitting gesture, and I say,"I'm not looking in there! You're always trying to pull shit like this on me!" I'm getting a little nervous, though. He's acting like he's Costello, and I'm Abbott, and the monster's right behind me. Finally I look, just in time to see someone pulling their pants up from behind the stall door! Oops. We do the only mature thing one can do in a situation like this: we run like hell, lock ourselves in the office, turn out the lights, and sneak peeks out every now and then. Lest you think we were cowards, we came out after about 3 hours. We were almost done laughing by then. We never heard anything about our antics. The only thing I can think of is that she was one of these occasional hikers on the Appalachian trail that popped in every once in awhile to use the rest rooms.

I stopped watching the Police Academy movies after Police Academy III. I just didn't find the story lines believable any more.