Junior English major
Things get weird real fast when rowdy college kids mix with people from the “real world” while outside the boundaries of the campus. I first started to notice these odd interactions one day when I was sitting in the Starbucks on Route 1 doing homework. I saw a man dressed head-to-toe in a mustard-colored suit at a table with stacks of Bibles around him.
At first, I thought, “Cool. This man is proud of his religion and just doing his thing. Huzzah for religious freedom.” But soon, the mustard-colored man started to go to surrounding tables, passing out Bibles and commanding Starbucks patrons to “seek and worship” his Lord. People were a little freaked out by a man coming up to their tables unsolicited, Bible-thumping his way there. I knew I was pretty freaked out. To avoid speaking to this mustard man, I put in my earbuds and pretended to be deeply engrossed in my blank computer screen.
A few minutes into my faked study session, I could feel eyes watching me. I knew it was the Bible man. I felt like a gazelle caught in a hungry lion’s gaze. I was trapped. I knew he was going to come up to me and preach whatever he was selling. But I remained strong and fixated on my computer for what felt like forever. Luckily, the Bible man left the Starbucks and headed back to whatever weird place he came from.
Later that night, I told my friends about the weird guy I saw at Starbucks and thought I would never encounter this man again. Well, I was wrong; I saw the same man the following weekend.
After a night of good, clean collegiate fun, my friends and I headed to Pizza Kingdom for some jumbo slices. We were sitting in one of the cramped booths enjoying our slices of death, regaling ourselves with the events of the night. In the midst of our caloric overload, I noticed a familiar man sitting in the back of the restaurant not enjoying a jumbo slice like the rest of the patrons. This man, dressed in a mustard-colored suit, was attempting to infiltrate tables of tipsy college kids by threatening “his God’s wrath.”
The people at these tables were either too inebriated to notice or they just ignored him, only making him more persistent. Seemingly angered that no one was acknowledging him, the Bible man approached my table of friends just as he approached me in Starbucks, but this time, I had no computer to fixate on. All I had was a 12-foot-long piece of pizza in my hand and a table of drunk friends who did not know how to handle this man.
The man sat down in the adjacent booth and began to recite passages from the Bible to us. He started to get louder and began to create a disturbance in the restaurant. Petrified by what this man might do to us, my friends and I decided to abandon our pizza and leave. But I wasn’t safe yet. The man decided to call out to me and said, “You are Satan’s child. You are a demon of the night. No one will ever love you.”
Yup. A man in a mustard-colored suit dwells somewhere in College Park telling people they are children of Satan.
What’s the key takeaway from this story? Don’t hang out at Pizza Kingdom at 4 a.m.
Maggie Cassidy is a sophomore English major. She can be reached at mcassidydbk@gmail.com.
[ READ MORE: Strange encounters in college ]
