It’s about 9 p.m. last Friday night, and the Boston University Escort Service van pulls into South Campus to pick up its first ride.
Beth Hornak, a senior, climbs into the van. She’s headed to a meeting at the Student Village. She’s sick, she tells the escorts, but she probably would have called for a ride anyway.
‘As a female student, I won’t walk around alone after 9 o’clock,’ she said.
The van drops her off, and she tells the drivers she’ll probably see them again once the meeting is over.
There are three escorts in the van. Konstantin Popov is behind the wheel. Aleksander Roslyakov sits behind him, taking requests for rides from headquarters over a walkie-talkie and logging them on a clipboard. Josh Pellittieri shouldn’t really be there yet, but he jumped into the van to give Popov directions to the Huntington Theater, the next pick-up. They’re all freshman – freshmen wind up working on weekend nights – but they know what they’re doing.
‘We get trained ad nauseum,’ Pellittieri says, laughing, as he leans back in his seat.
* * *
Yianis Zouras and David Duford leave the Escort Service headquarters at the George Sherman Union a little after 9:30 p.m. to conduct a safety check on Bay State Road.
Zouras and Duford are walkers for the Escort Service. It’s a much less popular service than the van – this particular night, nobody will ask to be walked home – so they perform safety checks.
The pair starts toward Bay State, wearing the Escort Service’s standard-issue white shirts, with flashlights and radios in hand. Along the way, they stop to check each emergency blue phone, dialing the Escort Service’s number.
‘Hello, BU Escort?’ the phone squawks.
‘Safety check,’ one of them replies.
‘Thank you.’ Click. This one works.
As they walk, Duford, a freshman from Tennessee, asks Yianis about the weather: ‘Is this about as cold as it usually is?’
Zouras laughs and shakes his head. The junior has been with the service since freshman year. He’s been a walker the entire time. When he’s not walking people across campus or checking blue phones, he sits apart from the group and studies engineering.
‘It’s great for me,’ he said of being an escort. ‘I’m paying my way through school, I get to study and I can help some people walk across campus.’
Tonight, Duford and Zouras are checking the brownstones on the south side of Bay State Road. They split up, and each checks every other building, moving quickly through the crisp October night. They test the phones in each building by calling the escort number and give the doors a good shake to make sure they are locked.
Once all the front doors are checked, Zouras and Duford walk back toward the GSU, checking the brownstones’ back doors on the way.
Zouras discovers an open door – unlike most of the BU buildings, it’s a black door, not red – but he radios headquarters anyway, as he’s been trained to do, and they call the Boston University Police Department.
‘This will be the first time this has happened,’ Dave says, since he started working.
Is he nervous?
‘Nah,’ he laughs. ‘We’ll just let the BUPD take care of it. It’s their job.’
A patrol car shows up within a few minutes. The door turns out not to be a BU building, but the officer checks inside anyway. Everything looks fine, so the officer locks the door and leaves.
In the meantime, Zouras has checked the rest of the doors. The safety check is finished.
Almost back at the GSU, the escorts stop to check one final phone. They dial headquarters.
‘Hello,’ the phone squawks, ‘BU Escort?’
‘Safety check.’
* * *
‘Thank you,’ Mary Grace Henry says as she hangs up the phone. She’s the escort supervisor tonight and her main job is to answer the phone. She sits in front of her phone with the escorts at one of three folding tables set up between the two banks at the GSU. The escorts sit around the tables, which are covered with notebooks and textbooks, snack foods, and movies they’ll watch to pass the time.
The Escort Service is completely student-run, with three managers that oversee its operations. One of them, Nick Berger, is there for most of the night tonight, and a second, Talene Kelegian, stops by to check on things. Tonight, however, it’s Henry’s show.
The phone rings. She takes the caller’s name and asks where they are and where they want to go. She asks how many people are with the caller. The escorts usually limit the van to groups of two people at a time, because they consider groups of three to be ‘safe’ – in other words, they don’t need a ride.
‘We’re here for your safety, not for a free ride,’ says Josh Hamlin, the service’s third student manager. ‘Our number one priority is student safety.’
Once she’s sure the call is legitimate, Henry puts it on hold and radios the van. ‘Guys, you have a ride from Warren to Danielsen. How long?’
She gets an answer, writes it all down and tells the caller when the van will be there.
By the end of the night, the escorts will have picked up about 60 callers – at least 100 students. Last year, the escorts responded to about 8,000 students.
The phone rings again. Henry answers – ‘BU Escort?’
It’s Hornak, who was brought to the Village earlier. Her meeting is over, and she’s ready to go home.
* * *
At about 11 p.m., Popov and Roslyakov pull in front of the GSU and jump out – their shift in the van is over.
Paul Testagrossa, a freshman driver, slides behind the driver’s seat. He is wearing his Yankees hat tonight, one night after New York knocked the Red Sox out of the playoffs.
Earlier, Testagrossa told everyone at the GSU about a Sox fan who punched him for wearing that hat the night before on Commonwealth Avenue.
‘All day, I just knew I was gonna get beat up,’ he laughed. ‘I thought it was gonna be because I said something, but I was just walking along. The guy asked me if I was a Yankees fan, and when I said yes, he punched me.’
‘The ironic thing is, as he punched me, I bit my tongue.’
Chris Bryant, a sophomore, climbs in after Testagrossa and takes the clipboard and walkie-talkie. Bryant is one of the escort service’s most experienced drivers, so he’s ready if the night gets hectic.
Right away, they pick up two people in front of the 7-Eleven in South Campus and then swing by Marsh Chapel to pick up four more before turning toward West Campus. One of them is holding a cup.
‘Just for the sake of me asking,’ Chris says, ‘that’s not alcoholic, is it?’
The rider shakes his head – it’s just coffee.
The riders get dropped off at West, and the van picks up a few more passengers. Testagrossa stops in front of T’s Pub to pick up two girls, but they tell him they won’t need the ride after all. One leans into the window and offers, as an explanation, ‘They wouldn’t let me in with my ID because I’m Australian!’ She giggles and disappears with her friend down a side street.
A couple of pick-ups later, the van rolls up to a corner and a couple waves it down.
‘Don’t wave us down,’ Bryant mutters. ‘I hate it when people do that.’ He knows some students treat the escorts like a taxi service and he doesn’t like it. ‘You can tell there’s rides that are in it because they want to be safe, and rides that are in it because they want the free ride,’ he says.
As the night wears on, the calls come faster. The van gets crowded. The wait for a ride becomes longer. It’s started to rain a little. The windows cloud up and the night becomes blurry to the people inside the van.
The ride itself starts to blur – destinations run together with songs on the radio. Warren to West. West to Danielsen. Coldplay. Outkast. Buswell Street to the Student Village, Ashford to Warren, the Foo Fighters, the Beastie Boys – ‘You can’t, and you won’t, and you don’t, stop!’ the radio shouts.
Bryant says the job can get hectic at times, but it’s nothing the drivers can’t handle.
‘Now and again, you get a rider who’s too inebriated, and they feel the need to vomit all over the van,’ he says. ‘You get people who act crazy, singing in the van.
‘It’s not out of hand if the drivers stay calm.’
The van pulls up to the gym on Babcock Street, already crowded, and at least 15 people approach the door. Testagrossa leans out of his seat, picking through the crowd to find the people who called for a ride.
Testagrossa says he expects people to get irate with him when they’re left behind, but usually they understand the van is full.
‘Then again, I am wearing my Yankees hat tonight,’ he laughs.