The Surf-Ari Family Riya Resheidat & Katherine Brennan CONTRIBUTING WRITERS It’s the beginning of November and the corner of Woodward Avenue and Jefferson Street looks like Christmas. A retired school bus has been revamped with pink and blue paint, zebra print siding and white Christmas tree lights. The bus, nicknamed The Surf-Ari, is driving around campus carrying four best friends and a lot of liquor. Roly Magnus, Joshua Davis, Phillip Mangan and Skyler McCarthy are out for a night of fun. Although The Surf-Ari, which was originally purchased for friends to use, is now hired by club promoters to shuttle partygoers to their events, the four guys are still doing this for the fun. All agree that the money is a bonus. They have a great time partying together, driving new friends around on the bus. This is the second school bus Joshua Davis has owned. He says the first broke down all of the time, but after some consideration he decided to buy another bus from a friend’s father. The seats in the bus have been placed along the walls and covered in red velvet.
The Surf-Ari family leans against the bus they use for road trips and late nights of bush-diving and drinking games. Magnus is walking up and down the zebra print-painted wooden plank covering the floor center aisle. With a microphone attached to a stereo in hand, he is singing Party in the USA as a group of girls celebrating a friend’s 21st birthday sing along in unison. When the bus reaches the girls’ destination, Magnus leaves the group with a word of advice: “Go get drunk, lower your standards, and find someone”. The bus is off and on its way for it’s fourth and final pick-up of the night. The guys are pounding on the ceiling of the bus, singing and dancing together. The man driving the bus seems oblivious to the noise. Ray Brown, one of the two bus drivers the four guys have hired for The Surf-Ari, is a school bus driver full time and has taken up driving for Magnus and his friends as a part time job. “It’s a little bit different from driving little kids in the day time, but I am used to the noise,” said Brown. “It gets pretty wild as far as banging and screaming and hollering.” The following day Magnus, a philosophy major at FSU, is getting ready to DJ at Potbellies for happy hour. Dressed in a long fur coat with swim trunks and flip-flops, he sits down to
talk about the friends he calls family. “I met Josh last year at the West 10 pool and apparently we bonded really well,” said Magnus. The group of friends went on a bus trip to Secret Beach soon after, and spent their time snowboarding down sand dunes. “After Secret Beach, it was sealed. We were family.” The Surf-Ari sometimes travels around Tallahassee with animals, such as a Great Dane named Tiger, a few cats and a cockatoo named C.J. “We are thinking of getting another because a cockatoo completes us,” said Magnus. Awaiting his graduation in December, Magnus says he receives A’s in all of his classes. “My personality is very sporadic, because I am very organized but at the same time out at night I am very wild,” said Magnus. But his explanation of how he maintains his high GPA with all of the partying is simple: “I am intelligent. I am a smart guy. I know what I study and I love what I study, so in that aspect it’s really easy to balance school and my studies.”
The Surf-Ari Family: from left to right, Roly Aguirre, Phillip Mangan, Skyler Mccarthy and Josh Davis.
Issue 2, December 2010
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