Posted by todd
Wed, 09 Aug 2006 20:20:00 GMT
(I wrote most of this a few months ago but never posted it)
A few months back I flew through my old stomping grounds of Raleigh, North Carolina and visited for a day. It wasn’t very well planned as the real reason for being on the East coast was for business in Atlanta the following day. In fact, it was so last minute that instead of staying with friends, I wound up staying in some random hotel in an area I knew was safe.
Safe for me that is. Apparently not safe for April, the alleged day spa owner who came running up to me as I was unsuccessfully trying to get into my room using the ghetto magnetic key card reader.
“Someone is following me. They followed me around the deck twice now.. I don’t know who they are.”
Now, there wasn’t anyone in sight, you can’t exactly tell terrified women that they are nuts. I mean, she probably WAS, but wouldn’t you feel silly if she wound up in a ditch afterwards?
She wanted to come into my room, but since it was a 50/50 shot between setting me up to be robbed or her being a total nut job, I told her I’d wait with her down in the parking lot until her friend came and got her.
She was very clearly on a lot of drugs and was talking incessantly, but pretty much unintelligibly.
Ladies, if you are ever trying to get a guy to save you and gain his trust, do not under any circumstances make the following statement:
“God everyone in this town is on drugs, all these strippers… coke… heroin. You think I’m crazy don’t you… You don’t believe me do you?!”
Well, when you put it THAT way.
I’m a pretty nice guy, but.... work with me here. The best response I could muster was “Well April, I don’t know you… so I don’t know if you are crazy or not. I’ll wait with you here if you want.”. I was still a little bit worried that the heroin van was going to roll up and roll me, but this girl seemed too dumb to set me up that well.
That’s all she needed to become my
insta-bestest-friend-in-the-world ™. “You really aren’t leaving me…are you??” (not so much a question as it was shock) “I’m TOTALLY going to pay you back for this… I want you to come down to the spa and I’ll give you a free massage… your girlfriend too! Do you have a girlfriend?” She rifled through her bags for about 5 minutes looking for her card before I convinced her to forget it.
“Do you party?”
...
...
I was pretty confident she didn’t mean chocolate cake and party hats.
Beyond that I had NO idea what type of “partying” she meant. It seemed pretty much a toss up between coke, heroin, and prostitution at this point.
Me: “Well, what kind of partying do you mean?”.
Her: ”Well, what kind of partying do you do? I’ve got a TON of coke in my purse. Want some?”
Me: “Ummm.. I’ve got a meeting tomorrow, and that might cause some sleep issues. Thanks though!”
It’s hard to imagine why this girl would be paranoid.
This got me thinking. Why was this girl AT this motel, and if she was so scared, why didn’t she go to HER room? This wasn’t exactly the kind of place you hang out at… just a lousy motel.
“April, what are you doing at this motel?”
“A bunch of my stripper friends are having a party upstairs, but I wanted to leave. And this guy was following me, and I didn’t know what to do so I walked around the building and…..blah blah blah blah”
It had been almost 20 minutes at this point, and it seemed clear that Aprils friends weren’t coming to get her….if they existed at all. With her credibility reaching a peak, and my being late to meet my buddy at the bar next door, I did what any good buddy would do.
I told the coked out stripper that I had to go meet my friend next door, and invited her to come with me.
She was rambling on her mobile phone with some chick bur started to follow me, eventually falling way behind. Apparently cocaine makes it difficult to talk and walk at the same time. I waited a minute and she still wasn’t coming.. just standing in the parking lot now talking. So I waved and told her I’d be inside.
My buddy was disappointed that I left the crazy girl out there, but the bartender seemed rather terrified that I’d considered bringing her in and dispatched orders to the staff not to let her in the door. She never tried though… just disappeared.
So all you Raleigh people... if you find a dead stripper in a ditch... check her purse.
Posted in Travel | Tags alcohol, cocaine, drugs, prostitutes, travel | 6 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by todd
Mon, 13 Mar 2006 21:50:00 GMT
AKA: Sweet Jesus!
If you read my stories regularly, you probably know that I’m a mobile phone geek. I’m not a software engineer anymore, and most of my day involves either directing a group of engineers, or more often doing strategery (Thanks GW) to make you phone haters buy more stuff on your phone.
In short, my job is to turn you all mobile consumer whores. Don’t fight it.
The best part about a career in mobile is that your clients (the phone companies) are spread out over the whole world. That might seem scary if you only watch the US media, but as I’ve discovered, there are actually other countries in the world where people don’t live in mud huts or eat babies.
Those are pretty much the target market, so occasionally I get sent somewhere weird.
Barcelona was weird.
Barcelona is exactly two scotches and one sleeping pill away from San Diego. Actually that’s a lie. That got me to Belgium.
Tack on some Belgian beer and a terrible hot dog.. now you are in Barcelona Spain.
I know what you are thinking right now.
“Ooh. That would be soooo cool! Spain! The Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria!”…
This would be true, if Nina was a transvestite hooker with a cataract problem and a voice as deep as mine. Personally, I don’t find that very “cool”. No joke, I was followed by this “woman” who went so far as to grab me and try and convince me to come with her. Now, Barcelona is notorious for pick pockets, and this woman was getting on my nerves anyway, so I wound up giving her a nice hard shove and telling her to fuck off. That worked and stopped her. She (not joking) pouted at me and looked highly offended.
Who knew that tranny prostitutes were so sensitive?
First off, people in Spain don’t really speak English. (shocker eh?)… My Spanish is terrible, although I can understand the gist of a conversation.
Guess what! People in Barcelona don’t speak SPANISH EITHER. It’s apparently some dialect of Spanish and French, known as Catalan. I got nothing.
All those years I spent watching Sesame Street, for NOTHING.
When you don’t speak the language, it’s tough to make friends in a new city. For instance, there were two very nice guys who always hung out in the hallway outside the apartment I was staying in. Every night I’d come home and they would be sitting there.
Every morning I’d leave for the tradeshow….. and they would be sitting there. They were dedicated to whatever it was they were doing out there, but I missed out because I couldn’t introduce myself.
Then one morning I walked out and sure enough, they were there, along with about 2 dozen little scraps of newspaper folded up into square packets, and a funny looking smoking device made out of a soda bottle and some tin foil.
They were very dedicated to freebasing cocaine. They looked very worried that I had busted them.
Now, I’ve been around the block a few times, and really could care less what other people do with their time. Beyond that, I didn’t really want to worry about getting jumped by drug addicts every time I came home, so what could I do?
I made buddies with them.
“No worries man, none of my business.” I told them while raising my hands up in the international sign for “none of my business”. Then I started walking away.
“Mi Amigo, Mi Amigo, come back!” said the crack head.
So I go back. Still not quite sure what the hell they were smoking. Apparently their English was better than my Catalan, and they had understood my statement, thereby automatically making me their buddy.
Crack head #1 takes a puff off his bong and offers it to me.
“No thanks man, I have to go to work. What is it though?” It sort of smelled like pot, and I’d heard that Barcelona was full of hashish.. That would have been cool. Pot heads don’t rob people… eat all their chips, yes.. rob them…. Notsomuch.
“Es cocaine y hashish”. Fuck. These guys were smoking cocaine and mixing in hashish for flavor, apparently.
“Thanks, but I have to get going. Maybe later” I figured that as long as they didn’t think I was going to call the cops, they wouldn’t screw with me.. so after about 5 more “Mi Amigo’s” I got out of there.
The rest of my trip pretty much consisted of me turning down propositions from ugly prostitutes and hard drugs from 22 year olds. On the upside, one of mi amigos actually did give me directions to a decent club my last day in town. They were the friendliest addicts I’ve ever met.
Still.. if you ever get the chance to fly 18 hours to Barcelona.
Don’t.
Posted in Travel | Tags barcelona, cocaine, phones, prostitutes, travel | 4 comments | no trackbacks
