Staring Down the Barrel of a Gun: Welcome to Paris pt trois

Continued 
“Let me in. Let me in” Insisted the ominous voice on the other side of the door.  I feel like I entered into an Alfred Hitchcock horror flick.  I’m in my chonies fighting off an intruder who is trying to break into my room. 

“Welcome to Paris”  

Mind racing: Dark corridor. Men with dark circles under their eyes smoking and eating Pizza at midnight in the lobby. A credit card that “Doesn’t work.”  The money I flashed for everyone to see (including the pizza-eating, cigarette smoking Mafioso).  A phone that doesn’t work. Mysterious phone calls. No security latch. 

And “No one knows we’re in France” – Kerry innocently told the nice receptionist.

I’m holding the door closed – adrenaline pumping – and from past experiences with the not-so-illustrious “Wolf Pack” (my big brothers and their hippie tribe) I knew it was dangerous for less than three people at one time to attack me.  I COULD HOLD MY OWN.

There would be blood!  Whatever reason this guy or these guys felt they had to get into my room at 4:00 am in the morning – it had better be good enough for them to die over.

Though I was in my underwear, (don’t visualize it – just accept it), I had the stool in one hand and was prepared to defend Kerry and knew that it might come to bloodshed!  

IT WASN'T GOING TO BE MINE!

“You’re not getting into this room” I said holding the door against the frame (like the Grinch when he had the strength of 10 Grinches or like the mother who, with superhuman strength, lifts the car off her child.  

 Picture of Kerry lifting mini-cooper 

“I need to come into your room” said the all-too-familiar voice… as though this was perfectly normal, twisting the key in the lock.

“Why!” I shouted hoping to wake up anyone who might happen to be in adjoining rooms.

“Umm…you left your key in the door and I want to return it to you.” 

Lamest thing I ever heard. “Slide it under the door” I said incredulously, freak out that at 4:00 am I had to be fighting off a guy who says he needs to return my key that was left in the door and needed to get in.       Nothing made sense!  

I was sure this guy was a pawn of the sinister-looking-Mafia-guys and wanted to bust into our room. “Take the key downstairs – we don’t need it”

Whispering, I asked Kerry to look for our key to see if this guy was telling the truth.  I'm positive that he wants to steal our passports and money and I quietly tell Kerry to hide both of our passport holders.

But where? They’ll find it a dresser drawer and under the mattress, I thought, so I told her to throw them on top of the large, tall-freestanding closet.

“I need to get into your room…” He said still unlocking the door and pushing against.  “I need to give you your key back”

 

“Go away – you’re not coming in” I said pushing back against him. Then in a stroke of brilliance, I said “I’m calling the Policia” and told Kerry to push the bedside tables over to me.

We both knew "calling the police" was an empty threat - we didn’t know that phone number.  

Building a pretty secure barricade the two of us began looking for a phone book or for emergency numbers that should be posted somewhere.

No phone book

No emergency numbers listed on the back of the door.

        ... and no Gideon Bible ... btw. 

What do we do?

Shrugging my shoulders – I looked at Kerry who knew that we had no way of calling the police.

 My mind raced. How would we get out of this predicament?  “Kerry” I screamed loudly for him and anyone else in the hotel to hear “Call the police!” 

She shrugged back, knowing that she didn’t have an international calling plan and that we had no phone number.      Mission Impossible! 

What were we going to do and was this going to end in some kind of fight to the death?

We couldn’t call Kerry’s mom – she’d freak out and have a heart attack.

Who could we call for help?  We wracked out brains. 

Caryl!  Caryl knows France – she loves Paris – and she knows some French. It’s 4-dark-30 in the morning here and I think 7:30 pm, Sunday night back in Sacramento.  

We call.                      Caryl answers her phone.      Yay! 

We tell her the story. She’s now as worried as we are and begins an Google search. She gives me the French equivalent of our 911.

I try˗no good. 

I try with country code – no good.

I call Caryl back. Tell her to look up number the police department. She does, but tells us that in the meantime she looked up Hotel Scams on the internet and that this was most definitely a scam.  

She says she looked up the Hotel Balladins and found that a lady had her purse stolen while she was dining at the hotel restaurant. I knew it! This place is shady. "You need to call the police and call the American Embassy." she said.    

Meanwhile, the guy on the outside of the door says, he’s calling the police.

"Why?" That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.  What's he going to do...tell them that he tried to break into our room in the middle of the night and has two American tourists trapped and freaked out of their mind”  I thought.

While barricaded in our room, we call the police and tell them the story. They have to transfer me to a different department. Ughhhh! I have to say the same urgent speech all over again. The officer tells me in broken English that he doesn’t feel like it’s such a big deal.  I repeat, “We’re tourist. We’re in your country and we're afraid. Please come.” The officer on the phone says he will personally be coming.

Hearts beating at (only about) a million beats-per-second. We put on our clothes and remain vigilant at the door.  

We call the American Embassy. They are freak out! They say that this is totally inappropriate. They have never heard of such a thing and that no one is to come into our room in the middle of the night – not even the police.  They take down our names, our hotel and phone number.  I tell them that we are frightened, but waiting for the police to arrive.  

Another knock on the door. It was a soft rap on the door like the first time. It sounded just like familiar tapping of the evil man who had tried to break in. OH, AND GUESS WHAT? DID I FAIL TO TELL YOU THAT THERE WAS NO PEEP-HOLE IN THE DOOR?

Dark hallway. No security latch. No peep-hole. 

"It's the police" a voice says.  

I don’t know if it is the police or a rouse. Is it the bad guys trying to fake me out? Do I open the door?  There was a tinge of nervousness in the voice of the man behind the door that I didn’t like. Should I trust it and open the door? 

I gave Kerry the look that I didn’t think we had any other option, but to open the door. 

I told the man that I wasn’t sure that I should and didn’t know how to trust if he was indeed the police. Grabbing the stool and holding it over head, Kerry and I removed the end tables and cautiously cracked the door open.

The door flung open. A foot was planted against the open door and another body quickly took a position in the door frame.

With my weapon (small stool) ready to strike and with all kinds of angry emotion all over my face - I was staring down the barrel of a gun!   




(This is my blog word limit. I apologize, but will have to continue this epic Dahlin saga in my next post)

  

THE DAHLIN ZONE and my biggest nightmare!

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man.  It is a dimension in Venice California in the gap in time between now and then. It is the middle ground between what was fact and what was perceived to be. In it lies the pit of fears regarding the survival of Catholic school and lots of older brothers. It is the dimension of 1960’s in Markie D’s imagination. It is filled with tragedy, humor and a satirical look at the human condition.  

It is known as “The Dahlin Zone”  

I blogged my way through that first terrible week of fifth grade in September of 1966. It is now October 1968, I have just turned 12 and am in seventh grade in Catholic School. Sister Edith is my teacher, and (like a lot of the nuns before her), she has had her share of Dahlin boys (5 or 6 to be inexact, one right after another).  By this time in her long teaching vocation she was just plain tired of the plague that had infested Saint Marks some many moons ago beginning in the 1950's. Sister Edith will forever be notorious for her music lessons and will likely go down in infamy for her "head tones," for cracking rulers over hands of many-a-seventh grader, and for throwing erasers. She had a good arm and nailed me just about every time she hurled one of those chalk-filled bombs in my direction. She is probably in heaven right now playing catch with Jesus (However, I just hope she's not throwing erasers).

Anyway... I skipped reporting on last year - my sixth grade experience. If life wasn't already difficult enough, I mean, being shocked and shot, buried and shoved in the Hamper of Death, Milk Wars and pushing cars, left behind and knocked out, bitten by snakes, tormented and tossed like a salad in the trunk of Gustav's legendary Rat Killer...Sixth Grade was far worst than all of those things combined!

Besides starting the year off on the "wrong foot" with leprosy, and a stolen sweater that embarrassed the heck out of me...Du...Du...Du...I discovered my biggest NIGHTMARE!

Oh, I had barely made it out of Sister Godzilla's class by the skin of my teeth. I'm not joking when I say,  "I barely made it out." My only consolation was the fact that all of the Nuns at Saint Marks already had - like - eight Dahlins before I got there and were not, under any circumstance willing to subject themselves to that kind of pain ever again. Not one of them would ever consider holding anyone of us back for another year. Thanks to the shear number of Dahlins and the rather rambunctious nature of my brothers, who preceded me, I practically had FUNKING INSURANCE.  When I was promoted from fifth grade, it was Sister Godzilla's last year and she tried everything in her power to flunk me back into the fifth grade for another stint- since she was leaving. PAYBACK for the time we had electrocuted her (BLOG Post 4/26/13). Apparently, the Pope vetoed her, because the Catholic Church felt they couldn't afford to ruin a perfectly new teacher, recruited to be her replacement.

I made it!  Just like the Hamper of Death... just like the Templates... and just like Salton Sea, I made it out alive!

Having said all that, why couldn't they have moved me across the hall into the other sixth grade class? Why did they stick me in my mother's class? (The reason was obvious,, to spare the nun across the hall). Yep, my mom had begun teaching the sixth grade at Saint Marks and I mistakenly figured that this year would be like being on a holiday where I could just kick back and relax!  Nepotism had to have it's advantages, right?




I love my mom, but boy was I wrong!

Turns out that, I didn't have a clue!

My mom was funny and there wasn't room in our classroom for two class clowns and besides she could make an example out of me! 

In the future.. they are going to find out some things about little boys.  They are going to discover things like ADD and ADHD and learning styles and things like that.  In 1967 they didn't have those kinds of labels. I don't know if that was a good thing or bad thing. Without being defined or confined by a label I guess we really didn't have all the excuses we have today. But, the way I was wired...let me just put it this way...there was nothing in that classroom setting that was conducive to my particular learning style. We couldn't move enough, we couldn't touch enough, the desk chairs were too hard and too straight...there was too much order... I couldn't learn through my ears and the teachers talked too much. All of this to tell you that...I was special...and they just didn't know it or how to handle someone like me. Shucks, why stand when you can sit? Why sit when you can slough? Why slough when you can lay down? Why lay down when you can crawl around on the floor and grab the girl's ankles. 

Why obey when you can climb over the cloakroom wall and make everybody laugh and why study when you can cheat off Regina's paper.  (It was all pretty simple to me - I don't know why they didn't get it)

Sixth grade would be the hardest ten years I ever spent in school! I figured my mom  might just flunk me, since I was hers. I pictured it in my head - I would probably end up like Jethro Bodine (on The Beverly Hillbillies) as a 26-year-old in Junior High School (I guess by then, at least, I'd be as tall as Marilyn Jones and maybe even have hair on my lip by then like some of the other boys). Anyway, like The Beverly Hillbillies, I was a fish out of water. That very first week I learned that sixth grade in my mom's class would not be a "cake-walk" especially since I arrived on the first day with "leprosy."

I'm going to tell you about that story,  but it all begins a few years earlier about how the Dahlins managed to bring mosquitoes to California.

Yep, we are the one's...all right. And I'll tell you exactly how that came back to bite me (that's a pun)...let's say, it came back to bite me - like a bazillion times AND just two weeks before the first day of school. Everybody knows that sixth graders can be pretty cruel at times and should understand why I wished I have been committed to a Leper Colony Instead.

I would have gladly accepted the bell around my neck and publicly declared myself to be unclean rather than the ridicule of my friends.

...and it all began with my dad's frugal, hair-gel concoction of sugar-water... which I tell you about Next Tme...

...in the mean time, here is a picture of my hair that is as hard as a plastic, baseball helmet...that a gale force wind couldn't mess it up. That is where we get the derogatory expression... "Helmet Head."

Oh, and by the way, The Beatles just came out with a new song, "Hey Jude" sounds pretty cool to me and looks like it's probably going to be a pretty big hit.

Take a bad song and make it better...  Don't be afraid

And anytime you feel the pain, hey Markie D, refrain,
Don't carry the world upon your shoulders