French Horror Story: Hotel new season begins

THE DAHLIN EFFECT part deux    

                      THE PARIS NIGHTMARE

We apologize for interrupting the life of 14-year-old Markie D to bring you this True life adventure of Epic proportion (part 2.. continued from last time ).

So just after the car-crash I made peace in the village by dancing with the crazy guy.

 Crazy Guy 

I had to show them the moves of the dancing Azungu (the white guy) from Venice. 

Sometimes - I think-  you think - I make this stuff up.. BUT IT'S TRUE!

and I played music with the kids

and so "The Dahlin Effect" is not just one of trouble that follows us around from VENICE around the world like this terrible car crash shown above - BUT it is also the ability to take a bad situation and to turn it into a party - just add Markie D and music... 

In the words of Steve Miller... "Come on and Dance"  Just like King David did before the Lord. 

However, this "Terrible, Wonderful, No Good, Rotten, Horrible" first night in Paris was indeed one of the worst nights in the rich, adventurous life of Markie D. This night proved to be even worst than the time we were kidnapped in Puerto Vallarta...                                                                                                               Kerry (pictured to right - 1981 just before being kidnapped) along with Kris, Theresa, Jane, Mary and me... Let me just say this - "Don't hitch hike in Mexico."   

Regarding Paris... remember this - all of those ads you see on the internet... not all of the options on those hotel websites turn out as promised... "all that glitters is not gold"

We needed a last minute reservation because of the "Chunnel" issues (the English Channel Tunnel) taking place at the time in regards to the immigration crisis.  

I had flown into Heathrow (London) from Malawi through Johannesburg South Africa and met Kerry there.  Knowing there might be delays in the Chunnel we booked a flight to Paris a day early. 

      

On the internet - the pictures of the hotel of the rooms and the price looked really good... 50% OFF... I WIN!  Taking the taxi from the airport, we arrived after 11:00 at night to something that looked more like this... only darker and that smelled of smoke because of the scary dudes in the lobby.  

Anyway, I promised you a story that involved the French police and the American Embassy.

Upon arriving, the taxi-driver who earlier said he could take our debit card (that had been set up with a chip specifically for international travel with France on the itinerary)...NOW said we owed him Euros.  We only had our debit card and American Money and $2000 in Kwacha (Malawi money worth about $4.00 American). 

He tried to use our card and it didn't work for some reason.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         DILEMMA - how do we get out of this jam?  Kerry goes into the hotel looking for someone who can speak English - the nice receptionist comes out to our rescue and says he'll pay the taxi bill from his till as long as we book the room and can add it to our hotel charges.                                                                                                                                  Very grateful... we have no option, but to accept his generous offer.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            YEAH - Jubilation I felt like I was back on the top of Mount Soché

I was with my bride of 33 years and now everything was fine and good in the world.  

Then - UGHHHHHHH... we get inside and my card didn't work - I just fixed this with Wells Fargo while at Heathrow Airport in London. 

There shouldn't be a problem... nothing can go wrong... go wrong... go wrong... unless of course it does! 

He swiped my card 4 times... my phone is running low on battery - because of all the flight changes and online hotel reservations... etc ...etc. 

I don't have enough battery power left to call Wells Fargo and scream at them. SO we dig through our luggage, find our Europe-power-adapters and converters and plug into an outlet twenty-some feet away from the front desk where Kerry stands with the "very nice receptionist" (you should see the sarcasm dripping off my face as I type those words).

 Let me put it this way -  he seemed nice at the time. 

With my face near the carpeted stairs tethered to my USB adapter I begin in a very nice and calm (I try) conversation with Wells Fargo Fraud Department.  I need them to activate my card in France... They assure me that France was on my travel itinerary all the time and that the card works...

I haven't slept in about 60 hours and I am trying not to scream at the supervisor at Well Fargo... "I'm here in a hotel. I'm watching the guy swipe my card and it's not working. MAKE IT WORK NOW!"

"Sir, your card works"

"SIR, I beg to differ, my card is not working."

Hotel guy tries my wife card...4 X's    FOUR TIMES... it doesn't work. Now past midnight - 61, 62 hours of no sleep. Sleep is all I want to do right now.  I tell The Wells Fargo guy that I'm not letting him off the phone until I get this resolved. "Midnight in Paris"

30 minutes into this... bent over.. necked craned...tired....He tells me that my card is working... I ask, "How long does it take until you see something on his computer screen when a customer swipes a debit card?"

"10 seconds" he replies. "If someone swipes your card it will show up here on my screen in 10 seconds."

"Then why isn't it showing up" I protested... as the "nice receptionist" swipes my card again. 

Nothing. 

I make a deal with the receptionist fellow.  I pull my hidden travel passport and money holder out from under my shirt.  I pull out American cash and tell him I will overpay in American money that he can hold my money until morning as a security deposit and then I will go to ATM and get Euros and pay him and he can give my money back.  

We strike a deal. My over-payment includes the money for the taxi. He looks up the exchange rate and tells me how much American money I need to give him to hold until we clear every thing up in the morning.

By this point I really don't care about the dark-eyed thugs who see me pull out my wad of cash. I pay what he wants, and tuck the passport-holder back under my shirt - knowing the I just showed all of this to the sinister looking dudes smoking in the corner and eating Pizza at midnight.  Even in my deliriously, drowsy-state I felt like this was a mistake in my gut. But, oh well, we're in Paris - the city of romance - what could happen?  

We get off on the third floor - a dark corridor - and after 63 hours... after 1:00 am, we finally crash! 

Oh, did I forget to tell you that even in my sleep-depraved state I asked the guy to type up a letter saying that I overpaid him in American cash to be held on deposit for the room. Oh and did I say that I made him make a copy and made both of us sign - Both Copies...this just isn't like me - BUT I DID!  

Weird! Right?   (Upon retelling this story I had people shocked in disbelief say, "That was the Holy Spirit" 

About an hour and a half later our phone began ringing... ANNOYING! I rose from the bed like a Zombie and answered the phone... EXCEPT no one was there - ONLY static... 

3 X's THREE TIMES.. this happened.. static every time.... on the forth time, I leave the phone off the hook... I NEEDED SLEEP - WE BOTH NEEDED SLEEP! 

Then our door handle began to shake... I'm practically dead... Kerry elbows me... 

I jump up in my chonies.... adrenaline pumping... with all the superpowers I had when I was a kid having to fight off  the hordes of hippies of ill-intent... and grab the handle and am fighting against someone who is trying to push the door open... 

Do I need to rehearse everything that is going through my brain?

1) A hotel that is not in the best part of town - (don't judge me - couldn't tell from the picture).

2) A dark - unlit corridor

3) Turkish mafia - men with dark circles under their eyes  - smoking in the lobby

4) A card that "Doesn't" work - so said the "nice" receptionist. 

5) A card that Wells Fargo assured me "worked" and the tracking software to tell within 10 seconds whether it's been swiped...or not.  

6) I had flashed wads of American money to everyone in the lobby. 

7) Kerry had told him our sad story of how we were supposed to be in England... (let me draw this one out for you ... NO ONE knows were in FRANCE!)

8) A phone that rings and there is only static...one the other end... (let me draw this one out - it reminded me of the horror flick "When a Stranger Calls" 

LET ME PUT IT THIS WAY - I was not dancing... and this had to be "The Dahlin EFFECT"  

Oh and did I tell you... NUMBER NINE ... ("neuf" in French) THERE WAS NO SECURITY LATCH ON THE DOOR!   

The receptionist (and who-ever-else) had our key in the door and was trying to get into our room at 3:53 in the morning. 

ADRENALINE - as a matter of fact, it is pumping now through my veins as I write this story...

Someone was going to die and it wasn't me... I actually felt sorry for who-ever-it-was that was trying to break into our room...  I could visualize my picture on the front of some French newspaper with blood all over my hands standing over three dead bodies...

As I fought to keep this guy (who was pushing on our door to get in) - I told my frightened wife, Kerry to find me some weapon I could fight this guy or these guys off with... she found a small stool that I was now holding in a death grip as I screamed at the guy telling him I would not let him in... and that he had better be prepared to die for what-ever-it-was that was so important that he had to get in at 4:00 am in the morning...  I have to admit - I WAS FREAKED... as I fought to keep the door closed with my hand tightly wrapped around the tiny round-lock-lever-thingy he turning the other direction with the key in order to get into the room.

HELLO.... We're in France - and couldn't even call the police if we had the number... I don't know their 911 and don't the country code... 

My ribs hurt... I'm breathing to hard... I need to stop - seriously... Until next time. 

The only thing that was wonderful about this"Terrible, Wonderful, No Good, Rotten, Horrible" first night in Paris was that I got to meet my wife after being out in the bush in Africa after three weeks... WHERE - I happened to feel perfectly safe in the Warm Heart of Africa... 

Meanwhile, I feel like the babysitter with the stranger in the house... 

Oh, by the Way - did I tell you this is TRUE...   

Picture credits... me; Poster Wikipedia; Pycho Wikipedia; Hotel Balladins - Booking.com

      

  

  

Venice verses the Dahlins: How we changed the World.

To clean streets with those humongous street cleaning machines was no new thing in the late 60's.

ONLY after the Fraternity House Burned down at the corner of Harding and Grandview it meant that the Dahlins had free access to urban sprawl - or worst yet - urban blight!

I'm sure that, whoever burned down the Fraternity had no idea at the time that we would completely take over that corner of the world and fill it with all of the broken down Dahlin vehicles. The arsonist may have thought they were getting rid of the late-night fracas of partying hippies only to face the horrors of reality that "nature abhors a vacuum" and the empty space became a Dahlin parking lot.

 Cars. Trailers. Boats. Trucks.

Truck is a polite word. In fact, our trucks had become trash barges...sarcophagi for the dead remnants of cannibalize automobiles that had been hastened into an early death by the tribe of White Swedes with Gold hair...

I think you get the idea! 

The Venice Police Department did all they could to help our neighbors who had called the cops on us for abandoning cars in front of their houses and across the street from us. They instituted new laws about moving cars every three days. The parking enforcement officers came by in their nifty three-wheeled-Harleys and began the game of  "Chalk the Tires" but we were too clever!

The game began with the officer drawing a chalk mark on the sidewall of the tire to see if the vehicle had been moved within the three day - maximum time allowed by the new "anti-Dahlin-law."

The Dahlins, however, thwarted the plans of "Big Brother" by taking a sponge dipped in water and washing off the chalk-marks.  I'm sure this made Mr. Blaser and the rest of our neighbors upset.  

                                The line of cars and the trash heaps continued to grow (it was almost like a fungus).

The police department had to institute new policies where they had hoped to trick us and keep us unaware of their sneaky plans to control the spread of Dahlin suburban blight by marking the lowest part of the exposed tread of tire to conceal the fact that they had been down Harding and Grandview Avenues.

This cost us a couple tickets, but we were on to their clever tricks!  "The game's afoot" as Sherlock Holmes would say.



This new part of the game was a bit more irksome, as it required more effort by having to roll the vehicle back a foot or two to conceal the chalk mark that was sneakily drawn on the tread of the tire. WE WON.

Sometimes we had to fix a flat or solicit the help of a hundred hippies to push the barges full of junk - even if it was just a couple feet.  But, we were on to the "MAN!"








Then came a new improved strategy on behalf of the city.      
           Venice verses the Dahlins.
Secret meetings were being held and it was decided that at tax payers expense the city would put up "Street Cleaning" signs for the purposes of making the Dahlin boys move their broken down fleet of cars twice a week  (I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist - BUT I wouldn't be surprised if my dad had something to do with this new parking enforcement). He was as tired of all the #@*&# cars as much as Don Blaser and everyone else in the neighborhood.

Up went the new signs that opened a new "theater of operations!"  IT WAS WAR.

John Gillemot and his friends over on Garfield got so upset over the whole thing that they decided to take the law into their own hands and mowed down all the signs along Garfield ave with an old Chevy truck! Though they destroyed the truck, the crazies over on Garfield felt it was a moral victory. Any day that I wasn't used as a throw toy or punching bag and didn't show up for school at Saint Mark's - all Black and Blue was considered a moral victory!

My dad, on the other hand, tried to wear us down by the great Dahlin spectacle put on for all the neighbors to watch in the Wednesday-and-Thursday-Street-Cleaning-Rituals that involved in moving all the Dahlin cars from one side of the street to the other.

The boys hated when my dad, the Staff Sargent, thumped on the walls at 7:00 am in the morning and began shouting his infamous phrases like "Up and at 'em"  "Time of the harvest moon"  "Party all night- sleep all day" and then rattling off  the command to "go" like a machine gun which was received with just about as much enthusiasm as walking into machine gun fire from a sniper. "Let's go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go!" "Up and at 'em...it's time of the harvest moon. Let's go girly-men. Get the hair out of your eyes and let's go move some cars."  To the older boy, this was a true American Horror Story which the neighbors came out and watched every week as if was the Ringling Brothers circus -itself!

I said "some cars" - that was an understatement - it was more like 'let's go and move the 73,000 broken down cars' - some with flat ties - some with no wheels at all - AND... those TRUCKS FULL of TRASH.

And so the party began!

And because of us...there is street-cleaning, parking-enforcement across this great fruited plain! Okay, so maybe we didn't change the World - but our impact was being felt!

Just another day in paradise for the Dahlins on in  Harding Ave!  

  

The Beatles The Blacklist and Breaking Bad

(Continued from previous post)



No... I'm not trying to bow to the altar of current trends, but only to show how the genesis of these future trends began some 45 years ago right on my short street, known as Harding Avenue in Venice California just at the time the "bromance" known as the Fab Four (i.e. the Bealtes) was in the early stages of breaking up.

Ringo was ticked that he wasn't given as much credit as he felt he deserved and was forced to take a back seat to Paul and John on the album covers.  John was having a love crisis of his own and had divorced Cynthia and married Yoko Ono earlier this year... and was still trying to figure it all out, which only served to erode the cohesiveness of the small tribe of the famous Four from Britain.

The guy who wrote the songs and sang about love seemed to not to know anything more about love as I did...a 13 year-old who had absolutely no clue. As I mentioned before; though, I was part of a large tribe, I was partially numb inside.. running off of the fixes of adrenaline that knew nothing of true affection.

Today was the day I had hoped to make progress in the discovery of what it meant to feel love. Seems like every day on KRLA I heard that song... "Love is all you need"  and the Beatles told me it was easy... but I think John is lying and I figured that it might be harder than it looks - obviously he was clueless.  

"Love... Love... Love...  It's easy" yeah right!

Returning from detention, I walked down Harding feeling like I had failed in my vain attempt to make my own affections known at the water-faucet incident at the girl's corner of the schoolyard at Saint Mark's Catholic grammar school. I rounded the corner by the burned down "Fraternity" house after screaming at Sister Schultz (a conversation that was all in my head) feeling a bit redeemed and withdrawing into the safe place of  my mental illness that my Viking Brothers had convinced me was retardation. If it was, it was okay, because in there, I was happy.

Whistling "All you need is love" I was headed anywhere, except home.  I was in no mood for a "template" (click here) Chewbacca and the Template of Doom , no mood for electrocution nor was I in any mood for some of my older brother's crazy antics and diabolical forms of sibling torture. I needed the break after being laughed at by all the girls in the eight grade class having to spend a hours worth of prison time. Looking to find Tommy or Jeffery or Ricky or Denny I forgot that being detained for the horrible hour - meant that Ulrich and his Angry-Small-Man-Crew, known as the "H" club, had already made it home from Saint Monica's High School and were hidden behind Frank Nargie's huge, green Mopar secretly siphoning gas. Either my presence shocked them or embarrassed them or startled them or just plain made them feel guilty or something... and seeing that I was already on "The Blacklist"  of the "H" club - they had no hesitation in ambushing me from where the three of them laid in wait behind Frank's car.

Ulrich and I had an arraignment about his paper route.  I was forced to delivered the newspapers, and he got all the money. He was pissed off that I was late today and he and his three cronies had to do the route all by themselves and vowed that I would have to pay with my life (poor Ulrich had to do his own paper route today - somebody call the WAHmbulance).

The torture that I normally received from my other brothers was significantly different. Usually, it was experimental and I was used as a lab-rat before they employed it on the nuns at Saint Mark's or on friends (just to make sure none of them got killed). It wasn't a bad arraignment, I kind of enjoyed it in a sick way - but with Ulrich, it was conjured up from somewhere dark. His bullying always turned into a bloody street fight where I was outnumbered at least 3 to 1. It was Breaking Bad and today was no different.

Before I surprised them, I was  getting to the part in the song where it says... "She loves you... yeah, yeah, yeah" lost in fond thoughts of my true love Andrea and BAM... out of nowhere I was tackled and thrown to the ground by the three angry midgets. I put up a good fight... got "monkey boy" in a head-lock chock-hold and managed to sock O' Casper Milk-Toast in the mouth when Ulrich stepped on my diminutive Adam's apple. Gasping for air, I begged for mercy and pleaded with him to get his foot off of my wind pipe... to which he snarled and retorted in disgust, "Oh it's always about you!" and kicked me until I let go of Monkey-Boy, to which I acquiesced.

Sure, I had some cuts and bruises... but had learned  how to tune out the physical pain and limped home - fearing like I was going down  the rabbit hole...It was as if I was sliding down a slippery slope that was like the story of Pinocchio in reverse where I was becoming less and less human...and needed love to save me. I was afraid that the more I withdrew into my own little world... and the more emotionally numb I became - the sooner I would stop being human and the more I would become a Zombie or Robot or a lifeless shell - incapable of ever knowing what love is.  




I avoided the Veloci-Rooster, stealthily managed to avoid the herb-smoking hippies and quietly navigated my way up the stairs to my room without further detection.


In silence, I cuddled with my beagle and prayed to the universe - begging for mercy that I would not become a monster.  The dog kept silent and stared into my eyes and let me know I was not alone in a big house filled with lots of unfeeling and uncaring bodies.