Wednesday, February 28, 2007

A story that I believe should be told

Because I forgot to tell it earlier, and it was kind of funny, and I don't want to forget it. It happened like a month ago in a Paris subway, and I was dragging home a friend who was really drunk and throwing up. Needless to say, I was a little annoyed, and a little in that frame of mind where I'm saying "Hey, God! Check it out, I'm doing a Good Deed! There better be some good karma in this for me!" which of course makes it insignificant and not really a good deed at all.

So we're going through the subway, right... we have to go about 4 stops, but there's a transfer in between, so we come off one train and this guy has to throw up. We find a trash can, he does his thing. Then a French guy sees us and motions and somehow mimes that he can get us water. I think he said "l'eau." (of course I felt proud of myself for recognizing a French word.) So I don't know what to think, but he's pointing the same way we're going, so I just start walking that way, and he walks with us. My drunk friend is going "Hey Dan, should I trust this guy?" and I'm trying to play it cool, so I kinda don't answer, but eventually I just go "I dunno" and keep walking. Eventually we get to a little water faucet. My friend washes his face off, and the French guy looks very satisfied because HE did a Good Deed. I say "merci!" and we walk away. But he's following us.

Suddenly we turn a corner and I realize: - French guy's friend has joined us, and - nobody else is around at all. And we go to walk away, but French guy stops us and says something that, in my paranoid state of mind, sounded like "Hey hey... let me teach you some karate." And with that, he puts his leg between my friend's legs and goes to do the stage-combat flip. You know, where you kinda grab their arm and toss them over your hip. At this point, I pull him away and go "Non!" so he tries again, and goes "okay, okay, hey hey hey... karate!" as if this would convince me that it's a good idea ("oh, karate! well, go right ahead!"), and I yell repeatedly in progressively louder voices, "NON!" So he backs away and lets us go.

At this point, I was pretty convinced that we were just about to get mugged, and I had saved us both. In retrospect, that's, uh, probably not the case. If they wanted to mug us, they could have, well, mugged us. Either they were just jerking our chain a little bit (in which case they probably got a big kick out of the fact that I was so scared) or they were trying to teach me how to carry him or something (in which case they were probably a little miffed that I was so rude). At any rate, it makes for a good story. At least, I thought so.

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