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Author: Joshua SMITH
Format: online manual
Pages: 496

 

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True Story #14: Stolen hearing aids & an Italian lingerie party

For summer vacation 2004 I stepped off of the train in Barcelona and made my way to the backpackers hostel I would be staying at for the next four days. It was Spring break in Italy, and apparently Barcelona was the American spring break equivalent to Cancun, and hundreds of gorgeous twenty to twenty-five year old Italian university girls had descended upon Barcelona.

I was sharing a room with nine other travellers who were checking out the following day, and Sancho, a charmingly passive sixty-six year old Barcelonan who actually lived at the hostel. Three months prior a large thunder storm had uprooted a tree and it fell through the roof of his house. Having no family, living alone, and lacking the finances to repair it, he was forced to move out, and had been living in the hostel ever since while he looked for something else.

I threw my backpack onto the top bunk bed, stripped down to my boxer briefs, covered myself with a towel, and headed off to the showers, travel size shampoo bottle in hand when Sancho stopped me at the door.

“Hey,” he seemed paranoid and spoke in a hushed tone as he laid in his bed reading a book.

“Don’t leave your belongings laying there on your bed. There are thieves staying here.”

“Really?” I responded.

“Yeah! I have lost two hearing aides in the last week. Both times I went to the shower and left them on my bed, and when I returned they were gone.”

“Your hearing aides?” I repeated.

“Yeah. Luckily the people in our room are leaving tomorrow, but don’t trust anybody here. You keep an eye on my things, I’ll keep an eye on yours. Deal?”

“Deal.” I responded after shaking hands over our secret pact before getting up to continue on to the showers. “Thanks for the advice.”

The following day I entered the hostel lounge room to find three German men who were on vacation. It was only 4:00 in the afternoon, yet they were already on their ninth case of beer. A wall of nearly seventy empty beer cans and counting were accumulating at the end of the table. The receptionist had scolded them so many times during the last three days for getting drunk, making so much noise, and leaving such a mess, that they unanimously decided to make this woman’s life a living hell by spending their entire last day at the hostel in the lobby drinking from the moment she began working to when her shift ended. As we sat there a young German guy, their drinking partner, entered into the lounge with his backpack on to say goodbye to his fellow alcoholic friends before making his way to the train station to return home. He was sent off with a cold can of beer, hearty goodbye hugs, and a farewell song sung at top of their lungs in German.

Fifteen minutes later the front automatic doors slid open and he limped back into the hotel lobby with a black eye, a bloody nose, one shoe, and a severely ripped shirt in his hand. He had, in the middle of the afternoon, on the busiest pedestrian walkway in Barcelona, with over three hundred witnesses, been jumped by four guys, and had all of his belongings stolen as he was descending the steps into the metro station.

The drunken German guys, upon seeing their wounded comrade, began laughing so hysterically that the wall of beer cans toppled and fell with a violent crash, covering the entire floor, launching the receptionist into a fit of rage, which only provoked them further.
I made my way upstairs to find Sancho standing amid a room full of college girls, all unabashedly preoccupied with changing and re-changing clothes and applying make-up for an exciting night out on the town. Lacy red thongs with matching bras, skin suntanned to perfection, belly button rings and immaculately placed tattoos, the plethora of seductive perfumes filling the air - It was as if Sancho and I had back stage passes to the changing room at a Victoria’s Secret fashion runway modelling show. Sanchos’ pace maker, if it hadn't been stolen yet, was probably working at full capacity.

The girls invited both Sancho and I to join them, but it was approaching 9:30pm, and though his spirit was willing, his flesh was weak, and Sancho’s bed time was drawing nigh. I on the other hand, jumped at the opportunity.

A twenty minute walk, with periodic stops at local bars to catch their happy hour prices, and we arrived at an underground club at midnight. I had heard stories that Barcelona was infamous for thieves and pick-pockets, so I was keeping my drinking to a very moderate level in case something happened, and coupled with the German guy’s mugging experience in broad daylight earlier that day, and my going out with seven girls, suddenly my older brother instinct kicked in, and I felt more like a personal bodyguard.

Alas, it was 6:00 in the morning, and the club was closed. As we made the twenty minute walk back to the hostel, we decided that a nightcap of café and donuts would be the perfect way to finish the evening. Seeing a dimly glowing light that resembled that of a diner at the end of an alleyway, the eight of us filed down the passageway to find to our dismay that not only was the diner closed, but it was also a dead end street.

Disappointed, we turn around to find ourselves face to face with twelve violent looking men standing in a pack blocking our exit. The girls, slightly drunk, tired, and now terrified, began crying and backing into the corner. Armed with nothing more than two years of high school wrestling and four months of body bag practice in karate class, I stepped in-between the girls and the violent men, and before they had a chance to react, I went on the offensive. To my advantage, the street was narrow, so the twelve men could only approach three at a time, making the odds a little more manageable. Months of training, conditioning, and repetitiously perfecting lethal karate moves were spent preparing me for this moment – I was a Caucasian Bruce Lee. I was Steven Segal without the pony-tail. I was Jean Claude Van Dam without the signature “splits in underwear” scene. I was unsympathetically kicking ass and taking names.
The last three guys, seeing the damage I had done to the first nine, turned and fled. Moments later four police officers, having been alerted by a telephone call from a bystander two stories above us, arrived with weapons drawn. When they turned the corner they found me leaning against a trashcan out of breath, nine men lying unconscious in the alleyway, and a group of girls huddled in the corner. They lowered their weapons and began laughing, and then just turned around and continued on their route. One of the assailants had managed to land a well placed blow to my forehead, cutting it open with his ring, which left a scar right in between my eyes. Word of mouth spread quickly among the other travellers at the hostel, and by lunchtime the following day everyone had heard about my exploits.

I was a hero.
True Story.
 

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