I have started a new feature on my site, “Stories from the road”.  There have been several stupid, funny, sad, ridiculous, or just plain fucktarded things that have happened to, by, or near me while travelling around the US or internationally.  I just have to share, mostly because I want to, so shut and read.  First up:  Basel Switzerland, and the night I almost met my wife.

It was the year 2000, Halloween, I had just flown into Zurich Switzerland and taken the train over to Basel for a business trip.  At this point in my life I was an Oracle DBA and was working on a new system implementation contract in Basel for my company.  This was my first trip across the pond in quite some time and I had forgotten how terrible the jet-lag was (i.e., I was a gaping pussy and was tired).  I had two friends and colleagues working on the project and were already on-site, let’s call them R and T.  R and T met me at the train station and escorted me to the corporate apartments we were staying in.  Now these apartments were, what’s the word?  Oh yeah, fucking shitty.  In fact, we referred to them lovingly as the crack-house.  It was a five floor tenement with paper thin walls and the tiniest elevator in existence.  If you farted on the fifth floor, they could hear it on the first.  The elevator could fit 2 maybe 3 people tops, and most guys had to cram themselves in the corner so they wouldn’t touch anybody else who happened to be in the elevator.  At any rate, I arrived and my hole in the crack-house wasn’t going to be ready until the next day so I would have to stay in one of the currently occupied apartments for the night as one of the guys on the team was back in the states for a couple of weeks.

So all I wanted to do was sleep, again, the pussy thing.  And all my friends wanted to do was go out and rip it up.  My arm was appropriately bent, peer pressure is a bitch, and we went out.  I was nursing a couple of beers and feeling sorry for my tired-self when I had a moment of clarity around the fourth or fifth beer.  The more beer I drank, the better I felt.  Looking back, it was surprisingly (and scarily) close to the moment in Old School where Frank the Tank (Will Farrell) did his first beer bong at the party :

Once it hits your lips, its so good!!

Now it was on.  Five beers turned into 15 or 16 and then it was time for the shots.  Remember this was Halloween, and the weirdest thing was that it was more popular in Switzerland than in the states for adults.  All of the bars were decorated to the nines and a lot of people were dressed up in costumes.  I was dressed-up as a drunken American asshole, I almost won some costume contests.  The most memorable shot was the “devils blood”, I haven’t the foggiest fucking idea what it was except it was red, strong, on fire, burning hot, and you had to suck it through a straw that was poked through the flames.

So after destroying my liver and most of my brain-cells, we began to stumble back to the crack-house around 2 or 3 AM.  The crack-house was located in the Muslim slums of Basel known as the Gundeli (pronounced Goon-doo-lee) and the road to it was a cavernous cut through buildings that echoed for blocks.  I come to find out later, from other accounts, that we were heard for blocks carrying on and yelling walking down the middle of the road in our wonderful drunken bliss.  On the way into the building, T started to hit all of the apartment call buttons and yelling into the intercoms.  A super nice woman we’ll call S was working on the project as well and trying to sleep at this point in the crack-house. 

We finally stumble up to the fourth floor where I am trying to figure out how the weirdest key in existence worked when T asked me: “Hey, have you met S yet?  “Nope”, I replied.  R replied, “OK!” and turned to S’s room, which was directly across the hall from the room I was trying to get into, slammed on the door loudly, and yelled “HEY S, WAKE UP AND MEET BILLYMAC!”  And then R and T sprinted to the tiny elevator.  I was stunned, I didn’t know what the fuck to do, I still couldn’t figure out how to get into the room and I could hear what I could only imagine a very pissed off S coming toward the door.  So I ran.  I ran down the stairs as fast as I could, so fast in fact, that I beat the elevator down.  At this point, it is worth noting that in the year 2000, I was only around 1 or 2 years away from retiring from playing rugby, and I’m a pretty big guy.  When the elevator opened, I pounced like a coiled lion.  I dove into the elevator with my arms spread in front of me and gripped the outside shoulders of both T and R, and then slammed the both of them into the back of the little elevator.  I was trying to put them through the back of it, let’s face it I was pretty pissed, and very drunk (and the look of pure terror on their faces was priceless).  Well it turns out that this was too much for our tiny little elevator to take, and it made the most incredible screeching metal on metal sound and lurched completely off it’s track, waking up the entire building.  Thinking fast, we got the fuck out of there muttering “oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit” and booked out the front door.  My annoyance not completely sated, I slapped T on the back and said “thanks a fucking lot”.  This was too much for good ‘ole T to take as well, he went flying off of the front stoop of the crack-house and into the bushes severely twisting his ankle.

The aftermath.  The elevator was destroyed, it didn’t work for weeks, which pretty much fried everyone’s ass that lived in the crack-house.  We never got pinned with the crime, but karmic retribution was the saviour of the day as T and his sprained ankle had to hobble up 5 floors to his room every day.  I finally met the infamous S the next day at work while nursing a 5 alarm hang-over.  Her first words to me “So you’re the asshole who was pounding on my door last night”  (ok, so she may have not said asshole, please allow a bit of poetic license).  All’s well that end’s well though, 4 or 5 months later we were dating, moved in together in late 2001, got engaged in 2002, and then married in 2003.  Who’d have thunk it the night I almost met her.

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