What's the most surreal situation you've found yourself? Or what's the strangest conversation you've had? Or who's the biggest nutter you've met and why? Of course no names
I've got a great number. I once met a guy who had just walked out on his wife, and had around £6,000 to spend on the night out to end all nights out. He ran into me and my friend and ... that night is still slowly being pieced back together.
I'm sure there are more, but the one that just popped into my head was when I was a teenager and my sister's then-boyfriend attempted suicide by taking a large number of a wide variety of pills. I had to drive him to the emergency ward. He kept drifting in and out of consciousness on the way, and when he was awake he was talking like some kind of vigilante Marxist from Mars. I kind of wish I'd taped his monologue, but he was dying and I had to floor it. They pumped his stomach, kept him in intensive care for a couple of days, and released him in less than a week. He survived, but I never saw him again.
I have too many to recount. For starters, any conversation with my mother in law. She's even too weird to fictionalize though. A reader would say she was not believable. Many that I've encountered in court. A guy I know whose wife won't have sex with him, and didn't even on their honeymoon. A guy for whom working out is his top priority -- beyond his job, or any relationships.
I should save this for a short story ... I'm in my 20s, first time out of the country (not counting Mexico), I'm traveling by myself and have just arrived in Managua. I knew nothing about current events in the county, Somoza was living in his cement bunker at the time. I'd been traveling a couple months and was used to exploring cities, so I went out to find a sidewalk cafe. I found myself in the ruins of the downtown center. An earthquake had devastated the city a few years earlier and the center was not rebuilt. It was grey and windy and a large piece of corrugated tin flapped loose from the top of a tall wall that used to be a building, coming down like a leaf. No one was anywhere around. Through the cracks of a large wooden door I could see pots and pans where someone was living in the ruins. An old British guy comes by on a bike and tells me it's not safe, I shouldn't be here. I head down another street tying to get back to where the city is normal and I walk by a military compound (small, not that formal of a place). There's one of those half barrels made into a barbecue with books being burned to ashes in it and a single soldier standing next to it. I asked him where I might find a cafe (I think I stupidly asked where I could get a beer). To summarize the end of this story, he took my passport, kept asking for $3, holding up his rifle, saying he'd take me to jail and I just kept saying I didn't understand him, because at first I really didn't. He finally gave up, gave me back the passport and told me to leave. I realized he had been nervous because he wasn't supposed to harass Americans. Lucky me. My memory of downtown Managua, totally surreal.
No. My sister broke up with him. She'd met him because he was an employee of my dad's company, and he quit the company after my sister dumped him. All this happened within about a week of him getting out of hospital. My guess is that it wasn't a good couple of weeks for him.
Ginger's story reminds me of something that happened me in my 20s. Early 90s I went to Latvia to see an Ireland soccer game. Thay had just got their independence from the old Soviet Union, which we knew nothing about. We were on the juice the whole day of the match. After full time about 3,000 Irish fans headed back into town, taking over just about every bar there was. Riga was very poor and welcomed us, well our wallets, with open arms and ringing tills. A few us decided to find a particular sky scraper hotel we'd heard about with a rooftop bar which was very exclusive. We shared straight vodka till near midnight with a friendly barman who stayed open after hours untill we could no longer stand. On our way back to our own hotel we decided on a nightcap in a cellar bar. Lo and behold, the whole Irish team were in there partying so we stayed. Earlier at the match I had swapped my Irish Tricolour with a local for his new found freedom Latvian flag. All purple with a white horizontal band across the centre and I had it signed by the Ireland squad. Fantastic! About 6am we left the cellarbar and were met on the street by the Russian army, leaving in a convoy of open-back military trucks and tanks - a real sight to behold. We were there, a massive part of Euro/Soviet history and too drunk to take in. As the soldiers passed I waved the flag above my head not even aware they were Russian, thinking they were Latvian. A whistle blew. Horns honked. The convoy jammed on. The full compliment from one open-back truck jumped down, armed with rifles and pinned me to the railings of the public park. One took my flag which upset me a lot and took a lighter to it, burning it in front of me. Another urged me onto the truck with the barrel of his gun. I shit! I stood alone, back to the gate, surrounded. Nearly cried. My friends were on up a bit looking for a taxi. They heard my screams and came back. David calmed everybody down and gave the leader all that was in his pocket. Whistles blew again and shouts were heard in Russian and the soldiers got back on the truck. I remember waking in the hotel. That day I learnt the definition of 'surreal' and to this day know I was blessed that night. True story!
I can't even use some of mine in my writing because they stretch the readers willingness to believe way past the breaking point, so why bother. I use them as a base factor for the "Whoa" effect when writing other, less intense scenes.
Well, how about the guy who abused his wife for years, and had his lawyer drag out the process and keep it from going through after she filed for divorce. A few months after she fled the state with her kids and all the possessions she could pack in her car, he burned down the house they had lived in. Then burned what was still standing down to the ground a couple weeks later. He served one night in jail for that. He frequently stole the younger child's ADHD medicine to get high. A few years later, he was parked on the shoulder of a back road, drunk, naked, and pleasuring himself. A female police officer showed up, and began to write him up. When he asked her to help him "finish" first, she arrested him. These are only a few things. There was much, much more.
I was on a couples date, heading to Galveston for fun at the beach. My girlfriend and I were in the backseat and the girlfriend of my girlfriend was driving -- on cruise control -- with her legs crossed in the seat -- eighty to ninety miles an hour! I was freaking, of course, but trying to play it cool. I didn't want to be a woos, you understand, because it didn't seem to bother anyone else, but, honestly, I was vise gripping the Naugahyde and holding on for dear life. She was weaving through cars, switching lanes two and three at a time, honking her horn like she was the only sane one on the highway. And then a full on, six lane traffic jam suddenly appears. She throws both bare feet to the brake pedal, the back-end of the car is fish-tailing, and it's still not enough until she shifts the car into Park while her boyfriend pulls up on the emergency brake. Somehow we stopped. I jumped out, walked over to the driver's door and told her to get her blank blank in the back -- her driving privileges were over.
10pm, 2010, Oktoberfest, Munich. I'm standing at the front door to the hauptbahnhoff (spelling?) waiting for a train out o' there and an african fella comes up to me. "Can you spare a cigarette," he said in german. "Sorry, nein deutch," I answered "Can you spare a cigarette?" "No ablo, Engleis, senior." "Do you have a cigarette," in spanish (I assume). "No ablo Espaniol -- errr, snakker du norsk?" "You are Norwegian? how come you don't speak english?" "How many language do you speak?" I said. "Nine... [insert list]" "For that, you may have a cigarette." "Thanks, here, have a beer." He produced from a plastic bag an, although warm, unopened 500ml beer, gave it to me. We spoke for about 20 minutes mostly about Australia and South Africa, until he said, "How long until the train?" "About two hours." "Want to go to a strip club?" I shrugged. Why not, seems logical. "Ahhhh, I don't have any money. Can you pay for me to get into the strip club?" "How much?" "15 euro," the morbidly obese doorman said. I pretended to answer my phone. I was pretty drunk, but I'll still never forget the man's face as he pointed at the phone, I looked at it, it was switched off. I sprinted out of the entrance hall of the club. Ran and ran until finally a cop pulled me up, I told him I had a train to catch and he asked me to walk... The end.
