wanker in the stairwell (you want to read this, trust me)

it/s saturday night. kate is in the middle of helping me with my biggest klepto feat yet: steal a mattress, bedframe, sheets & pillow from the bedroom of a friends/ apartment without him noticing. don/t frown at me for stealing. this was a challenge.

you see, lately whenever i get drunk, i end up stealing something from someone. it started out as mistakes. on st. patrick/s day i was simply too drunk & just walked out of the bar with a glass of beer, not really thinking about it & woke up the next morning with a glass in my purse. i end up with people/s lipstick & sunglasses and i mean i only have one group of friends so it usually gets returned to its owner but it started getting bigger.

it began with stuff around town. kate, sam & i stole flowers from the memorial by place gaillard because my apartment needed sprucing. we had joked about it for a while. people kept putting flowers there for two days, then taking them away & replacing them with new ones. giant displays of flowers that were still perfectly good when they got dumped. so we waited until the second night, went and did a little pre-dumpster diving, with our justification the fact that while whoever that memorial for is dead, i am very much alive and can actually use the flowers. my apartment was lovely for two whole weeks.

then came the cobblestones. callie & i decided that the not-quite-finished cobblestone street that was being redone in bourges needed some sprucing. bellingham-style. we wanted to take a few cobblestones, paint them bright colours with messages like "hug your mom" and "respect your elders" and "smile". rainbows & peace signs & the like. but of course we were drunk when we decided this, so instead we ended up scattering cobblestones around the city & waking up with a few still in our purse. how you can forget about a few cobblestones in your purse is beyond me, but hey, it was callie/s going away party & we were celebrating. let/s just leave it at that.

don/t worry, mom & dad. i am not stealing cars or robbing banks. it is harmless pranks that happen when twenty-somethings get drunk in foreign countries. or actually, i/m going to go ahead & go out on a limb & say when anyone gets drunk anywhere. but i/ve become a bit of a legend known for my ridiculous drunken feats. this, however, is not the point of the post. it is merely the preface. background info to help you understand where we/re at when the story starts.

and where we/re at is a challenge. a dare, if you will. a friend of mine, ruairi, is moving back to ireland this week, and has been trying to sell his bed for a few months now. apparently this proved impossible. no one responded to his ads. in the paper, in the city/s magazine, online. no one. so he challenged me to steal his bed. i gladly accepted and looked for the right moment to do my work.

the right moment was saturday night. ruairi had his going away party. first at our bar, les freres berthom (also the bar remy works at; well, will work at until the end of this week when he will be switching jobs to hopefully have a more normal life), then later at ruari/s. gethin had already helped me drag the mattress, sheets & pillow the km or two to my apartment, but the bedframe was still there and we were looking for an opportunity to slip out with it.

that opportunity came with the drunken decision to head to the only bar where we like to dance: l'apart. with everyone preparing to leave, kate & i had an out. gethin distracted ruairi, and we somehow managed to get the bedframe out the door & down the windy stairs to the cobblestone street below.

this is where our story really starts.

so by now it/s around 2am & we/re on the little street i live on, cracking up because we/ve dropped the bed frame for the millionth time, when this sketchy guy passes us on his bicycle & asks if we need a hand. we/ve already passed this guy once a while back & he was on foot. a little odd, but whatever. we politely decline, watch him round the corner, and bust out laughing once again.

we finally pull ourselves together & get the bed frame to the front door of my apartment & out of nowhere we see the sketchy guy once again emerge from the shadows (this time on foot) to ask if we need a hand. once again, i say no. we/re almost at my front door, but thanks. no biggie. but then i drop my jacket on the way in the door & he follows us in to give it back to me. i thank him and gesture for him to leave. he walks out the front door but it doesn/t close all the way. not really my biggest concern at the moment as we have a large bed frame wedged in a very small hallway and somehow have to wish our way up a winding stairwell, too.

half way up the stairs (rather tricky in the middle of the day with two grown men = quite the challenge with two drunk girls) kate starts whispering loudly for me to look down at the bottom of the stairs because the sketchy guy is back. i see him (sort of) through the bars of the stairwell (i/m above the bed frame, we/re wedged at the part in the stairs where it awkwardly bends, & kate is below the bed frame fairly near sketchy guy), yell down to him that we really don/t need a hand, but thanks anyway, and ask him to please leave. kate keeps making motions & sounds suggesting she/s freaked out & then says "umm, i think he/s giving himself a hand down there..." i laugh & tell her she/s a funny one. "no, chels," she urges. "seriously, look."

i look and to my complete disbelief this guy has his dick hanging out. oh but that/s not it. he is happily wanking, just you know, jacking off in a stairwell watching two drunk girls try to push a bed frame up the stairs.

"euh, qu'est-ce que tu fiches la?" (umm, what the fuck are you doing there?) i yell down at him.

totally nonchalantly he replies, "bah, je me branle..." (uh, i/m masterbating...) and then looks down at himself jerking off as if i am a blind idiot for not seeing clearly what he is doing.

"dégage! va-t-en! franchement, c'est dégueulasse, si tu dégages pas j'appelle les flics!" (get out! go away! seriously, that is fucking disgusting and if you don/t get out i/m calling the cops!)

he pauses, comes in his hand, looks up at both of us, shrugs, says "d'accord" and walks out the front door, slamming it behind him.

there was a moment of what-the-fuck in the stairwell for a while there. kate & i were rather disturbed. "what a wanker," kate said. "literally." we both laughed nervously, but it was a bit too too early for jokes of that sort. we awkwardly struggled our way up the rest of the stairs & got the bedframe into the living room. but the whole master bater debacle sort of undermined the great feat underway and made sitting on the finally-assembled couch a tad anticlimactic, so to speak.

i haven/t seen his face since, thank the sweet lord. he wasn/t hanging around the apartment after that, which i probably wouldn/t do either if i was him. and don/t you worry, if i do see him, i will be sure to remember him. and then i will find out where he lives & up the ante, making my next challenge to steal his hands. i won/t let him go around asking young innocent (or not-so-innocent) girls if they need a "coup de main" ever again...