I’ve almost been run over several times. Which seems kind of small compared to the other stuff in this thread, but I feel incredibly lucky each time I see a car zoom near me and realize what happened.
Another 70’s story…
I hung around a couple of stoners in my neighborhood. We were always together and nearly always high. One weekend in the spring I had to go with my parents and older brother to Ann Arbor Michigan so my brother could check out the school. We lived in Delaware (yep, it did exist back then) so it was a long weekend away. Turns out some of my friends went down to a state park along the Brandywine river that weekend and were doing bong hits while sitting on the roof of their car. Cop came by and made an easy arrest. I would have been there. Just pure luck that I wasn’t.
Went to college in Greensboro NC. Found more stoners there. One weekend my friend came by with some pharmaceuticals and we went to a festival at UNCG. Ran into some other friends of friends with a 1.75L bottle of awful tequila and washed down those pharms. My friend passed out on the athlectic fields after awhile. I left him laid out on the ground to find his car. On the way I ran into the tequila drinkers and we managed (quite easily, I recall) to get into a loud argument with a college security guard. I managed to get disengaged from that group just a few minutes before the guard called the real cops. That crew spent the night in jail while I went for the car. Another near miss. Finally found his car and drove across the soccer field and picked up my friend. Another guard on foot was racing towards us as I folded my friend into the passenger seat. We got out of there fast. Two steps late or one step early. I’ve been lucky.
Here’s two stories about living in Istanbul, Turkey.
Me and my friend, Zoran, who is from Serbia, set out one evening to find a nearby nightclub. Well, I guess they closed it down or something because we walked in circles looking for it. This guy walked up to us and in thickly accented English said, “You want man? You want woman?” He was a pimp! Horrified, we yelled, “No, we don’t want anything!” and ran away.
However, the night was not lost. Zoran had heard about a concert being held by a band named Baba Zula that he really liked. This time we were able to find the place and we rocked out for hours. There were bellydancers onstage and in the crowd, and the band was incredible. They didn’t even charge us for the show!
My other story is the famous ‘How I got tear-gassed during a riot in a Middle Eastern country’ story. I was walking down Istiklal Caddesi, which is this big famous street with lots of fabulous shops. Up ahead of me I could see a crowd of people yelling and jumping around, but not knowing what was up, I walked up into them. A lot of young people, possibly college students, were holding signs that said “Kommunist”. Then the police arrived, clad in riot gear. Before I knew it, they ran up to some guy, clubbed him, and started spraying us all with tear gas. Everyone stampeded. I fled and managed to avoid being either beaten or jailed. But my nose, my eyes, my lips, everything burned thanks to the gas. Not fun.
I didn’t entirely escape trouble, but it was a lot less than it could have been.
I had met someone at a coffee shop and we ended up talking for several hours. We decided to take a walk and ended up on a path going through a park. (A small park in the short north area of Columbus Ohio, it is 1 sqaure city block in size) What neither of us realized is that the park ‘closed’ after dark, even though there are no fences or gates or anything. So we ended up being picked up for trespassing. Thankfully we didn’t get hauled away or anything, just given a summons to court where we would plead and then pay a fine.
The potentially bad part is that just before this the law was changed to make it (if I recall correctly) a first degree misdemeanor with mandatory jail time under city law. Thankfully they commuted it to go under state law and it ended up only costing me about $100.
Despite my reclusive, nerdy youth I once very nearly killed my friend and on another occasion myself due to extreme stupidity on my part.
As a kid, I enjoyed gun games where we’d play gansters or robbers or cowboys etc., slinging toy guns that went off with a loud bang. Some of those guns (the coolest ones) were pretty realistic, all-metal construction and working trigger mechanisms. I had no experience with any real weapons. It was unfathomable to me anyone would even have a real gun of any sort in our well-off city neighborhood (this was back in the early 80’s, Northern Europe).
Once I visited a friend of mine, and while we were in his room chatting, I noticed a cool toy rifle on the wall, grabbed it and proceeded to point it at my friend’s head, saying something like: “you’re days are over, punk!” Just as I was about to pull the trigger, my friend turned my way with a horrified look on his face and screamed: “Don’t shoot!”
Turned out the “toy rifle” was in fact a cocked and loaded airgun. At point blank range, the pellet might’ve easily done some serious damage to my friend, even killed him (single airgun shots do kill people every once in a while). Now, what a ready-to-fire airgun was doing inside an eight-year old’s room unsupervised is a good question, but I very nearly ruined my friend’s and myself’s future by pure ignorance.
A couple years later I was collecting willow shoots for a school project when I noticed some extra-choice shoots inside a mesh-fence enclosure housing a power line junction (no idea what these are called in English). Disregarding the Lethal Danger! signs, I climbed over the fence to the shoots and cut them off, proud of my catch.
Just as I raised the bundle of willow to my shoulder, our teacher appeared on the other side of the fence, ghost-white and in obvious agony. I was still unaware of any real danger - just as long as I didn’t TOUCH anything, I should be safe, no? My teacher sputtered and writhed and told me in a shaky voice to get out of there by exactly the same route I came in, without any uneccessary movement. I did, and climbed over the fence with my willow shoots, unharmed. Only after did it dawn on me that I could’ve suffered a deadly jolt of electricity any moment inside the closure, with high-voltage apparratti buzzing all around me. I guess I qualify for this thread.
I’ve got quite a few stories, most of them of the “So I was on this slow boat going to Timbuktu…” genre.
I already posted it in a different forum, but its too perfect not to put here. The other night I made a short film about the time I thought it’d be a good plan to wander into the middle of a civil war: How a toy cat saved me from rebels.