You may remember me mentioning that I have had more near death experiences than anybody I have ever heard of. It is time to tell yet another of those stories. Because the thing is… there is that ‘thing’ again… I tend to almost die in some very interesting ways. If you haven’t read my story about the time I almost drowned off the coast of Northern California, I suggest you go up to that little magnifying glass search thingy at the top of the page and type in ‘What a way to go’… I think that is what the post is called. But it is a really funny story.

Here is another one.

When I was about 22 years old, I happened to find myself in Amsterdam. Maybe I will tell you story of my first trip to Europe someday, but it was a month-long journey through many countries, and was filled with passion and romance and danger and excesses… and this is a family friendly blog… more or less.

So here is the slightly cleaned up version of an evening in Amsterdam in 1982.

My younger brother, Sid, and I were staying at a youth hostel called ‘The Last Waterhole’. It was run by some guy from Texas. We ended up playing frisbee in the very narrow alley outside the hostel. A whole month in Europe with just one tiny backpack and I still managed to jam a frisbee in there. Frisbees were not popular in Europe, so we created something of a stir. People gathered to watch us. The alley was so narrow tha it took a fairly high level of skill to skim the frisbee as far as we were throwing it. One of the people in the crowd was an English hooker that I had befriended. Oh, don’t you roll your eyes at me. I have had a lot of friends who were hookers in my crazy life. I didn’t say I was a patron. Sid and I ended up spending a total of a week in Amsterdam which we used as our base of operations for our travels. We kept leaving and coming back for a day or two. So I made friends with a nice girl in an interesting line of work. I don’t judge people who make money doing what other people do for free.

So anyway, it turned out that this girl’s… ummmm… business manager didn’t like the fact that she was watching us throw the frisbee during peak working hours. So he came over to her and told her to get back to it. I guess she didn’t get back to it fast enough because he grabbed her arm and started swearing at her in Dutch. Well, being who I am, I had already picked up enough swear words in that language to be angered by this. But not as angry as I was about the way he grabbed her so forcefully. I have alway had a Don Quixote complex. And it has always gotten me into trouble. But I will not stand by and watch a bully at work.

I walked right up to him and told him to let go of her arm. He turned on me in more than a little surprise. You may recall that I am six feet four inches tall, weigh 200 pounds, and have size fifteen feet. He was a little shorter and a little lighter, but not too much of either. But I guess he decided that he didn’t want to risk getting into a brawl with me. So he glared at me and stuck a hand inside his leather coat. In very clear English he told me, “I have a gun.”

Let me try to explain what went through my mind. I had had guns pulled on me before. It is never fun. No matter what size of gun it is, you would swear that you could drive a truck right up the barrel. It is scary. But at this point I couldn’t help thinking that he had made a very large tactical error. If you are five or ten feet from a guy with a gun, you have very few options. You can’t charge without getting shot, and you can’t outrun a bullet. When you are right up next to a guy with a gun pointed at you, you are still in a pretty tricky situation. But this guy hadn’t taken the gun out yet. He told me about it first. And I was just inches from him. At this point I figured I could get my hands on the gun, or at least on his hands, before he finished pulling it out. And since I was a little bigger, I figured that I had at least a 50/50 chance of being the one who ended up with the gun.

So without letting any fear show in my eyes… another trick I learned in my wild youth… I calmly leaned right down into his face and said, “If you have a gun, this might be a really good time to take it out.”

Well let me tell you he was not expecting that. He suddenly seemed to realize what I had already figured out. That he had made a clear error in judgement giving away his ace in the hole before the game was over. He sort of hemmed and hawed a little. He might even have blushed. But his hand didn’t move, and that was all I cared about at that moment. We both became aware that we were the center of attention from a fairly large and rather international crowd of spectators. We both knew that he wasn’t going to shoot me in front of that many witnesses. He gave me one last tough guy glare, turned, and stalked off. The crowd actually started to cheer.

My little English friend was both pleased and worried. She insisted on buying me a few Heinekens while she warned me to watch out for the guy in the future. Which I can assure you that I did.

Then she took me out into the moonlit streets of Amsterdam and… uhhhh… showed me the sights.

I hope I didn’t mislead you by calling this a near death experience. I guess I could call it a ‘just one more time when my big mouth got me into a really dangerous situation but I somehow managed to get myself out of it mostly just by dumb luck’ story, but that is way too much typing.