Vignettes #10

My pal Walter is one of those friends who has provided me with an abundance of stories just from the experiences I made with him. This is one of them.

In the early 90s Walter was one of my partners founding a cinema of our own. In the beginning we all had to work additional jobs, since business was only slowly getting started. Since Walter had a night job as projectionist at a different theater, and I had a day job working as an auxiliary teacher I did most of the projectioning work at our place. But twice a week I had my evening off. Those were to be Walter's evenings.

And quite often he excused himself, so that I had to do his evenings as well. One day I got a call from one of our friends telling me Walter had an accident and couldn't work that evening and probably for the next evenings as well. He told me had broken his arm while "Fensterln"! That's the Bavarian word for secretly trying to get into a girl's room with a ladder without the parents noticing!

I thought I had heard it all concerning wild excuses, and at first I did not believe it. I also demanded to hear the story from him personally. So he did call me.

He didn't tell me the full story, though, because I got to read it in the local newspapers the next day: He was drinking at one of our favourite pubs, where a girl worked as waitress, known by many as the 'nymphomaniac'. She was always a bit too homey with guys so she did make that impression.

Obviously Walter had a few pints too many and kind of believed she was inviting him over for after the pub's closing. Her apartment was right above the pub. Of course, after closing the pub she had no intentions to spend any more time with him, said her goodbyes and left to go upstairs.

But that didn't bother Walter. Next to the pub there was a construction site, and he found a ladder there. Unfortunately, it was way too short to reach her bedroom window. Luckily he found a solution: he also found a brandnew spare door that was to be installed the next day. So he took the door, climbed up the ladder with it, prolonged the ladder by placing the door on top and went on climbing further on up. You can imagine the result.

Besides breaking his arm his head had to be stitched and he had to pay for a new house door.