So I was Probably a French Fugitive

I wake up and I am exhausted. The year is 2007 I’ve been living for almost a month in a luxury hotel in Paris France. Despite the setting, I feel like absolute death. I’m hungover, naked and there is a blonde next to me whose face I can’t see.

“ she’s blonde?”

“ I don’t Voluntarily go for blondes”

This is my fourth week in Paris and I’ve made myself at home but in a hotel. The apartment I was promised hasn’t materialized yet. My enthusiasm for the place and its women has dampened my normal intuitiveness about something being amiss.

Enthusiasm is a very nice broad word for alcohol, girls, and food.

I get up to go to the bathroom and do my normal routine when there is a woman in the room that I don’t want to stay with.

I’ll take the world's longest shower and hope to god she’s gone after about two or three checks out of the bathroom door. I was not as forward then as I am now, so bear with me.

An hour and a half go by, I peeked my head out the door and she’s gone. In her defense, I am sure she has been through this before. Her swag gave that away honestly.

I finish my shower and walk through the minefield of liquor bottles, kebab wrappers, and clothes.

Of course, she left her underwear. Whatever.

As if I needed a loud noise at this time, my hotel phone rings which is super weird because all weeks here in the hotel I wasn’t even sure it worked.

The voice on the phone sounded firm but sort of shifty. He wanted to get off the phone very fast.

“We have secured your plane ticket back to the United States”

I am baffled but asked again attributing my lack of understanding to his thick French accent.

I could only muster a confused and completely inadequate given the sentence before:

“What?”

He explains in painstakingly terrible English at the team can no longer pay me. Two very important things to take away from this:

This is going to be a theme for at least two more years

How can you not pay me anymore when you haven’t paid me, to begin with?

Payday was tomorrow.

Sensing my immediate sorrow and confusion he gives me a quiet but quick I’m sorry and hangs up before I can even say anything.

I call my agent who isn’t even awake yet and inform him of what’s going on. I’m pretty sure my sorrow turned into anger and it was completely misplaced in his voicemail.

So for roughly 5 hours the existential dread of “Is this the end of my career” hung over me.

Nothing a little booze and breakfast couldn't make go away at least for a second. After walking around Paris and the only area, I feel comfortable in, amongst the Turkish, I finally get a phone call on my burner.

Realistically, I have enough burner phones to make people think I’m either a drug dealer or a spy at this point. I’m at least a year away from making it big-time enough to have a BlackBerry

It’s roughly 1 o’clock, and I’m too drunk to be having this conversation so I let my agent do most of the talking. Somewhere between 11 AM and now, my French team begins the process of being sold. The first thing they did was get rid of all the Americans and the cost of their contracts.

By the time I got back to the Hotel, other Americans were carrying the luggage out.

One of which I would see a few years down the line playing in Portugal and the other one would never play basketball again but become an NBA assistant

After hanging up my slurred but exceptionally handled phone call with my agent I learned that he is working on getting me a new team and not letting me go back to the states which gave me some relief. That relief was short-lived as the exceptionally snooty concierge and front desk attendant let me know that I am due to check out tomorrow at 10 AM, much earlier than the “I’ll have an answer and a new team 1 o’clock French time” my agent assured me.

Hours pass and I stare at the ceiling wondering what was waiting for me back in the states.

Do I have to get a job?

Will I play basketball again?

This will be embarrassing as hell

Did I wear a condom last night?

OK, those last two were probably the loudest in my head. I was super confident in my agent and what he could do I feel like I was probably more confident in him than he expected me to be since we had only been together for a short amount of time.

He did not let me down around 11 PM to let me know a team was interested in me in Austria and after much haggling, I would get a guaranteed contract for at least the rest of the year.

I had a plane ticket waiting for me and all I had to do was print the ticket and get to the airport. Both of which would prove to be way harder than it should’ve been even for pre QR code and PayPal world

I was saved but not out of trouble because within five minutes of getting off the phone with my agent, I called down to the front desk of the hotel.

The same snooty front desk attendant, call him Mr. snooty, hands me a large piece of paper with a lot of French words on it. I didn’t get a chance to look at those words but put together very quickly that it was a bill for well over €5000

My French team was sold roughly 2 weeks before all of this came down despite still having practices. Thanks to the new team and French law, the new owners of said the team were no longer responsible for the bills incurred by the old owners of the French team

I stared at that paper for so long that French could’ve turned into English. However, the smartest thing I did was realize I’m in a foreign country it’s not panic. At least Outwardly.

I had the money but I wasn’t paying for this at all. No damn way

I smiled and nodded and then quietly walk away just as I was about to burst into tears.

I paced my room back-and-forth at almost a cartoonish clip.

I need an idea and I needed it fast. I want to say that I came up with a brilliant idea That was going to work.

Instead, I came up with the stupidest idea ever that I can’t believe I worked on. Instead of being Batman, I was Captain Jack sparrow.

The one thing that is always important in a foreign country is that you always have your hands on your Passport or wallet. Everything else is replaceable but if you need to get home at least you have both of those.

I immediately, for comfort, go looking for them to find my passport but for some reason, I could not find my wallet. I tore the room apart by the time I was done, it looked like Guns N’ Roses or another subpar 80s hair metal band stayed overnight

I sit down and retrace my steps back to when I had sex with “the blonde.” I go to the side of the bed and find a wallet that is not mine

It looks similar to mine but it’s not mine which means I have her wallet and she has my wallet the only difference is she has €20-€40 in it and I have my lone credit card a debit card that works overseas with about €150 in cash.

I am a fucking moron

Online banking was not a thing or at least a popular thing at the time. Essentially I would have to wait for a phone call saying:

“your account has been locked “

Not that that would matter because I have a burner phone with maybe €15 left on it Which would more than likely empty out in three minutes due to international calling rates

I’ll deal with that problem in a second but at least I have my damn passport and really silly stupid plan.

I knew two things:

It was going to work and I would make it to Austria in one piece

or it was going to fail miserably and I would be spending a few days, if not weeks, in a French prison

Either way, something tells me I’m never coming back to France again