Locked Out Naked

Paris in the canicule.  The famous heatwave that strikes in the month of August and causes the French to flee to the mountains and the seaside.

I however was in Paris and furthermore I was dressed appropriately for the canicule.  That is to say I was not dressed at all.  In fact I had nothing on.  Not to put too fine a point on it I was standing there completely in the all together.

Nothing wrong with that you might think – and there would have been no problem if I had been in my room in bed which is where I should perhaps have been.  I was not however. I was standing in a hotel lift in my birthday suit and the doors were about to open.

I looked down t my nude body.  It was the sight which was about to greet the waiting guests when the doors opened!  A sight which although it may have been pleasing to the eye, at least of any ladies present, was liable to cause somewhat of a sensation. I must be dreaming I thought.  That’s what happens in dreams. You get caught in public with no clothes on and everybody looking at you.  It doesn’t happen in real life – does it?  Yes it does!  I really was there, standing in a hotel lift, dying of embarrassment waiting for the doors to open.  They started to open.

“My God!” I thought “I’m not dreaming.  I really am standing here.  I really am completely in the nude”

I tried to formulate an explanation of how I came to be standing in a lift showing my embarrassment and my naked form for everyone to see.  The explanation however was complex…

It had all started earlier that evening when I had been invited out to dinner with some French colleagues.  It is the profound belief of all French people that English visitors want to spend a long evening sampling their delicious cuisine.  It is however the undying wish of most English people to avoid at all costs the strange offerings of offal that seem to characterise modern French cooking.  I had not particularly wished to join them.  Small talk with French people was not my idea of a good night out, and anyway my preference for an evening meal verged more towards Big Mac and Fries rather than duck’s gizzards and unmentionable parts of a bull.  However it would have been rude to refuse.

I was somewhat worn out after a long day’s work and I lay down on the bed to rest before dinner, and before I knew it I had fallen asleep and woken up with a start.  Five to eight!  I had only five minutes to get ready before dashing out.  I quickly flung my clothes on and dashed out.  I was staying in a large rambling hotel in St Germain de Pré and it was a long walk down to reception – along the corridor, down a flight of stairs, back along another corridor, into the lift, down four floors, out into the foyer and across to reception.  Fighting my way through one of those groups of giggling oriental schoolgirls (dressed strangely in what looked like an English public school uniform), that infest Paris in the summer, I only just arrived in time.

Dinner dragged on eternally.  Bottles of wine came and went.  Plates of cheese appeared and vanished.  Aperitifs and digestifs were quaffed with alacrity until at midnight I eventually found my way back to the hotel somewhat worse for the quantity of alcohol I had been unable to avoid imbibing.  I walked across the foyer to the lift, went up four floors, along the corridor, up the flight of stairs, along another corridor and got to my room.  I searched for my room key card.  I hadn’t got it.  I realised that in my hurry I had left it in the room.  So back I went all the way to reception; along the corridor, down a flight of stairs, along another corridor, down four floors in the lift and across the foyer.  The Night Porter greeted me.  On my announcing that I had locked myself out of my room he let out an audible sigh.  I had expected him just to give me another key, but no.  He had to go through a great rigmarole of asking my name and the room number and confirming that I was genuinely the person who was staying in the room by asking for identification.  Then he had to get the master key and accompany me all the way (foyer, lift, corridor, stairs, corridor) to the room in order to open the door.  He wasn’t too happy, especially when he discovered that the room wasn’t locked at all as I had neglected to take it off the latch
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When I got into the room it was stiflingly hot.  Being on the top floor under the Mansarde roof it had received the full heat of the sun through the day.  I crawled into bed exhausted and because of the heat there was no way I was going to wear pyjamas.  At half past six I woke up lathered in perspiration and as a result of all the alcohol dying for a pee.

The cheap attic floor rooms the hotel provided for employees of skinflint companies like mine did not have en-suite facilities.  The four rooms on the corridor shared a bathroom at the end of the corridor.  I thought I would just nip along the corridor in the altogether.  After all there'd be nobody about that time of night and I don't know, and I have to admit this, it seemed a little bit daring, a little bit of an adventure.  I stepped out into the dark corridor.  Bloody French hotels never left the lights on at night and just had them activated by a sensor at the end of the corridor.  The lights came on and I let the door close behind me.  Why did I let the door close when I was stark naked and hadn't got a key.  I'd like to say it was an accident, but in reality I was still being a little bit daring.  Only a little bit because I knew that I could get back in, because as the porter had shown me, the door did not automatically lock..  But it did..  I turned the handle and it wouldn’t turn.

Bloody hell!

Bloody, bloody, bloody hell!

The bloody man must have put it to lock when he opened the door!  Then the full  horror of the situation dawned on me.  It was everybody’s nightmare – locked out of a hotel room in a state of undress and a panic - what the French would call “déshabillé”.  But I was more than just in a state of undress, I had been sleeping in the nude.  I was stuck out in the corridor stark naked, with nothing to cover my embarrassment.  I mean this is the sort of thing you see in films not in real life.  But this was real life!

Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks! – I thought, perhaps inspired by the sight of them dangling in the open air.

Imagine my predicament.  Or indeed imagine my bollocks dangling in the open air if you prefer.

I mean what on earth do you do in this situation (apart from panic)?  Three courses of action occurred to me.  My first idea was to knock on the room next door and ask them to phone down to reception for me.  But being greeted in the middle of the night by the sight of a pair of dangling bollocks would give some people a heart attack.  The next idea was to wait till the night porter came on his night rounds.  But I just couldn’t stand stark naked in the corridor like this waiting for him to come.  People would soon be up and about.

I just had to get the situation resolved as soon as possible.  There was only one thing for it - to go down to reception and get the night porter to open up the room for me.  And the room was miles from reception.  I was going to have to walk right through the whole hotel (along the corridor, down the stairs, back along the corridor, down the lift, and right across the foyer to reception) in the all together and a fast run and hope I didn’t meet anybody on the way.  Hopefully it was too early even for early risers to be up (hopefully!).  And anyway it was the middle of the night and the hotel was in semi-darkness.  The next decision was whether to try and find something like a discarded newspaper or whatever to cover…well whatever needed covering (that is to say my naughty bits).  That's what they always do in films, But to be honest I think you just look silly trying to do that – running round trying to cover your naughty bits with your hands as if people didn’t know you had them (naughty bits that is – not hands), or didn’t know what they looked like. 

Anyway the only thing available was a breakfast card – There was no point in trying to cover my bare behind, but I did try hiding my penis with it.  It didn’t really help.  I’d like to say it wasn’t big enough but it probably was,– it was only about six inches long, (the card that is, not my penis) – for those readers who have not had the dubious pleasure of measuring it (my penis that is, not the card) for themselves I would hasten to add that it is somewhat bigger than that, but only (to put it politely) at its maximum dimension, which it was not exhibiting at this time.  It was just that it looked stupid – or rather I looked stupid (I think my penis probably looked quite sensible) holding it there, and wandering round the hotel in the all together was better than looking stupid.  So I decided just to go to reception as if it were a perfectly natural thing to be doing, letting it all hang loose, as they say, and if I met anyone I would just have explain what had happened.  They must have seen a penis before – it was hardly going to come as a surprise to anybody that I had one.

So there I was setting off along the corridor stark naked (if not quite unashamed down the stairs, back along the corridor to the area where the lifts were situated.  And as I entered the lift lobby the sensor brought the full glare of the lights on.