“Damn you, Shlomi! May you wake up stark naked at the bottom of a festering hippo pool, gargling elephant dung like it’s mouthwash, sprouting a rat’s tail from your forehead, and cursed with a baboon’s ass so blindingly red that traffic stops out of sheer confusion! May every mosquito within a hundred-mile radius see you as an all-you-can-drink buffet, and may the local witch doctor take one look at you and immediately request an exorcism!”
I was livid.
Flickering artificial blue, green, and red light—courtesy of the migraine-inducing neon monstrosity outside my window—danced like a demented disco across my face. My head rested on an ancient pillow, a relic so old it might have cushioned Napoleon himself at Waterloo, now doubling as a petri dish teeming with enough bacteria, fungi, and viruses to either terraform Mars or single-handedly trigger the next extinction event.
And as I lay there, marinating in regret and possible biohazards, I cursed my new “best friend” Shlomi with the kind of vengeance usually reserved for Greek tragedies, biblical plagues, and people who steal parking spots at the last second.
Through the door—if you could even call that sagging excuse for a barrier a “door,” since I had no idea until now that people actually made them out of mouldy cardboard, pizza crusts, and what I could only assume was regret—oozed an ensemble of groans, mewls, whimpers, and even the occasional bleat. Sounds typically reserved for either a war-ravaged Cambodian brothel or the unholy aftermath of an exorcism gone horribly wrong.
Which, in hindsight, made perfect sense. Because that’s exactly where my dear “friend” Shlomi—executing a prank so diabolical it deserved its own museum exhibit—had booked me. A London suburban sex house where the carpets were filthier than a radioactive landfill, stickier than a tub of rotting pig intestines, and held together by nothing but the ghosts of bad decisions.
The blanket—alive in ways that defied both science and morality—was so infested with bed bugs and unidentified legumes that it had to be physically secured to the bed, lest it develop sentience and flee the premises in search of a better life. It appeared to be woven from pre-WWI cotton diapers, steeped in a century’s worth of unholy bodily fluids and historical trauma.
An opening excerpt from this chapter remains available here.
The full manuscript is currently reserved for submission and publication.
Marcel Romdane,
escaped the hell of British hospitality—and lived to warn the others.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Revenge has wings. And a tailwheel.
Limuru, Kenya, April 2012
That’s Shlomi up front — pale, queasy, and one barrel roll away from regretting every practical joke he ever pulled.
Four years after dumping me into Motel Ebola — the seventh circle of British hospitality hell — it was finally payback time. Sweet, high-octane revenge, served at 10,000 feet over Kenya.
Shlomi climbed confidently into the front seat of my yellow Super Cub, grinning like a man expecting a pleasant Sunday tour over Nairobi. What he got instead was an airborne exorcism, personally delivered by my former flight instructor — a man with all the mercy of a caffeinated warthog and the tactical elegance of a napalm strike.
Barrel rolls. Steep climbs. Dives so sharp they tickled death’s toenails. The result? A man who once survived Kenyan wedding photography now questioning gravity, God, and the meaning of friendship — all before lunch.
He went up smug and brave.
He came back green and broken, clinging to the airfield like it was the only honest thing left in his life.
From Riches to Rags, Part II – Motel Ebola, and the Reckoning Above Nairobi.
Revenge really is best served cold — preferably in the lower stratosphere with a screaming slip indicator, guardian angels ghosting your flight plan, a co-pilot mid-prayer, and the unmistakable aroma of panic, regret, and partially digested breakfast fogging up the cockpit..
Vindication? Achieved.
Balance of the universe? Restored.
London stunt? Avenged.
Me? Thoroughly satisfied, watching him stagger off the runway like a man who’d just had tea with death and accidentally proposed.
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