One night I was working at a private home, and it was late. I had just finished my show, placed everything back inside my bag, and closed it. I noticed a few teenagers were really anxious to get their hands into my bag and have a look around. Nevertheless, I decided to grab a bottle of water in the kitchen. When I returned, one teenager had actually opened my bag and was rummaging through it.
“Excuse me,” I said, “but I don’t think it’s right for you to just open my bag and look through it. What did you expect to find?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I thought all your stuff had gimmicks, and I could easily figure out your tricks if I got my hands on them.”
“Well, that’s not the case,” I said.
About fifteen minutes later, I had just finished talking with the gentleman who had hired me, and was about to leave. As I walked towards the front door, I noticed everyone at the party was gathered in a circle around the staircase.
I squeezed through the crowd to see what was going on. Well, the same teenager who had been looking through my bag had stolen a prop from me. It was a legitimate set of police handcuffs that I had used in my act earlier that night. The teenager had taken them and hidden them somewhere, and then handcuffed his younger brother to the wrought-iron staircase. This kid was not going anywhere fast.
Now came the big question of the day. “Can you get me out of here?” The younger brother asked.
“I don’t have a key. They’re just a prop and aren’t to be used for real.”
“No really,” he said. “Stop being funny and get me out of these.”
“I’m serious — there’s no key. You’re going to have to call the cops because they’re the only ones who have a universal key.”
The parents did call the cops, but were told, “Since it’s not an emergency, we’ll come sometime later.”
It was 11:30 p.m. on a Saturday night. Who knew how long they would be.
As I was leaving, the kid said to me, “My brother is going to pay for this! Not because he handcuffed me to the railing, but because I’ve got to go to the bathroom really bad.”
It was punishment enough to be handcuffed to the railing, but now he had to use the toilet in a house full of people … holy s@#t!
The next day I called the parents and asked what had happened. The mother said, “The cops showed up, but not until 3:30 a.m., and my son was sound asleep hanging from the railing. The cops said it was the funniest thing that they’d ever seen.”
The kid was chained to a staircase railing for four hours while his brother teased him. I have a feeling that somehow, over the next few months, there was some sort of repayment.
I can only imagine.