Waiting for the Other Shoe to Fall

Life is all about waiting for the other shoe to fall and getting out of the way before it hits you. The first shoe is just the set-up—the act of a straight man and who ever remembers the lines of the straight man?

The second shoe is the punch line and is accompanied by a drum roll. Battaboom!

A fire alarm went off the other night while my wife and I were staying in the Emily Morgan Hotel across the alley from the Alamo. I was pretty sure it wasn’t a warning that the Mexican army was back in town but I was absolutely positive that there wasn’t a fire. That’s because I, like most people, have a long history of dealing with fire alarms going all the way back to my early days at Abraham Lincoln Elementary School. And the thing is, there is never a fire, it is always a drill.

The time of the alarm was 2:33am and our room was on the eleventh floor. The first thing that we discovered was that a fire alarm in a hotel is a lot more intimidating than a fire alarm in a school. It was loud, extremely annoying and it wouldn’t stop.

I just assumed it was a test because that is all I have ever known and then, as if it had read my sleepy, still groggy mind, a voice came screaming through the ceiling announcing, “This is not a test, it is a real alarm,” and then repeated itself in case anyone wasn’t paying attention, “This is not a test, this is a real alarm,” and then proceeded to direct everyone to go immediately to the first floor and exit the building, and oh yes, “do not use the elevators.”

Well there it was—the other shoe falling. A test at this hour, on this floor would have been bad enough but this was going to hurt, possibly in a very real sense. Hearing the words, “This is not a test, this is a real emergency”—that got me to thinking.

I wasn’t really thinking at all but all kinds of thoughts were popping into my head. Kath and I immediately turned to the fire exits and opened the door only to discover there was a brutal rainstorm pouring down outside at the same time that our real-not-a-test fire alarm was raining down upon us inside. This could probably be called the third shoe falling and by this time everyone was trying to figure out where they were coming from.

Then someone opened their door and said they had just called down to the desk and were told it wasn’t a real emergency and it wasn’t a drill but it was door number three—a mistake. That’s the fourth shoe hitting me right on cue right in the crook of my knee.

We began walking back to our rooms, somewhat relieved, somewhat upset, so wound up that we didn’t know if we would ever get back to sleep, and just a little embarrassed to be standing in the hall in just our pajamas.

And then the alarm sprung to life again, as if infused with a new dose of terror juice and again it was accompanied by a voice telling us this was no joke.

Well now the shoes were kicking us from every angle. It was like being in a Three Stooges movie or a Keystone Kop flick. One thing after another and each thing was worse or more ridiculous than the previous. It went on like this for maybe twenty minutes—the alarm and the voice saying get out and someone swearing it was a mistake and to get back in.

Finally, we said the hell with it, went back to bed, suffered through a few more alarms, which we didn’t get up for, and then mercifully fell back to sleep, aware that possibly this is how they may have felt defending the Alamo back in 1836 when wave after wave of Mexican soldiers kept assaulting the tiny, defenseless mission.

In the morning it was like nothing had happened. By the time we made our way to the lobby most people had probably checked out and new people were checking in. There was a little chatter in the elevator but not much. We advised the desk as to how frustrated we were, they gave us a free breakfast and that was it. The rain was gone and the heat returned and life went on, the way it always does if you don’t let the second, third or fourth falling shoe get the best of you.