King for a night

Meet Pau, a guy who faked getting his credit card stolen to avoid paying a 1,430 euro bill from a puticlub.

That is not a typo. 1,430 euros in a puticlub.

Can you imagine the night this guy must have had? Have you ever heard the saying "Better to be king for a day than a shmuck for a lifetime"? Ol’ Pau took this concept to the extreme. 1,430 euros! Holy shit! What he must have done that fateful night is mind-boggling.

Typical puticlubs

He surely was king that night, but when he woke up the next morning with a massive, cubata-fueled hangover he must’ve had intense feelings of regret:

The boy [the article states that he is 31, so I don't know why they are calling him a boy] reported on the day of the 9th that on the night of the 7th he was the victim of a petty theft and that he was robbed of his ID and his credit cards. The police discovered that on the very night of the 7th charges were made with the supposedly stolen credit cards that summed up to 1,430 euros in the bordello Club Eden de Melianta (Fontcoberta) and an establishment in Vall-llobrega.

[sorry, it was two puticlubs!]

El noi va denunciar el dia 9 que la nit del dia 7 havia estat víctima d’un furt i que li havien robat el DNI i les targetes de crèdit. Els Mossos van descobrir que just la nit del dia 7 amb les targetes suposadament robades s’havien fet unes despeses que pujaven a 1.430 euros al prostíbul Club Edén de Melianta (Fontcoberta) i en un local de Vall-llobrega.

But Pau wasn’t too clever:

… the manager of the bank where he has his account explained that the theft was reported when the transaction with the credit card had already been made and, on top of it all, the police found some of the credit cards on him.

... els responsables del banc on el denunciant té el compte van explicar que la denúncia l’havia presentat quan li havien comunicat la despesa feta amb la targeta i, per acabar-ho d’adobar, els Mossos van trobar algunes de les targetes a mans del denunciant.

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I wonder if Pau taught his techniques to this I guy I used to work with, Miguel (he was nicknamed Ronald McDonald – or "Ronahl MacDonahl" as they said it. I think he was given this nickname because he always had a silly looking grin).

One day while we were loading trucks he told me how he was hanging out with some friends in a club called Sr. Lobo when one of them found a lost credit card.

Instead of turning it in to lost and found, the group of them went to a puticlub and did the things you normally do in puticlubs - and charged it all to the stolen credit card. He described the ensuing orgy in explicit detail, which I won't go in to now (the hardest thing was to keep from laughing while Ronahl was describing this, because I was picturing him, and it was just a terrible image to have in my mind).

I’ll just say this: his adventures with the stolen credit card continued after the puticlub, and were even more sordid and ridiculous … but I simply can’t think of a way to justify writing about them in this post so I will leave them to a later date …

Ronahl even had the audacity to steal a crappy transistor radio from the puticlub, which he brought to work and proudly showed to me.

He talked endlessly about that night until he got fired (yet another story).

I guess he figured since I was a guiri I wouldn’t understand what he was talking about.

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About year ago I ran into Ronahl near my apartment, in barri Sant Pere. It was pouring rain and everybody was scurrying to the nearest awning, newspapers over permanent hair-doos, pants soaked up to the knees … and suddenly I saw Ronahl bounding up to me with his big stupid grin.

"Ehhhhhh … que pasa tio!"

It turns out that after getting fired from the warehouse he got a job as a "gas meter counter". He had in his grimy hands a notebook, sopping wet, with all the meter indications. Needless to say all the numbers were blotched and smeared by the rain, making them totally illegible. I wonder how many people got screwed up gas bills because of this.