The Tic Tac Toe Man from Dubai ((Revised 8-2008) (A Troy Burroghs Story))

The Tic Tac Toe Man
From Dubai




I once owned a hotel with a big lounge in it, I was kind of a stickling person, or stubborn about who came in my place back in those days, and things, little things annoyed me back then, trivial matters that is, a trying period of time in my life you could say. Having said that, one day a man come in that really got my goat, he was about six-foot three inches tall, perhaps 220-pounds, with a balled head, said he was from Dubay, wherever that is.
As I stared at the man, now sitting in my lounge chair, legs spread out on the carpet, as if he owned the place, I noticed a drawing on his head, right in the middle of it, it covered the whole top of his head, everywhere, and there in the lounge, everyone, several folks, could see it, if indeed they were looking his way, and once they looked his way, they stared like me, and never look any other way but at him.
Anyhow, this fellow from Dubay annoyed me some, and if you can’t figure it out, I can’t figure you out; because I believed at the time, he should annoy anyone if not everyone with his mannerisms and floppiest of behaviors, and so I still felt, yet I learned something from this fellow, perhaps not to judge, and to be wise enough to figure out what he may has up his sleeve.
Now that this happening is history, I get thinking: what if I had just left this alone, you know, not let it bother me, just overlooked it, and said, hell with the trivial matters, let it go, he’ll go away, and so will my annoyance, and so will that snake up his sleeve. But you know, that was not me, things are not always so simple for me, I actually make things worse, harder on myself sometimes, a curse I suppose you might call it, so although I can say that now, then I couldn’t, and to be quite frank, the man from Dubay, was not all that bad, he just irritated me. And if that joker came back into my new life, the one I no I’d hide from him, but of course that was some fifteen years ago.
So here we are, I’m looking at this deadbeat, and he is looking at me, and perchance he is saying, what I am thinking, ‘What is the matter with this whacko? Who keeps looking at me?”
And on his head was this Tic TAC Toe game outline, that had all the X’s and O’s, marked in, except for one, and if he put a zero in it, in the unmarked space, he’d win the game, thus it would be over I suppose, or so this is what came to my mind, and if he put an x in it, not sure what that would mean, but it would not be three zeros in a line, so I assume he’d lose. Well at this point it wasn’t the case. And I said,
“Mister, I understand you the person from Dubay…you should leave my hotel, you are not a guest here!” and he corrected me, said, “It is called Dubai, not Dubay…!” And that annoyed me even more.
I repeated myself, “You are not a hotel guest here, so get out of my hotel lobby— pronto.”
I was not kind, nor did I have a soft voice, and he said,
“Mr. Hotel owner, from Minnesota, we in Dubai do not like being addressed this way, especially in public places,” and I said, “My name is Troy Burroghs,” I said, and “no sir, it is my place, not a public place, my hotel, and get out of here now!”
I even tried to pull him up, and he almost laughed in my face. It didn’t work, they must feed them iron bread in that place called Dubay, and so I thought.
Fine, he wouldn’t leave. So I went to the next level, called the police, and they did there job for once, and kicked him out of my lobby, they were not sure for what reason, other than he was not a guest, and he refused to leave, and he annoyed me.

It was now evening and he came back, I saw him coming from the parking lot. He came in like he owned the place, this time the “O” was filled in on his head, so I suppose he was feeling good, he perhaps won the game according to the graphic on his skull-skin, he came right up to me, asked me,
“Now what are you going to do about it?”
I said with venom in my heart, “I’m going to have you put in jail if you don’t leave.”
Then he asked a funny question, one I think he already knew.
“Mister, where do you bank?”
“Troy,” I said, “call me Troy or Mr. Burroghs!”
I thought about this: what an odd question and I wasn’t going to answer him, but out of some kind of curiosity, I did, said, “Midway National Bank, why?”
“Well,” he said with a laugh, “you owe $20,000-dollars on this dump, do you not?”
I got thinking, this guy really knows my business, perhaps reading my mail, something like that, but I answered him correctly, “No sir, I owe $22,184,26 cents because my last payment bounced, a bad check, because the deadbeats in this hotel don’t pay their rent on time, and deadbeats like you come in and sit around sucking up my heat in the winter and air-conditioning in the summer.”
Well, he didn’t argue about that, and said laughingly, “I bought the bank!” (Ha, ha, ha…!”) Meaning the bank I owed the loan to that I was late on my most recent payment, which was a contract for deed, and he bought the contract for deed up, I learned. So in essence I owed him. He even pulled out the contract I had signed, his owner ship of his bank. I got thinking he went through a lot of trouble to prove a point.
“Get out of my hotel, pronto!” he said.
And I said, “Boy you guys down there in Dubay, don’t fool around!”
And he said, “It’s called Dubai!”


(DM) 6-3-2007 (Reedited and Revised, 8-3-2008)