Featuring Stan Lee As The Bartender

This story took place on the night of my nineteenth birthday party, which was more years ago than I’d care to count now. I have been a fan of Marvel comics since a young age and worked part-time in a comic book shop at the time. So, for a gag, one of my friends bought me a five-foot-tall inflatable Spider-Man.

Being students, we went to our local student union and I decided to inflate Spider-Man and put him on one of the chairs at the table. There were plenty to spare, so it wasn’t robbing anyone of a chair; I know that Peter wouldn’t have approved of that. He attracted quite a bit of attention and laughter, particularly when he got his own pint of beer. However, then, the night took a turn.

A guy ran over to our table, picked Spider-Man up, and then ran to the door. At first, I thought he was pranking us because he stopped at the door and turned back with a big grin, so I got up to walk over, and just as I was opening my mouth to say, “Very funny,” he sprinted out of the door! Several of my friends and I put down our drinks and ran out of the bar after him, but he had a head start and there were several different routes he could have taken, so we had to split up and each took a different path.

I couldn’t find him, but five minutes later one of my friends came back, triumphant, with Spider-Man under his arm! He told us that he caught up to the guy, who decided that an inflatable novelty was worth stealing but not fighting over, so he dropped it and ran off again. Thinking that was the end of it, we turned to go back into the bar only to be stopped by the bouncer.

Bouncer: “You guys are barred for tonight. Leave.”

Me: “What? Why?”

Bouncer: “You know why.”

Me: “No, actually, I really don’t. Somebody stole this—” *lifts up Spider-Man* “—from me so we just ran out to get it back. Why are we getting barred because someone stole from us?”

Bouncer: “You broke all of your glasses on the way out!”

Me: “No, we didn’t! Why would we do that? And if we had, why would we be dumb enough to come back after doing that?”

The bouncer stepped away to talk to the management on the radio for a moment before coming back.

Bouncer: “Okay, you can come in, but you have to deflate Spider-Man. He was causing too much excitement.”

When we got back to the rest of our friends, they explained that someone (presumably a friend of the thief) had picked up our glasses where we had each left them to run out, finished our drinks, and then just dropped the glasses, breaking them, before running out as well. Apparently, the bouncer had been given a garbled version of that story, hence his initial reluctance to let us back in.

Anyway, those acts of d****ebaggery aside, at least I got to tell the story about how we rescued Spider-Man on my birthday!