This happened about--let me think--eight years ago, my son's third birthday, mkay? We were vacationing not here but a town close to here and staying in one of the big hotels. Big hotel. And, actually, there he is right there. Um. And I had taken my daughter down to the pool to swim. (She was five years older than him, so she was about eight at the time.) And my wife stayed in room with him. She stayed in room, was taking a shower; I'm down at the pool with my daughter. And after about fifteen minutes my wife comes in, frantic, saying, "He's gone. He got out of the room. Something happened. He's gone; I dunno where he is."
So I'm freaking out--naturally--we run back upstairs, can't find him anywhere, run up and down the halls calling his name, don't see him, see a couple people in the hall (they haven't seen him). So now we're really freaking out; we don't know if he's gotten out, he's wandering the hotel, uh, if somebody's snatched him. You know? So we go down to the front desk; don't get a lot of help down there. They go, "Well, you know, we'll have people look for them."
I say, "No. Call the cops now." So they call the cops, and after about fifteen minutes a cop comes in, but he looks to be all of maybe eighteen. You know, so I'm not really reassured--no offense. [Laughs] But, you know.
And he goes, "Well, you know, we'll do our best to find him. Go back up to your room and we'll call ya." Well, I'm not gonna do that. So my wife and I continue to run the halls. We're trying to talk to anybody who's seen a little boy running in the hall. Checking the elevators, making sure he's not riding the elevator up and down. And this particular hotel has a, uh, a rooftop bar. And you can take an elevator up there, so thank God, we hope, hope that he didn't go up the elevator, you know, to go to the bar, or to get up on the rooftop.
We're really freaking out now. It's been maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. Seems like five or six hours at this point. No sign of him. So in the middle of all this running around and this commotion and this anxiety, the fire alarm goes off. So now people are streaming out of the hotel. We weren't outta the hotel. The people who are up on the rooftop, coming down. The whole hotel is emptied out on the parking lot, and I'm still running around: "Have you seen a little boy? My little, my son's missing, he's wearing, you know, et cetera, et cetera." Describing him. Nobody's seen him.
We're still freaking out. And then, uh, a lady firefighter comes up to me, says, "I understand that your son is missing." She goes, "I have to check the rooms." Because anytime there's a fire, they've gotta, if there's a fire in the hotel, they gotta go room-to-room and check every room and make sure nobody's unconscious, asleep, or somebody's hiding in there and, and setting off a fire. Whatever.
So I go up with her; we check one floor, go down to the floor--my floor now, that we were staying on--and we go all the way down the hall. And we get to the room right next to my room. She opens it up. My son's in there asleep on the floor.
So apparently he had gone out, and he--you know, he's, like, this big--probably thought he was going back to our room, wandered in and fell asleep on the floor.
Well, I came to find out my wife pulled the fire alarm. She was smart enough to know that they'd have to come and check every room. So if somebody was hiding in there with him, they'd find them. If he was somewhere, they'd find him, and that's what happened. So I guess the moral of that story is always marry somebody smarter than you.