from the NY Times

A Night Out That Became a Night In. In the Bar.

Richard Perry/The New York Times

Kyle Hausmann spent hours longer than he intended at Trophy Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, after being locked in overnight. 

The singer R. Kelly wrote a popular R & B opera about being trapped in a closet. Nicholas White became a minor celebrity after security cameras caught him stuck in a Manhattan elevator for 41 hours. Add to these annals of urban misfortune the tale of Kyle Hausmann, a mild-mannered paralegal who recently found himself locked in a Brooklyn bar.

The night in question started innocuously enough for Mr. Hausmann, 24, a Harvard graduate who lives with a roommate in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The Trophy BarIt was May 20, a Tuesday, and Mr. Hausmann’s roommate was the D.J. at Trophy Bar in Williamsburg.

Mr. Hausmann got to the bar at 8 p.m. It was a spirited night. There was dancing. There was drinking. Mr. Hausmann downed a few more drinks than he normally would.

“Really sweet guy,” Mandy Misagal, one of the bar’s three owners, who was bartending that night, said of Mr. Hausmann. “Really wasted but super nice.”

The hours melted away. Four a.m. approached, closing time, so Ms. Misagal tallied the night’s receipts as a worker cleaned up. Mr. Hausmann was milling about with the last stragglers. Then, around 4:30, he went into a bathroom. And for reasons that are unclear even to him, he stayed in there for quite a while.

The bar emptied. Ms. Misagal flipped off the light in one of the bar’s two bathrooms, reached for the doorknob of the second bathroom and found it locked. “Curious,” she thought. Seeing no light coming from the bathroom, and hearing not a peep, she figured that the other bar worker had accidentally locked it behind him. Then her car service showed up and honked. Ms. Misagal went outside. The other worker pulled down the security gate and padlocked it from the outside.

They both left.

A few moments later, Mr. Hausmann opened the bathroom door. That is when he realized he was locked in the bar.

“The lights are off in the bar, and the chairs are up. And I wondered, ‘Where did everybody go?’ ” Mr. Hausmann said.

A faint light was coming through the windows — it was about 5:30 a.m. “I thought, ‘I guess I’m going to be late for work,’ ” he said.

“My working theory was that I had gone down a wormhole,” he continued. “Someone pointed out that perhaps I had gone to Narnia. But I would’ve remembered Narnia. So it must’ve been a wormhole.”

Mr. Hausmann tried the front and back doors, but they were locked and needed keys to be opened. The windows had bars. Mr. Hausmann deliberated whether to pour himself a drink. “And then I decided that I didn’t really want one,” he said.

Calling the police seemed extreme, so instead he dialed up friends on his cellphone. But no one picked up — it was 6 a.m. Finally, a friend who was staying at his apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant answered and tried to shake Mr. Hausmann’s roommate awake. “Kyle’s stuck somewhere; he needs your help,” the friend mumbled. But the roommate slept on and the friend fell back asleep.

Next, Mr. Hausmann picked up the bar’s phone and hit redial, inadvertently calling the mother of one of the owners in Las Vegas.

“How did you get this number?” the woman asked. “You can’t be calling because you’re locked in a bar.”

Mr. Hausmann hung up. He wandered around the bar, trying to figure out what to do. Then he happened on a laptop on the bottom shelf of the D.J. booth.

“I checked my e-mail,” he said, “which was completely not helpful. My friends were planning a get-together. And I wrote back, ‘Yes, this will work. If only I could figure out how to escape from the bar I’m trapped in.’”

Next he did a Google search for “what to do if you get locked in a bar.” “But Google did not have any good answers,” he said.

And then — hallelujah! — he found a spare set of keys for the bar. Believing escape was near, he penned a note to the bar owners on a paper towel, saying he had gotten trapped and was letting himself out and would return the keys later that day. He ended on an affectionate note. “The mystery only adds to my fondness of the bar,” he wrote.

But there was that security gate beyond the front door, padlocked from the outside. And yet there was still another possibility of escape. Trophy Bar has a garden patio, and now that he had keys, Mr. Hausmann could get back there. He went out, climbed on top of a picnic table, surveyed his options and worried about what the neighbors might think.

“There were a lot of fences to go over,” he said. “But I wasn’t worried about going over. I was worried about being seen going over. Because it was first thing in the morning. And people might wonder ‘what’s going on here?’ and call the police.”

So he tried another round of phone calls. Finally, he reached a friend who agreed to come to the bar. The plan was for Mr. Hausmann to slip the keys under the security gate, and for the friend to open the padlock. The friend showed up, and began calling Mr. Hausmann’s cellphone and banging on the security gate. But by that time Mr. Hausmann had fallen asleep on a bench out back.

Mr. Hausmann eventually woke up and again called his friend, who agreed to come back. It was around 8:30 a.m., 12 ½ hours after his night at the bar began.

Then Mr. Hausmann heard some clanking, and the security gate went up.

Jim Rowe, another of the bar’s owners, walked in.

“And there was Kyle standing there,” Mr. Rowe said. “He was pretty smiley. I couldn’t believe it. I asked, ‘Are you hung over? Are you O.K.?’ ”

Mr. Hausmann replied: “I’m fine, I just got to go to work.”

“I really love your bar,” Mr. Hausmann continued, as Mr. Rowe stared at him, dumbstruck. “I’ll be back.”

Mr. Hausmann’s mini-saga might lack the melodrama of R. Kelly’s fictional musical epic, and it was vastly less harrowing than the grim ordeal endured by Mr. White. But it has made Mr. Hausmann something of a cause célèbre at Trophy Bar, where the owners gave him nods on their MySpace page.

And just as he promised, Mr. Hausmann has gone back to Trophy Bar. He celebrated his 24th birthday there last Tuesday.

When the party was over, Mr. Hausmann walked out, unimpeded, into the night.

[ click to read hilarious piece at the NY Times ]