After a fun reunion with the Mombo Club-El Rancho Delux mob it was back in the barrel with a vengeance. Sundays get a little hectic when there’s only one of us working at VeloNews.com (everyone else pissed off to their country chateaus). We got a whole lot of nothing all day long, and in French, too. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried to decipher a French story about a Basque bike race for an American audience. Happily, I ate a lot of acid as a young man and now I understand everything.
I had a Bicycle Retailer and Industry News deadline lurking in the background, too, but it’s tough enough to write comedy when things are funny, so I pushed that to the back burner. Ain’t nothin’ funny about trying to translate a language you haven’t spoken since you were 8.
Meanwhile, I see my man Bill Clinton is so desperate for poontang that he has to go all the way to North Korea for some takeout. What do you want to bet he makes ’em both wear blue dresses for the flight home? I got a choice between 12 years at hard labor and 12 hours in a pressurized aluminum tube with Bubba, I’m busting rocks and eating kimchi, know what I’m saying?
"It's just this little chromium switch here," mumbles Mombo.
The first Mombo Club-El Rancho Delux Welcome Back Summer Party in many a moon erupted Saturday night in Gabacho Heights, Colorado, a sprawling Aryan Nations compound just south of Bored Housewives Buttes, under the dark, phallic shadow of Pool Boy Peak.
Held at the palatial manse of Larry and Sheryl Martinez (“Oye, pendejo, make sure you call us ‘the Martins’ while you’re here!” hissed Larry upon our fashionably late arrival), the 2009 MC-ERDWBSP (Geezer Edition) reunited several members of a filthy fraternity that predated National Lampoon’s “Animal House,” which, contrary to popular mythology, was not a comedy but a documentary.
In attendance were the Martins, retired El Rancho jefe Jethro, Mombo Hisself and his wife Kimmie-Boats, Mudbone, Sarah and Charley Ellisonwonderland and of course Your Humble Narrator and the lovely Herself. The part of Fast Eddie was played by a potted plant, but the much-anticipated Dance of the Potato Salad had to be canceled in the absence of Chris Intercoursey, who advised via e-mail that he would be with us in spirit, if not in spirits.
The always-fastidious Jethro incinerates a turd he found on the deck.
“Say hey to the gang for me,” wrote the alleged writer, who now has something nebulous to do with trains in a northern suburb of San Francisco (yeah, I know, it sounds dirty to me, too). “Tell them I’m here in my back yard, sleeping with the toaster, snoring and blowing chicken feathers out my mouth every time I exhale.”
I was pleased to note that despite the passage of time and kidney stones that I remain the cutest member of the band, a perky Paul backed by a mangy pack of Ringos. Still, Mudbone has a kind of George thing happening (pre-Maharishi) and Mombo evokes John (pre-Mark David Chapman). That would make Larry George Martin, as he arranged the music for the evening, a typical El Rancho party mix of Jerry Jeff Walker, Tom Waits, Parliament-Funkadelic and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen.
But the annual MC-ERDWBSP was always as much about comedy as it was about music, promiscuity, firearms, substance abuse and encounters with law enforcement, and though we were long on Cheeches and short on Chongs we laughed long and loud, winking to one another as we fraudulently cast absent friends as the stars in the worst of our reminiscences in order to avoid death by spouse (although the tale of Fast Eddie and His Faithful Dog Blowjob the Wonder Pooch remains wholly unexpurgated and unprintable, even on this site).
"Pull my finger," says Larry to Mudbone, who is trying to squeeze one off himself without soiling his Hello Kitty thong.
I snapped a few pix of the gathering, thinking that with journalism circling the bowl I might make a buck or two with the local gendarmes. But the only contraband these elderly maricons were smoking turned out to be a pair of old El Vestido Azul cigars left over from the Clinton administration, and the cops said no sale.
As space is limited here, we’ll put the rest of the pix up on Herself’s Flickr account as soon as I’ve finished Photoshopping everyone’s clothes back on.
Alas, the Ellisonwonderlands are not pictured, as they arrived even later than we did, and Sarah was carrying a great big stick.
Oh yeah. Word comes from New Mexico that this year’s chile crop should be killer. Hatch Valley farmer Jimmy Lytle told The Associated Press that his crop is about two weeks ahead of schedule and he hasn’t had “any problems whatsoever.” I can’t wait. I went through last year’s chile more rapidly than expected and have been making do with whatever I can find fresh at the grocery plus (ick) canned. It just ain’t the same.
The parade into Paris is on as we speak. Ho hum. Out comes the champagne. A quick sip for the cameras and the plastic cups get tossed. What a waste of good wine. The only suspense remaining is who wins the finale on the Champs-Élysées. I’d love to see Thor Hushovd pip Mark Cavendish, but I think one of his teammates would have to grab a fistful of the little bastard’s jersey for it to happen.*
Meanwhile, a real race is going on right here in Colorado — the World Championship Pack-Burro Race in Fairplay, a 29-mile out-and-back footrace for men and jackasses alike to the top of 13,185-foot Mosquito Pass and back. My man Hal Walter is in the thick of it with his burro, Laredo, and you’ll be able to read all about it sometime in the next day or so at Hardscrabble Times.
* Jeebus. Mark Renshaw gassed it so hard out of that final corner he sucked all the oxygen out of Garmin-Slipstream’s lungs. That Manx git can flat make a bike hop.
The swine flu comes to the Air Force Academy. Jeez, like it isn’t already tough enough to be a doolie at the Zoomie Zoo.
Downtown, it was a bear scaring the berries out of the civilians.
In Frogland, meanwhile, the Schleck brothers came out to play, briefly dragging most of the other contenders away from yellow jersey Rinaldo Nocentini on the Col d’Agnes. It seemed a pointless exercise at 8 a.m. Bibleburg time, the course being downhill all the way to the finish, but hey, what do I know? You can count my stage-racing wins on the toes of a peg leg.
… back of my neck getting burned and gritty. It finally quit raining here in Bibleburg and zango! Just like that we’re in the 90s. You know it’s hot when you ask Turkish whether he wants to go outside and he gives you that blue-eyed are-you-fucking-kidding-me look and stalks off for a daylong nap in our bed, under the ceiling fan. I had to run the sprinklers for an hour this morning to keep the lawn from catching fire.
The two or three of you who follow the action here at Mad Blog Media may recall that a sawbones clipped a seborrheic keratosis off my mug a while back and sent it off to the wizards for processing. Word is that the booger was non-cancerous and thus the only physical ailment afflicting Your Humble Narrator is a wicked case of butt-ugly, which as we all know goes from the skin right down to the bone.
No rubber bracelets for that one; sorry. Maybe I should contract with a Chinese outfit to crank out a few jillion LiveUgly® bracelets and sell the sumbitches through Wal-Mart. Talk about your target market.
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