I got drunk and told my boss to go fuck himself this morning. It felt really good. Now that I’m unemployed I’ll be able to spend more time on Steemit and stop neglecting my beloved internet friends.
Anyway, so when we last saw our four irresponsible 16 year old adventurers: Head, Messy, Master Race and Yours Truly, it was New Year’s Eve 1997 and we were bumbling around Dallas looking for a party because the rave we wanted to go to got shut down by the cops. We were given directions to a party called “The Underground” but the only parts of the directions we could remember were that it was somewhere between Deep Ellum (Bar district) and the West End (Warehouse district) and that there were a bunch of strobe lights in the window. It turns out “The Underground” was just a regular ass club, but I wouldn’t realize that until several years later. So we departed Deep Ellum, drove right past the West End, took five left turns, and wound up balls deep in the barrio.
This was in the dark ages before GPS when you had to actually look at a map to know where you are and where you were going. Not that it mattered because Head didn’t have a map of Dallas in his POS Ford Maverick. It was about 1am and we were lost as a retarded kid in AP calculus. Low and fucking behold we drive past a rundown shithole warehouse with a bunch of strobe lights in the window and some deep ass base bumping inside. “Well fuck a nun running,” thought us, “We found the party!” While Head looked for a place to park we see this fat Samoan dude with a mohawk stumbling across the street completely fucked up. Master Race hangs out the window and shouts, “Yo man, is this the party?” and Samoan Joe is all, “Frrrck yesh brah! Gho in.”
We’re like, “Cool” so we mob up in that bitch like we just brought the party with us. You know on movies where there’s loud music playing and then something awkward happens and you hear the record scratch and the music stops and everyone stares? This was one of those moments. Close your eyes and let your inner secret racist bubble up to the surface. Now take every negative stereotype you can imagine about Mexican gang members in the 90’s, or just imagine the cast of Blood in Blood out, and that was the party we walked into.
Side note. When I was a kid I lived in a tiny shithole about 45 minutes south of San Antonio called Jourdanton. I think there were two stoplights in the whole town. Anyway, it was like 80% Hispanic. The local video store had three sections: New movies, Old Movies, and Blood in Blood Out. They had a whole wall with nothing but copies of Blood in Blood Out, and they were always rented out.
So there we are, four pasty ass underage middle class white boys from podunk Paris Texas accidentally crashing a Mexican gang party in the shittiest part of Dallas. We quickly make a democratic decision to get the fuck out of there before we get stabbed and then this four foot tall cholo, looking like a tattooed, goateed, bandana covering his eyes under sunglasses inside at night, Cheech Marin walks up and says, “Who the fuck said you white boys can come in here?”
Aha! Suspicion confirmed. We are going to die. We tell him about the fat Samoan guy with the Mohawk and he says, “Hold on. Let me go ask him” and he disappears.
We found this unsettling because the fat Samoan was leaving the party when we talked to him.
After a few minutes we make another democratic decision to run away when Cheech shows back up with this big ass gnarly Danny Trejo looking motherfucker who reeked of tequila and felonies. So Cheech points at us and asks Machete, “Did you tell these white boys they could come into our party?”
Machete looks us up and down like he’s trying to decide which one of us to eat, waves his gigantic brown finger right in our face and says with a snarl that could curl Freddy Krueger’s claws, “You little gringos, you cannot come in here. What the fuck were you thinking? No. You cannot come in here….unless you can do the tootsie roll.”
I’m over here wondering if I can run faster carrying less weight after I shit myself while without missing a beat, Master Race goes, “Hell yeah motherfucker! I can tootsie roll!” and starts dancing. He was not, however, doing anything even remotely resembling the tootsie roll.
Machete puts his arm around Master Race and says, “Alright vato. Its ten bucks to get in. We got cervezas, we got liquor, we got senioritas, and we got black eyed peas. Help us celebrate the New Year white boys!” Then he gave us all a hug.
Messy, Master Race, and I made a bee line for the keg and started drinking. I looked over and saw Cheech and Machete with their arms around Head at a buffet table where the special of the night was health code violations and piling up a plate of black eyed peas for him to eat because apparently it’s good luck to get botulism on New Year’s Eve.
We got our beer, he got his beans, and we all withdrew to an empty room so we could get drunk, food poisoning, and calculate the cost/benefit analysis of being served alcohol vs. getting stabbed.
Then Cheech stumbles in with two bottles and squeezed into the filthy couch we were huddled on. We passed around his curiously odd selection of white zinfandel and coconut rum until the bottles were empty. Then he left, and we were still scared despite us all just bonding over hepatitis. The fake ecstasy we took earlier that night never made us trip. However, it affected our drunk. Instead of passing out after four beers like usual, we got mothafuckin' crunk.
Eventually we got up and started dancing to the surprisingly good techno blasting through the building. We were in this room for about two hours without incident but the second we started dancing a fog machine we hadn’t noticed above us came on and fogged out the room. When the cloud lifted the whole room was full of people and I had this fat Chiquita in a checkered mini skirt pushing her ass against my crotch while two dozen cholos cheered me on. Shit got blurry after that but I remember moving to the main room and being in a line with about thirty vatos and being taught how to salsa dance while wearing a bandana and getting called “Holmes” a lot. We left sometime in the wee hours of the morning, full fledged Vatos Locos. Thank god nobody had a tattoo gun.
After we left we spent a while peeing in a dead end alley and hanging out on the hood of Head’s car, drinking some beers Cheech sent us home with while we waxed poetic about life and the merits of being an honorary vato.
Once Head decided he was drunk enough to drive we threw all our beer bottles at a brick wall and headed home. Paris, TX is 100 miles from Dallas, and there isn’t shit anywhere in between. Halfway home the car overheated and died. Apparently Head cracked the radiator during his Dukes of Hazard stunt downtown earlier that night. Messy’s dad owned an auto body shop so we elected him to fix Head’s car before a highway patrolman drove by. Thankfully Messy actually knew just enough about engines to determine the radiator needed fluid. Since they don’t sell radiator fluid in the middle of fucking nowhere at 5am, we took turns pissing into Head’s radiator and used an old coke can we found on the side of the road to top it off with muddy ditch water.
Against all odds, we made it back to Paris right as the sun came up for the first time in 1997, which is right about the time Head’s radiator cracked in half. We all had a great time and Head got grounded for two months.
